Will The Republicans Impeach Obama If He Moves Unilaterally To Stop Wage Theft?

The poll last week by NBC and the Wall Street Journal confirmed that most Americans support a progressive vision of our country beyond what the fractured, sclerotic Beltway Establishment Democrats have the guts to push-- and on another planet from the reactionary Republican vision of a mean, crabbed country divided in perpetual class war. 82% want to lower the cost of student debt. 75% want to spend more money on infrastructure. 65% want to raise the minimum wage. 59% support addressing climate change by limiting carbon emissions. Conservatives and Wall Street whores oppose all of these things. Only a third of Americans back the conservative push to raise the Social Security retirement age to 69 and only 41% want the Federal government to stop funding Obamacare, core Republican agenda items backed by more than a few from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

There isn't much President Obama can do to do about the progressive things, although it's likely he'll veto two years worth of Republican efforts to further annihilate the middle class with their Koch-inspired ideological extremism. But there is another piece of the progressive puzzle that Obama can and should move on unilaterally, one that has widespread support from the American people: overtime pay. "With a stroke of the pen," wrote venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, "President Obama can make sure you get what you earned, without any congressional action at all. If it feels like you're struggling harder than your parents did, working longer hours for less money, it's because you are. Meanwhile, a handful of capitalists like me are growing wealthy beyond our parents' wildest dreams."

When I first got into the workforce, over 65% of salaried workers earned overtime pay-- today, just 11% do. Overtime was a fact of life... a good fact of life and I used to relish those awesome time-and-a-half bumps in my paychecks when they came. Now workers are looking an an entirely different phenomenon, wage theft, "which occurs when an employer withholds pay rightfully earned by an hourly worker. It happens in a variety of ways, from not paying for overtime, to denying mandated breaks, to subtracting hours from employees' weekly total."

A recent poll commissioned by labor group Fast Food Forward estimates that a stunning 89 percent of fast-food workers have experienced at least one form of wage theft. A previous study, conducted in the first half of 2008 before the recession, found 68 percent of low-wage workers had been victims of wage theft in their previous work week, and estimated that wage theft cost workers an average of $2,634 annually.

...Wage theft can become increasingly common in times of high unemployment, experts say. "When people are desperate for jobs, they're afraid to risk them by taking on their boss," said Ross Eisenbrey, of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

And because the amounts of wages being withheld are often small, it can be hard for a low-wage worker to find an attorney willing to take their case.

For their part, fast-food managers are under "tremendous pressure" to keep labor costs low, especially when sales are sluggish, said Nelson Lichtenstein, the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Companies may also engage in the practice when the risk of getting caught is low. There aren't nearly enough U.S. Department of Labor investigators to enforce the laws, said Gebreselassie. He added, "The chance any worksite will be investigated is miniscule."

Nevertheless, the issue of wage theft has been getting increased attention in recent months. In March, the owner of seven McDonald's restaurants in New York was ordered to pay almost $500,000 to more than 1,000 employees who performed work off the clock and had other pay illegally withheld.

Now back to our friendly, enlightened capitalist Nick Hanauer and his suggestion to President Obama to remedy this without letting conservatives stand in the way. He;s working with DFA, which has a petition you can sign if you agree. Hanauer wants the Department of Labor to simply raise the overtime threshold to $69,000. In other words, if you earn $69,000 or less, the law would require that you be paid time-and-a-half for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Hanauer:

That would mean 10.4 million middle-class Americans with more money in your pockets or more time to spend with friends and family. And if corporate America didn't want to pay you time and a half, it would need to hire hundreds of thousands of additional workers to pick up the slack-- slashing the unemployment rate and forcing up wages.

President Obama could also expand the ranks of workers eligible for overtime pay by ending the exemption that denies overtime to teachers, doctors, computer professionals, and many others. And he can do all this simply by instructing the Department of Labor to change the rules-- immediately putting money into the pockets of millions of American workers.

...Many of my fellow capitalists will warn you that a higher overtime threshold would be a job killer, but the truth is, we already have more capital than we know what to do with. Corporate profits have doubled over the past 40 years to more than 12 percent of GDP; that’s about a $1 trillion a year in extra profits.

But rather than invest in creating jobs or raising wages, executives like me are mostly spending our windfall profits manipulating the price of our own shares through stock buybacks. In fact, over the past decade, public U.S. corporations have spent an astounding $6.9 trillion buying back shares, reducing the total outstanding, and increasing the value of the remaining shares owned by capitalists like me.

We get richer. You get nothing. Again, sorry. But we're only playing by the rules-- rules that President Obama has the power to change.

President Obama is showing that he isn't shy about using his executive powers to do good things for the American people. But the White House needs a strong public push-- the president needs to hear from as many of you as possible that overtime pay is to the middle class what the minimum wage is to the working poor, and that a stronger middle class is good for business and good for America.

Again, here's the DFA petition.

Do You Think Chris Christie Is Mainstream, A Centrist? He Wants You To. How About AOC?

In the video above, Morning Joe regular, Mike Barnicle, asked Chris Christie how he felt about the neo-fascist CPAC convention giving the announcement of Senator John McCain's death a standing ovation. Barnicle's soft ball: "Is that your political party?" Watch Christie's pivot into an attack on the figure the right-of-center establishment fears most in the whole country. "No, that's not people I would agree with," establishes a rapport with the audience who would also not agree with Nazis cheering the death of John McCain either. "You know, Mike, there's always been elements of my party that I haven't agreed with." Oh, he's such a bipartisan centrist (just like me... my kinda guy). Now that he's got your attention and sympathy... the pivot:

I think that's normal for any political party. I'm sure there are folks who have heard some of the things that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is saying that are mainstream Democrats who say 'no, that's not the party that I belong to, even though that may be where the energy is right now in the Democratic Party.'... Both parties...

Which "things that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is saying" are comparable to a bunch neo-Nazi Trump supporters cheering the death of John McCain? A 70% margin tax rate on annual income over $10,000,000? The Green New Deal? Medicare for All? Replacing ICE? What does she say that is so offensive to self-labeled "centrists?" That "people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be drafting health care legislation and that people who are taking money from oil and gas companies shouldn't be drafting climate legislation?" I understand exactly why that enrages congressional criminals like Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD). I can see how it drove that worthless slug Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who was kicked out of office by voters in Missouri in part because she took $1,671,164 from the healthcare sector, denounce a reformer like AOC. She doesn't make establishment career criminals comfortable. Nor does she want to. And they want her DEAD.

Yesterday Mehdi Hasan's Intercept essay, AOC, Sanders And Warren Are The Real Centrists Because They Speak For Most Americans, made a lot more sense that the garbage you normally hear fromBeltway media sellouts using the word "moderate" to describe conservatives. Hasan is as angry about this as I am. He asks his readers-- one of whom you should be-- to "Google the words 'moderate' or 'centrist' and a small group of names will instantly appear: Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, and, yes, Howard Schultz. Bloomberg is considered a 'centrist thought leader' (Vanity Fair). Klobuchar is the 'straight-shooting pragmatist' (Time). Biden is the 'quintessential centrist' (CNN) and the 'last hurrah for moderate Democrats (New York Magazine), Shultz is gifted with high-profile interview slots to make his 'centrist independent' pitch to voters." Blood boiling yet? Hasan:

Now Google the freshman House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s been dubbed a member of the “loony left” (Washington Post), a “progressive firebrand” (Reuters), and a “liberal bomb thrower” (New York Times).

Got that? Biden, Schultz and Co., we are told, sit firmly in the middle of American politics; Ocasio-Cortez stands far out on its fringes.

This is a brazen distortion of reality, a shameless and demonstrable lie that is repeated day after day in newspaper op-eds and cable news headlines.

“It’s easy to call what AOC is doing as far-lefty, but nothing could be farther from the truth,” Nick Hanauer, the venture capitalist and progressive activist, told MSNBC in January. “When you advocate for economic policies that benefit the broad majority of citizens, that’s true centrism. What Howard Schultz represents, the centrism that he represents, is really just trickle-down economics.”

“He is not the centrist,” continued Hanauer. “AOC is the centrist.”



Hanauer is right. And Bernie Sanders is centrist too-- smeared as an “ideologue” (The Economist) and “dangerously far left” (Chicago Tribune). So too is Elizabeth Warren-- dismissed as a “radical extremist” (Las Vegas Review-Journal) and a “class warrior” (Fox News).

The inconvenient truth that our lazy media elites do so much to ignore is that Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren are much closer in their views to the vast majority of ordinary Americans than the Bloombergs or the Bidens. They are the true centrists, the real moderates; they represent the actual political middle.

Don't believe me? Take Ocasio-Cortez’s signature issue: the Green New Deal. Former George W. Bush speechwriter-- and torture advocate-- Marc Thiessen claims that the Green New Deal will “make the Democrats unelectable in 2020.” The Economist agrees: “The bold plan could make the party unelectable in conservative-leaning states.” The Green New Deal “will not pass the Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them,” a testy Diane Feinstein, the senior and supposedly “moderate” Democratic senator from California, told a bunch of kids in a viral video.

But here is the reality: The Green New Deal is extremely popular and has massive bipartisan support. A recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University found that a whopping 81 percent of voters said they either “strongly support” (40 percent) or “somewhat support” (41 percent) the Green New Deal, including 64 percent of Republicans (and even 57 percent of conservative Republicans).

What else do Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and Sanders have in common with each other-- and with the voters? They want to soak the rich. Ocasio-Cortez suggested a 70 percent marginal tax rate on incomes above $10 million-- condemned by “centrist” Schultz as “un-American” but backed by a majority (51 percent) of Americans. Warren proposed a 2 percent wealth tax on assets above $50 million-- slammed by “moderate” Bloomberg as Venezuelan-style socialism, but supported by 61 percent of voters, including 51 percent of Republicans. (As my colleague Jon Schwarz has demonstrated, “Americans have never, in living memory, been averse to higher taxes on the rich.”)

How about health care? The vast majority (70 percent) of voters, including a majority (52 percent) of Republicans, support a single-payer universal health care system, or Medicare for All. Six in 10 say it is “the responsibility of the federal government” to ensure that all Americans have access to health care coverage.

Debt-free and tuition-free college? A clear majority (60 percent) of the public, including a significant minority (41 percent) of Republicans, support free college “for those who meet income levels.”

A higher minimum wage? According to Pew, almost 6 in 10 (58 percent) Americans support increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to (the Sanders-recommended) $15 an hour.

Gun control? About six out of 10 (61 percent) Americans back stricter laws on gun control, according to Gallup, “the highest percentage to favor tougher firearms laws in two or more decades.” Almost all Americans (94 percent) back universal background checks on all gun sales-- including almost three-quarters of National Rifle Association members.

Abortion? Support for a legal right to abortion, according to a June 2018 poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, is at an “all-time high.” Seven out of 10 Americans said they believed Roe v. Wade “should not be overturned,” including a majority (52 percent) of Republicans.

Legalizing marijuana? Two out of three Americans think marijuana should be made legal. According to a Gallup survey from October 2018, this marks “another new high in Gallup’s trend over nearly half a century.” And here’s the kicker: A majority (53 percent) of Republicans support legal marijuana too!

Mass incarceration? About nine out of 10 (91 percent) Americans say that the criminal justice system “has problems that need fixing.” About seven out of 10 (71 percent) say it is important “to reduce the prison population in America,” including a majority (52 percent) of Trump voters.

Immigration? “A record-high 75 percent of Americans,” including 65 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, told Gallup in 2018 that immigration is a “good thing for the U.S.” Six in 10 Americans oppose the construction of a wall on the southern border, while a massive 8 in 10 (81 percent) support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

How much of this polling, however, is reflected in the daily news coverage of the Democrats, which seeks to pit “leftist” activists against “centrist” voters, and “liberals” against “moderates”?

How is it that labels like “centrist” and “moderate,” which common sense tells us should reflect the views of a majority of Americans, have come to be applied to those who represent minority interests and opinions?

How many political reporters are willing to tell their readers or viewers what Stanford political scientist David Broockman told Vox’s Ezra Klein in 2014: “When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want. Within both parties there is this tension between what the politicians who get more corporate money and tend to be part of the establishment want-- that’s what we tend to call moderate-- versus what the Tea Party and more liberal members want”?

The center ground-- if it even exists-- cannot be found on a map; it is not a fixed geographical location. You cannot get in your car, type the address in your navigation, and then drive to it.

It moves, it shifts, it reacts to events. The center of 2019 is not the center of 1999 or even 2009. You want to know where it is right now? You want to find the moderate middle? Then ignore the right-wing hacks, the conventional wisdom-mongers, and the donor class. Go check out the policy platforms of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.

You may not recall Brad DeLong, the subject of an interesting piece by Zach Beauchamp for Vox yesterday. He's a UC-Berkeley economist, who served as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration and is widely considered "one of the market-friendly, neoliberal Democrats who have dominated the party for the last 20 years. The term he uses for himself is 'Rubin Democrat'-- referring to followers of finance industry-friendly Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin." Zach reports that "DeLong believes that the time of people like him running the Democratic Party has passed. “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,” DeLong wrote. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.” Good; I hope that's one less vote for Status Quo Joe.

The core reason, DeLong argues, is political. The policies he supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were.

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

The result, he argues, is the nature of the Democratic Party needs to shift. Rather than being a center-left coalition dominated by market-friendly ideas designed to attract conservative support, the energy of the coalition should come from the left and its broad, sweeping ideas. Market-friendly neoliberals, rather than pushing their own ideology, should work to improve ideas on the left. This, he believes, is the most effective and sustainable basis for Democratic politics and policy for the foreseeable future.

The 21st Century Will Be The Most Unequal Period In Human History

Progressives think Obama could have done more-- much more-- to further the legitimate economic interests of the American working class. Others think he did as much as he could under the political constraints in Washington. His record is a mixed bag. Yesterday, the unemployment continued its downward trend, dipping to 5.6%, the best numbers since Bush tanked the economy in 2008...in fact, the best numbers since Bill Clinton was president. Despite dogged, systematic obstruction by the GOP, Obama's policies have worked to drag the country back from the brink of Republican apocalypse. On the other hand, he has continued coddling Wall Street banksters instead of prosecuting them and his race-to-the-bottom, job-destroying trade agenda is straight out of Wall Street boardrooms and Republican Party think tanks. Obama's plan, also announced yesterday, to make two years of college as free and universal as high school is clearly meant to close gaps that lead straight to the unconscionable wealth disparity that threatens American democracy.

Had McCain or Romney won it would have been far worse in every way. If Jeb Bush wins, he'll prove that once again. But we don't need to speculate or peer into a crystal ball to see the toxic impact of conservative governance on working people. Just look at our pals the British. They have a Conservative government and their own income and wealth inequality is, if anything, even worse than our own! In fact, David Cameron's trickle-down policies have made the U.K. the most attractive location as a tax haven for the super-rich. Parasites from around the world are flocking to Britain-- and buying up everything. Jacques Peretti investigates why in a new 3-part BBC series, The Super-Rich and Us, Part 1 embedded above.

How about this little factoid? "Since the '08 Crash, there's been 80 billion pounds ($120 billion dollars) of Austerity cuts, the same amount bankers will have been given in bonuses." Or this one, which sounds a lot like a Bernie Sanders speech: "In 2013 the UK’s thousand richest people saw their wealth increase by a sum equivalent to the combined earnings of the country’s fulltime workforce: £70 billion." The reviews have been pretty scathing. This is from yesterday's New Statesman:

It’s not the vulgarity that makes you want to puke so much as the asininity. The super- rich, it seems, really are different from the rest of us, their stupidity extending to the purchase of such fatuous me-treats as £30,000 sessions at the spa and brassieres encrusted with diamonds. Here’s an image for you. On a private Caribbean island, a pink, bald, loaded Brummie slashes the sand again and again with a golf club, every ball flying straight out into the ocean where, being made of fish food, it soon dissolves to nothing. As several novelists have discovered to their detriment just lately, this is a world far beyond satire, the symbolism so powerful and obvious that it requires not the slightest literary gussying-up.

...“We used to call it divine right,” said Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based entrepreneur who earns £12,000 an hour. “Now we call it trickle-down economics.” Wealth like his own, he pointed out, just doesn’t convert into jobs, or even into high-street sales (though he earns a thousand times more than other people he doesn’t buy a thousand times more stuff). A lone voice among the super-rich, Hanauer would love to pay more tax. You could say that he regards doing so as a matter of life or death, because he fears the pitchforks will be coming for his kind pretty soon. But his government, like our own, won’t allow it. For the time being, the thinking goes, the gates-- electronic, 24-hour CCTV, panic buttons-- are plenty sturdy enough to keep out the barbarians.

The rich, though, have a different vision of reality than normal people do. And they can afford to force their vision into public policy. In the light of the widely-discussed report this week from the Pew Research Center, The Politics of Financial Insecurity. As Roberto Ferdman reported for the Washington Post, "There is little empathy at the top. Most of America's richest think poor people have it easy in this country."

Why the surprising lack of compassion? It's hard to say. At the very top, the sentiment is likely tied to conservatism, which traditionally bemoans government programs that redistribute wealth, calling them safety nets. Some 40 percent of the financially secure are politically conservative, according to Pew. And conservatives are even more likely to say the "poor have it easy" than the rich-- a recent Pew survey found that more than three quarters of conservatives feel that way.

More broadly, the prevalence of the view might reflect an inability to understand the plight of those who have no choice but to seek help from the government. A quarter of the country, after all, feels that the leading reason for inequality in America is that the poor don't work hard enough.

But as my colleague Christopher Ingraham pointed out last year, to say that the poor have it easy is to ignore how serious their struggle is in comparison to the rest of the population, and especially those with money to spare. The poor are much less likely to have health insurance, much more likely to be the victim of a crime. They don't get the same level of education or have the same food options. Inequality, as my colleague Matt O'Brien wrote, "starts in the crib," and it plays out even in what babies of different socioeconomic backgrounds are fed. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The Rage And Anger Of… The Wealthy Class?

How does this sound to you? "If these profit-earning companies decide they can make more profit by adopting a technology that has the unfortunate result of polluting the air or the water, corporations will typically do that because the profit is more important to them than the social consequences that they basically don't have to live with and they don't have to pay for…The lip service as a nation we give to equality, to democracy, to equal opportunity are radically undone by the reality of the class structure… Here's a perfect example of the profit motive creating a housing boom that becomes a bust and that now, to recoup the money the minority who invested in it, requires millions of people-- the majority-- to, literally, lose their homes, producing in the United States in 2010 and 2011, a society that has millions of empty homes side by side with millions of homeless people… Over the last 30 years, [American capitalism] hasn't raised the wages the way it had for 150 years before. The confrontation with the inability of capitalism to deliver the goods was postponed by having Americans work way more hours than other people in other countries and by having American workers take on a level of debt no other working class ever, anywhere, had ever seen before. But we've now run out; we can't do more physical hours of work and we can't borrow any more money because we're not able to pay what we've already borrowed. And we're now going to have to face it and I think what we're going to see is an American working class that is going to rediscover class and realize that they have to question a system that works this way. They are going to demand fundamental changes-- and when they do, and as they do, they will rediscover the language of class, re-learn it from the working people in other countries who never forgot it and it will re-enter the discourse and debates of American society and probably with a vengeance."

A couple of year ago, we shared a short TED Talk on income inequality by Nick Hanauer, an uber-successful Seattle-based entrepreneur who asserts that rich people don't create jobs and aren't entitled to the tax advantages Republicans and corporate Democrats bestow on them (in return for legalistic bribes known as campaign contributions and career insurance)-- this TED Talk:



Today, Hanauer, writing for Politico, has a lengthy memo "to my fellow zillionaires," warning them-- as one private jet owner to another-- that he sees pitchforks in their futures. And he's raising the specter of guillotines and Madame DeFarge.

At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country-- the 99.99 percent-- is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.


Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.

The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression-- so that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks-- that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too. It’s not just that we’ll escape with our lives; it’s that we’ll most certainly get even richer.

The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts.

What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too… If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

…Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk. But in Seattle, our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet? Well, trickle-downers, look at the data here: The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage? San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America? Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us. It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass.

…The oldest and most important conflict in human societies is the battle over the concentration of wealth and power. The folks like us at the top have always told those at the bottom that our respective positions are righteous and good for all. Historically, we called that divine right. Today we have trickle-down economics.

What nonsense this is. Am I really such a superior person? Do I belong at the center of the moral as well as economic universe? Do you?

My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows. They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another pillow company. Three generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in Seattle named Bezos. I look at the average Joe on the street, and I say, “There but for the grace of Jeff go I.” Even the best of us, in the worst of circumstances, are barefoot, standing by a dirt road, selling fruit. We should never forget that, or forget that the United States of America and its middle class made us, rather than the other way around.

Or we could sit back, do nothing, enjoy our yachts. And wait for the pitchforks.

Jaime Fuller, in this morning's Washington Post, sees a convergence of thought on the left and on the right that the economy is rigged to benefit a very few wealthy, powerful families. The Beltway party Establishments may not see it but "according to a new Pew survey, 62% agree and 78% think that too much power is concentrated in too few companies. "This discontent," writes Fuller, "isn't limited to those who share [Elizabeth] Warren's liberal ideology; 69 percent of young conservative-leaning voters and 48 percent of the most conservative voters agree that the system favors the powerful, according to Pew."

Although Warren seems an outlier in the legislative branch for her fiery discontent with inequality-- and the role she says Wall Street plays in exacerbating it-- the Pew survey suggests that the vast majority of Americans are at least open to her underlying premise.

Everyone, that is, except business conservatives. This faction has vastly different views of the American economic system than most Americans. Two-thirds of business conservatives think the economic system is fair to most people, and 57 percent think that large companies do not have too much power.

The demographics that bind business conservatives go a long way toward explaining why they diverge on this issue. The business conservatives that Pew surveyed were the most affluent of the seven political typologies they defined-- 45 percent have family incomes above $75,000. Fifty-seven percent of business conservatives say they are interested in business and finance, and 68 percent invest in the stock market. No other typology has them beat on these two measures.

Americans' political beliefs are generally grounded in how they see politics interact or interfere with their own lives. We can focus on the diner-embed model of analyzing politics day and night, but for most Americans, gossiping about how a next-door neighbor lost their house or a cousin got a promotion at Goldman Sachs is all they've got. Business conservatives think the economic system is fair; others who aren't as enmeshed in it disagree.

So does conservative discontent with the current economic system mean that the rest of Congress is going to hang Thomas Piketty posters on their office walls and head to Zuccotti Park? (Or vote for Elizabeth Warren?)

Don't count on it. Business conservatives' confidence in the economic system might differ from everyone else, but business conservatives are politically active enough to make a big impression on politicians. Seventy-one percent of the business conservatives surveyed by Pew say they always or nearly always vote in primaries. "Steadfast conservatives" are similarly active too, but they aren't quite as affluent as their conservative counterparts, and they don't donate nearly as much money.

Another reason conservative politicians aren't about to join hands with Warren? The conservatives-- and many of the liberals-- who agree with her on the economy's unfairness don't agree with her on the source of the problem.

Skeptics, solid liberals and young conservative outsiders were the only political typologies more likely to think Wall Street was hurting the economy more than it helped it.

Until Americans agree on what needs to be done to fix the economy, their disappointment with its underpinnings are unlikely be met with any sweeping populist changes in policy. And this poll suggests that's not happening today.

Question of the day: if you could vote-- secretly of course-- to see the bodies of Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito swinging from a scaffold in front of the Supreme Court building tomorrow morning, how would you vote?

Economic Inequality-- Not Just Public Policy... It Starts On A Personal Level

A lot of voters-- voters who don't know rich people, I always thought-- were impressed with Trump's claims that because he was so rich he wouldn't be susceptible to taking bribes and being a crook. Personally, I know lots of rich people so I recognized Trump was lying-- lying egregiously, tricking voters by design.

At the end of 2013, Paul Piff, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at UC Irvine gave the TED talk above, which I urge you to watch. Piff describes his primary academic interest as "how social hierarchy, economic inequality and social class, and social emotion shape relations between individuals and groups." Conclusion seems to be that rich people have a great tendency towards greed, avarice, entitlement, delusion about their own abilities and general sociopathic behavior. I guess it's why the French and Russian revolutions killed so many of them. It's why the year after Piff's TED Talk, billionaire Nick Hanauer warned fellow plutocrats that the pitchforks are coming. "I have," he admitted, "been rewarded obscenely for that with a life that most of you all can't even imagine: multiple homes, a yacht, my own plane, etc., etc., etc." He went on:

But let's be honest: I am not the smartest person you've ever met. I am certainly not the hardest working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all. I can't write a word of code. Truly, my success is the consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing. But I am actually pretty good at a couple of things. One, I have an unusually high tolerance for risk, and the other is I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future, and I think that that intuition about the future is the essence of good entrepreneurship.

So what do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 percent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind. In 1980, the top one percent of Americans shared about eight percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans shared 18 percent. Thirty years later, today, the top one percent shares over 20 percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans share 12 or 13. If the trend continues, the top one percent will share over 30 percent of national [income] in another 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans will share just six.

You see, the problem isn't that we have some inequality. Some inequality is necessary for a high-functioning capitalist democracy. The problem is that inequality is at historic highs today and it's getting worse every day. And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks.

So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It's not a matter of if, it's when. And it will be terrible when they come for everyone, but particularly for people like us plutocrats."

Piff found in his studies the same thing that Hanauer found in his own social observations: "We're at unprecedented levels of economic inequality. What that means is that wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals, but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us. And if it's the case, as we've been finding, that the wealthier you are, the more entitled you feel to that wealth, and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests above the interests of other people, and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest, well, then, there's no reason to think that those patterns will change. In fact, there's every reason to think that they'll only get worse, and that's what it would look like if things just stayed the same, at the same linear rate, over the next 20 years." Why is that important? He doesn't talk about pitchforks or guillotines or firing squads.

[I]nequality-- economic inequality-- is something we should all be concerned about, and not just because of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but because individuals and groups with lots of economic inequality do worse ... not just the people at the bottom, everyone. There's a lot of really compelling research coming out from top labs all over the world, showcasing the range of things that are undermined as economic inequality gets worse. Social mobility, things we really care about, physical health, social trust, all go down as inequality goes up. Similarly, negative things in social collectives and societies, things like obesity, and violence, imprisonment, and punishment, are exacerbated as economic inequality increases. Again, these are outcomes not just experienced by a few, but that resound across all strata of society. Even people at the top experience these outcomes.

So what do we do? This cascade of self-perpetuating, pernicious, negative effects could seem like something that's spun out of control, and there's nothing we can do about it, certainly nothing we as individuals could do. But in fact, we've been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions, small changes to people's values, small nudges in certain directions, can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy. For instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation or the advantages of community, cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people.

This is the kind of solidarity Randy "IronStache" Bryce's campaign-- in fact his whole brand-- is all about. The DCCC is desperate to figure out how to duplicate Bryce's brand. Ben Ray Lujan himself showed up in Racine to see what he could discern. He couldn't discern anything, of course. Bryce has a more powerful brand than any DCCC candidate. He's raising more campaign funds-- from more people-- than any DCCC candidate. Why? Bryce, a union activist, is all about solidarity. The DCCC New Dems and Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party don't know what solidarity is. They've never felt it, not for a moment in their lives. They won't ever represent us. Randy and candidates like him will represent real people DCCC-New Dem garbage careerist candidates are the enemy of regular people. They stink. Are they better than Republicans? Sure-- more or less. Are they worth a bucket of spit? No? A bucket of piss? No. Should you vote for them? Certainly not in a primary. Against a Republican in November? Make up your own mind about that. I wouldn't. I've never voted for my Blue Dog-New Dem congressman, Adam Schiff, since he was first elected. And I never will. I've never voted for California Senator Dianne Feinstein, not when she ran for the Board of Supervisors, for mayor of San Francisco, for governor or for senator. She represents wealthy special interests, not me and not the issues or values I care about.

There's a reason I asked Kansas Democrat James Thompson to put an exclamation point on the end of this post. This is heavy... and if you find it as compelling as I do, please consider contributing to his campaign at the ActBlue 2018 congressional thermometer on the right.

As someone who was once homeless, I understand better than most the pain and struggle of being truly poor. As I have climbed the ladder of success, I witnessed firsthand that the ladders are not equal; they are not the same for every person. Some are shorter, some are longer, and some don't have a ladder at all, but rather an elevator that only stops at the penthouse. I do not hate the rich. I want to be rich myself. What I find offensive is not the wealth but the greed. The type of greed that pushes people down rather than pulling everyone up. Income inequality is the greatest injustice of our time because it creates so much other injustice in its wake in areas such as criminal justice reform, healthcare, sex trafficking, racism, sexism, employment, campaign finances etc. When our children are sick, should we not be able to get them care? When men and women give of themselves a full days labor for the betterment of our society, should they not enjoy a full days wages that allows them the basic dignity of taking care of themselves and their family. Shouldn't a poor man's vote count just as much as the rich man's?

The true battle for our country's future is not between the left and the right, but between the top and the bottom. Charles Koch is credited with saying "I only want my fair share. ALL OF IT!", which highlights the greed of the privileged princes of Wall Street. Through corporate socialism over the past 40 years, a/k/a "trickle down economics," the billionaire boys club redistributed the wealth of this country to themselves and now use that wealth to pay for the oppression of working people by sewing division and keeping the masses in disarray. The shadow oligarchy controlling this country knows that a populace divided by racism, sexism and xenophobia cannot unite sufficiently to wrest power from them or their puppets in Congress. However, while much of our country's wealth is concentrated in a relative few individuals such as the KOCH brothers, the real power of this country is located in the people, working class people, but only if we unite, for with unity comes great strength and power to demand change.

Consequently, campaign finance reform is probably the most pressing issue confronting Americans in 2018 and 2020. We must fix the system, before we can fix the problems in the system. We must remove the ability of corporations to control our political arenas and representatives by reversing Citizen's United.  We must than ensure that working people are paid a fair days pay for a fair days labor and moving our minimum wages to $15 and adjusting it annually based on inflation.  Next, we must make sure that the product of our labor is no longer amassed by the rich but instead remains with us through a fair and progressive tax policy. Passing a Medicare-for-all policy that at minimum contains a public option, will guarantee working Americans are no longer slaves to the grind simply working for their healthcare and instead are free to move from job to job and maximize the fruit of their labor. Finally, we must guarantee education for all citizens at public universities to remove the anchor of student loans from around the neck of our populace. To "make America great again" we must restore our democracy to one that again enables social mobilization instead of the veiled caste system that we have become. United we stand, divided we fall.

Do You Enjoy Reading? Economic Inequality-- (Almost) The Whole Story

Over the weekend, CNN published a crowd-sourced list of the 99-- like in the 99%-- must-reads on income inequality. The titles that are linked are available online or are avilable in the DWT online book store.

1. "The Price of Inequality," by Joseph Stiglitz

2. "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," by John Perkins

3. "Player Piano," by Kurt Vonnegut (Vonnegut's first novel; according to the back cover, it's a "chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines.")

4. "Economic Growth and Income Inequality", by Simon Kuznets

5. "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else," by Chrystia Freeland

6. "The Unwinding," by George Packer

7. "A Tale of Two Cities," by Charles Dickens (Heard of him?)

8. "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand ("I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.")

9. "How Class Works," animation, by Richard Wolff

10. "Random Family," by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

11. "Behind Beautiful Forevers," by Katherine Boo (The Pulitzer-winner explores inequality in Mumbai's "undercity.")

12. "Highly profitable companies..." by Matthew Yglesias, Slate

13. "In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters," NYTimes.com map (National map shows a poor kid's odds of climbing to the top of the income ladder, by location.)

14. "A Framework for Understanding Poverty," by Ruby Payne

15. "The Big Sort," by Bill Bishop

16. The Bible (James, Chapters 2 and 5, and the books of Job and John were recommended. From James: "Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, 'Here's a good seat for you,' but say to the poor man, 'You stand there' or 'Sit on the floor by my feet,' have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?")

17. "The Other America," by Michael Harrington

18. "The One Percent," documentary by Jamie Johnson (The Johnson & Johnson heir is pretty good at biting the hand that feeds him.)

19. "Progress and Poverty," by Henry George

20. "Winner Take All Politics," by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

21. "The Haves and the Have-Nots," by Branko Milanovic

22. "A Theory of Justice," by John Rawls

23. "Park Avenue" documentary, by Alex Gibney (New York's Park Avenue is home to enormous wealth and excruciating poverty.)

24. "Wealth Inequality in America," YouTube video

25. "Inequality and New York's Subway," by The New Yorker (This is fascinating in its minimalism. See median household incomes mapped by subway stop.)

26. "Nickel and Dimed," by Barbara Ehrenreich (Just read it. The author tries to live on low-wage jobs and finds it's nearly impossible. Heartfelt and so well-written.)

27. "The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger," by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

28. "Wealth of Nations," by Adam Smith

29. "The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism," by George Bernard Shaw

30. "740 Park," by Michael Gross (Gross examines one of the richest buildings in the world.)

31. "Savage Inequalities," by Jonathan Kozol

32. "The Jungle," by Upton Sinclair

33. Podcast on the "Economics of Enough"

34. "America the Beautiful," by Ben Carson

35. Nick Hanauer's TED Talk on income inequality (video up top)

36. "The Case for Happiness-Based Economics," by Kentaro Toyama

37. "Superclass," by David Rothkopf

38. "Love and Capital," by Mary Gabriel

39. "Why the rich don't give to charity," by Ken Stern, The Atlantic ("One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans-- those with earnings in the top 20%-- contributed on average 1.3% of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid-- those in the bottom 20 percent-- donated 3.2% of their income.")

40. The Poverty Clinic, by Paul Tough, The New Yorker

41. "The House I Live In," documentary by Eugene Jarecki

42. "Screwed," by Thom Hartmann

43. "Richistan," by Robert Frank

44. "You Call This Democracy?" by Paul Kivel

45. "The Conscience of a Liberal," by Paul Krugman

46. "The Wretched of the Earth," by Frantz Fanon

47. "Reckless Endangerment," by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner

48. "Ill Fares the Land," by Tony Judt

49. "The FairTax Book," by Neal Boortz (Wanna get rid of the IRS? Here's your book.)

50. "Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945" by Thomas Hungerford, for the Congressional Research Service

51. "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts," by Karl Marx

52. "The Grapes of Wrath," by John Steinbeck

53. "The American Way of Eating," by Tracie McMillan

54. "Animal Farm," by George Orwell ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.")

55. "How much inequality is necessary for growth," by Fuad Hasanov and Oded Izraeli, Harvard Business Review ("Although our findings suggest that modest increases can generate growth, other data indicate that heightened inequality shortens growth spells and may halt growth. Reducing inequality, though, has clear benefits over time: It strengthens people's sense that society is fair, improves social cohesion and mobility, and broadens support for growth initiatives. Policies that aim for growth but ignore inequality may ultimately be self-defeating, then, whereas policies that decrease inequality by, say, boosting employment and education have beneficial effects on the human capital that modern economies increasingly need.")

56. "The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions," by Thorstein Veblen

57. "Orange is the New Black," Netflix series

58. "Wage Inequality and the Rise in Returns to Skill," by Chinhui Juhn et al

59. "Rules for Radicals," by Saul Alinsky

60. "Mayday for America's Middle Class," by Hedrick Smith ("If America is going to get beyond paralyzing gridlock and dangerous brinkmanship in the budget battles this fall, what's needed is a shift in the economic mind-set that has dominated Washington for three decades. To paraphrase what Albert Einstein reportedly said at the dawn of the Atomic Age in 1945: You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.")

61. "Why Nations Fail," by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

62. "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-2002," by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez

63. "Unequal Democracy," by Larry Bartels

64. "Wealth and Poverty," George Gilder

65. "Rich Schools, Poor Schools," by Arthur Wise

66. The Catechism of the Catholic Church-- Social Justice (A reader suggested Chapter 2, Article 3. One excerpt: "Socio-economic problems can be resolved only with the help of all the forms of solidarity: solidarity of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples. International solidarity is a requirement of the moral order; world peace depends in part upon this.")

67. Dorothea Lange's photography (Think Dust Bowl.)

68. "The Working Poor: Invisible in America," by David Shipler

69. "All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America," by Joel Berg

70. "Targeting the Wealthy Kills Jobs," by T.J. Rodgers, Wall Street Journal

71. "If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?" by G.A. Cohen

72. The Inequality Issue of The Economist

73. "The Capitalist Revolution," by Peter L. Berger

74. "Getting Rich: America's New Rich and How They Got That Way," by Lisa A. Keister

75. "13 Bankers," by Simon Johnson and James Kwak

76. "The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity," by Michael Marmot

77. "Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America," by Cynthia Duncan

78. "America: What Went Wrong," by the Philadelphia Inquirer (This 1990s newspaper series really stuck one reader, who wrote in an e-mail to me that "it took my breath away when I read it as a young man in my late 20's; and it continues to have a profound impact on my thinking today-- particularly about concerns over the American middle class.")

79. "Out of this furnace," by Thomas Bell

80. "Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade Off" by Arthur Okun

81. "The New Good Life," by John Robbins

82. "Workonomics" section of Upworthy.com (Engineered for clickability, with headlines like, "Hey Broke People: This Statistic Will Piss You Off.")

83. "The United States of Inequality" video, BillMoyers.com

84. Monty Python clip on "Constitutional Peasants" ("Oh, there you go, bringing class into it again ...")



85. "The Other Wes Moore," by Wes Moore (From an online book description: "Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question.")

86. "Moral Man and Immoral Society," by Reinhold Niebuhr

87. "The Politics of Rich and Poor," by Kevin Phillips

88. "A Modest Proposal," by Jonathan Swift

89. "Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality," by Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R. Jacobs

90. "Five American Authors on Wealth Poverty and Inequality," by Ichiro Kawachi and Philippa Howden Chapman

91. "Caesar's Column," by Ignatius Donnelly

92. "The Time Machine," by H.G. Wells

93. "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," by David Graeber

94. "The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald ("The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.")

95. "How Unequal Can America Get," YouTube of Robert Reich (video below)

96. "Twilight of the Elites," by Christopher Hayes

97. "Third World America," by Arianna Huffington

98. "It's the inequality, stupid," by Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot, Mother Jones ("A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90% of us? $31,244.")

99. "The Maximum Wage," by Sam Pizzigati