America Isn’t a Corporation

“And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.”

That’s how the fictional Gordon Gekko finished his famous “Greed is good” speech in the 1987 film “Wall Street.” In the movie, Gekko got his comeuppance. But in real life, Gekkoism triumphed, and policy based on the notion that greed is good is a major reason why income has grown so much more rapidly for the richest 1 percent than for the middle class.

Today, however, let’s focus on the rest of that sentence, which compares America to a corporation. This, too, is an idea that has been widely accepted. And it’s the main plank of Mitt Romney’s case that he should be president: In effect, he is asserting that what we need to fix our ailing economy is someone who has been successful in business.  Read more here.

For Immediate Release                Contact: Jeff Hauser 202-637-5018

Statement by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka

On Mass Arrests of Peaceful Occupy Wall Street Protests
October 26, 2011

It is a tremendous dishonor to America when the voices for the powerless are suppressed by the powerful -- the top 1%. We are extremely alarmed by the increasing number of arrests of peaceful protestors across the country and call on elected leaders to stop ordering the police to make these arrests. The Occupy Wall Street movement has elevated the national conversation by shining overdue attention on the struggles of the 99% for whom the economy is broken. When people can't raise their voices around pervasive inequality, there is a fundamental problem with how we're functioning as a nation.

Mayor Bloomberg of New York City listened to reason from the community and did not forcibly disband the original Wall Street protestors at Zuccotti Park. We urge all elected leaders across the country to enable peaceful protestors to continue to exercise their most American of rights.

Setting Their Hair on Fire

by Paul Krugman

First things first: I was favorably surprised by the new Obama jobs plan, which is significantly bolder and better than I expected. It’s not nearly as bold as the plan I’d want in an ideal world. But if it actually became law, it would probably make a significant dent in unemployment.

Of course, it isn’t likely to become law, thanks to G.O.P. opposition. Nor is anything else likely to happen that will do much to help the 14 million Americans out of work. And that is both a tragedy and an outrage.

Before I get to the Obama plan, let me talk about the other important economic speech of the week, which was given by Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve of Chicago. Mr. Evans said, forthrightly, what some of us have been hoping to hear from Fed officials for years now.

As Mr. Evans pointed out, the Fed, both as a matter of law and as a matter of social responsibility, should try to keep both inflation and unemployment low — and while inflation seems likely to stay near or below the Fed’s target of around 2 percent, unemployment remains extremely high.

So how should the Fed be reacting? Mr. Evans: “Imagine that inflation was running at 5 percent against our inflation objective of 2 percent. Is there a doubt that any central banker worth their salt would be reacting strongly to fight this high inflation rate? No, there isn’t any doubt. They would be acting as if their hair was on fire. We should be similarly energized about improving conditions in the labor market.” Read more.

AFL-CIO's Trumka Calls for Labor Movement Separate from Parties: 'I've Had a Snootful of This Shit!'

By John Nichols, The Nation

The following article first appeared in The Nation magazine. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their email newsletters here.

“We want an independent labor movement strong enough to return balance to our economy, fairness to our tax system, security to our families and moral and economic standing to our nation,” declared Trumka, who in recent months has been repositioning the AFL-CIO as a force that will hold Republicans and Democrats to what he describes as “a simple standard: “Are they helping or hurting working families?”  Read more.

Dear Dr. Dollar:

The main narrative that I hear in mainstream press is that U.S. workers are being undercut and eventually displaced by global competition. I think this narrative has a tone of inevitability, that low wages and job loss are driven by huge impersonal forces that we can't do much about. Is this right?
— Vicki Legion, San Francisco, Calif.

Yes, that is the main narrative. But, no, it’s not right.

Globalization, in the sense of increasing international commerce over long distances, has been going on since human beings made their way out of Africa and spread themselves far and wide. Trade between China and the Mediterranean seems to have been taking place at least 3,000 years ago. (We know this through chemical analysis of silk found in the hair of an Egyptian mummy interred around 1000 BCE; the silk was identified as almost certainly from China.) The long history of long-distance commerce does cast an aura of inevitability over globalization.

But the spread of international commerce has not taken shape outside of human control. Globalization takes many forms; its history has variously involved colonial control, spheres of influence, and forms of regulated trade. Read more.