Saturday, 12 May 2018

Every Democrat Should Support Bernie Sanders’s New Labor Bill

quote [ If we're going to reverse the 40-year decline of the middle class and reduce the widening gap between the super-rich and everyone else, we must restore the constitutional right of workers to collectively bargain for a better life. ]

Bernie is going to put the power of a platform to the test. He is going to run into some strong head wins. The constant barrage of noise coming out of Trump, His own party trying desperately to hang on to the old order, and most important a News Media who has no incentive to cover him or his message.

The forces allied against him a formidable probably even stronger than in 16 The difference this time is he is not coming in to this late or unprepared.

First of all he is not unknown has face recognition and a known record to run on. He has a viable political organization and has a presence in cyber space.

But next week there will be another network or newspaper story about how The Democratic Party stands for nothing but the anti Trump party or that Do Democrats Really Need a Message? even though it is plainly said...

Health care must be recognized as a right, not a privilege. Every man, woman and child in our country should be able to access the health care they need ...

We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty. The current federal minimum wage is starvation pay and must become a living wage. We must increase the MW to $15 dollars an hour ...

Combating Climate Change to Save the Planet...

Private prisons...Student debt....and all of these have white papers laying out of the details.


Bottom line it looks like Bernie is in this and if the Old SOB has one more run in I am going to follow...
[SFW] [politics] [+3 Underrated]
[by bbqkink@9:07pmGMT]

Comments

bbqkink said @ 11:07pm GMT on 13th May [Score:2]
bbqkink said @ 1:04am GMT on 14th May
Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump)
President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!

President Trump says he's working with China to save ZTE

satanspenis666 said @ 1:55am GMT on 13th May
While I personally like Bernie and support many of these changes, I don't think that any other politicians are likely to push this agenda at this time. We are at full employment and politicians are not likely to push for labor changes when people are working. Economists and politicians will argue that the free market will lead to higher worker rights and wages.
electric guppy said[1] @ 3:17am GMT on 14th May [Score:2]
We are at full employment

If I can find the article I read a few days ago on this point, I will follow up with a link. The author's premise was that we are not at full employment. The official unemployment numbers only include people actively looking for work.

There is a large pool of uncounted potential workers who will take work if it becomes available. This pool is the reason wages continue to remain low, and will remain low until the pool shrinks enough (whatever percentage that turns out to be). But we need some other statistics beyond the official unemployment numbers in order to get a handle on the wage situation.

Update: Although I have not yet located the (fuller) analysis I was thinking of, this is a brief summary: There Is No U.S. Wage Growth Mystery (14 Jul 2017)
mechavolt said @ 2:45am GMT on 13th May
The problem is that "full employment" is only full in the sense that the jobs are technically filled. While the number of jobs has rebounded since the recession, a significant proportion of them are underpaid. Which means your tax dollars, and yes I'm talking to you numbers, are subsidizing the wages of these underpaid jobs through welfare programs. People need to spend enough to survive, and the money is coming from somewhere. What I just don't understand is why the hypocritical right feels that they should be paying for it through taxes instead of higher wages direct from the employer.
Taxman said @ 4:16am GMT on 13th May [Score:1 Underrated]
rylex said @ 4:37am GMT on 13th May
Because class war.
lilmookieesquire said @ 1:35pm GMT on 13th May
McDonalds and Walmart specifically balance salaries with social programs factored in.
mechavolt said @ 3:44pm GMT on 13th May
Exactly my point! If the right actually cared about their supposed platform, this should piss them off. I especially hate their argument that if we raised the minimum wage, that everything would cost more. They're already paying to subsidize wages, the costs are already there! Except in the current setup, the corporations benefit, and the workers suffer.
Hugh E. said @ 3:51pm GMT on 13th May
What makes you believe The Right think they should be paying for it through taxes? The Right want neither living wages nor social assistance. The Right want cheap labor and a lower class.
1111 said @ 12:55pm GMT on 13th May [Score:-2 Boring]
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mechavolt said @ 3:41pm GMT on 13th May [Score:0 Good]
http://www.sensibleendowment.com/entry.php/11719

I'm sorry, what was that about not running away from conversations?
1111 said @ 4:36pm GMT on 13th May [Score:-1]
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Taxman said @ 7:32pm GMT on 13th May [Score:0 Underrated]
You’re a sock puppet account. You could be 3456, or fish, or norok, or any other asshat on the forum. The point is you avoid conversations where you would be made to look foolish. You avoid having a named account that you have to stick with, because then people would be able to call you out for what you’re attempting to call them out for.

Mechavolt is pointing out you were silent in the article that made you and your ilk look foolish.

You ran away when I asked you what leader killed Osama Bin Laden. You said you were ‘done’ and left. Are you implying that others can’t do the same with you?
1111 said @ 8:11pm GMT on 13th May [Score:-2 Overrated]
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Taxman said @ 10:57pm GMT on 13th May [Score:0 Underrated]
I was having a discussion with 3456. Now this might be coincidence but you and that account put spaces before your first sentence and your last sentence. So weird right? Two sock puppet accounts that have the same writing style?

The way you want it: People can call you out, but only on your individual sock puppet accounts. If you talk shit under another account and then use this one to specifically to only call out people you think have wronged you, you’re acting in bad faith. As I said, get a real account, and people might take you seriously.
arrowhen said @ 11:36pm GMT on 13th May [Score:0 Insightful]
If 1111 and 3456 aren't the same person, they at least have the same mother...


1111 said @ 8:30am on 5th May [Score:-4 Boring]

I wasn’t suggesting Hugh engage with me, I was asking if he had the intellectual wherewithal to engage with Walkers argument.

He doesn’t.

So then, your soccer analogy misses the goal posts entirely.

You were on firmer ground when you were calling my mother a whore.

Much more commensurate with your intellectual abilities

--http://sensibleendowment.com/comment.php/11715/132177



3456 said @ 6:39am on 30th April [Score:-4 Troll]

Any of you indeed.
The full breadth of your sparkling wit and inventive use of imagery was on display yesterday when you called my mother a whore.
For you, given your paltry gifts, that was the height of oratory.
You must be tired today.

--http://sensibleendowment.com/comment.php/11685/131887
1111 said @ 11:19pm GMT on 13th May [Score:-1]
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Taxman said @ 12:05am GMT on 14th May [Score:-1]
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arrowhen said @ 12:15am GMT on 14th May [Score:0 Hot Pr0n]
At least he finally admitted to the sockpuppetting!
1111 said[2] @ 12:46am GMT on 14th May [Score:-1]
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Taxman said @ 2:08am GMT on 14th May [Score:0 Underrated]
Well since you’re 1111 and 3456 that means you want people to “celebrate” Trump’s ‘success’ on North Korea. You want a nobel prize before doing anything. Trump just wiped the Iran deal without showing any evidence of wrongdoing. What’s to stop him from doing the same thing to N Korea? What’s to stop N Korea from thinking the same thing will happen with the next president when Trump is shortly out of office?

So you want praise for success, ok. Let’s do a check to make sure you’re serious then. Who was the leader that took out Osama bin Laden? Has nothing to do with Korea. Just want to see what your memory says. What you can say yourself.
1111 said @ 5:28am GMT on 14th May [Score:-1]
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Taxman said @ 11:28am GMT on 14th May [Score:0 Underrated]
But it has everything to do with your argument. You can’t (won’t) do what you’re asking everyone here to do. Why should anyone take you seriously?
bbqkink said @ 9:00pm GMT on 13th May
I don't think that any other politicians are likely to push this agenda at this time.

Or at any other time they weren't forced into doing it...VOTE!!
steele said @ 12:58pm GMT on 13th May
A quick excerpt from The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century Added emphasis mine. :D

Reveal

Globalization is also capable of influencing policymaking. Intensified competition, financial liberalization, and the removal of obstacles to the flow of capital may encourage fiscal reforms and economic deregulation. As a result, globalization shifts taxation from corporate and personal to expenditure taxes, which tend to be associated with a less equal distribution of after-tax income. Even so, at least up to this point, international economic integration and competition is in theory expected to constrain only certain types of redistributive policies and in practice has not generally undermined welfare spending.12

In rich countries, demographic factors have impinged on the income distribution in different ways. Immigration has had only a small effect on inequality in the United States and has even generated equalizing consequences in some European countries. Conversely, assortative mating—more specifically, the growing economic similarity of marriage partners—has widened gaps between households and has been credited with causing some 25 percent to 30 percent of the overall increase in American earnings inequality between 1967 and 2005, even though this effect may have been largely concentrated in the 1980s.13

Institutional change is another prominent culprit. Falling union membership rates and eroding minimum wages have been contributing to rising income disparities. Government redistribution has been found to be positively correlated with union density and collective wage bargaining. Stronger organized labor and employment protection lower returns to skills. More generally, union membership tends to compress wage inequality by institutionalizing norms of equity. The inverse—deunionization and downward pressure of real minimum wages—has consequently skewed the distribution of earnings: in the United States, a decline in private union membership from 34 percent to 8 percent for men and from 16 percent to 6 percent for women between 1973 and 2007 coincided with an increase in inequality in hourly wages of more than 40 percent and accounted for a sizeable share of overall disequalization in this period, on a scale similar to rising skill premiums. Minimum wages, by comparison, played a much smaller role in this process. At the same time, more equitable labor market institutions in continental Europe were more effective in limiting rising inequality.14

Just as labor market institutions help shape the way compensation for labor is allocated, fiscal institutions play a crucial role in determining the distribution of disposable income. During and after World War II, marginal tax rates on income in many developed countries had soared to record highs. This trend was reversed at about the same time when income inequality began to recover: one survey of eighteen OECD countries finds that in all but two of them, top marginal rates have declined since the 1970s or 1980s. Top income shares in particular have been strongly correlated with the burden of taxation: countries that saw significant tax cuts witnessed substantial growth in top incomes even as others did not. The scale of wealth taxation has trended in the same direction: whereas hefty inheritance taxes had hampered the rebuilding of large fortunes in the postwar period, subsequent tax reductions have facilitated renewed accumulation. In the United States, lower taxes on capital income have raised its share of overall after-tax income, and large increases in the relative weight of capital gains and dividends accompanied tax cuts in the 2000s. Between 1980 and 2013, the average income tax rate for the top 0.1 percent of households fell from 42 percent to 27 percent, and average tax on wealth fell from 54 percent to 40 percent. Reduced tax progressivity accounts for about half of recent increases in American wealth dispersion, whereas rising income inequality has largely been driven by divergence in wages. Even though in recent decades the scale of redistribution increased in most OECD countries, taxes and transfers have not kept pace with rising market income inequality and since the mid-1990s have become a less effective means of equalization.15
Because taxes, business regulations, immigration laws, and various labor market institutions are determined by policymakers, several of the aforementioned sources of inequality are firmly embedded in the political sphere. I already mentioned that the competitive pressures of globalization may influence legislative outcomes at the national level. But politics and economic disequalization interact in manifold ways. In the United States, both of the dominant parties have shifted toward free-market capitalism. Even though analysis of roll call votes show that since the 1970s, Republicans have drifted farther to the right than Democrats have moved to the left, the latter were instrumental in implementing financial deregulation in the 1990s and focused increasingly on cultural issues such as gender, race, and sexual identity rather than traditional social welfare policies. Political polarization in Congress, which had bottomed out in the 1940s, has been rapidly growing since the 1980s. Between 1913 and 2008, the development of top income shares closely tracked the degree of polarization but with a lag of about a decade: changes in the latter preceded changes in the former but generally moved in the same direction—first down, then up. The same has been true of wages and education levels in the financial sector relative to all other sectors of the American economy, an index that likewise tracks partisan polarization with a time lag. Thus elite incomes in general and those in the finance sector in particular have been highly sensitive to the degree of legislative cohesion and have benefited from worsening gridlock.

Moreover, voter participation is strongly biased in favor of affluent households. Since the 1970s, traditionally low turnout among less affluent voters has been amplified by massive immigration of noncitizen low-income workers. In the 2008 and 2010 elections, voter participation was closely correlated with income and characterized by a fairly linear increase from low to high income households: in 2010, only a quarter of the poorest households but more than half of those enjoying incomes in excess of $150,000 cast their ballots. The American “1 percent” are both politically more active and more conservative regarding taxation, regulation, and social welfare than the population as a whole, and this skew is even stronger in the highest tiers of this income bracket. Finally, notwithstanding a huge increase in the number of itemized donations, campaign contributions have become more concentrated over time. The highest-earning 0.01 percent used to contribute 10 percent to 15 percent of all donated campaign funds in the 1980s but accounted for more than 40 percent of the total in 2012. Candidates and parties consequently increasingly rely on very rich donors, a trend that further reinforces a more general observable bias of legislators in favor of the preferences of high-income voters.16

All this amply supports the conclusion that shifts in power relations have been instrumental in complementing and exacerbating disequalizing pressures arising from technological change and global economic integration. There is now a growing consensus that changes at the very top of the income and wealth distribution have been particularly sensitive to institutional and political factors, sometimes with dramatic consequences. In the United States, 60 percent of the growth in market income between 1979 and 2007 was absorbed by the “1 percent,” whereas only 9 percent of the total increase went to the bottom 90 percent. The same elite group pocketed 38 percent of all growth in after-tax income, compared to 31 percent for the bottom 80 percent. The share of the highest-grossing 0.01 percent of American households more than doubled between the early 1990s and the early 2010s. Dispersion has consistently been concentrated in higher income brackets: although the ratio of U.S. incomes at the ninetieth to those at the fiftieth percentile has continuously grown since the 1970s, the ratio of incomes at the fiftieth to those at the tenth percentiles (i.e., between middling and low levels) has been rather flat since the 1990s. In other words, the well-paid are pulling away from everybody else. This trend has been typical of Anglo-Saxon countries in general but is much weaker or even absent in most other OECD countries. Even so, overall income inequality has universally been sensitive to top income shares in the long run: in a number of countries, the share of the 9 percent of households below the top “1 percent” has been stable (at around 20 percent to 25 percent) from the 1920s to the present day, whereas top shares have been much more volatile. Similar trends have been observed for upper wealth shares. All this shows that the relative size of the largest incomes has been a major determinant of overall inequality and thus merits special attention

bbqkink said @ 12:29am GMT on 14th May
bbqkink said @ 1:32am GMT on 14th May
Home Depot founder on Bernie Sanders: ‘This is the antichrist!’ Come on guys I thought you all said that was Obama...
bbqkink said[1] @ 7:36pm GMT on 14th May
The US Senate is scheduled to vote Wednesday, May 16 on whether to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules.

Republican senators were hoping to avoid the vote, but Democrats are using a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to force the full Senate to vote. The CRA resolution would nullify the FCC's December 2017 vote to deregulate broadband and kill net neutrality rules and would prevent the FCC from taking similar actions in the future.


I'm not sure if they have any chance of passing this or if it is just to get the names of those who will vote against it. I'll be willing to bet it doesn't get a vote in the house.
mechanical contrivance said @ 8:01pm GMT on 14th May
It might pass the senate, but it won't pass the house. Even if it passed both the senate and the house, Trump would veto it.
1111 said[2] @ 1:23am GMT on 14th May [Score:-1 Boring]
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arrowhen said @ 2:15am GMT on 14th May [Score:-1]
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Taxman said @ 2:26am GMT on 14th May [Score:-1]
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1111 said[1] @ 5:22am GMT on 14th May [Score:-1]
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Taxman said @ 11:43am GMT on 14th May [Score:-1]
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