Replies to post #434413 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Incoherent, at best, contrafactual at worst.

A sweeping generalization without basis in fact. In fact there is nothing in the recently passed Dem Bills that remotely supports your claim.

Dems of the past believed in a hard days work for decent pay and conditions...Then filled the gaps and nothing more, the modern democrats don't resemble them at all....

[sortagreen]

Politics is the art of the possible.

Remember Hillary care? We got eviscerated.

"my god we used to be able to raise a family on one person working class pay"

Have you ever been to a "right to work" state? Oh that's right. Unions suck. Union "bosses," amaright? Where'd Neil Gorsuch come from? Where'd Roberts and Alito come from?

The working class voted away their own rights, just like women voted away Roe. These things were never secrets.

Dude, I've been trying to stay out of your way, but you're getting really screechy... y'know? Did something happen in your life?

[SoxFan]

So you think Dems sent jobs overseas. Are you ignorant of what you are talking about? The great migration started in the 80's when Raygun was POTUS and increased under HW Bush and then continued. Walmart practically forced suppliers to move overseas or else.

when you say this you truly are full of fecal waste -

Dems of the past believed in a hard days work for decent pay and conditions...Then filled the gaps and nothing more, the modern democrats don't resemble them at all...

So who has been fighting for unions, wage increases, better safety nets? So what state do you live in maybe you live in one of those shithole states that say to companies our people will work for shitty wages and benefits and we are against unions and you just don't know any better.

[fuagf]

The White House is only telling you half of the sad story of what happened to American jobs

"Dems gave most all that away siding with the corps,"

Related: Way more CEOs are Republicans than Democrats. Here’s the proof
By Lydia DePillis, CNN Business
Published 2:53 PM EDT, Tue May 14, 2019
[...] In a working paper released this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers at Harvard Law School and Tel Aviv University ran the names of all individuals to have run a company listed in the S&P 1500 between 2000 and 2017 through federal campaign finance databases, which include contributions to both congressional and presidential candidates as well as party committees.
P - The result: 18.6% of CEOs consistently donated to Democrats, while 57.7% donated to Republicans, with the rest leaning toward neither party.
P - That may not be surprising, given how big business tends to benefit more from conservative policy goals like lowering taxes and easing up on regulations. Labor unions donate heavily to Democrats, who tend to support more worker-friendly policies.
P - But the research shows just how deep those preferences run, and it further explores the wider implications at a time when corporations spend vast sums of money on elections
[...]
One found that nonprofit organizations are more likely to submit comments during rulemaking processes that favor their corporate donors, increasing the likelihood that the final rule reflects their donors’ priorities. Another found that the philanthropic arms of Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies funnel their contributions into the districts of members of Congress who attain seats on committees that are relevant to their industries, and concluded that the amount of politically motivated “charitable” giving amounted to more than six times the amount raised annually by political action committees.
p - “Given the lack of formal electoral or regulatory disclosure requirements, charitable giving may be a form of political influence that goes mostly undetected by voters and shareholders, and which is directly subsidized by taxpayers,” the authors wrote.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/14/business/republican-democrat-ceos/index.html

This article dated when Republicans/Trump had the White House.

Linette Lopez
Jul 26, 2017, 2:20 AM


Navarro is the guy the arrows are pointing to. Reuters

* The Trump administration's timeline on the decline of American workers starts in the late 1990s with the rise of China. 

* That thinking overlooks the impact of spending cuts, deregulation, and a shift to shareholder primacy at the expense of investment in innovation and workers. 

* That began in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president and led a push for more Laissez Faire economics. 

* Ignoring the US's hand in the demise of its own working class means this administration will never actually find ways to grow the economy for them.

White House Trade Council head Peter Navarro was explaining .. https://www.npr.org/2017/07/19/538148732/white-house-trade-council-director-touts-made-in-america-week ..  what he sees as the biggest problem with the American economy since the 1990s that exacerbated inequality and left the American worker in the lurch. 

"Well, I think you start with the idea that we've had 15 years of subpar growth — 2 percent or below," he said in an interview with NPR to promote "Made in America Week." 

"Prior to 2001, we grew at 3 and a half percent. The big difference has been the entry of China in particular into the World Trade Organization and our markets. And we've just been hammered. What that does as a proxy, basically, is it drains essentially the lifeblood out of our manufacturing economy, out of our communities, out of our tax bases."

So the narrative from the White House is that China's big push into global markets is the root cause for stagnant economic and wage growth since the turn of the millennium. But that narrative has a really basic flaw: It's only half the story. And with only half the story, you're not going to find a whole solution to the slow growth, low wage, low unemployment predicament we find ourselves in now.

The problem didn't start in the 1990s, it started in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan — a hero of the Trump administration — was president, and neoliberal economics were first making their mark on policy. Reagan and his ilk distrusted government and believed that the private sector could make the best decisions when left on its own. You've heard about this — it's called laissez faire economics.

This ideology ultimately led to the financialization of the US corporation — the process of putting shareholders first, often at the expense of workers and consumers — and its emergence as an actor that takes resources from the economy rather than creating them. This, combined with a government zeal for lowering taxes rather than spending, means no one — not the government, and not the private sector — is investing enough in America to keep the economy strong across social classes.

Insert: AP fact check: Trump’s fog of misinformation on trade
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=150678459]

In short: Government cuts and changes in how corporations operate mean American workers are getting screwed by their own government and their own employers.

Navarro and I end up with the same dire view of the current economic landscape. We just disagree on how we got there.

An unstoppable force...

But I'm jumping ahead — let's go back to the Reagan era. That was also the time Japanese manufacturers had developed a superior management style to their American rivals and, frankly, started eating our lunch.

Instead of keeping a wall between management and workers, Japanese manufacturers adopted “organizational integration,” which put technical specialists and shop-floor workers together. The result was better products made faster in Japan, and jobs lost permanently in the United States.


The Financialization of the US Corporation, William Lazonick

William Lazonick, an economics professor at UMass Lowell, describes the results of that transformation in his 2012 paper .. https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol36/iss2/17/ , "The Financialization of the US Corporation: What Has Been Lost, and How Can It Be Regained." It's a must-read for this kind of stuff.

Lazonick describes the huge negative effect competition from Japanese manufacturers had on American manufacturing jobs:

---
"The adverse impact of Japanese competition on US employment became particularly harsh in the double-dip recession of 1980-1982 when large numbers of good blue-collar jobs disappeared from US industry, as it turned out permanently (Bednarzik 1983).

"Previously, in a more stable competitive environment, US manufacturing companies would lay off workers with the least seniority in a downturn and re-employ them when economic conditions improved. Now companies were much more likely to shutter whole plants (Harris 1984; Hamermesh 1989).

"From 1980 to 1985 employment in the US economy increased from 104.5 million to 107.2 million workers, or by 2.6 percent. But employment of operators, fabricators, and laborers fell from 20.0 million to 16.8 million, a decline of 15.9 percent (US Department of Commerce 1983, 416; and 1986, 386)."
---

Industries like consumer electronics, automobiles, machine tools, steel and microelectronics were all hit especially hard by Japan's advancement.

Most never recovered. Some companies disappeared from the face of the earth, like consumer electronics maker RCA. In 1981 it was a global leader, by 1986 it was bought by GE and then chopped up and sold for parts.

...meets an immovable object


Lawmakers watch closely as President Reagan signs
into law a landmark tax overhaul on the White House
South Lawn in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 22,
1986. Reagan called the bill a "sweeping victory
for fairness." AP Photo/Bob Dougherty

All of this was happening amid a wave of deregulation in the US.

The head of the SEC, John Shad, was a former banker — something that hadn't happened in 50 years. He, like Reagan, believed that the private sector could channel funds better without regulation and so he wrote rules with that in mind.

For example, in 1982 he made it legal for companies to repurchase their shares .. https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity .. on the open market pretty much whenever they wanted. Previously, the SEC had considered this a form of stock price manipulation.

This was also the era of the corporate raider, pushing companies to become leaner and more profitable as quickly as possible.

The shareholder became the main thing for a company to worry about. Employees lost their status. Companies feared getting attacked, so they bent over backward to mollify the former at the expense of the latter. Those new stock repurchasing rules, for one thing, allowed them to shore up their defenses by buying back stock. But, of course, that meant spending money that could've gone to innovate, invest in new technology and equipment, or reward workers. 

That's when Lazonick says the financialization of the American corporation began in earnest, and blue-collar workers were left behind by corporate America and the government alike:

---
"As secure middle-class jobs for high-school-educated blue-collar workers permanently disappeared, there was no commitment on the part of those who managed US industrial corporations or the Republican administrations that ruled in the 1980s to invest in the new capabilities and opportunities required to upgrade the quality and expand the quantity of well-paid employment opportunities in the United States on a scale sufficient to re-establish conditions of prosperity for these displaced members of the US labor force."
---

Reagan's mission was to cut the budget — which meant not spending money investing in the future of these workers .. https://www.businessinsider.com/retraining-solution-to-robots-automation-2017-7 . In the decades after this process started, manufacturing workers would find their numbers diminishing as corporations sought ways to please shareholders, and the government sought ways to lower taxes and deregulate the private sector.

No one had their backs.

The rich get richer

When corporations borrow money, one would think that money would go into investment in the firm. But according to the Roosevelt Institute .. http://rooseveltinstitute.org/untamed-how-check-corporate-financial-and-monopoly-power/ , a left-leaning Washington think tank, since the 1980s, companies have invested less than 10 cents of each borrowed dollar. They've put far more effort into buying back stock which, thanks to the way executive compensation works, makes the C-suite richer and richer.

From 2003 to 2012, S&P 500 companies used 54% ($2.4 trillion) of their earnings for stock buybacks. That has also contributed substantially to the inequality we're seeing, as the main beneficiaries of buybacks are wealthy investors.

Meanwhile, the private sector has called on the government to invest in innovation. Back in 2010 the American Energy Innovation Council .. http://americanenergyinnovation.org/who-we-are/  — which includes executives from Microsoft, Bank of America, and other massive companies — called on the government to increase its investment in alternative energy from $5 billion to $16 billion annually.

Of course, as Lazonick pointed out in his paper, seven of the companies on the council had spent $228 billion from 2000-2010 on stock buybacks.

To put this another way: big business is asking the government to assume the risk involved in innovation, so they can take advantage of the benefits.

Navarro never mentions things like this. No one in the administration ever does. The way they tell the story, the only problem in corporate America lies with foreigners taking advantage of unfair circumstances and big multinationals that cut jobs domestically to tap cheap labor abroad.

The administration thinks the remedy for that is punishing China — and other trading partners — who have a competitive edge. They look outward instead of inward. Navarro hammered on this trend:

---
"...what's interesting is that with every different country that we have a large trade deficit with, we have a different set of problems — with Mexico, for example — cheap labor," Navarro explained. "With Germany, they have a misaligned currency. So if you address these issues of unfair trade practices, if you get better trade deals, if you stop things like forced technology transfer or the theft of our intellectual property, if you ensure that the sweatshops of the world live up to international standards for minimum wage and safe working conditions, if you have reasonable environmental protection, then American manufacturers can compete with anybody in the world."
---

If this is the way you look at that problem, you're not going to find a sustainable solution. The world didn't take America's jobs, America let the world have them without investing in a path to new ones because politicians were more interested in tax cuts, and corporate America was more interested in short term gains.

That's the part of this sad story you won't hear from the Trump administration.

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-american-jobs-in-the-80s-2017-7