Declaration of War on working Americans


I get e-mail, even sometimes from the CATO Institute:

For your interest…

Cato has launched the Department of Labor portion of www.DownsizingGovernment.org

http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/labor

The site includes essays on unemployment insurance, job training programs, labor union laws, and trade adjustment assistance.

Please enjoy,

Chris Edwards
Editor, www.DownsizingGovernment.org
Cato Institute

Doesn’t that sound like a declaration of war on working people, to you?  If not, why not?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2011 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Government, Labor and unions, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

16 Responses to Declaration of War on working Americans

  1. Morgan K Freeberg's avatar Morgan K Freeberg says:
    February 29, 2012 at 7:42 pm

    Calm down big guy, all I asked for was a number.

    Is there one or isn’t there?

    Like

  2. James Kessler's avatar James Kessler says:
    February 29, 2012 at 6:19 pm

    Morgan writes:
    …despite the fact that it has been proven both morally and economically bankrupt each time it has been attempted.

    That’s a powerful statement, considering “each” means “all.”

    How many times, exactly, has it been attempted?

    You mean besides Nazi Germany, Somalia and any time the Republicans have had a shred of power since Reagan?

    Can you provide any examples of it actually working? Oh and provide evidence please.

    Like

  3. Morgan K Freeberg's avatar Morgan K Freeberg says:
    June 16, 2011 at 5:59 pm

    …despite the fact that it has been proven both morally and economically bankrupt each time it has been attempted.

    That’s a powerful statement, considering “each” means “all.”

    How many times, exactly, has it been attempted?

    Like

  4. Jim's avatar Jim says:
    June 16, 2011 at 5:50 pm

    I think of the Anarcho-Republican vision is more of a “Land of the Dead”, as imagined by George Romero. But you basically have the same idea, Pangolin. More or less.

    I also think a great many of the sheep who follow the movement actually believe in trickle down, despite the fact that it has been proven both morally and economically bankrupt each time it has been attempted.

    Like

  5. Pangolin's avatar Pangolin says:
    June 16, 2011 at 3:54 pm

    What Cato and it’s ilk really want is warlordism as currently prevalent in Somalia or Afghanistan. I suspect that the so-called “Republic of China,” really a warlord state, prior to the Japanese invasion is their ideal.

    In these places the wealthy can buy anything they desire up to and including human slaves. Those that object are shot. Any people that object collectively are deemed “communists” and shot by whatever token government is captive to the current ruling warlord’s faction.

    People are worked to death or disablement and discarded. When the poor are in the way of the rich they are simply slaughtered. Look what happens to the disabled in the U.S. Look what happened to Oscar Grant. He was poor and in the way; the police simply shot him.

    Like

  6. Jim's avatar Jim says:
    June 10, 2011 at 5:22 pm

    Ed asks, “Doesn’t that sound like a declaration of war on working people, to you?”

    Of course.

    But then, it’s only “class warfare” when poor people fight back.

    Thanks for the link.

    Like

  7. Ed Darrell's avatar Ed Darrell says:
    June 9, 2011 at 4:11 pm

    Morgan gives us national crime trends, hoping they apply in California, too.

    Happily, most do. So, how do we attribute cause of decreasing crime rates? Is it the cut in police budgets, or the closing of schools? The San Jose Mercury-News chimes in:

    Investing in crime prevention pays bigger dividends, since it means fewer victims. Prevention includes working to send fewer rather than more former inmates back to prison: California’s recidivism rate of 70 percent is a national embarrassment. It has fed the overcrowding that the Supreme Court deemed cruel and unusual punishment, ordering the state to reduce the prison population of 170,000 by 33,000 inmates in the next two years.

    California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, has demonstrated that prison costs and crime rates would continue to plummet if the state expanded programs to teach employment and accountability skills to nonviolent inmates. She had great success with this program in San Francisco, bringing in business partners to offer useful training as well as reduce taxpayers’ costs.

    And

    The latest crime statistic to make headlines was California’s homicide rate for 2010, which hit a 44-year low. But there is no solid evidence that Three Strikes played a role. The drop in crime here is similar to that of New York, another populous state, which does not have a Three Strikes equivalent.

    California’s juvenile prison system offers evidence that locking up more people does not directly reduce crime, according to research by Barry Krisberg at the UC Berkeley School of Law. In 1996, California had 10,000 juveniles behind bars, Krisberg says. By 2010, the number had shrunk to 1,000. But instead of the spike in crime that many expected, the number of incidents has dropped. Incarceration hardens kids. It can have the same effect on nonviolent adult offenders if the state continues doing nothing to steer them toward a better life.

    Crime prevention can take many forms, as San Jose has learned. In 2010, the city opened the Seven Trees Community Center in hopes of improving the area. Since then, aggravated assault dropped 83 percent in the neighborhood, drug crimes fell by 80 percent and auto theft plummeted by 70 percent. Keeping community centers and libraries open are public safety investments far more rewarding than building more prisons.

    There’s a growing consensus that advanced law-enforcement techniques, an aging population — young men commit most violent crimes — and a less violent drug culture are what account for the national drop in crime. California needs to seek productive ways to continue the trend — not just lock up more people and forget about them.

    Like

  8. Ed Darrell's avatar Ed Darrell says:
    June 9, 2011 at 3:28 pm

    Crime is in decline in California? Then your prisons should be emptying out, and much of your budget problems will go away. Then you can appropriate the extra money from closing down the prisons to rebuilding the schools.

    Happy day!

    Somehow, I doubt that’s what’s in the cards.

    Like

  9. Morgan K Freeberg's avatar Morgan K Freeberg says:
    June 9, 2011 at 3:17 pm

    One wonders if [Morgan] even considers the connection between starving the schools, cutting benefits for unemployed workers, and having overcrowded prisons.

    Ed, crime has been in decline while the economy stinks on ice and our school kids can’t name any American presidents besides Washington and Lincoln.

    There goes that argument.

    Like

  10. Morgan K Freeberg's avatar Morgan K Freeberg says:
    June 9, 2011 at 3:14 pm

    Still not seeing where the declaration of war is.

    And it’s going to be mighty tough to rein in the government spending if every time someone proposes that something be cut, it’s a “declaration of war on working Americans.”

    How about when a liberal wants to cut spending on defense, is that a war on working Americans too?

    Like

  11. Ed Darrell's avatar Ed Darrell says:
    June 9, 2011 at 3:14 pm

    Ellie said:

    And this is a surprise? “I’ve got mine Jack, now root hog, or die” is the corporate motto.

    As Ebenezer Scrooge asked, “Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?”

    Ironically, Morgan’s country has an ample supply of prisons, but it has proven impossible to run them at a profit while starving the schools. One wonders if he even considers the connection between starving the schools, cutting benefits for unemployed workers, and having overcrowded prisons.

    Like

  12. Ed Darrell's avatar Ed Darrell says:
    June 9, 2011 at 3:11 pm

    Morgan said:

    So when you say it’s a declaration of war on working people, what you really are worried about is people on the government payroll…plus people on unemployment, who are not on any payroll. It would be closer to the truth to say you’re concerned about a declaration of war on NOT working people.

    No, not at all. We have this silly (to some, maybe to too many) idea of freedom in this nation (have you ever visited the U.S.? You should come sometime, and see the vestiges of a free nation — it’s still inspiring, even in today’s dissipated state; often you write as if you’ve never seen freedom for individuals at work).

    But we discovered over a century ago that big corporate entities could crush individual freedoms and individuals if left unchecked. For example, while a worker technically had the right to sue an employer for an injury on the job caused by employer error, negligence, or recklessness, the reality was that employees could not afford lawyers nor the rest of the legal process to push such a claim in court; so corporations killed more than 600,000 Americans in their drive to make profits. We developed a set of laws that gave employees the right to organize to bargain for better wages and better working conditions. We created a workers compensation system to fairly compensate workers and restore them to health, When the states were unwilling/unable to provide reasonable unemployment compensation, the federal government stepped in to provide a backstop for problems that are really national in scope, going well beyond the borders of any state or any region of the U.S.

    That system was fledgling, but got us through World War I; it was almost in flower when it pushed us to victory over tyranny on two fronts in World War II, and then to victory over communist tyranny in the Cold War.

    It’s really more accurate to say the CATO proposals are war on America — but there are some Americans here who agree with you that workers are dirt and should be just grist in the cogs of Corporate Greed Run Amok.

    Maybe I shouldn’t pull punches.

    CATO’s proposals are Stalin’s dream.

    As for turning it over to the states “where the government can’t count and ran up such a huge deficit that it now must eliminate major education, police, and fire fighting programs” — are you trying to imply that the federal government is inherently better at counting and is not running up a deficit?

    Certainly more able than Rick Perry and the Texas Republicans, yes. Perry can’t count. He’s mathematically handicapped and unable to run a system that works for people — which is why Texas has so many unemployed, so many uninsured, and so many working with no protections and no benefits. Perry brags about job creation in Texas — we lead the world in jobs that provide no benefits and less-than-living wages. Slavery, without obligation to the slaveholder to feed and clothe the slave.

    Why do these things keep coming back to the phony and unsubstantiated fantasy that the federal government is somehow supreme in ethics, wisdom, compassion, ability to count…maybe we should just cut to the chase and examine what assurances are provided for us in this area.

    The federal government’s ability to borrow and spend in deficit to keep the economy going is both an economic necessity for a free nation, and a material factor of superiority over the state governments who lack such authority.

    What is it about a free nation’s economics that you so despise? Maybe we should just give up pretense of loving freedom for all, and declare our nation an oligarchy. Putin would be happy to come run the thing – we have better wine, weather, and automobiles than he can get in Moscow.

    Does the Constitution presume that federal officials can decide things better?

    Not at all. History tells us it is so, however. As a collective nation, we tend to make better decisions than as states — in economic issues, in human rights, in human welfare, in religious freedom, in land management, and especially in protecting workers’ freedom to work, pay the bills, raise a family, and save for retirement.

    Is there something in the recruiting, employment and contracting processes that would make this the case?

    Only in history. There is no inherent barrier to states getting smart, nor any unscalable barrier to states getting the sense to spend in deficits. I cannot explain why states clung to racial segregation past the point of all rationality. I cannot explain why states oppose workers’ rights to bargain to be economically sound and be safe, decades after those workers won World War II.

    You tell me: Why are the states bastions of invidious discrimination, economic insanity and total disregard of human rights? I don’t know why.

    Other than, at the moment in which this post goes up, the President happens to be a democrat and the Gov. of Texas happens to be a Republican…something enduring and substantial.

    In late 1788 Madison dashed off a note to Jefferson in Paris explaining that though the federal constitution proposed lacked a bill of rights, every ex-colony had a bill of rights in its own charter that protected basic rights including especially rights to religious freedom. In his response, Jefferson noted that the French provinces generally had rules protecting human rights — but who would think that adequate to protecting human rights in all of France? (This was prior to the French Revolution, ironically.) Protecting human rights is not the exclusive realm of either a national government nor the political subdivisions under it, but of all of those bodies — and even more important in a federal system is the protection of human rights at all levels.

    There is no case to be made that any state has done better than the federal government in paying unemployment compensation in any form, at any time in the past 60 years. California and New York have gone beyond federal protections of worker rights in a few areas, but now both states claim to lack money to continue such protections, since they cannot borrow to spend into deficits at all.

    Surely there is an argument to be made that states can do better — but there is no demonstration of such better action, and there appear to be huge barriers to states doing the job that needs to be done now, not least their inability to manage their own financial affairs with judicious borrowing to meet state obligations to defend human rights and workers rights.

    CATO would like to obliterate all worker protections, I suspect — and they are not too fond of clean and safe food acts, either. There’s a lesson there.

    Like

  13. Ellie's avatar Ellie says:
    June 9, 2011 at 3:08 pm

    And this is a surprise? “I’ve got mine Jack, now root hog, or die” is the corporate motto. Your job has been eliminated and you don’t know what to do next? Surely somewhere in your household, there’s a bowl with which you can beg. Oh, I forgot, begging is usually illegal. I guess we should all just drop dead if we are unlucky enough to lose our jobs and are unable to find others. That way, we’ll decrease the surplus population and enable corporations to send even more jobs out of the country and/or hire illegals to work here.

    Like

  14. Morgan K Freeberg's avatar Morgan K Freeberg says:
    June 9, 2011 at 2:11 pm

    So when you say it’s a declaration of war on working people, what you really are worried about is people on the government payroll…plus people on unemployment, who are not on any payroll. It would be closer to the truth to say you’re concerned about a declaration of war on NOT working people.

    As for turning it over to the states “where the government can’t count and ran up such a huge deficit that it now must eliminate major education, police, and fire fighting programs” — are you trying to imply that the federal government is inherently better at counting and is not running up a deficit? Why do these things keep coming back to the phony and unsubstantiated fantasy that the federal government is somehow supreme in ethics, wisdom, compassion, ability to count…maybe we should just cut to the chase and examine what assurances are provided for us in this area. Does the Constitution presume that federal officials can decide things better? Is there something in the recruiting, employment and contracting processes that would make this the case? Other than, at the moment in which this post goes up, the President happens to be a democrat and the Gov. of Texas happens to be a Republican…something enduring and substantial.

    Like

  15. Ed Darrell's avatar Ed Darrell says:
    June 9, 2011 at 1:55 pm

    The threat to eliminate federal support of unemployment compensation and turn it over to the states, like Texas, where the government can’t count and ran up such a huge deficit that it now must eliminate major education, police, and fire fighting programs; the threat to eliminate job training programs just because they are little used; the threat to drag unionization laws back to the pre-Haymarket “Riot” days, when corporations typically trampled on workers’ basic rights and contract rights, etc., etc.

    Which part of any of those essays is not an assault on working people?

    Like

  16. Morgan K Freeberg's avatar Morgan K Freeberg says:
    June 9, 2011 at 1:10 pm

    What part of it, exactly, is such a declaration?

    Like

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