The American Prospect

Why the Cause of Full Employment Is Back from the Dead

Harold Meyerson — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 09:00:00 +0000

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Senators Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand speak to reporters during a news conference in Washington

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is introducing a government-guaranteed full employment bill this week. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand issued a tweet in support of the concept earlier this month. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has proposed setting up pilot full employment programs in 15 urban and rural areas with persistently high levels of unemployment.

In other words, full employment—once a staple of Democrats’ rhetoric and on occasion an element of Democrats’ substance—has returned to their lexicon and their policy proposals.

Government-sponsored employment programs are nothing new; indeed, they were a centerpiece of the New Deal’s efforts to reduce the catastrophic unemployment of the 1930s. These weren’t full employment programs, to be sure; they were improvised emergency programs to fend off the dislocations and, indeed, the threat of starvation that confronted millions of Americans in the depths of the Depression. In the autumn of 1933, the Roosevelt Administration’s emergency aid administrator, Harry Hopkins, convinced Roosevelt that only a federally funded mass employment program could keep many thousands of Americans from starving during the upcoming winter. With Roosevelt’s go-ahead, Hopkins established the Civil Works Administration, which managed to put more than four million Americans (in a nation of roughly 130 million) to work on infrastructure programs in less than three months. The program ended with the coming of spring, but was re-established as the Works Progress Administration in 1935, which employed more than five million Americans building post offices, schools, libraries and airports, paving roads, and (for what Communists of the day referred to as “culture workers”) painting murals, writing guidebooks and putting on plays. (Hopkins’s manifest brilliance as an administrator was such that the army glommed onto him during World War II to organize munitions allotments and the like.)

Still, these New Deal improvisations, massive though they were, didn’t constitute a full employment program. Nor were they targeted at groups that, through the legacies of discrimination, racism or kindred causes, were compelled to dwell on the fringes of the job market, or outside it altogether. The Depression had the effect of narrowing the historically disparate rates of unemployment among the discriminated against, the poor, the working class and some of the middle class. With funds from the CWA and WPA, states structured their own programs, and predictably, many of them were segregated or favored whites over blacks and Latinos.

Full employment didn’t emerge as a federal government cause celebre until 1944, when the topmost fed himself—Franklin Roosevelt—made it the centerpiece of his Economic Bill of Rights, which he unveiled in his State of the Union address that year. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Roosevelt declared, and proceeded to itemize the particulars of his new bill of rights. First on his list was “the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.”

The impetus for the bill was the fear, shared by Roosevelt and a number of his economists, as well as other Democratic politicos, that with the war’s end—which meant the return of roughly 10 million men from the armed services to the civilian labor force, and the cessation of wartime production—unemployment would revert to the levels of the ‘30s. To avert the feared catastrophe, the administration introduced the Full Employment Bill of 1945, which passed the Senate but was defeated in the House by a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats who feared improving the living standards of African Americans. The following year, the Congress did enact a brutally scaled-down version of the bill, whose only real consequence was to establish the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.

The massive postwar depression never came, of course. The high levels of unionization and the wage hikes produced by the 1946 strike wave increased Americans’ purchasing power to record levels, boosting the economy. The G.I. Bill, the federally-backed housing construction boom, the effect of Social Security on levels of seniors’ poverty—all the legacies of the New Deal—kept the nation from sliding back to the economy of the ’30s.

But the New Deal’s magic had not been extended to African Americans, as the civil rights leaders of the 1960s were acutely aware. That’s why A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who led and organized, respectively, the great 1963 March on Washington, termed it “a March for Jobs and Justice.” That’s why Randolph and Rustin, working with economist Leon Keyserling, produced the Freedom Budget several years later, which outlined the economic programs needed to bring blacks and others whom the New Deal had left behind into the broadly shared prosperity of the time. The sine qua non of the program was a governmental full employment program. (As Kate Aronoff has outlinedin a brilliant piece in The Intercept, the call for employment programs to bring blacks into full economic citizenship went all the way back to W.E.B. DuBois.)

Like the Poor People’s Campaign, the Freedom Budget was effectively interred with the death of their leading proponent, Martin Luther King Jr. By the mid-‘70s, however, the cause of full employment was again taken up by a cadre of democratic socialists, led by Michael Harrington (a comrade of Randolph, Rustin, and King—democratic socialists all—dating back to the ‘50s). Harrington’s particular mission was reuniting the remnants of the Old Left (which chiefly meant, the progressive unions) and what remained of the New, whose activists could be found in various social justice and environmental campaigns. He also was seeking a way that progressives could retain the support of the white working class while at the same time continuing to promote the causes of racial equity and environmental reforms that many in the white working class were cool to, at best. Harrington argued that it required full employment—that is, broadly shared economic prosperity—to make such reforms more palatable to this onetime base of New Deal support, and that the Right’s fledgling efforts to chip away at unions and New Deal legislation could exacerbate the right turn of white workers. (Pretty good prophet, that Harrington.)

The old left and some of the new took up the full employment banner yet again. In the mid-‘70s, Murray Finley, the president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers—chiefly, a union of women and racial minorities being pushed, despite their union’s efforts, to the margins of the economy—initiated a coalition for full employment. A number of strategically savvy environmental activists formed Environmentalists for Full Employment.

And in Congress, California Democrat Augustus Hawkins in the House and former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, then back in the Senate, introduced full employment legislation. Hawkins—who in 1934, running on Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California slate, became the first African American elected to California’s legislature, and in 1962 became the state’s first black congressional representative—was a social democrat on the left wing, economically, of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Like its 1945 predecessor, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Bill, as it came to be called, was rooted in some specific apprehensions about where the economy might be headed. By the mid-Seventies, it was clear—as it had been clear to Randolph, Rustin, King, and Harrington in the ‘60s—that the great civil rights legislation of the ‘60s was not sufficient to end the poverty that minorities continued to experience. As well, by the mid-‘70s, it was also clear that the great postwar boom could be coming to an end, that the burgeoning war on unions and government was beginning to take a toll on American workers’ pocketbooks.

But the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill met a fate also similar to its 1945 predecessor. A new generation of elected Democrats—the Watergate congressional classes of 1974 and ’76, disproportionately Democrats from previously Republican suburbs; and President Jimmy Carter—were hesitant to embrace what they saw as old-style New Deal programs. Separate legislation establishing small-scale employment programs in inner cities was enacted (only to be abolished by Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan), but by the time Humphrey-Hawkins emerged from Congress, it had been scaled back to a single mandate to the Federal Reserve, ordering it to try to promote high levels of employment as well as low levels of inflation—a mandate the Fed has rarely taken seriously.

Moreover, the high inflation of the late 1970s—kicked off and sustained by the rising oil prices resulting from cutbacks in oil exports from the Middle East—encouraged the Right, and much of the center, to blame government and unions for the rising cost of living. The Phillips Curve, an economic theory which said there was an inherent and inflexible inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation, was invoked to disparage any governmental efforts to diminish joblessness, much less mandate full employment.

Over time, the Democrats didn’t so much repudiate the cause of full employment as just forget about it. After Gus Hawkins’s retirement in 1992, Detroit’s John Conyers continued the Congressional Black Caucus’s push for governmentally mandated full employment, though throughout the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies, this cause had little traction.

Yet today—with official unemployment at just 4.1 percent—it has suddenly been remembered and resurrected. How has that happened?

Yet again, a specific set of dysfunctions of the broader economy has raised full employment from the museum of dead causes. The rise of precarious and poorly paid work, chiefly in but not confined to the service sector; the wage stagnation affecting most of the workforce (which Jared Bernstein documentedin a piece for the Prospect earlier this week; the declining level of labor force participation in those parts of the country where work, particularly remunerative work, has largely disappeared; the chronic economic insecurity of millennials, and the political left turn they’ve executed in response; the opening to more radical economic reforms unleashed by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign—all these have led to a new economic radicalism bleeding its way into the Democratic mainstream. The party now embraces the $15 minimum wage; the cause of single-payer is taken up by a surprising number of elected officials; and Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin—up for re-election in a state where working class whites forsook their Democratic allegiances to vote for Donald Trump in 2016—has authored a bill that requires corporations to have their workers elect one-third of their corporation’s board of directors—a feature, somewhat modified, of German social democracy, and one reason why Germany’s workers are, on the whole, doing better than ours.

In this kind of economic climate, it should come as no surprise that full employment is coming back. In the Winter 2018 issue of the Prospect, Mark Paul, William Darity Jr., and Mark Hamilton made the casefor the policy and laid out some specifics of what such a program could look like. A number of economists affiliated with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College turned outa detailed proposal this month, which I gather helped inform Senator Sanders’ legislation.

As should be clear from this mini-history, the political path to full employment is a daunting obstacle course. But the growing public awareness that actual existing American capitalism isn’t working all that well is propelling us down that path again. And rightly so.

Moving People, Not Cars

Joan Fitzgerald — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Dylan Passmore/Creative Commons

Cambridge, Massachusetts, is ranked number one in the nation for bike infrastructure and walkability.

This article appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect. Subscribe here.

Bike rentals are popping up in every major U.S. city, a harbinger of the desire of more and more people to break the car habit. Enthusiasts have visions of Copenhagen and Amsterdam, where about 40 percent of people commute to work and do many errands by bike. Yet few American cities have separate lanes in which bikes can safely travel. Meanwhile, bus rapid transit—buses moving in their own lanes that drive up to platforms and are boarded like trains—is catching on as a lower-cost alternative to expensive subways. But here’s the catch that is slowing the shift to both bikes and modern buses: There are only so many lanes on a given street, and at some point these uses compete with each other—unless cars are given less space to hog the road.

Unlike Europe, American cities tend to have a stunted, token version of these car-alternatives. Instead of separated, dedicated lanes for bikes and buses, we get what transportation planners have dubbed “sharrows” (lanes that both cars and bikes use, marked confusingly with a bike symbol); and bus-rapid-transit “lite” (a lane seemingly reserved for buses, except when it isn’t). But there’s another option. If there were fewer cars permitted in center cities, and street parking were ended to open lanes for other uses, we could move more people through cities faster, more pleasantly, and with a lot less pollution.

This is not difficult as a matter of transportation planning. In a nation addicted to cars, the problem is politics. And the underdevelopment of mass transit creates a vicious circle. The less available and attractive the alternatives, the more people cling to their cars. And the more cars dominate, the less room there is for bikes and buses. But some cities are making headway nonetheless. And the pioneers, from which we can learn, are mainly in Europe.

It’s hardly a new idea. Florence, Italy, has closed off its historic center, a 40-block area, to all but pedestrians, taxis, and buses for years, as have many other Tuscan towns. Venice is completely car-free. Freiburg, Germany, banned cars in its historic center in 1973 and built extensive bike and trolley infrastructure. The list goes on.

There is renewed enthusiasm among urban planners for rethinking city streets to meet the goal of moving people—without the assumption that cars have priority while buses, trolleys, bikes, and pedestrians take the space that’s left. Some European cities are taking the idea a step further by discouraging or eliminating cars—truly reimagining cities. Berlin, Hamburg, Madrid, and Oslo are among the European cities currently taking comprehensive action to create car-free zones and bike “superhighways”—physically separated, uninterrupted bike lanes that traverse a city. To do this, they are de-privileging cars.

The View from Oslo

With 61 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions from transportation and 39 percent from cars, Oslo has developed an integrated solution for reducing pollution and emissions that features more electric vehicles, better transit, fewer cars, and more bikes and walking. Oslo has become the world’s capital for electric vehicles due to generous national subsidies, development of a charging infrastructure, and incentives such as free charging, exemption from tolls, and use of HOVlanes. In 2017, half the new-car purchases in Oslo were electric.

Sture Portvik, Oslo’s project leader on electric vehicles, tells me that expanding public transportation and making it cleaner are also key priorities. Transit ridership has been rising steadily, up 4.6 percent in 2016 alone. Frequency of service on the tram system has been increased and in 2016, Ruter, Oslo’s public transportation company, announced an unprecedented 10 billion kroner ($1.3 billion) expansion to be built over eight years. Ruter also aims to be completely fossil-free by 2020.

The tram and metro run on renewable hydropower. About 35 percent of city buses are powered by biodiesel, hydrogen, and biogas, and the first battery electric buses are being piloted this year with major bus-charging infrastructure planned for next year. By 2025, 60 percent of the bus fleet will be fully electric. Five hydrogen buses are being tested as part of a European hydrogen bus demonstration project. Portvik adds that more park-and-ride solutions are being developed to reduce the number of cars coming into the city. Combined with highly subsidized fares, he expects car traffic to be reduced significantly.

In 2015, citizens elected a progressive government made up of the Labour, Green, and Socialist Left parties. This coalition doubled down on efforts of the previous conservative city governments by proposing to create Europe’s largest car-free city center. The city’s announcement was met with considerable opposition from residents and businesses, which was a bit of a surprise to planners, given that only 12 percent of the area’s 1,000 residents owned a car and 93 percent commuted by public transit, bike, or on foot. But the business community was concerned about losing shoppers and street life generally. Residents were concerned about their communities becoming isolated.

After several months of planning, the city council devised a three-phase plan to gradually work toward having as few cars as possible by 2019. The idea is to reduce cars by shrinking parking. As of June 2017, most cars (even electric) must park in garages outside of the city center. Spaces for the disabled and delivery vehicles are being preserved. To date, 362 parking spaces have been eliminated and another 405 will be removed by June.

The city plans to add 60 kilometers (nearly 40 miles) of bike lanes, on which construction has begun, as has closing off a few streets to cars. And Oslo is converting 35 streets to bike-only, on a path for the city to become car-free by 2019. With a recently improved city bike program, the added lanes will help the city to reach its goal of 25 percent of commuting by bike by 2025. Given that Oslo is hilly, the city council appropriated 5 million kroner ($645,800) to subsidize electric bike purchases, and is piloting a small freight terminal where goods are dropped off for distribution by electric bicycles.

Kari-Anne Isaksen, political adviser to Oslo’s vice mayor on environment and transport, told me that planners are also working on improving the pedestrian network by adding amenities such as playgrounds, trees and foliage, and cultural events in pilot areas in the zone. She says that in year three, the city will assess its progress and public opinion before committing to expanding the nearly car-free zone.

IN NORWAY, WHERE CARS are taxed at 100 percent and government subsidies for transit are plentiful, cities don’t have to go it alone. But in the United States, cars rule, and historically federal transportation aid has supported highways more than public transit. So American cities that are trying to reduce car traffic and promote transit, walking, and biking have a far tougher job. Two East Coast cities that say they are trying are Cambridge and Boston—cities that both have high rankings for bike-friendliness and walkability.

Bike-Friendly Cambridge

Cambridge, Massachusetts, is well-situated for de-emphasizing cars. It is the nation’s top-ranked medium-sized city for bike friendliness and walkability, with 24 percent of residents walking to work, and 77 percent getting to work by means other than a car. The MBTARed Line subway serves every major square, and the city is developing more dedicated bus lanes. With about 46 miles of bike facilities, bicycling has become a viable mode of transportation. Tegin Teich, a transportation planner in Cambridge, says the actions the city is taking are like Oslo’s, with goals focused on emphasizing and enhancing the more sustainable modes of walking, bicycling, and transit, but without an ultimate “zero cars” goal.

The city has focused on de-privileging cars since its 1992 Vehicle Trip Reduction Ordinance, which established a transportation demand management plan and bicycle and pedestrian programs. The ordinance requires anyone adding vehicle parking spaces to commit to an approved plan to limit the number of single-occupancy vehicle trips. There is ongoing monitoring to ensure compliance.

The unfortunate occurrence of three bicyclist fatalities in Cambridge in 2015 and 2016 motivated strong political support to expedite separated bike lanes for safety. The most recent addition of protected lanes is on Cambridge Street, a major thoroughfare with high crash rates. A community input process was essential, as creating the lane required removing 85 of 150 parking spots. And planners had to figure out how to have the protected lane while still accommodating bus pick-ups and drop-offs for the high school located on the street, handicapped parking and accessibility, and transit bus access. While residents and businesses expressed the same complaints as those in Oslo, overall response has been positive, particularly because a key motivator for creating the lanes was safety.

With an overall goal of reallocating road space to move people more sustainably, Teich and her team examined bus delays on heavily used routes. While dedicated bus lanes were an effective solution, the team had to figure out both the political and technical feasibility of creating them. And since bus corridors are often the same streets with bike lanes and heavy pedestrian use, Cara Seiderman, Cambridge’s transportation program manager, says they have been careful that the conversation not be about buses versus bikes, but about how to accommodate all modes safely.

A major bus rapid transit (BRT) project is underway on Mt. Auburn Street after it was determined that more than half of the people on the roadway during peak commute times were traveling by bus. The project includes dedicated bus lanes, “queue jump” lanes that give buses priority at intersections, and transit signal priority for bus lanes. While eliminating cars is not on the agenda, they have been de-prioritized.

Boston: A Missed Opportunity

Across the river from Cambridge, Boston’s street network can’t accommodate dedicated bike and bus lanes without curbing the space claimed by cars, which the city does not seem willing or ready to do. The city does have a new transportation plan, Go Boston 2030, which identifies 58 action items including overhaul of bus routes, a citywide network of bike lanes and walking paths, and several “complete streets” projects to retrofit major thoroughfares for use by pedestrians and cyclists. The problem is that most projects are unfunded and thus the timeline for completion is, for the most part, 5 to 15-plus years out.

To many transit, bike, and pedestrian advocates, Go Boston tinkers at the edges of the city’s transportation problems, but comes nowhere close to de-prioritizing cars to make way for the proposed bike and bus lanes. This omission is painfully evident in the Seaport District, Boston’s fastest-growing area, where priorities are mostly being set by private developers.

Instead of a much-needed transit stop, the Seaport is getting two big government-subsidized parking garages. One of them, a project of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, is a $22 million extension of an existing garage. The big one, a 1,550-space $85 million facility, referred to as the “Seaport Transportation Center” is being built by the Massachusetts Port Authority. In fairness, it is replacing lost surface parking. But a fair criticism is that including a shuttle bus stop, a Hubway bike rental station, and a taxi/Uber stand is hardly promoting public transit, walking, or biking, nor does it merit the title “transportation center.”

Instead of eliminating parking, Boston is only focused on making it more efficient. The Boston Transportation Department’s planning director, Vineet Gupta, told me of a recently completed year-long parking performance pilot in the Seaport that priced different blocks independently, changing the price every two months based on the number of available spaces. The price would increase or decrease depending on availability. While the pricing scheme only resulted in a 1 percent increase in parking availability, illegal parking that clogs streets decreased substantially. But since curbside parking, at roughly $2 an hour, is still a bargain compared with off-street lots, where entry alone costs $15 or more, the pilot only nudged things slightly in the direction of market pricing. So, the pilot ends up being just one more strategy to make it easier to drive.

Despite a desire to attract young professionals to live in the Seaport District, there are no protected bike lanes. Go Boston 2030 calls for a protected bike lane in five years, but there is no funding for it or any of the bike lane projects in the plan. The Seaport’s only public transit is the Silver Line, Boston’s only BRTservice, which is described as BRT“lite” at best because it doesn’t have dedicated lanes throughout, and where it does, there is little enforcement of vehicles parking in it. Silver Line buses serving the Seaport are overcrowded and, with no dedicated lanes, lumber along in car-congested streets.

Boston’s emphasis on cars and parking in the Seaport is creating what transportation planners call induced demand—the phenomenon in which providing more roads creates more traffic. Instead, the city could have proposed a grand vision for making the Seaport District car-free, say, by 2030, as Oslo and other cities are doing.

A key question is how to fund such a grand vision, and where leadership comes from. As several local experts and advocates told me, the current mayor, Marty Walsh, has not made transit a priority. When a distinct area like the Seaport grows, private developers should be made to contribute funding for the improvements needed within that district. Failing to do that has been an enormous planning failure. Paradoxically, its compact geography makes Boston the ideal city to establish car-free zones. What we see in Freiburg, Oslo, and other cities is that the public loves them.

SOME U.S. CITIES HAVE gotten serious about funding the kind of transportation improvements necessary for real progress. In 2016, 70 percent of Los Angeles residents voted for Measure M, a permanent half-cent raise in the sales tax that will bring in $860 million a year for a subway line expansion, a new subway line, an airport connector, biking infrastructure, and greenways. Seattle residents voted for Proposition 1 in 2015, which is raising $930 million over nine years to fund transit, bike lanes, and pedestrian paths as part of the Move Seattle plan.

While Seattle doesn’t have the subway or commuter rail network of Cambridge and Boston, Move Seattle is significant because it has no goals or actions to accommodate cars. Its focus is on improving mobility by bus, transit, biking, and walking in key corridors of the city. Among its initiatives are adding seven to ten corridors with designated protected lanes for bikes, buses, and transit; seven BRTcommuter corridors with designated lanes; 50 miles of new protected bike lanes, including bike routes to all schools; more frequent inner-city bus service; 100 blocks of new sidewalks; and improved crossings at 225 intersections. Most importantly, Seattle raised the funding to make it happen.

There is more to getting people out of cars than creating bike and bus lanes. De-prioritizing cars takes three things: political will, good urban planning, and ample funding for transit. We see all of these in Oslo, combined with a grand vision of a city designed to move people rather than cars. All three are still in short supply in too many U.S. cities.

Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers’ Mobilization

Maurice BP-Weeks, Stephen Lerner, Joseph A. McCartin, & Marilyn Sneiderman — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 16:33:30 +0000

AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

Marchers cheer as they cross the finish line at the Oklahoma State Capitol after marching 110 miles from Tulsa, as protests continue over school funding

“Why are we walking?” asked Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association. “There are 700,000 reasons why: our students. And they deserve better. … They see broken chairs in class, outdated textbooks that are duct taped together, and class sizes that have ballooned.”

While labor’s overall circumstances are certainly dire, we’re at an exciting time of renewed energy in the labor movement. Leading the way this time around are the teachers of West Virginia and Oklahoma (with teachers in Kentucky and Arizona not far behind). All of these states, like most of the country, have seen systematic defunding of public services, and nowhere is that pain felt more than in the classroom. School funding has been shown to improve the outcomes not only for individual students but also for the overall community. If we truly want a strong economy where everyone (most especially black and brown students) can thrive, funding public education is the way to get there.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this latest round of teacher labor power is that their demands are broad and inclusive. Even though the teachers who have gone on strike or are considering it are paid well below the average and have terrible benefits, they have put the focus of their demands on their students’ needs, on improving classroom quality and increasing classroom resources. In doing so they made clear that winning a raise for themselves would be insufficient—they have demanded a significant investment in children as well as a win on the “bread and butter” issues. This type of focus helps defeat the false narrative that teachers are just greedy individuals who don’t care about children.

One of the ways in which the teachers have accomplished this is by focusing their energy on corporate-controlled politicians and powerful financial entities whose austerity agendas those politicians have advanced at the expense of public education. By “going up the food chain,” these mass teacher mobilizations have not only avoided pitting themselves against parents, taxpayers, and members of the community who should be their natural allies. They have also helped lay the basis for a broad convergence of allies with common aims.

These mobilizations have thus effectively “flipped the script” that has predominated for more than a generation in our political discourse, a script in which teachers’ unions and their demands were relentlessly scapegoated for everything that ailed public education. By taking to the streets and their state capitals, teachers have demonstrated that there is no force more capable of freeing our schools from the strangling grip of austerity politics than organized teachers standing shoulder to shoulder with their allies.

The mobilizations that recently erupted in a seemingly spontaneous fashion in the “right-to-work” states of West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona aren’t the first such labor actions to have widened the scope of their demands beyond their own bread-and-butter concerns. They are, in fact, similar in vision, language, and tactics to a series of local experiments that have been undertaken by teachers’ unions and their allies in union-friendlier cities such as Chicago, St. Paul, and Seattle since 2012—experiments that have adopted the term “Bargaining for the Common Good.”

Since the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012, teachers and other public employees in these and a handful of other cities have embraced Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG) in a deliberate effort to challenge the forces that have been making public schools and the entire public sector “broke on purpose,” as Chicago teachers put it.

Campaigns adopting this approach have been seeking to expand and redefine the participants, processes, and purposes of collective bargaining. They have brought such community allies as parents’ groups and racial justice partners into the shaping of bargaining demands from the outset, and demanded that these allies be present during negotiations. They have introduced greater militancy into the bargaining process by staging actions that help illuminate the cozy relationships between the financial interests and political leaders that have led to austerity budgets and the underfunding of public services.

Perhaps most importantly, they have redefined the aims of collective bargaining, recognizing the degree to which financialization, the slashing of taxes on the rich, privatization, and deepening inequality threaten both public services and the health of the communities that depend on them. BCG campaigns have recognized that the real power to determine the public agenda is not held by the school boards or mayoral offices they have traditionally negotiated with, but rather by the financial interests that consistently dictate the priorities of those who hold these offices.

On the surface the settings that have witnessed the recent mass mobilizations of teachers seem enormously different from the locations where BCG campaigns have made the most progress. BCG arose in cities where unions retain a significant presence and where collective bargaining rights are protected by law. The recent teacher mobilizations, by contrast, erupted in “right-to-work” states where unions have little presence and collective bargaining rights are virtually nonexistent. Whereas the BCG campaigns gained traction in diverse cities where they have highlighted how communities of color have been victimized by the defunding of the public sector, the recent teacher mobilizations have erupted in heavily white and rural Kentucky and West Virginia, which rank 45th and 50th, respectively, among the nation’s most racially diverse states. And, whereas successful BCG campaigns were launched only after a year or more of careful planning by their architects, the teacher mobilizations of the past month seemed to erupt almost spontaneously after intense grassroots organizing, much of which took place in a matter of weeks on social media.

Yet despite all of the differences in origin and initial orientation, both the BCG campaigns and the recent teacher mass strikes mobilizations have naturally gravitated toward the same analysis and conclusions.They have come to see the crisis in public education as symptomatic of deep distortions in our economy and political priorities; they have grasped that the plight of teachers and their schools is inextricably tied to the fate of the communities they serve; and teachers in all of these settings have concluded that they needed to fight on behalf of those communities as much as for themselves. That’s what Chicago teachers did in demanding “Schools Chicago’s Children Deserve,” and what West Virginia teachers did in refusing to end their walkout until all state employees received the same raise they had won for themselves, and what Oklahoma teachers did when they demanded levies on the state’s enormously wealthy and notoriously tax-dodging oil and gas industry.

The extent to which teachers in Seattle and St. Paul, Logan County, West Virginia, and Logan County, Oklahoma, have begun converging around the same logic should alert us that something important is afoot. Historically, breakthroughs for worker organization in this country have tended to occur when planning, analysis, and conditions suddenly align in ways that could not have been foreseen among otherwise disparate and diverse workers whose common experiences are teaching them similar lessons.

Could this be such a moment?

Although there is good reason to fear for the future of the U.S. labor movement, weakened and beset as it is by hostile legal, political, and economic forces, there is also reason to believe that these very conditions might provide the spark for a revival of worker organization. For 40 years, financialization, deregulation, neo-liberal globalization, privatization, and the reorganization of worker-employer relations have gradually undermined private-sector collective bargaining and confined bargaining in the public sector to the narrow ground of wages and benefits, all too often pitting beleaguered taxpayers against unions. The impact of these dynamics has been especially pernicious in communities of color.

We have now reached a point where collective bargaining has become so broken that requires workers to reimagine it as a tool to address the larger forces that are promoting surging inequality, extracting wealth from communities of color, and accelerating the erosion of any semblance of democratic control over the forces that are governing their lives.

Whether by flooding into statehouses in Frankfort, Tulsa, or Charleston to demand adequate school funding through increased corporate taxes, or by occupying the Bank of America in Chicago to demand that it renegotiate the toxic interest rate swaps it foisted on the Chicago Public Schools, teachers have begun to reinvent bargaining in ways that correspond to kind of economy we now face. Just as developments in private sector collective bargaining in the post-World War II era provided a model for the introduction of collective bargaining into the public sector, the reinvention of collective bargaining by public sector workers in response to the crisis they have faced in recent years might serve as a model for the reinvention of collective bargaining in the private sector in the years ahead.

No lasting breakthrough will be possible without careful planning, hard work, and, ultimately, greater coordination. A crucial piece of this work must be research and power mapping that can help teachers and others connect the dots, to identify the common culprits who are driving the austerity agenda. In every state we should ask ourselves some key questions: Who are the main power players? What common targets exist across different types of campaigns? What banks or corporations are taking money out of the public budget and how do we band together to get that money back? A number of organizations that investigate and provide answers to such questions have emerged in recent years, among them Little Sis, a grassroots research wiki that consolidates information on corporate power and its influence over government; Hedgeclippers, which documents the harmful impact of hedge funds and private equity on public services; and the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), which specializes in analyzing the racialized impact of financialization. Research conducted by groups like these could help provide the underpinnings for an increasingly coordinated national movement.

Whether a national movement does emerge will depend heavily on the vision and commitment of the nation’s unions in this crucial hour. Organized labor has never been able to predict or trigger the developments that have led to its revival and reinvention over the course of two centuries. Like all movements of the less powerful, it has had to be opportunistic, acting boldly at the right time by using the best ideas, models, and language at its disposal to build new forms of power for those who lack it. But it has had to be decisive when these windows of opportunity have opened, for they have never stayed open for long. Confronted as they are by powerful enemies, unions must seize the opportunities that these recent teachers’ mobilizations and the pioneering work of recent Bargaining for the Common Good campaigns have presented to them.

How the Tax Bill Backfired on the Republicans

Robert Kuttner — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 13:44:26 +0000

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images

House Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy conduct a news conference in Washington

Did you have a happy Tax Day? Are you feeling grateful for the Republican tax cut?

Evidently most American taxpayers are not.

In a sublime case of poetic justice, the so-called Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) is backfiring on the Republicans big time. Most voters are unimpressed, and Republicans themselves are ceasing to emphasize it in their campaign material.

In the March 13 special election for the Pennsylvania 18th House district, where Democrat Conor Lamb narrowly beat Republican Rick Saccone, Republicans actually pulled adsthat bragged about the tax act, because their polls showed that it was more of a target than an achievement.

Republican strategists who wanted President Trump to emphasize the tax cut this spring were initially annoyed that Trump was talking about trade, immigration and Korea instead. Now they realize that Trump may be onto something.

Even better, Democrats are sensing that the tax issue can be turned against the Republicans big time in the 2018 and 2020 elections. This outcome is the resultof Republican overreach, opportunism, and sheer greed.

Previous Republican tax cuts, under Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, were also tilted to the top, but they made sure to include some real benefits for regular people. But this year’s bill was so heavily skewed to the wealthy that most people don’t seemore than trivial benefits in their paychecks.

In their excess, Republicans also managed to accomplish something—for their opposition—that has entirely eluded Democrats on tax politics since Reagan: total party unity. Reagan’s two big tax cuts in 1981 and 1986 peeled off lots of Democratic votes in Congress. Though the substance of the supply-side cuts was bogus, many Democrats figured that if the bill was going to pass anyway, they should share in the credit. The same thing happened with the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.

This time, however, the tax bill was both so extreme in its substance, and so purely partisan in the way it was enacted, that not a single Democrat in either house voted for it.

Republicans were counting on the sheer complexity of tax policy to put one over on the voters. But they missed one aspect: By increasing the deficit to the tune of some $1.5 trillion dollars over a decade, they were setting up demands for offsetting cuts in widely supported programs like Medicare and Social Security. And that’s easy to grasp.

Those calls are already coming, from Republicans who belatedly and disingenuously discovered the tax bill’s impact on the deficit. This presents a fat target for Democrats.

Some of the specific measures, such as the $10,000 limit on the deductibility of state sales and income taxes and local property taxes, were intended to punish voters in blue states with relatively progressive taxes and decent public services, such as New York, California, and several others. But there are at least twenty endangered Republican House members in such states and this spiteful provision paints a large target on their backs.

After the bill passed, many Democrats were initially gun-shy about making this a prime election issue, on the premise that tax cuts are invariably popular. But this tax cut isn’t.

The tax law also gives Democrats the chance to ask: what else might we do with $1.5 trillion dollars? For instance, a true invest-in-America program that rebuilds archaic infrastructure and creates lots of good jobs. Or substantial relief from crippling college debt.

On multiple levels, the tax act invites debates that play to the strength of Democrats.

Each claim in the Republican propaganda is phony. The growth stimulated by the bill will not enable the cuts to pay for themselves. The changes in the tax code are not increasing investment—mainly they are promoting more stock buybacks that artificially pump up share values and enrich the rich.

Far from creating incentives to reverse offshoring, the law actually enables corporations to pay a lower rate of tax on profits earned overseas. And despite a good deal of messaging by corporate allies of Trump claiming that worker raises and bonuses are the fruit of the tax cuts, the small number of raises are a pittance compared to the tax savings.

Last week, headlines were made by the news that regulators had levied a billion dollar fine against Wells Fargo for its chronic frauds against its customers. That billion was less than a thirdof the money that Wells saves from the tax cut.

Republicans are supposed to be for fiscal balance. But when there is an opportunity to deliver trillion-dollar favors for corporations and the rich, deficits are no problem.

Republicans are allegedly for states rights. But this law overrides the ability of states to make their own choices about taxing and spending.

Republicans are supposed to be for economic efficiency. But this tax bill creates incentives for economically perverse activity such as stock buybacks and sheer gimmicks such as “pass through” entities where the point is not to improve the economy, merely to give the wealthy a tax break.

Trump promised to Make America Great Again. This law promotes more offshoring.

The law is such a political loser for Republicans, and the hypocrisy is so ripe, that one has to believe that Republicans sensed that this Congressional term was their last chance for a long while to grab whatever they could. They made few concessions to political realism. Republicans can expect a long period in the political wilderness, and this law will help bring that about.

The ancient Greeks held that character is fate. The tax act speaks volumes about the character of today’s Republican Party, and it will help seal the Party’s fate in coming elections.

An earlier versionof this article appeared at The Huffington Post. Subscribe here.

The Shameful Silence of the CEOs

Robert Reich — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa via AP Images

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaks at an Economic Club of Washington event in Washington

Congressional Republicans would be more willing to stand up to Trump if their major financial backers—big business and Wall Street—had more backbone.

Ever since 1971, when the then future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell urged corporations to mobilize politically, corporate money has flooded Washington—most of it into Republican coffers.

Today, big corporations and Wall Street essentially own the Republican Party. In the 2016 campaign cycle, they contributed $34 to candidates from both parties for every $1 donated by labor unions and all public interest organizations combined.

They donate far more to Republicans than do extremists like the Koch brothers, and have far more influence over the GOP than does the Tea Party.

Which means the CEOs of America’s largest firms have the power to constrain the most dangerous, divisive, and anti-democratic president ever to occupy the Oval Office.

So why don’t they? What explains their silence?

Consider Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States. Dimon also chairs the Business Roundtable—the most influential confab of major CEOs in America, founded in 1972, just after Powell urged CEOs to mobilize.

Dimon has gone out of his way not to criticize the mad king. While he “strongly disagreed” with Trump’s equating white supremacists to protesters in Charlottesville last summer, he also counseled “not to expect smooth sailing” in the first year of a new administration.

Now well into Trump’s second year, with the sailing more treacherous than ever—Trump has fired most of the adults around him and grown even more erratic and unhinged—Dimon is even more conciliatory.

Asked last week how Trump is doing, Dimon gushed.“Regulatory stuff, good.” The potential summit with North Korea, a “great idea.” He regrets his 2017 prediction that Trump would be a one-term president, telling Fox Business, "I wish I hadn’t said it, I was talking probabilistically.”

Dimon’s reluctance to criticize Trump is particularly curious given Dimon’s public laments about widening inequality, the explosion of student debt, America’s growing racial divide, the failure of inner-city schools, and the expenditure of “trillions of dollars on wars.”

One obvious explanation is found in the money rolling in from the GOP’s new tax law and Trump’s frenzy of deregulation. Profits have soared at JP Morgan and at other big banks and corporations. Compensation for Dimon and other CEOs has exploded.

Never underestimate the power of a fat compensation package to buy up scruples. From the perspective of Dimon and other CEOs, what’s not to like about Trump and the GOP?

It turns out, plenty. As the Republican Party moves toward Trump’s looniness – his xenophobia, isolationism, attacks on the press and on truth, conflicts of interest, anti-Muslim and racist provocations, climate-change denials, proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, and evisceration of the constitutional divide between church and state—Jamie Dimon and his ilk could come out big losers.

Let them try to sustain corporate profits as America slides towards authoritarianism. Try to maintain comfortable lifestyles as America descends into angry populist tribalism.

Besides which, don’t Dimon and other CEOs have a moral responsibility to sound the alarm?

I’m old enough to recall a time when CEOs were thought of as “corporate statesman” with duties to the nation. As one prominent executive told Time Magazine in the 1950s, Americans “regard business management as a stewardship,” acting “for the benefit of all the people.”

CEOs of that era formed the Committee for Economic Development to champion such causes as universal pre-kindergarten and campaign-finance reform.

Today’s CEOs finance a larger part of our political system, yet they won’t take a stand to save it.

The socially-conscious Committee for Economic Development has withered, while the profit-obsessed Business Roundtable (and its louder cousin, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) have become dominant.

The corporate statesmen of the mid-20th century have been replaced by sycophantic Dimons of the 21st—at a time when we need statesmen more than ever.

Democracy is fragile. Two weeks ago, Hungary’s far-right governing party, Fidesz, gained a huge victory in national elections, further tightening Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s grip on power—signaling an end to Hungary’s independent press and a deepening threat to its democracy.

If the leaders of American business remain silent about what Trump’s is doing to American democracy, they will be complicit in its demise.

Even the CBO Says the GOP Tax Reform Will Incentivize Corporate Offshoring

Kalena Thomhave — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 20:11:41 +0000

Lars Halbauer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

After the release of the GOP’s tax reform plan, several outlets, including the Prospect, noted that new tax provisions would incentivize corporate offshoring, instead of protecting jobs and raising wages as promised. But recently, even the Congressional Budget Office, the independent entity charged with nonpartisan analysis for Congress, agreed that tax reform could encourage companies to stash profits overseas—and also offshore American jobs.

In December, House Speaker Paul Ryan published on his website that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act benefits “job creators of all sizes” as it “Prevents American jobs, headquarters, and research from moving overseas by eliminating incentives that now reward companies for shifting jobs, profits, and manufacturing plants abroad.”

Observers like the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the Tax Policy Center pointed out that that wasn’t the case. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the territorial tax system that Republicans have pushed for, under which only domestic income is subject to corporate taxes, represents “a massive, permanent tax advantage for foreign profits over domestic profits [that] would not help the U.S. economy.” And by placing American workers into more competition with lower-wage workers abroad, the CBPP researchers concluded, offshoring could harm U.S. wages. Reuven Avi-Yonah, professor of international tax law at the University of Michigan Law School, told the Prospect’s Justin Miller, “There will be companies who haven’t moved before who will have more incentive to do so in the future.”

Now, even the CBO has concurred, pointing out the distorted tax incentives that tax reform will allow.

Two weeks ago, the CBO published its report on the next decade’s outlook for the budget and the economy, which included an analysis of the tax reform. Buried in the 162-page report was a paragraph about the effects of tax provisions on corporations’ location of tangible assets, like investments and jobs. As the report reads:

By locating more tangible assets abroad, a corporation is able to reduce the amount of foreign income that is categorized as GILTI [global intangible low-tax income]. Similarly, by locating fewer tangible assets in the United States, a corporation can increase the amount of U.S. income that can be deducted as FDII [foreign-derived intangible income]. Together, the provisions may increase corporations’ incentive to locate tangible assets abroad [emphasis added].

Wells Fargo, a big beneficiary of the tax plan (that, like many others, is planning to reward their shareholders with their tax savings), recently laid off hundreds of call center workers in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, moving those jobs overseas. Those jobs will be relocated to the Philippines, where Wells Fargo has added thousands of workers in the past few years.

The GOP’s tax reform may only further incentivize this behavior.

“Big companies are pocketing their windfall and shipping American jobs overseas, and the Republican Congress is rewarding them for it,” said Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Chris Shelton in a statement. CWA is concerned, as many of the threatened jobs are call center and other customer service positions. The union published a report last month about how big banks in particular will not only benefit from the massive cut in the corporate tax rate, but have been eliminating thousands of American jobs in the call center and customer service industry and shipping them overseas. In the last six months of 2017 alone, the country’s largest banks cut 8,000 jobs, according to the report.

While the tax law has increased the likelihood that other companies will mirror the job-slashing actions of banks, the moves abroad have already encountered resistance. Democratic Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania wrote a letter to Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan and pressured him to reverse the Bethlehem job cuts, citing the $3.7 billion in tax breaks that Wells Fargo will enjoy as a result of Republican tax reform. And because of offshoring and other unsavory practices by the bank, CWA will be among the groups protesting Wells Fargo’s annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday in Des Moines, Iowa.

There’s been opposition from Democrats in Congress too. If we do indeed see anything like a blue wave in upcoming elections, legislation recently introduced in the House and Senate could be the model for a law that rolls back the effects of the tax law on offshoring. The No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, sponsored in the Senate by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and in the House by Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas, would align domestic and offshore tax rates, eliminating the lucrative tax incentives that draw companies to offshore their assets.

Without legislation like this, large corporations’ legal tax avoidance and offshoring of jobs would continue to place pressure on Americans’ jobs and wages, and also on government services that are already badly-underfunded.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper in March 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump said, “We're just shipping company after company after company is leaving this country and leaving jobs behind (sic).” And under President Trump, this trend may very well snowball.

Unemployment, Low. Wage Growth, Meh.

Jared Bernstein — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 09:00:00 +0000

AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File

A recruiter in the shale gas industry speaks with an attendee of a job fair in Cheswick, Pennsylvania

The unemployment rate has been stuck at a low level of 4.1 percent for the last six months. The papers are replete with stories of labor shortages, of companies fighting over high-school students and hiring folks right out of prison. While pockets of labor-market weakness always exist somewhere, there’s little question that in broad terms, the U.S. job market is closing in on full employment.

And yet, wage growth has been underwhelming. I’ll lay out the facts of that case in a moment—but how can that be? Don’t tight labor markets boost workers’ bargaining clout? Don’t employers have to bid up paychecks to keep their workers from just going around the corner to better jobs? Isn’t one of the key benefits of full employment that—as is not the case when labor markets are slack—employers must compete for workers? What’s blocking that crucial economic dynamic?

Here’s what I think is going on. First, the job market isn’t as tight as the low unemployment rate suggests. Second, slow productivity growth is a constraint on wage growth. Third, a set of institutional and cultural factors—some old (too little union power), some new (monopoly power by megafirms)—are reinforcing the inequality that’s long been embedded in our economy and are pushing back on wage growth, even at low unemployment.

It’s trickier than you might think to establish what’s up or down with wage growth. There are dozens of different wage data series, and they don’t always agree. As well, wage growth comes in two flavors: nominal and real (inflation-adjusted). Even so, enough consistent patterns emerge that we can conclude the following:

Tight labor markets still boost nominal wage growth, just not as much as they have in past economic expansions.

A few simple figures tell this story. The first figure plots nominal hourly wage growth for middle-wage workers against the unemployment rate, showing that in the last few economic expansions, as the unemployment rate came down, wage growth picked up. In fact, the pickup was remarkably consistent: in each case, wage growth peaked at around 4 percent.

But not this time, at least so far. Though unemployment is just as low as it was in the past few expansions, nominal wage growth is barely hitting 2.5 percent.

Source: BLS

That 2.5 percent happens to be roughly the rate of inflation, meaning real earnings, at least by this series, haven’t gone much of anywhere for mid-wage workers in recent years, as I’ve argued here.

President Trump’s economists falsely claim that the tax cut is already showing up as real wage growth. Not so: real hourly and weekly earnings for mid-wage workers have hardly budged since the end of 2016.

The next figure shows two scatterplots of subsets of the data from the first figure. The plot on the left, covering the 1990s, shows a tight correlation between lower unemployment and faster wage growth. In the second plot, however, from 2010 through today, the dots are all over the map.

Source: BLS

To be clear, some other series show faster wage growth, and there’s some compelling evidence that minimum wage increases have helped boost low wages in states that raised their them. But in every series I’ve checked, the correlation between unemployment and wage growth is diminished.

Which begs the question: Why?

First, the job market is simply not as tight as the unemployment rate might lead you to believe. The media accounts cited above are not wrong, but they don’t represent the national economy. The tame wage growth shown above is itself one indicator of the existence of slack (as is the absence of price pressures), but another important one is the employment rate of prime-aged (25-54) workers. That rate—a proxy for labor demand—fell sharply during the recession.

It’s been climbing back, but, especially for men, it still has some ways to go. Prime-age men, whose employment rates have suffered a longer-term decline, have made back 76 percent of their pre-recession loss. Economists have warned that some unknown number of these workers, by dint of their skill or health deficits, are out of the reach of the labor force—their joblessness is structural, not cyclical. But I say: be careful about writing people off. The power of a piping-hot labor market to pull people in may be greater than you think.

Second, slow productivity growth is a real constraint on pay gains. From the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s, productivity, or output per hour, grew more than twice as fast as it has since then. But what does that have to do with wages?

To understand that, we need to invoke our third causal factor: inequality, and the high and growing imbalance in power between wage setters and wage earners. As noted, diminished union power is very much a factor, as is the increased concentration of dominant employers in certain industries, like Walmart in retail, which gives such employers the power to set wages below where the tightening labor market would predict. Then there’s labor market discrimination, housing segregation, unequal access to education and training opportunities, persistent trade imbalances, unwarranted Federal Reserve rate hikes, and the chipping away at labor standards designed to protect workers against exploitative employers (wage theft, misclassifying employees as contractors, eroded minimum wages and overtime rules).

When output-per-hour, or productivity, is high within a firm, employers can handily respond to tighter labor markets with higher wages, and yet still maintain their profit margins. But when productivity is low, then higher pay means lower profits (or higher prices, which also dings sales and profits), so employers will do whatever they can to stave of pay raises.

Put it all together, and you’d expect to see, even at low unemployment, precisely what we are seeing: flat real paychecks for mid-level workers amidst soaring profits, with the regressive tax cuts contributing much to profits and nothing to paychecks.

That means the job market is going to have to tighten up a lot more before workers have the clout to push up their paychecks. What 4 percent unemployment helped to accomplish in previous recoveries might well take 3 percent unemployment today. Higher wages will also require union power, more balanced trade, a patient Fed, the restoration of labor standards, regulation of monopoly power, and workplace voice for those who continue to suffer discrimination.

If that sounds like daunting agenda, that’s because it is. But it is also the path to economic justice. And nobody said that path wasn’t going to be steep.

The Federal Prohibition on Marijuana Is On Borrowed Time

Paul Waldman — Sun, 22 Apr 2018 22:13:28 +0000

AP Photo/Josh Edelson

A marijuana plant is seen on Hippie Hill in San Francisco

If you're a politician wondering whether you should try pot, I've got news for you: Everybody's doing it. Why not give it a try? You don't want people to think you're square, do you?

By "try pot," I don't mean actually smoke it (though who knows what's going on in the cloakroom these days). I mean come out for some form of marijuana legalization. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner recently joined the board of a cannabis company, and last week on semi-official marijuana holiday April 20, certified cool dude Chuck Schumer, the leader of Democrats in the Senate, announced that he will soon be introducing legislation to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level. Oh how times have changed.

They're hardly the only ones. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, being pushed to the left by a primary challenge from Cynthia Nixon, now says the state should start preparing to legalize it. Major corporations like HP are inching their way toward involvement in some corner of what is already a multibillion-dollar industry. And President Trump just struck a deal with Republican senator Cory Gardner to pull back on Attorney General Jeff Sessions's plans to crack down on states that have legalized cannabis, like Gardner's home state of Colorado (though if I were Gardner I wouldn't be too quick to take the president at his word).

As fast as things have been changing around the marijuana issue, the real change is likely to come three years from now. That's when we may find ourselves with a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president—both of whom would have made a promise to end the federal prohibition and leave the matter up to the states. At that point, Republican opposition may have dimmed to the point where it isn't even much of a fight.

Schumer's announcement illustrates that support for federal decriminalization has become the consensus position of the Democratic Party. That isn't the same as support for outright legalization, since there are even some Republicans who think the question should be left to the states, which is a much safer position for even Democrats to take. But every 2020 Democratic presidential candidate is likely to support an end to the federal ban, and you'll probably hear at least one or two of them state their support for legalization more broadly.

That's a far cry from 1992, when Bill Clinton said he smoked once as a student but didn't inhale (I actually believe him; even in his 20s, the man was triangulating). Just two years ago, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders technically supported federal decriminalization, but were plainly uncomfortable about it. Clinton recommended that other states wait to see how things turned out in Colorado and Washington before they decide whether to legalize it themselves.

But they aren't waiting. As of now there are nine states plus the District of Columbia that have made marijuana legal for recreational use. Another 20 states allow medical marijuana, leaving only 21 where the drug is still completely illegal. All of those 21 are governed entirely by Republicans, with the exception of Virginia, which has a Democratic governor.

As politicians usually do, Democrats are chasing public opinion. Just since 2000, the number of Americans supporting legalization has doubled, going from around 30 percent to well over 60 percent (see here or here). While Jeff Sessions may go into battle on this issue thinking that he's going to show those dang longhairs once and for all, marijuana is slowly escaping the baggage of the 1960s. Even healthy numbers of Republicans—43 percent in this Pew Research Center poll—are ready for legalization.

But the culture war never really dies—especially for the GOP. Republican officeholders know about the generational divide on the marijuana issue, and know that older voters are the core of their base. So even as their position grows more and more unpopular, they won't be able to abandon it completely.

Which is why we could well see a similar evolution on cannabis as we saw on same-sex marriage, in which it becomes a reality on the ground, the apocalyptic predictions of opponents don't come true, and after a while Republican objections grow quieter and quieter. If you press a major Republican officeholder on the marriage equality these days they may say they still support "traditional marriage," but they almost never bring it up themselves. They know that public opinion has passed them by and there's no margin for them in fighting about it.

You can already sense that they're feeling something similar on marijuana. While the Supreme Court isn't going to declare a universal right to smoke pot, we'll see legalization spread steadily, from blue states to purple states and finally—even if it takes a while—to red states. If the politicians don't do it, the voters will: There are likely to be marijuana initiatives on the ballot in multiple states this November, including even some deep-red states like Utah, where a medical marijuana initiative has likely qualified for the ballot. The opposition of the Mormon church may not be enough to defeat it, given that medical marijuana enjoys overwhelming support, with polls finding as many as nine in ten Americans in favor.

There's a good chance that Democrats will take back the House this November, then win the presidency and control of the Senate in 2020. With control of the government in hand, 2021 would see a raft of progressive legislation on a variety of issues, many of which will produce bitter, lengthy legislative battles. But ending the federal marijuana ban? That one will be relatively easy.

The Vapid Defense of Share Buybacks

Harold Meyerson — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 18:25:50 +0000

AP Photo/Richard Drew, File

The logo for 3M appears on a screen above the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange

This past Sunday, with the share buybacks of American corporations at an all-time high, The Washington Post business section ran a major piece documenting buybacks’ rise and giving the arguments for and against the practice. And the arguments for, I’m compelled to say, look mighty flimsy.

Those arguments have never been more important, since the Republican tax cut supercharged the irresistible force (greed) that compels CEOs to authorize buybacks—as their pay is commonly linked to the share values that buybacks inflate. And “supercharged” may be understating it: “In February alone,” the Post reported, “U.S. corporations announced a record $150.7 billion in buybacks.”

The problem with buybacks—the problem their defenders are obliged to address—is that they simply funnel corporate profits into shareholders' pockets rather than into investment. The defenders’ argument is that once the shareholder gets a hold of that additional money, he or she invests it in a company that will actually invest it. “That money doesn’t go into a black hole,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the doyen of Republican economic advisers, told the Post. “It goes into a financial market somewhere. Another entity uses that money to make investments that kick off a chain of events that leads to higher capital for workers, higher wages, higher productivity.”

“The shareholder,” said John Cochrane, an economist at the right-wing Hoover Institution, “goes and invests it in another company that might have something better to do with it. Money usually takes four or five steps to get anywhere, but eventually the money from the buyback makes its way into the hands of a company that isn’t going to leave it in cash. It’s going to build something new with it.”

There are some problems with these arguments. If buybacks “kick off a chain of events” that eventually lead to higher wages, higher productivity, and more investment, why haven’t we seen higher wages, higher productivity and more investment in the past couple of decades? After all, we’ve had a decade of record-high buybacks—by University of Massachusetts economist William Lazonick’s calculations, virtually all the profits of the Fortune 500 from 2005 to 2015 went to share buybacks and dividends, even as productivity slowed and wages stagnated.

Indeed, in dismissing the case against buybacks, Cochrane actually makes a pretty convincing case against their utility. Why does it take “four or five steps” for a shareholder’s investment to actually reach a corporation that invests its funds in something productive? Could it be that a shareholder who has pocketed the buybacks from corporation A—whose CEO felt compelled to issue the buyback lest his company’s stock lag behind the competition—goes and invests it in corporation B, whose CEO is under the identical pressure to boost his share price by buying back shares as the CEO at corporation A was? And so are the CEOs at corporations C and D, which is why it may take five steps, or more, to find a company that actually will invest some of its cash. And who’s to say that our shareholder doesn’t actually seek out corporations that reward shareholders through buybacks rather than corporations that divert those funds into long-term investments? That’s certainly the modus operandi of our activist investors.

To read and ponder the Holtz-Eakin and Cochrane defense of buybacks is to be compelled to conclude that if we truly want to boost productive investment, we need to tax those profits on which American corporations are comfortably nestled (our public corporations, the Post reports, currently have $4.9 trillion in cash) and use the proceeds for public investment. If we truly want to boost workers’ wages—and with $4.9 trillion on hand, the corporate sector appears to be able to do that—we should simply eliminate all obstacles to those workers forming unions.

The Post piece, then, has performed an invaluable service. By publishing these defenses of share buybacks, it has made clear that share buybacks are indefensible.

Tax Cuts for the rich. Deregulation for the powerful. Wage suppression for everyone else. These are the tenets of trickle-down economics, the conservatives’ age-old strategy for advantaging the interests of the rich and powerful over those of the middle class and poor. The articles in Trickle-Downers are devoted, first, to exposing and refuting these lies, but equally, to reminding Americans that these claims aren’t made because they are true. Rather, they are made because they are the most effective way elites have found to bully, confuse and intimidate middle- and working-class voters. Trickle-down claims are not real economics. They are negotiating strategies. Here at the Prospect, we hope to help you win that negotiation.

The Continuing Quest for a More Walkable Los Angeles

Emily Han — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 09:00:49 +0000

(AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Pedestrians at Union Station in March 2014 in Los Angeles

screen_shot_2017-07-19_at_4.28.52_pm.png

Angelenos spend unfathomable amounts of time in cars navigating traffic jams—ones that definitely don’t turn into La La Land-style dance parties. A recent study by INRIX, a transportation analytics company, found that Los Angeles residents spend 100 hours in traffic congestion, the worst in the United States. Despite L.A.’s car-centric reputation, walking and taking public transit is the norm for many Angelenos, especially people of color. According to Los Angeles Metro, the county’s transit agency, most of its passengers are African American or Latino.

Social inequality is baked into the regional land use laws characterized by low-density sprawl that has contributed to car dependence. Affluent, majority-white communities concentrated in the most desirable areas are effectively walled off by “redlining,” segregated housing policies that prevented low-income people and people of color from buying homes and living in white neighborhoods.

Before World War II, L.A. real-estate maps outlined a rating system for home loans based on mortgage risk and investment opportunity. Predominantly black, Latino, and Asian neighborhoods (as well as some white and working-class areas) ranked poorly, and residents had difficulty securing home loans or the funds for home improvements.

That rampant discrimination combined with a persistent shortage of housing near job centers that middle- and low-income people can afford, plus a lack of transit options, has produced the congestion that defines Los Angeles today. Long distances between home and work complicate walking and biking, while the absence of a high-frequency transit network also encourages driving. “Without an understanding of L.A.’s racialized history, we see cars, think it’s been this way and it’s always been this way,” says Monique López, founder of Pueblo, an urban planning firm specializing in social and environmental justice issues. “If we better understand that history, we’re able to dispel that narrative that this is L.A. and this is the way it always will be.”

Expensive housing and epic traffic congestion are the price Angelenos pay for decades of car-focused urban planning. The median income of bus passengers is $16,218 and for rail $24,390. In Los Angeles County, the average costs of housing and transportation amount to 57 percent of an individual’s income: 35 percent for housing and 22 percent for transportation. Low-income residents bear the biggest burden of limited housing supply and the cost of driving. Using that framework, a person making $50,500 or less, would spend about $900 per month on transportation. (A 2017 AAA report found that Americans spend an average of $8,469 per year on car ownership—or about $700 a month.)

Los Angeles County’s transportation choices more closely resemble those of the Midwest and the South than the Northeast: 77 percent of L.A. County residents commute to work by driving alone. In Harris County, Texas (Houston), 79 percent of commuters drive alone and in Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit), 81 percent of drivers do. (On the East Coast, it’s a different story: In Kings County, New York (Brooklyn), more than 60 percent of commuters take public transit.)

Los Angeles doesn’t have to imagine what would happen if the region doesn’t change its road-warrior ways. It’s already on display in Texas, where low-density land use and fast-paced population growth—4.3 million people moved to Texas between 2000 and 2010—has created an endless dependency on highways. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) expanded one Houston highway from eight to 23 lanes, but that project did not reduce driving times—yet TxDOT continues to pour millions of dollars into expanding its highways.

There has been an overall decline in L.A. transit ridership last peaking in 1985, which is partly attributable to dissatisfaction with available transit options, which in turn fuels rising car ownership. Meanwhile, people continue to move into L.A. County, which could spell even more intense gridlock unless the region re-thinks its destiny by planning for a more pedestrian-friendly future. A walkable city means building more workforce housing, a robust bike network, and reliable transit that puts homes and employment in closer proximity. There are huge benefits in denser, walkable places, including reduced stress, more physical fitness, and less pollution. Walking, biking, and transit also have significantly lower financial barriers to entry; they also offer greater independence for residents, including young people and the elderly.

L.A.’s diversity means walkability can have different meanings depending on the neighborhood. According to the 2016 American Communities Survey, 48 percent of Los Angeles County residents are Hispanic, with 27 percent are white, 8 percent African American, and 14 percent Asian. Some affluent, white neighborhoods foster walkability with farmers markets, coffee shops, and bike lanes: Those amenities are viewed as positive attributes. In black and Latino communities, however, walkability can take on a negative cast when linked to perceptions about personal safety or creeping gentrification.

López studied the first/last-mile issue on the Blue Line, a light rail line that runs through African American neighborhoods like Watts and Compton. She found that many residents were less focused on issues like broken sidewalks that may concern wealthier neighborhoods and more focused on police patrols. She found that many residents avoided stations with a heavy police presence and walked to stations with fewer officers, due to their concerns about past negative encounters with law enforcement. Uneasy relationships between police and people of color affect perceptions about walkability across the country. ProPublica and The Florida Times-Union found that black people were three times as likely as white people to get a ticket for pedestrian violations in Jacksonville, Florida.

For some residents, promoting walkability can also send signals that they may be on the verge of being priced out of a community. “People have grown so accustomed to broken sidewalks, bad transit experiences, and car-driven planning,” says Alissa Walker, the urbanism editor at Curbed LA, which focuses on architecture and real estate. “When something good happens with transit or walking or getting people out of their cars, people see it as gentrification.”

How can the region break the cycle of car dependency, integrate new modes into its transportation mix, and make the entire package palatable to all Angelenos? Transit and planning officials can start by creating walkable communities around major transit corridors. Building grocery stores, shops, and schools within a smaller radius would encourage more regular walking trips. Residents also need to adjust their thinking. Walker suggests that residents should draw a two-mile circle around their homes, and try to walk, bike, or take transit within that circle. For people who are physically able, “even just a few trips during a week or the month that aren’t in a car add up in a big way,” she says.

Two programs in Los Angeles have helped shift the thinking on walking and transit. The Transit-Oriented Communities program provides guidelines to incentivize affordable housing near transit while the Great Streets initiative focuses on revitalizing commercial corridors. The city is also gradually adding more housing: The city planning department approved plans for nearly 20,000 more housing units in 2017. A new state law allows for additional housing, such as in-law units and backyard cottages, on single-family lots, which would promote walking in suburban neighborhoods by increasing density in these areas. But just how to create more density remains controversial. Democratic State Senators Scott Wiener of San Francisco and Nancy Skinner of Berkeley proposed Senate Bill 827, which would have allowed more housing near transit corridors. But the high-profile proposal recently failed to make it out of committee: It drew bipartisan opposition, especially from lawmakers representing wealthy low-density neighborhoods, and advocacy groups concerned about gentrification and the lack of protections for affordable housing.

(L.A. Metro)

Wilshire/La Brea station excavation for the L.A. Metro Purple Line

Meanwhile, to settle an accessibility lawsuit over sidewalks, crosswalks, and other walkways, the city launched Safe Sidewalks LA in 2015, a $1.4 billion, 30-year program expedites sidewalk repairs and new installations like curb ramps. Aiming for walkability also means constructing fewer parking lots, and land use that doesn’t prioritize cars can significantly lower housing construction costs. In one popular Reddit thread, an architect explained why parking makes it so expensive to build multifamily housing in Los Angeles. Removing existing parking is challenging, but there is still the opportunity to minimize it for new construction projects. There will still be a need for parking, but communities must balance space for cars against more space for housing. In 2017, Santa Monica voted to eliminate parking minimums in new developments in its downtown community plan—a decision that could influence other cities and towns in the region.

The success of the Expo Line, the newest light rail line connecting the city of Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles, shows that connecting a series of destinations, walkable areas, and bus routes can boost transit ridership. The line, which opened last May, has already exceeded its ridership projections for 2024. Two transit projects under construction, the Purple Line extension to the Westside and the Crenshaw Line in South L.A. present ample opportunities for more mixed-use and transit-oriented development along these corridors. “If we don’t do a good job ensuring affordable housing near transit hubs,” says López, “we’re not going to meet climate action goals.” She adds, “Actually quite the opposite is going to happen: You’ll be removing people and pushing them further away from walkable areas and areas with transit access, and see a decline in transit ridership in these areas.”

While there is plenty of excitement about Metro’s new slate of rail projects, the real potential in undoing gridlock lies in improving bus service. Buses do not require the complex infrastructure that rail does and can offer transportation to neighborhoods where rail is not feasible. Providing schedules that work is one key to boosting ridership where it’s needed most: Orange County, California, has experienced an overall decline in bus ridership but has seen a 20 percent increase in passengers on high-frequency bus routes. In Seattle, Washington, one out of every five commuters now rides buses. The increase in ridership followed a series of street improvements, including providing a bus-only transit mall downtown; establishing passenger pick-up areas that didn’t interfere with traffic; and giving buses green-light priority over cars.

Undoing the car-centric status quo also means getting a grip on issues that threaten pedestrians and cyclists, like speeding. Los Angeles transportation officials have instituted traffic-calming measures known as “road diets.” These road redesigns reduce pedestrian and cyclist traffic fatalities by slowing down fast-moving traffic. One project, in the Mar Vista neighborhood in L.A.’s Westside, focused on transforming a 0.8-mile stretch formerly dominated by speeding cars into a vibrant neighborhood hub: City transportation officials redesigned a major commercial thoroughfare for safer biking by removing one traffic lane and replacing it with a protected bike lane buffered by parked cars, and adding additional crosswalks. Another road diet in the town of Playa del Rey reduced the number of lanes on roads where speeding led to a high rate of traffic fatalities.

However, despite the fact that road diets reduce fatalities, these projects have also generated considerable political controversy. Some city councilmembers have either rejected road diets in their own districts or have come out against them. After only five months, the city returned the Playa del Rey road to its former configuration. (As strange as it sounds, the most vocal opponents to the redesign were residents who live in other cities south of Playa del Rey. They argued that the road diets significantly slowed their commutes.) Emilia Crotty, executive director of Los Angeles Walks, a pedestrian advocacy group, views the backlash this way: “If people thought they had a viable alternative, they wouldn’t drive,” she says.

Many Angelenos remain completely disengaged from the wider conversations about their mobility choices. “Most people don’t really understand how [planning processes work]; they’re busy living their lives. It’s pretty difficult to unpack where the decision points are, who the decision-makers are, what type of money is on the table,” says Jessica Meaney, the executive director of Investing in Place, a local advocacy group focused on equitable regional planning.

Yet all citizens must learn to appreciate the power they can wield in local transportation and housing decision-making. Increasing public input means not only educating local residents, especially in disadvantaged communities, about their transportation and housing choices, but also bringing more transparency to the kinds of decisions that communities can make. Transportation advocates and planners can work with residents to promote the benefits of getting out of cars by spotlighting those successful regional projects that have improved the pedestrian experience. Chipping away at car dominance one neighborhood at a time will help make L.A. a more walkable place to live and work.