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Catherine Rampell, Washington Post Writers Group

Photo: Mayra Beltran /Houston Chronicle

Liberals should look to all tools to help the poor

Extracting more money from evil, exploitative capitalists has become a rallying cry for much of the grass-roots left. In the meantime, though, its largely ignoring other important policies for lifting Americans out of poverty.

In a recent column, I urged progressives to more seriously grapple with the cumulative effects of policies that make workers more expensive to hire. More than doubling the federal minimum wage to $15, for example, would risk pricing a lot of people out of work. Especially in low-cost-of-living areas such as Mississippi, where half of all jobs pay less than $14.22.

In other words, well-intended, feel-good policies can sometimes backfire, hurting the people youre trying to help.

This humble suggestion generated a lot (like, a lot) of hate mail, along with a good follow-up question: What, then, should progressives who want to help the working poor devote their energy to?

Regarding the minimum wage, there are useful tools available to help set pay according to local costs of living. MITs Living Wage Calculator is used by some public officials and companies to determine reasonable wage floors.

More important, lots of the other anti-poverty tools deserve more love from the left in particular what might be called post-tax policies.

Pre-tax policies such as the minimum wage, overtime and fringe-benefit requirements help increase workers paychecks, with employers (and sometimes workers themselves) generally footing the bill.

Post-tax policies, by contrast, involve redistribution of income and wealth through the tax code and social safety net. Think: the earned-income tax credit (EITC), food stamps, housing vouchers, health insurance subsidies. They are about boosting living standards on the back-end, with the taxpayers paying. Relative to other rich countries, the United States relies very little on these post-tax tools.

If you look at Americas income inequality before taxes and transfers, its not great but its still about on par with France, Germany and Finland. If you look at income distribution after taking into account tax and transfer payments, we suddenly become the second-most-unequal developed economy in the world, behind Mexico.

There have been quiet efforts to expand some of these post-tax anti-poverty policies. This year alone, EITCs have been added or expanded in six states, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But all these changes were done legislatively, rather than through well-advertised ballot initiatives. They get much less press coverage and popular organizing relative to, say, the Fight for 15.

At a conference last fall, I asked Jason Furman, then chair of President Barack Obamas Council of Economic Advisers, about the countrys reliance on pre-tax vs. post-tax measures to help boost economic security. He said he favored using both kinds of tools (as do I). But he also noted a remarkable disparity in progressive enthusiasm for the two approaches, especially relative to payoffs.

During Obamas tenure, the White House oversaw an expansion of overtime protections that was expected to put an extra $1.2 billion into workers pockets. It also helped pass tax-code changes that put an additional $28 billion in the pockets of low- and moderate-income families. Guess which inspired more attaboys?

Whatever the reason, the dearth of excitement for these post-tax policies is a strategic mistake. Programs such as the EITC and food stamps, if well-designed, complement the minimum wage. They can do things that the minimum wage cant, such as grow more generous for larger families. Critically, they also dont raise the cost of employees, which means the well-heeled business lobby is less likely to fight them.

Post-tax policies can distort labor markets too, of course especially if they result in benefit cliffs that discourage people from working more. Thats where smart design comes into play.

But every policy has limitations, which is why those on the left would do well to consider every tool at their disposal. Bleeding hearts are often helped by hard heads.

crampell@washpost.com

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Liberals should look to all tools to help the poor - San Antonio ... - mySanAntonio.com

Sen. Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth WarrenWarren asks where bank CEOs stand on customers' ability to join class action suits Labor Department seeks delay of Obama investment adviser rule Obama donors not committing to Biden MORE (D-Mass.)on Saturday pushed her party toward the left.

The potential2020 presidential candidatedeclared in a speech that progressive liberals not only can restore the Democratic Party from its disorderlystate, but that they currently control its direction, The New York Times reported.

If were going to be the people who lead the Democratic Party back from the wilderness and lead our country out of this dark time, then we cant waste energy arguing about whose issue matters more or who in our alliance should be voted off the island, Warren told the crowd at the annualNetroots Nation meeting, which was reportedly received with applause.

We are not a wing of todays Democratic Party. We are the heart and soul of todays Democratic Party, she added.

TheDemocratic Partyisnt going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill, Warren said. It is not going to happen.

While Warrendid not explicitly name former President Bill ClintonBill ClintonPenalties assessed by EPA decline under Trump, study finds Bill and Hillary Clinton to take questions at joint Dallas appearance Monica Lewinsky responds to Scaramucci calling New Yorker reporter 'the Linda Tripp of 2017' MORE, she went after the measures passed in his administration that the left wing of the party largely despises, reassuring the crowd not to fear a shift back toward the middle, as Clinton had done in the 1990s.

Warren supported and stumped for Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonJudge orders new search for Hillary Clinton's Benghazi emails Chance the Rapper: 'I have a bigger voice than Donald Trump' Bill and Hillary Clinton to take questions at joint Dallas appearance MORE as the Democratic nominee in the 2016 presidential campaign. However, she was one of the last Senate Democrats to announce their endorsement during the bruising primary process she waited until June.

Warren's speech at the conference, which is viewed as a testing ground for prospective presidential candidates, further fuelsbuzz that Warren plans to run for president in 2020.

The Times reported that the Massachusetts lawmaker madelittle attempt to dismiss the bid speculation.

Her speech comes amid divides within the Democratic Party. Warren alsourged the liberal crowd not to push others out of the party's movement.

She made similar comments during a recent interparty dispute over whether Democrats can disagree on their stance onabortion.

"I am strongly pro-choice. I am strongly pro-choice, and I will fight," Warren told The Huffington Post. "But that's not how everyone in the party feels."

Go here to see the original:
Warren: Liberals will 'lead the Democratic Party back from the wilderness' - The Hill

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From one perspective, Elon Musk is liberals' dream entrepreneur. He's a science nerd and a romantic visionary in the progressive firmament of California. He's the man who not only brought electric cars back from the dead, but made them cool. Tesla, the car company Musk founded, is gearing up for mass-production of a $35,000 model, which hopes to bring his vision for a climate-change-fighting car to the masses.

But some of Musk's employees tell a different story.

Recent reports in The Daily Beast and The Guardian tell of workers enduring tough conditions, long hours, and frequent injuries in Tesla's famous plant in Fremont, California. Since 2014, ambulances reportedly rushed there over 100 times to deal with "fainting spells, dizziness, seizures, abnormal breathing, and chest pains, according to incident reports obtained by The Guardian. Hundreds more were called for injuries and other medical issues." Unsurprisingly, some of these same workers are pushing to unionize Tesla's workforce, with the support of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union.

Musk and Tesla's management have staunchly resisted and criticized that idea.

The law forbids employers from directly threatening or retaliating against employees for supporting a union drive. But owners and management are still perfectly free to express their opinions to workers. Given the resources they wield and their control over the workplace floor as a social space where workers talk to each other this anti-union messaging can still have pretty overwhelming force. "Every time we go out there and try to hand out flyers, security comes and talks to us for 20 to 30 minutes, takes our badges, makes sure we're employees of the factory," Alan Ochoa, a pro-union Tesla worker, told The Daily Beast. "Sometimes people from HR come, and they don't hold back on their opinions on the matter."

The dispute has also spilled over into whether Tesla broke the law. The UAW has filed four complaints against Tesla, claiming it violated the National Labor Relations Act by "intimidating [and] creating the appearance of surveillance and conducting surveillance on [employees] and others for their union activities and/or union sentiments," and for instruct[ing] employees that they were not allowed to pass out any literature unless it was pre-approved by the employer." The company has denied the charges as "entirely without merit."

This murky he-said-she-said quality is pretty common in disputes between labor and management/ownership, and in Tesla's own internal battle.

Back in February, a pro-union worker named Jose Moran wrote a blog post detailing how long work hours, frequent injuries, and mandatory overtime are still a big problem at Tesla. The post apparently stung Musk enough that he personally issued a point-by-point rebuttal in a long company email.

For instance, The American Prospect reported that wages at the factory run from $17 to $21 an hour quite a bit less than the national average of $29.04 for auto-manufacturing. That Tesla employees often have to deal with California's sky-high costs-of-living only exacerbates the problem. The company counters that it shares stock with employees, and that total compensation is actually better than the industry average when the stock is factored in. "A Tesla team member earned between $70,000 and $100,000 more in total compensation than the employees at other U.S. auto companies!" Musk wrote in his response to Moran. The workers counter that the stock doesn't fully vest until they've put in at least four years of work a problem when your bills arrive on a monthly basis.

Then there's the matter of long hours and workplace injuries. One thing Musk and everyone else seems to agree on is that the problems were definitely bad several years ago. Employees used to put in 14-hour days, but policy changes and the hiring of a third shift eventually cut that down to eight hours. (Musk even mentioned that he slept on the factory floor in a sleeping bag in 2016 as a show of solidarity.)

A study commissioned by pro-union workers, drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistic data, found that Tesla had an injury rate 31 percent higher than the industry's average in 2015 the last year for which comprehensive data is available. Its serious injury rate was 103 percent higher. A Tesla spokesperson responded that "we may have had some challenges in the past," but safety improvements cut injuries by 30 percent in 2016. The spokesperson also said that as of the first quarter of 2017, the company's total injury rate was 32 percent better than the industry average.

Pro-union critics are skeptical, saying the data for 2016 and 2017 is too preliminary to be fully trustworthy.

Tesla workers are also reportedly sometimes put on light duty to accommodate their injuries and ongoing pain. But this comes with lower pay: an effective even if arguably unintentional punishment for bringing up the injury in the first place.

Finally, there's the looming production grind needed to meet the massive order list for Tesla's newest model, which could drive the company's injury rate and hours back up again: "There's no realistic way than going up through 12 hours," said Tesla employee Michael Sanchez.

The point here is not to try and reach some objective determination as to who's right and who's wrong. Both sides have relatable stories. Indeed, they're flip sides of the same coin: They show how the strengths of the tech visionary can also be their great weakness. The pro-union workers see themselves as being driven into work hours and conditions beyond the bounds of decency by Musk's vision for the future. Musk views himself as a scrappy entrepreneur, balancing on razor-thin finances, trying to break into a sclerotic industry dominated by massive players, all in the name of saving the planet.

But perhaps the irresolvable Rashomon-esque nature of the dispute is itself arguably the best case for unionization. We're all human, none of us are perfect, and we all tell the story of our experiences through inevitably biased lenses. If Musk and his workers can tell such different tales about the evolution of the same company, is that not evidence they should all have a say in setting the terms by which that company operates?

There was a time, decades ago, when the American left and the labor movement aimed to make the workplace such a democratic space. Today, that dream is mostly dead: That ownership and management give orders, and employees obey, is basically taken as the natural order of things.

In some ways, this can be a boon for liberalism. As Google recently demonstrated, unquestioned authority can be an effective tool for enforcing progressive social norms. Or in Musk's case, an effective tool for driving forward the progressive dream of a green economy reliant on zero-carbon-emitting electric cars. These are both entirely worthy goals. But should liberals wield the power of the boss in pursuing them?

As discontent mounts against inequality and stagnation, and against the immense power that employers hold over their workers the old dream will almost certainly have to be resurrected. In that way, Elon Musk sits at ground zero for a coming reckoning within American liberalism.

Read more here:
Should liberals support an electric car company that's anti-union? - The Week Magazine

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Posted: Aug 14, 2017 12:01 AM

I wish I could say that its a shock that someone died in Charlottesville, but Ive been predicting just this sort of thing in radio appearances for months. The liberal media is dying to blame it all on Donald Trump, but it should look in the mirror.

To begin with, the liberal media is almost entirely responsible for growing the Alt-Right merger of hate groups and internet trolls. Most people are well aware of the stifling political correctness that reached an apex under Barack Obama. People are sick and tired of being attacked and scolded by the humorless left-wing thought police every time they stray from the latest liberal doctrine. That created a large group of people who enjoyed tweaking social justice warriors and some of them realized the easiest way to do that was with racial slurs. Every time some doofus leaves a noose on a college campus or says the N-word, its treated like a national crisis. If youre an anonymous troll who enjoys getting people to react to everything you say, thats a FEATURE, not a bug. All you have to do is say something racially offensive and all these people who studiously try to ignore you will go out of their minds.

That racial element gave the Nazis, white supremacists and KKK mouth-breathers a way to connect with the more socially adept trolls making the Pepe the Frog memes. Of course, the media liberals fueled them as well with their hypocrisy. They painted EVERY white supporter of Donald Trump or the Republican Party as a racist even as they ignored and defended the vicious anti-white rhetoric that has become commonplace on the Left. Just to give you a quick example of that, there was a hashtag that trended on Twitter after the attack called #ThisIsNotUS. It started out as a way for white liberals to virtue signal, but it quickly turned into an all too typical attack on white people, America and Trump voters. Here are some of the most popular comments from the hashtag

#ThisIsNotUs Then who is it? 63% of white men & 53% of white women voted for KKK-endorsed Trump. The majority of EVERY OTHER ETHNICITY didnt

If you are white and you are trying to say #ThisIsNotUs you are part of the problem.

If you're earnestly tweeting #ThisIsNotUS, know that the you might as well have been one of the white supremacists walking w/ tiki torches.

Every white person that tweets #ThisIsNotUs is being complicit in not addressing the rampant racism and bigotry that in their community

#ThisIsNotUS? Easy to say so. Unfortunately you can't have the Black, Brown, Asian, Jewish, Muslim or LGTBQ "experience" to know #THISISYOU

Gaga, prime example of a white woman using tag #ThisIsNotUs like this country wasnt built on slavery & racism. THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN AmeriKa

#ThisIsNotUs is how white people try to absolve themselves from their complicity in white supremacy; it v much is you, your inaction fuels it

The biggest talking point white supremacists have are comments like these. Would that be true if the mainstream media actually treated these comments with the same sort of contempt it has for the Alt-Right?

Nope.

Yet these sort of comments are MAINSTREAM on the Left. Let me repeat that. They are MAINSTREAM on the Left.

On the other hand, white supremacists are nothing on the Right. David Duke is a joke. Richard Spencer? Let me tell you a little story about Richard Spencer. I was walking around CPAC and noticed an enormous gaggle of media surrounding someone I didnt recognize, who didnt seem to be drawing a crowd of regular attendees. As it turns out, the massive group of media people werent following a big name. They were following Richard Spencer, who was later kicked out of the conference, presumably because the organizers never wanted him there in the first place.

Yet Richard Spencer, like David Duke before him, is treated like some kind of rock star by the media liberals even though hes a nobody in the conservative movement. Why? Because they dont care about conservative opinion. They dont care about conservative views. They care about creating propaganda that paints the Right as a bunch of hood-wearing, Nazi-saluting scumbags. So, they treat Richard Spencer like a rock star.

This creates a sort of Kim Kardashian effect. Ninety five percent of any influence Spencer has comes from the fact that anything he does is a big deal to the media. Why were Spencer and Duke able to gather even 500 Tiki torch-waving idiots in Charlottesville? Because the media would cover everything they did with bated breath. It gave them a chance to feel important, to feel like they were making an impact. In fact, white supremacists have started to believe their own BS because they keep hearing it from the media. After fighting with Richard Spencer on Twitter, I still remember one of his fans claiming that white supremacists were an essential part of Trump getting elected. My response was.

Yeah, you guys made a bunch of Holocaust memes & called people cucksand then you're all....I'm helping.

The hardcore racists out there are pariahs everywhere except in the mainstream media, where theyre treated as incredibly important.

On the other hand, the same mainstream media that has elevated the Alt-Right has been silent as violence has increasingly become a mainstay at liberal protests, including the counter-protest of this event. A few shops getting looted or people getting hurt doesnt stop the media from describing a liberal event as a peaceful protest. Even the counter-protests in Charlottesville were widely described as peaceful. Yet, protesters chanted From the Midwest to the South, punch a Nazi in the mouth, a female reporter was punched by one of those counter-protesters, the organizer of the rally was hit, and other people were attacked. Thats not peaceful. Thats something LIBERAL POLITICIANS should be asked to condemn.

In other words, Nazi and KKK members are HORRIBLE. The violent liberal counter-protesters are ALSO horrible. James Alex Fields, Jr? Who appears to have marched at the rally before plowing into a crowd? I condemn what he did. I also condemn the Bernie supporter who shot up a congressional Republican softball game. Additionally, I will condemn the next person on the Left or the Right who kills someone over politics, which seems inevitable when you have opposing sides carrying shields and weapons to political rallies. Those condemnations dont make a damn bit of difference as long as the liberal media keeps elevating white supremacists and excusing the violence of the Alt-Left. Im genuinely sorry people are dying at political rallies, but it would be surprising if the death at Charlottesville were the last one. Their blood will be on the hands of the liberal media.

Link:
How the Liberal Media Created Charlottesville - Townhall

ATLANTA Sen. Elizabeth Warren used a speech to a grass-roots conference Saturday to take direct aim at Democrats diminished moderate wing, ridiculing Clinton-era policies and jubilantly proclaiming that liberals had taken control of the party.

While not invoking former President Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton by name, Warren sent an unambiguous message that she believes the Clinton effort to push Democrats toward the political center should be relegated to history.

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The Democratic Party isnt going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill, she said, highlighting measures Bill Clinton signed into law as president that are reviled by much of the left. It is not going to happen.

Yet Warren, D-Mass., who is widely thought to be considering running for president in 2020, noted to about 1,000 activists here for the yearly Netroots Nation meeting that they hardly needed to worry about the party shifting to the middle as it did in the 1990s. Liberals, she said, have taken charge.

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We are not the gate-crashers of todays Democratic Party, Warren said, invoking a term first used to describe the liberal blogosphere that emerged a decade ago. We are not a wing of todays Democratic Party. We are the heart and soul of todays Democratic Party.

Warrens five-day trip started in Poland, where she met with US and Polish officials and had dinner with a unit of Army reservists from Brockton.

Despite Warrens words, deep divisions remain in the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential campaign. There is the familiar center-versus-liberal divide as well as an increasingly animated clash between economic-focused activists on the far left and liberals driven more by issues of race, gender and identity.

While Warren first rose to stardom on the left because of her populist jeremiads against concentrated economic power, she sought to use her remarks in Atlanta to broaden her indictment against what she calls a rigged system. Expanding her signature attacks on Wall Street and its political influence, she said women, African-Americans, undocumented immigrants and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people were all suffering from fundamental inequities.

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Warren lampooned a recent New York Times opinion article, Back to the Center, Democrats, by Mark Penn, a onetime Clinton strategist, and Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president. The path forward is to go back to locking up nonviolent drug offenders and ripping more holes in our economic safety net, she said of their argument.

Still, Warren implored the crowd not to push others out of the movement.

If were going to be the people who lead the Democratic Party back from the wilderness and lead our country out of this dark time, then we cant waste energy arguing about whose issue matters more or who in our alliance should be voted off the island, she said, drawing applause.

The annual Netroots gathering began in 2006 when it was called YearlyKos and sponsored by the Daily Kos blog. But it has grown in scale, mirroring the rise of liberals in the party.

The conference has also become a proving ground for would-be Democratic presidential candidates. Warren did little to dissuade a friendly crowd from thinking she, too, was eyeing a White House run.

Recalling the moment this year when Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, rebuked her for not following Senate rules and said, nevertheless she persisted Warren repeated the line that has become a rallying cry for her. When she vowed to the crowd in Atlanta that she would persist, chants of Warren 2020 rose up.

Read the original:
Liberals are the 'heart and soul' of Democratic Party, Warren says - The Boston Globe