Progressive Opinion

commondreams.org — Michigan has just passed a corporate servitude law. The law is intended to destroy unions, or at least make then ineffective. It says simply that workers do not have to pay union dues to take a job—even if they get benefits previously negotiated by a union. Most workers who don't have to pay dues won't pay, and that will defund the unions, killing them and taking away rights unions have fought hard for over generations. Without workers negotiating as a unified group, corporations will not have to grant those union-created rights. Corporations will have take-it-or-leave-it power over individual workers. In short, this is corporate servitude: you do what you are told and take what you are offered.

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robertreich.org — Republicans want to make corporations and the wealthy even richer — demanding tax cuts and roll-backs of regulations on the pretense that companies and the wealthy are the “job creators.” But the real job creators are America’s middle class and all those aspiring to join it, whose purchases propel the economy forward. And whose declining earnings are holding the economy back. So two cheers for Ben Bernanke and the Fed. They’re doing what they can. The failure is in the rest of the government — at both the federal and state levels — still dominated by deficit hawks, supply-siders, and witting and unwitting lackeys of big corporations and the wealthy.

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nymag.com — When the only cuts on the table would inflict real harm on people with modest incomes and save small amounts of money, that is a sign that there’s just not much money to save. It’s not just that Republicans disagree with this; they don’t seem to understand it. The absence of a Republican spending proposal is not just a negotiating tactic but a howling void where a specific grasp of the role of government ought to be. And negotiating around that void is extremely hard to do. The spending cuts aren’t there because they can’t be found.

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robertreich.org — I keep hearing that the billionaires and big corporations that poured all that money into the 2012 election learned their lesson. They lost their shirts and won’t do it again. Don’t believe that for an instant. It’s true their political investments didn’t exactly pay off this time around. But if you think these losses mean the end of high-stakes political investing, you don’t know how these people work. You see, if and when they eventually win, these billionaires will clean up. Their taxes will plummet, many of laws constraining their profits will disappear, and what’s left of labor unions will no longer intrude on their bottom lines. And they have enough dough to keep betting until they eventually win. That’s what it means to be a billionaire political investor: You’re able to keep playing the odds until you get the golden ring.

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juancole.com — What “right to work” laws do is allow workers to be free riders, benefiting from union representation without paying the dues that support the officials, lawyers and others who make successful collective bargaining possible. Unsurprising, in “right to work” states, unionization rates fall precipitously. “Right to work” can also be called a “wage reduction program,”, since the average wage of the average worker in “right to work” states is roughly $5,000 less than in states that do not interfere with unions. Some 70% of Swedish workers are unionized, compared to about 9% in the United States. The nominal per capita annual income of Swedes is $57,638. For the United States? $48,328. And, income inequality is twice as bad in the U.S. as in Sweden. But, folks, you might as well give up on being Sweden. You are all peasants now, so bow the knee to your lords.

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jaredbernsteinblog.com — Suppose you’ve been on a successful diet for the last month and you’re bragging about how much weight you’ve lost. Do you start counting that morning, and proudly proclaim “I’ve lost 2.5 ounces!?” Of course not. You start counting when you started dieting a month ago and brag on the 15 pounds you’ve shed since then. Yet, Congressional Republicans want to only count today’s ounces instead of last months’ pounds. In a Politico piece sent to me by a colleague (I can’t find the link), it’s reported that claiming spending cuts resulting from the 2011 Budget Control Act is verboten in the R’s world–they call it double counting. By their logic, any cuts President Obama agreed to today wouldn’t be counted tomorrow, so what’s the point? That’s one of them there rhetorical questions: apparently, the point is not serious negotiation–it’s fun with numbers, and I gotta tell ya Mr. Boehner, we’re really not having much fun out here.

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washingtonpost.com — Mr. President, it’s unbecoming for a columnist to beg, but since you’ve ruled out “going constitutional” on the debt limit, and CEOs won’t flex enough muscle to stop Republicans from using it for blackmail again, I’m down on my knees. You simply have to enlist the press to generate a roar of protest against GOP hypocrisy and recklessness here — or else doom us to lurching painfully (and pathetically) from “fiscal cliff” to “debt cliff” for months. The good news is this can be done with an investment of a mere five minutes of your time. So here’s a plan.

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billmoyers.com — As police held back thousands of protesters near the state capital building, Michigan, the birthplace of the modern labor movement, became the 24th state to enact so-called “right-to-work” legislation. Earlier today, Governor Rick Snyder signed two bills preventing public and private sector unions from requiring workers to pay union fees. The Detroit News reports that after requests from Grover Norquist and others, Snyder switched sides on the issue. United Auto Workers President Robert King said in an interview, that the Koch brothers and Amway owner Dick DeVos “bullied and bought their way to get this legislation in Michigan.” State Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville may have been under pressure, the DetroitFree Press said, from the anti-union Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), both financially supported by the Koch brothers. ALEC’s model right-to-work bill “mirrors the Michigan law word for word.”

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thedailybeast.com — It tells us something that Governor Rick Snyder signed the right-to-work bill into law with no fanfare, in private, as if he didn't quite want to own up to it. The whole question of how this came about is an interesting on. But Michigan voters, if properly organized by labor, might undo this. Remember, Ohio voters undid a somewhat similar conservative law last year. That vote was 61 to 39 percent, and if anything Michigan is slightly more union friendly. Democrats can't afford to leave this fight to unions. The ultimate goal here is to weaken not just unions, but the Democratic Party. So the Democrats--the national party, the money people, and so on--have no choice but to put some muscle into this fight, starting today.

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salon.com — Reporting on fiscal cliff negotiations tends to focus on one main demand by each side – President Obama’s insistence that tax rates on the wealthy go up, and Republicans’ insistence on sweeping cuts to and “reform” of entitlement programs. There’s obviously a lot more involved in than this, but it’s not a bad way of understanding the basic framework of the talks. And it’s a good way of understanding why, for now at least, they don’t seem to be going anywhere.

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