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News Release Archive | economy | Accuracy.Org

Auto Unions “Saved the Industry by Making Concessions”

February 27, 2012

AL BENCHICH, ajbenchich at me.com
Retired president of UAW local 909 and a retired GM worker in Michigan of 36 years, Benchich said today: “The public airwaves are filled with straight on reporting of what these people [the Republican presidential candidates] are saying with hardly any critique of their statements. [Mitt] Romney especially is pretending that unions were the big beneficiaries of the ‘auto bailout’. But it wasn’t a bailout like the big banks got a bailout, it was a loan that’s being paid back. I don’t see Romney and company calling the bankers the villains for their actual bailouts.

“There’s some discussion of restoring the middle class — and it ignores how vibrant unions were critical to having a large middle class. And now, with the denigration of unions, we’ve seen the degeneration of the middle class.

“What happened with the loans to the auto industry is that the unions saved the industry by making concessions. One of the biggest concessions was agreeing that new workers — including the ones everyone is now toting — are only at about $14 an hour. Now, for a family of four, that’s only a little above poverty level. That’s not middle class.

“The union agreed to phase out the older workers with good wages and have new workers at a lower tier and I think that was a big mistake. What we should have pushed for was converting the industry to be more forward-looking — making wind turbines, solar panels and high speed rail.”

Tagged With: Al Benchich, economy, worker's rights,

Students on Hunger Strike for University Workers’ Living Wage

February 24, 2012

Seventeen student hunger strikers are beginning the second week of their fast for a living wage for workers at the University of Virginia getting a living wage.

Interviews with student hunger strikers as well as with university employees who have been asking for a living wage for years can be arranged via Emily Filler, emilyfiller at gmail.com

More information about the campaign and the hunger strike is available.

Among the hunger strikers:

JOSEPH WILLIAMS
Williams just wrote the piece “Why I’m Hunger Striking at UVA,” which is featured on Michael Moore’s website and states: “… in our ‘caring community,’ hundreds of contract employees may make as little as $7.25 per hour … I have experienced many periods of economic hardship in my life. Growing up, I moved over 30 times — including various stays in homeless shelters, the homes of family friends, and church basements. I know firsthand what the economic struggle is like for many of these underpaid workers.”

Williams is third-year student at the University of Virginia and player for the Virginia Cavaliers football team.

Tagged With: economy, Joseph William, worker's rights,

Business Leaders Want Big Corps to Pay More, Not Less

February 23, 2012

SCOTT KLINGER, scottklinger at businessforsharedprosperity.org
Klinger is director of tax policy for Business for Shared Prosperity. He said today: “President Obama’s tax framework spotlights some very important themes, including closing corporate tax loopholes and curtailing the abuse of offshore tax havens, but the devil is in the details. Until the President proposes a rate for his global minimum tax, we remain concerned that this positive idea could be turned into a permanent tax break for tax-dodging U.S. multinational corporations. Moreover, the tax framework places too much emphasis on lowering the corporate tax rate and not enough on raising corporate tax collections from their historically low levels. U.S. corporations pay far less toward the cost of public services and infrastructure than they did in decades past and less than their foreign competitors pay in their countries today. The reality is that large U.S. businesses, as a whole, are undertaxed, not overtaxed. In 2011, total corporate federal taxes fell to just 12.1 percent of domestic profits and corporate taxes accounted for just 7.9 percent of all federal revenue. Moreover, as a percentage of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, the corporate tax share was just 1.2 percent. All these levels are historically, irresponsibly low.”

FRANK KNAPP, sbchamber at scsbc.org,
President and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce and vice chair of the American Sustainable Business Council, Knapp said: “Small businesses are tired of big businesses not paying their fair share. The President’s proposal puts the cart before the horse. Rather than starting with a lower corporate tax rate of 28 percent — and an even lower rate for manufacturers — we should start by establishing a fair and responsible share of corporate taxes as a percent of our economy that is competitive with our major trading partners, and achieve that through a combination of closing loopholes and adjusting tax rates where warranted. Then we can meet three important objectives: ending loopholes and breaks that reward large U.S. corporations for disguising their domestic profits as ‘foreign’ earnings and shifting investment and jobs overseas; leveling the playing field among big and small businesses; and raising the revenues we need for the modern infrastructure, education, research and other public investments that underpin an innovative, healthy, job-creating economy. Austerity plans, like those that are causing riots in Europe, are wrong for America. Big businesses and the wealthy have to pay their fair share.”

See “Post Calls Obama a Corporate Hack” by Dean Baker.

Tagged With: corporations, economy, Frank Knapp, Scott Klinger,

Obama’s 2013 Budget: Beyond the Partisanship

February 14, 2012

2013 Obama Budget - Graphic courtesy Wall Street Journal, CBO, OMBDAPHNE WYSHAM, daphne at ips-dc.org
Wysham is the co-director or the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She said today: “The good news in Obama’s 2013 budget is that he proposes ambitious initiatives on public transit, clean vehicles, energy efficiency, and renewable energy issues, and has proposed to eliminate $4 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. The bad news is that he doesn’t go far enough on all fronts to ensure that the dirty energy industries of the past — including offshore oil and gas drilling, nuclear power and coal — are taken off the dole and made to clean up their messes, thereby allowing truly clean energy to compete on a level playing field.”

KAREN DOLAN, karen at ips-dc.org
Dolan is director of the Cities for Progress Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She said today: “On the domestic side, the President’s budget has some good proposals for investments and some progressive revenue-raisers. It works well as a populist campaign document and is important as such. However, some programs for low-income families would suffer further unnecessary cuts and the President proposes, over 10 years, to reduce non-security discretionary spending from its current 3.1 percent of GDP to a 50-year low of 1.7 percent. We have to do better.”

ROBERT ALVAREZ, bob at ips-dc.org
Alvarez, a senior scholar of nuclear policy at the Institute for Policy Studies, said today: “President Obama’s proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency of $8.3 billion, while reduced from the previous year by $105 million, also reflects some important increases to states and Indian tribes to better enforce the Clean Air and Clear Water Acts. About 60 percent of the Department of Energy’s budget is going mostly for nuclear weapons and the cleanup of nuclear weapons sites. The single largest expenditure in DOE is for nuclear weapons, which commands 27 percent of DOE’s entire budget.”

MIRIAM PEMBERTON, miriam at ips-dc.org
Pemberton, a research fellow with Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, said today: “The preventive medicine in our security budget — including diplomacy, peacekeeping, economic development, climate stabilization — has been shortchanged for years as military spending has surged. Though the President has talked about investing more in prevention, his budget fails to do so. It leaves the extreme imbalance between military and non-military spending virtually unchanged through 2016.”

Tagged With: budget, Daphne Wysham, economy, Karen Dolan, Miriam Pemberton, Robert Alvarez,

iEmpire: Apple’s Labor in China Even Worse than NYT Reports?

February 9, 2012


ARUN GUPTA, ebrowniess at yahoo.com
Gupta just wrote the piece “iEmpire: Apple’s Sordid Business Practices Are Even Worse Than You Think,” which states: “Behind the sleek face of the iPad is an ugly backstory that has revealed once more the horrors of globalization. The buzz about Apple’s sordid business practices is courtesy of the New York Times series on the iEconomy. In some ways it’s well reported but adds little new to what critics of the Taiwan-based Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, have been saying for years. The series’ biggest impact may be discomfiting Apple fanatics who as they read the articles realize that the iPad they are holding is assembled from child labor, toxic shop floors, involuntary overtime, suicidal working conditions, and preventable accidents that kill and maim workers.

“It turns out the story is much worse. Researchers with the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) that legions of vocational and university students, some as young as 16, are forced to take months’-long ‘internships’ in Foxconn’s mainland China factories assembling Apple products. The details of the internship program paint a far more disturbing picture than the Times does of how Foxconn, ‘the Chinese hell factory,’ treats its workers, relying on public humiliation, military discipline, forced labor and physical abuse as management tools to hold down costs and extract maximum profits for Apple.

“To supply enough employees for Foxconn, the 60th largest corporation globally, government officials are serving as lead recruiters at the cost of pushing teenage students into harsh work environments. The scale is astonishing with the Henan provincial government having announced in both 2010 and 2011 that it would send 100,000 vocational and university students to work at Foxconn, according to SACOM.

Gupta is a founding editor of the New York City based Indypendent and also helped found the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Tagged With: Arun Gupta, Asia, china, corporations, economy,

Obama Economic Policy: Change or More of the Same?

January 26, 2011

RICHARD WOLFF
Rick Wolff is author of the book Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. He said today: “Some 20-30 million unemployed, underemployed, and no-longer-even-looking workers were not worth addressing nor offering any new governmental program (e.g. direct federal hiring as undertaken by FDR from 1934 to 1941). The past program of Bush and Obama to rely on the private sector and stimulating it in the hopes that benefits will trickle down to reduce unemployment has not worked now for years. Yet that is all the State of the Union address offers, more of the same old, same old that has failed. The long term effects of massive, long-term unemployment will continue to undermine growth and revitalization of the U.S. economy in multiple ways. [Read more...]

Filed Under: , Tagged With: economy, education,

The Real Context of the GE Appointment

January 21, 2011

One year ago today, the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that corporate entities can spend unlimited money in elections, arguing that they have the same basic First Amendment rights as human beings.

President Obama is in Schenectady today, appointing by executive order GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt as chair of a new “President’s Council on Jobs and Competetiveness.” He is in effect replacing economic adviser Paul Volcker.

THOMAS FERGUSON
Ferguson’s books include Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. He is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute.

He said today: “Volcker out and Immelt in, because the administration now wants to emphasize ‘recovery’ and ‘jobs’ instead of ‘crisis stabilization’? Since when did any stabilization not include jobs as a top priority? What we actually have here is the disappearance from the scene of the best known and most visible critic of the excesses of the financial sector and his replacement by the sitting CEO of a company that is heavily dependent on government aid of all sorts, including diplomatic assistance to invest more in China. This is not about jobs, but political money — the White House knows that after Citizens United, it will need to raise about a billion dollars — that’s right, a billion — for its reelection campaign. That’s the context in which this and its other recent appointments need to be judged.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: , , Tagged With: citizens united, economy, job, money in politics,

U.S.-Chinese Relations

January 19, 2011

Chinese President Hu Jintao is in the United States this week for a state visit.

HENRY ROSEMONT
Available for a limited number of interviews, Rosemont is visiting professor of religious studies at Brown University and author of several books including A Chinese Mirror: Moral Reflections on Political Economy and translations of Chinese classics. He said today: “China is a threat to the United States only if the United States assumes that it is, and pursues an aggressive foreign policy that serves only our own and not China’s interests. The best hope for a less tension-filled world is for both countries to reduce military spending significantly — with the U.S. taking the lead both to show good faith and because its military budget is larger than the rest of the world’s combined — and to be willing to surrender a little of their sovereignty to the United Nations in order to strengthen that organization’s ability to reduce terrorism and war and adjudicate disputes between nation states.” Rosemont wrote the piece “Is China a Threat?” [Read more...]

Filed Under: , , Tagged With: china, economy, military bases,
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