Isaiah J. Poole Archive

President Trump has resurrected an old canard in his effort to sell a new effort to restrict immigration into the United States. The legislation he backs, he said at a White House ceremony, was necessary in part to protect “minority workers competing for jobs against brand-new arrivals” under the current immigration system.

This theme is a hardy perennial in right-wing media and think-tank reports, often featuring members of a small but persistent cadre of conservative black people willing to be the face of the pernicious idea that in order to boost the fortunes of African Americans, we have to keep new immigrants out of the country.

This notion keeps getting debunked, but Trump trotted it out anyway as his administration launches key assaults against the core concerns of African-American people.

This comes the same week as news reports that the Justice Department is gearing up a new assault on affirmative action programs at colleges, based on the lie that these programs discriminate against white and Asian college applicants.

Wall Street, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and right-wing Republicans are ganging up again this week against consumers who want to hold financial institutions that rip them off accountable.

The target this time is a rule issued this week by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that is designed to restore the ability bank and credit card customers, as individuals or as a group, to take a financial dispute to court.

“Our new rule will restore the ability of groups of people to file or join group lawsuits. In some cases, not only will companies have to provide relief, they will also have to change their behavior moving forward,” said a statement issued by the agency. “People who would otherwise have to go it alone or give up, will be able to join with others to pursue justice and some remedy for their harm.”

However, unsurprisingly, it took less than a day for the guardians of Wall Street profiteering to attack the rule. They are the same people – like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., in the Senate and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, in the House – who are working to either get rid of the CFPB entirely or render it toothless.

As medicine for our health care system, it’s worse than a placebo. It will do active harm to millions of people, particularly low-income people and seniors. It cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations and dangles paltry tax credits to working people. It leaves consumers facing higher health care prices and will force many of them to forgo needed care.

This is the toxic prescription that the Trump administration and the Republican Congress wants to give the American public in place of the Affordable Care Act.

The House Republican plan was injected into the political debate Monday evening, while the country was still recovering from President Trump’s latest Twitter seizure. With much of the media preoccupied with Trump’s other democracy-destroying antics, the extreme nature of what the House Republicans have proposed has yet to hit home. But when it does, expect more of the condemnation of the Republicans’ “repeal and replace” wrecking ball that we saw when members of Congress were in their home districts during the February congressional recess. People’s Action was a leader in those town hall confrontations and protests, and now that the details confirm the worst fears of working people, the poor and the elderly, People’s Action affiliates will intensify its resistance.

A key feature of the Republican plan is the replacement of the premium subsidies that were available through the Affordable Care Act health care exchanges with a tax credit that ranges for individuals from $2,000 to $4,000 a year, based on age. The tax credits would go toward policies purchased on the open market that would be very different from what’s offered on the exchanges. Those policies would be much less regulated, so they would cover less and be free to charge more. Meanwhile, some $600 million in taxes, largely on the health care industry and wealthy Americans, that were raised to cover the cost of the Affordable Care Act subsidies would be eliminated.

In what can rightfully be described as a “basket of deplorables” being offered up to lead the Trump administration, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) stands apart. And we are going to have to unite to stand up against the nomination of Sessions to be attorney general.

“Like the Confederate general he is named after, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has long been a leading voice for the Old South and the conservative white backlash vote Trump courted throughout his campaign,” writes Ari Berman in The Nation. “Sessions, as a U.S. senator from Alabama, has been the fiercest opponent in the Senate of immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, and has a long history of opposition to civil rights, dating back to his days as a U.S. Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s.”

Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color Of Change, said in a statement, “There’s no other way to say it: Jeff Sessions is a racist. He has opposed the Voting Rights Act. He has taken extreme views on immigration and free speech that threaten black communities and other communities of color. He makes jokes about the Ku Klux Klan and referred to a black federal prosecutor as “boy.” As attorney general he represents a threat to the legal rights of black people across the country, and the Black prosecutors and civil servants he will oversee in the Department of Justice.

News out of Germany that U.S. trade negotiations with Europe similar to the one that produced the Trans-Pacific Partnership have collapsed is another sign that an organized grassroots is successfully putting the multinational corporate trade agenda on its heels.

Britain’s Independent, in an article published Monday, quotes Germany’s Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel as saying free trade negotiations between the European Union and the United States have failed, but that “nobody is really admitting it.”

The trade deal is called the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP. It is being negotiated between the U.S. and the members of the European Union. Discussions have been going on at the same time the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation deal that includes several Asian countries as well as Western Hemisphere nations, was being forged.

The BBC published an article on its website Monday with a headline framing the TTIP collapse as a question rather than a declarative fact, but noted in its story, “There are many critics who hope Mr Gabriel’s assessment is right.”

When Rev. William Barber, best known in progressive circles as the leader of the Moral Mondays protests against the right-wing governor and legislature in North Carolina, was brought to the stage at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night, there was cheering from the North Carolina delegation but polite applause from the rest the hall. They did not know who Barber was, and then they not know what was coming.

Ten minutes later, when Barber finished his address, the entire convention hall was on its feet.

“I come before you tonight as a preacher,” he began, and from that moment Barber took the convention delegates through the convergence of progressive populism and “faith and morality.”

“It may sound strange, but I am a conservative,” he said, “because I work to conserve a divine tradition that teaches us to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.”

The core of his speech was a challenge for the delegates at the convention to be “moral defibrillators” of the nation. “We must shock the nation with the power of love.”

One of the unheralded victories in the Democratic Party platform victories puts the party officially on the side of workers in a big, concrete way.

The platform draft that is now on its way to the full platform committee, which votes on it at a meeting in Orlando, Fla., in early July, includes a call for a “model employer executive order,” or what is often called a “good jobs executive order.”

The language included in the draft says:

“Democrats support a Model Employer Executive Order or some other vehicle to leverage federal dollars to support employers who provide their workers with a living wage, good benefits, and the opportunity to form a union. The $1 trillion spent annually by the government on contracts, loans, and grants should be used to support good jobs that rebuild the middle class.”

A coalition of worker and grass-roots organizations has been pressing President Obama to sign such an executive order, which would cover an estimated 8 million workers employed by federal contractors. Many of these workers are in low-wage service jobs, such as preparing fast food for companies such as McDonald’s and Subway that have contracts to operate on federal facilities.

While national pizza chains like Domino’s and Papa John’s have been targeted by Fight for 15 protests around the country because of their low wages and allegations of wage theft, a Washington, D.C.-based pizza entrepreneur has made his chain a champion of the $15-an-hour minimum wage.

Michael Lastoria is the owner of the 15-store &pizza chain, and one of his shops will be the site Monday evening of a ceremonial signing of legislation that will increase the minimum wage in the District of Columbia to $15 an hour by 2020 and afterward annually based on the cost of living.

The signing of the bill – the “Fair Shot Minimum Wage Amendment Act” – comes with warnings from conservatives and business groups that job creation and business investment in the city will dry up and that those who can will run across the Potomac River to Virginia, where the minimum wage will remain at the federal level of $7.25 an hour.

But Lastoria, in an interview with OurFuture.org, said that in fact he is expanding his chain, planning six new pizza shops this year. The reason, he said, is simple: “Allow your employees to thrive and your company will thrive.”

“We really have never seen a successful business where our employees didn’t feel appreciated, engaged and supported,” he said.

President Obama on Wednesday did a remarkable 180-degree turn on Social Security, and since we have been dogging him for his earlier failed attempt at a “grand bargain” that would have cut Social Security benefits for future seniors, let’s give credit where credit is due.

Here’s what the president said at the Concord Community Elementary School in Elkhart, Ind.:

But look, let’s face it – a lot of Americans don’t have retirement savings. Even if they’ve got an account set up, they just don’t have enough money at the end of the month to save as much as they’d like because they’re just barely paying the bills. Fewer and fewer people have pensions they can really count on, which is why Social Security is more important than ever. We can’t afford to weaken Social Security. We should be strengthening Social Security. And not only do we need to strengthen its long-term health, it’s time we finally made Social Security more generous, and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned. And we could start paying for it by asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute a little bit more. They can afford it. I can afford it.

That is the message that members of the progressive Social Security coalition have been pressing for years, but this is the first time that we can claim President Obama as an ally on this issue.

House Speaker Paul Ryan ended up overshadowing his own efforts Tuesday to highlight the Republican Party’s proposals for overhauling aid programs for low-income people by telling reporters that he was still planning to endorse and vote for a presidential candidate that had earlier uttered what he called “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

The Speaker of the House shredding his moral credibility – in the heart of one of Washington D.C.’s historic African-American communities, no less – to remain loyal to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was indeed far more worthy of media attention than the ostensible purpose of his crossing the Anacostia River, which was to use a church-based substance abuse treatment center as a backdrop for his effort to rebrand the Party of the 1 Percent as the party that cares the most about the poor.

Nonetheless, the package of proposals that Ryan began unveiling this week, under the branding of “A Better Way,” should not be ignored, even though many of their tenets will be familiar to people who have followed what passes for anti-poverty policy in the conservative movement. What Ryan hopes is that at least Senate and House candidates will use the “Better Way” proposals to give the impression that the Republican Party is more than the “Party of No” and a party that thinks the solution to every economic problem is a tax cut for the wealthy.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) helped kick off the “Take On Wall Street” campaign on Tuesday by detailing the work that remains undone by the Dodd-Frank financial reforms that were signed into law six years ago.

“The rules that protect our economy boil down to just two basic principles,” she said. “The first one: Government institutions shouldn’t be allowed to cheat people. … Second, financial institutions should not be allowed to force taxpayers to bail them out.”

Warren explained the need for a new level of financial reform by saying that while the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill did impose some discipline on the financial sector, “let’s get real: Dodd-Frank did not end too big to fail. If you think it did, stand on your head, because you are looking at the world upside-down.”

Warren embraced the Take On Wall Street campaign’s five-point agenda: Reinstate the Glass-Steagall wall separating consumer banking from speculative trading activities and other financial businesses, closed the “carried interest” loophole that allows people like hedge fund traders to pay a lower tax rate on their earnings than workers, eliminate the tax deduction for CEO “performance” bonuses, crack down on payday lenders and create “public option” banking services through entities like the U.S. Postal Service, and a financial transactions tax that would not only raise money for needed services but would help curb high-speed speculative trading.

Those of us who have been concerned about Republican voter suppression tactics expected this might happen: A relative of a Republican political candidate complaining about “onerous rules” that got in the way of casting a vote.

By now, you’ve probably seen or read the story: Ivanka Trump, daughter of Donald Trump, and her brother Eric both missed the voter registration deadline for Tuesday’s New York Republican primary, and thus are locked out of the opportunity to vote for their father.

“New York has one of the most onerous rules in terms of registration, and it required us to register a long time ago, almost — close to a year ago. And we didn’t do that,” Ivanka Trump complained. “Most states you can register as late as the day of the actual primary,” she told CNN.

It’s probably too much to expect, but perhaps Ivanka Trump’s personal experience will make her and her candidate father more sympathetic to the effects of the voter suppression tactics that Trump’s party has engaged in, especially since President Obama took office and after the Supreme Court invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Twenty-one states have imposed new voting restrictions since 2010, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. (And New York’s not one of them.) We’ve most recently seen the effects of these laws in the Wisconsin and Arizona primaries, where thousands of voters waited for hours to cast a ballot – and untold thousands of others gave up. The Justice Department is investigating the Arizona primary for Voting Rights Act violations after the state coupled new voter ID requirements with a cut in the number of polling places in Maricopa County from 200 to just 60. The county population is 30 percent Hispanic.

Remembering the artist Prince and one of his greatest hits, “1999,” got us thinking: 1999 was actually a pretty good year for the U.S. economy.

Time spent browsing through the Economic Policy Institute’s “State of Working America” website is sobering, though, once you compare how working people were faring in 1999 to where they are now. In some cases, it’s stunning how far we’ve fallen.

Let’s take a look back. During 1999, the economy was growing at a rate in excess of 5 percent. Unemployment by the end of the year had fallen below 4 percent – it was down to 3.5 percent among white people and 7.8 percent for African Americans. Median family income was $48,831, or $69,405 in 2014 dollars. Wages then were not rising as fast as productivity, but the gap was not huge – worker productivity was up 8.7 percent over 1995; median wages in that period had increased almost 6 percent.

There were problems, to be sure, but that was an economy in which wages were rising, people who wanted work could find it, and the nation had the opportunity to begin eating away at the inequities that had plagued the nation’s economy for generations, such as the wide divisions in economic opportunity based on race and gender.

But, as a line in the song “1999” says, “two-thousand-zero-zero, party over, oops, out of time.”

It was actually 2001 when the economy dipped into recession and a conservative president and Congress accelerated the policies that moved the nation away from its course toward shared prosperity.

A call for a $1.2 trillion program of federal infrastructure spending is definitely not what you would expect to emerge from the think tank Third Way, the purveyors of austerity-lite, era-of-big-government-is-over centrism within the Democratic Party establishment.

But that is exactly is what economist and investment banker Daniel Alpert has concluded in a paper issued this week by Third Way, “GLUT: The U.S. Economy and the American Worker in the Age of Oversupply.” In doing so, Third Way is helping to mainstream the same kind of jumpstart in job-producing investment called for by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Both Sanders and the Progressive Caucus have put forward proposals for $1 trillion in infrastructure spending, Sanders in the form of a bill he has introduced as Vermont senator, and the Progressive Caucus in the form of a central provision of the People’s Budget, a comprehensive spending blueprint that has been offered as an alternative to the budget sent to the floor by House Republicans.

The “glut” that Alpert refers to in the title of his paper refers to the number of workers in the U.S. who are either unemployed, working part time when they want full-time work, or are not counted as looking for work at all but would get off the sidelines if they felt it would be worth it to jump into the labor pool.

The Panama Papers disclosures this weekend are giving the world a wider window into a world that is not new to the people who have been fighting against the schemes wealthy people and corporations use to shelter their money from taxes.

These papers were leaked from the files of Mossack Fonesca, a Panama-based law firm that is a leader in the creation of secretive shell companies that companies or individuals can then use to keep their wealth out of the sight of governments.

A good deal of this wealth, in addition to being the proceeds of tax evasion, ends up being used in a host of illicit activities. But politically, what’s criminal about the Panama Papers is what people can do legally.

Mossack Fonesca is one of several firms that for as little as $1,000 will sell individuals what amounts to a shell corporation starter kit, including a post office box in a low-tax, low-regulation company. For additional money, you can accessorize the shell corporation with a Potemkin board and other accoutrements. Then, if you are, say, a Silicon Valley tech company or a pharmaceutical giant, you could do something like transfer your patents to the shell company, and as a result all the profits you make from those patents are no longer taxable in the United States. Or you could simply ask someone who wants to give you money to give the money to the shell instead of directly to you. The shell could then spend the money on your behalf so those transactions aren’t traceable back to you.

The House Republican budget proposal for fiscal 2017 faces an uphill battle for approval when Congress reconvenes after the Easter recess, given that it is opposed not only by House Democrats but by a gaggle of hard-right, tea party Republicans. But that doesn’t make it politically irrelevant, and it certainly doesn’t make its ideas any less dangerous.

The policies and priorities in the House Republican budget closely mirror what would face the country if a Republican wins the White House, especially if the party retains control of the Senate. Today, President Obama’s veto pen combined with Democratic leverage in the Senate constrains how much of the House Republican agenda can actually get enacted. But what happens if that veto pen is gone?

House Republicans have in mind so many sweeping and radical changes throughout the federal government that singling out five of them only begins to capture the real harm a budget like this would do to real people, and to the country as a whole. (A broader summary of what the House Republican budget would do and how it matches up with the White House and Progressive Caucus People’s Budgets has been produced by the National Priorities Project.) But this should help voters understand how much it matters who will be in the White House and the Congress in 2017.

The conservative naysayers who predicted that New York City was going to fall into an economic abyss under the unapologetically progressive mayor Bill de Blasio are having to eat their words.

The New York Times on Monday is the latest publication to find that New York City, under his leadership, “has rarely been in better financial shape.”

The city has added a record 248,000 jobs in the last two years, according to numbers cited by the Times from the New York State Department of Labor. And those jobs have come with rising wages, in part because of efforts by de Blasio to increase wages for fast-food workers, city employees and city contractors.

“Of course, a roaring real estate market has left many New Yorkers struggling to pay for housing and has fed a homelessness problem that has bedeviled Mr. de Blasio,” the Times’ news story said. “Still, by virtually any measure, the city continues to do better than the rest of the country in rebounding from the financial crisis, economists said.”

One of those economists is James Parrott of the New York City-based Fiscal Policy Institute, who categorically rejected the notion that the health of the New York City’s economy was driven by Wall Street.

Consider this number: $8.2 billion. What could families living in depressed communities around the country do with those dollars?

That is the amount of money that has been sucked out of the pockets of financially struggling Americans in the past year by payday and car-title lenders, using unethical, predatory business practices.

Here’s another stunner: One of the people working to kneecap the federal agency that wants to restrain those practices and help these families keep some of that money is the chair of the Democratic National Committee.

That’s what Campaign for America’s Future alum Zach Carter reported in The Huffington Post, disclosing that the payday loan industry, in its fight against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s efforts to curb the usurious practices of the industry, “has cultivated a powerful new ally in recent weeks: Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.).

A sustained campaign on behalf of Senate cafeteria workers – including a 63-year-old employee who was homeless because he could not earn enough money to afford an apartment – has succeeded this week in getting these workers a desperately needed boost in pay and benefits.

Thanks to the organizing efforts of Good Jobs Nation and other allies, Senate officials signed a new contract with the workers that raises their minimum pay to $13.30 an hour and brings the average pay to workers close to the $15 an hour that the workers were demanding.

News of the agreement was published Monday by The Washington Post.

The Senate cafeteria workers were held up as a prime example of the kinds of poverty-wage jobs held by people under federal contracts. The company with the contract to manage the Senate cafeteria, Restaurant Associates, is part of a multinational corporation that boasted in its 2014 annual report that it had done well enough to offer to increase its dividend payments to shareholders by 10.5 percent as well as return 1.5 billion pounds – more than $2 billion – to shareholders via share buybacks and other means.

This should be a no-brainer: As much as possible, every dollar our federal government spends should help support American jobs and bolster the American economy. But that’s not happening to the extent that it can – and should.

There’s an opportunity to turn that around, though, and that is what brought economist Robert Pollin to Capitol Hill this week, where he pressed the case for how the federal government could use its buying power to strengthen U.S. manufacturing.

Pollin, who is co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, presented his new report, “Strengthening U.S. Manufacturing Through Public Procurement Policies,” at a briefing in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing room.

That room was where the House version of a five-year surface transportation bill that was eventually signed by President Obama last week was forged. That roughly $300 billion bill is the largest measure to come out of the current Congress that could be used to bolster manufacturing jobs. It contains a “Buy America” provision that, if administered properly, could be critical in moving the economy to sustained full employment.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) says he wants to double down on so-called “welfare reform” from his new perch as speaker of the House. But Ryan should first look at the experience of Maryland, and specifically to a recent study that exposes the broken promise of welfare reform.

That study, by researcher Lisa Thiebaud Nicoli at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, is one of the remarkably few efforts to actually chronicle in detail how welfare recipients actually fare once they get back into the workforce. The story for a majority of people in Maryland who exit Temporary Assistance for Needy Families – the official name of the federal welfare program – is “a struggle to earn enough to achieve self-sufficiency” and make ends meet, the report said.

“Clients are able to find jobs, and most of them want to work,” Nicoli said in an interview. “The problem comes in the ability to find jobs that allow them to become self-sufficient and then in maintaining those jobs.”

Regardless of what a House-Senate panel (that has been reportedly negotiating through the Thanksgiving holiday) finally decides, the surface transportation bill that Congress hammers together and put on President Obama’s desk is going to be a blown opportunity to adequately address our transportation needs and to move decisively toward full employment. But it does not have to be the final word.

True, the bill will represent the first time since President Obama took office that Congress has been able to pass a transportation authorization bill that enables states and localities to do long-term planning on federally supported highway and public transportation projects over the next five or six years. That’s an improvement over the stopgap measures that never lasted more than a couple of years and often lasted just weeks.

But the legislation contains both inadequate funding and bad policy.

Both the House version (at $325 billion) and the Senate version (at $350 billion) are dramatically less than the Obama administration’s proposal for $478 billion over six years. And even the administration’s proposal, which it billed as a 45 percent increase in transportation investment, would be little more than a down payment toward the more than $1.5 billion that government transportation researchers estimate should be spent over the next six years to finance needed improvements in our roads and transit systems alone. Put another way, federal, state and local governments are only spending about half of what they should be spending to fix our transportation network and improve it to meet demand. Neither the House nor Senate bill significantly moves the needle toward filling that funding gap.

There is one case pending before the Supreme Court that doesn’t get counted among the rulings that could have an effect on issues of equality and discrimination – but, as a friend-of-the-court brief filed recently by more than 70 civil rights organizations outlines, the case involving the California Teachers Association puts at stake issues of equality as well as those of worker rights.

An adverse ruling in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association “would undermine one of the most successful vehicles for providing economic and professional opportunities for American workers, and, in particular, for women, people of color, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (“LGBT”) workers,” according to the brief filed by a group led by the National Women’s Law Center, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the Human Rights Campaign.

That vehicle is the power of workers to organize and bargain for such issues as equal pay for women doing the same work as men, actions to undo patterns of racial disparities, and equality for workers regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Have you ever complained about the cost of funding social programs for the poor? Then you should support a living wage for workers.

That’s the message supporters of the Responsible Business Act are sending employers in Chicago. The bill would charge Cook County businesses for the cost of social services their employees have to rely on when they don’t earn a living wage.

With so many adults having no choice but to take low-wage service jobs to support their families, “it just isn’t fair that large companies aren’t paying their workers enough to meet their basic needs,” said County Commissioner Robert Steele when he introduced the legislation in October. “The Responsible Business Act is vital to ensure that companies that won’t pay their workers a living wage don’t force Cook County residents to pick up their tab.”

Chicago’s minimum wage went up to $10 an hour in July. Though that’s higher than the paltry $8.25 minimum for the rest of Illinois, it falls short of the $11.66 an hour single adults in the county need to make ends meet, according to a widely used living wage calculator developed by MIT.

In an event that was supposed to highlight the Republican presidential candidates’ views on the economy and its woes, it’s surprising that the Fox Business Channel debate Tuesday did not address a newly urgent issue that is striking at a key segment of the Republican base – the rising mortality rate among lower-income white people.

Not even the word “white” was uttered during the two-hour-plus debate, which took place days after a bombshell report by two Princeton University professors that “documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013.”

The report chronicles “increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis” among particularly lower-income and lower-educated whites that contrasted from improving health and mortality indicators among African Americans and Hispanics. The death-rate increase is just one of several signs of “growing distress in this population,” the report said.

The researchers, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, draw a correlation between declines in quality of life among working-class whites and changing economic conditions since the 1970s. “After the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education,” they write.

The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was released by the Obama administration Thursday, and as Lori Wallach, head of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and a leading expert on trade, its provisions are “even worse than we thought.”

Wallach was among several leading experts that included representatives from labor, environmental, consumer and health care interests who denounced the treaty in a news media call as one that would harm working families and throw the balance of power between ordinary people and corporations even further out of whack.

Global Trade Watch has published an initial 17-page analysis of the voluminous trade text. According to that analysis, a broad range of interests are threatened by the treaty.

It would encourage American corporations to send more jobs overseas, for example, while threatening the ability of the U.S. government to use taxpayer dollars to boost American businesses and workers. Health groups such as Doctors Without Borders say the treaty will put life-saving medications out of the reach of billions of people in the developing world – and financially struggling people in the United States – because drug companies will have more monopoly control to block generic competition and can thus keep their prices high.

You’ve already heard, and will keep hearing incessantly as the presidential campaign heats up, the argument that U.S. multinational corporations are at a competitive disadvantage because of our high corporate tax rate.

The latest takedown of that argument – and the argument that we should adopt a “territorial” tax system that would allow corporations to shield more of their profits from U.S. taxes – comes from 24 prominent economists whose letter to Congress was published this week in Tax Notes.

The list of signers includes Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and his university colleague Robert B. Reich; Edward D. Kleinbard, University of Southern California professor and former congressional Joint Committee on Taxation chief of staff; Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute, and Martin Lobel, chairman of Tax Analysts.

Their letter first argues that “there is no factual basis for the assertion that U.S. multinationals cannot compete globally because of the U.S. tax system.” The numbers show that U.S. corporations right now are doing very well, thank you: Corporate profits in just the second quarter of 2015 were $1.8 trillion, almost 10 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. The taxes paid on those profits as a percentage of GDP, meanwhile, are near an all-time low: 1.9 percent.

The surprisingly disappointing September unemployment report – 142,000 new jobs created compared to an expectation of more than 200,000 – should break once and for all two illusions about our ability to sustain a robust economy.

The first illusion is that there is no penalty for the continuing lack of public investment in the fundamentals of the real economy – from the schools that develop the skills and creativity of our future workforce to the transportation networks that enable us to move goods and people through our communities.

Years ago we should have had a place a major plan to bring all of our common assets – from schools to roads to water systems to our energy grid – into the 21st century. Not only would this have created millions of jobs, but it would have set the nation up for sustainable, more ecologically responsible, long-term growth. We should have taken advantage of the near-zero borrowing costs and the willingness of the markets – notwithstanding the sky-is-falling bleating of the chattering class – to allow the United States to take on more debt as long as it was wisely used to build for the future.

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said in an interview on Bloomberg today that the federal spending constraints imposed by the Republican Congress – the “sequester caps” – mean the economy is producing 500,000 fewer jobs a year than it would if those constraints were lifted. Those jobs would range from construction workers to teachers to health care workers.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Monday went to a pillar of the religious right – Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. – to make the case that fighting for economic justice is as moral an undertaking as such cornerstone issues for Christian conservatives as opposing abortion.

“It would, I think, be hard for anyone in this room to make the case that the United States today is a just society or anything close to a just society,” he said in his speech to a packed convocation at the school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, known for forming the Moral Majority political organization and leading its fervent crusades against gay rights, reproductive choice and other progressive positions on social issues. “There is no justice when the top one-tenth of 1 percent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. There is no justice when all over this country people are working longer hours for lower wages, while 58 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent.”

Nor is there justice, he said, when “low-income and working-class mothers are forced to be separated from their new babies one or two weeks after giving birth” because “the United States is the only major country on earth that does not provide paid family and medical leave,” or when “thousands of people in this country die each year because they don’t have health insurance and don’t get to a doctor when they should.”

Hours before the Federal Reserve was to announce whether it would increase interest rates, several dozen protesters gathered outside Federal Reserve offices in downtown Washington to demand that the Fed keep interest rates where they are, arguing that the economy as they experience it has yet to recover.

It was not clear whether any of the Federal Reserve members heard the demonstrators, organized by the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up coalition, but the demonstrators got their victory nonetheless: After the protesters left, the Fed announced that it would keep its zero-interest-rate policy in effect for a while longer.

That takes off the table the immediate fear that a rate hike would set in motion a slowing down of economic growth before that growth could lift the fortunes of millions of people still looking for work or whose wages have stagnated because the labor market is not tight enough.

“The case for raising short-term interest rates is extraordinarily weak,” said Josh Bivens, economist with the Economic Policy Institute. That case would be a tight labor market that forces employers to pay more to find good workers, and an inflation rate that is accelerating. “That is not the economy we have today.”