Progressive Justice: Organized Labor

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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Five Candidates for the Corporate Death Penalty by Russell Mokhiber

One of the most famous signs to come out of Occupy Wall Street stated simply: “I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”

That was sort of a joke.

But in fact, for the benefit of real live human beings, some corporations ought to be executed.

When it comes to the serious crimes that big corporations engage in – pollution, corruption, fraud, threatening the lives of real Americans – the death penalty is off the table. (photo: David Shankbone)

My guess is that most of the occupiers at Wall Street would be in favor of the corporate death penalty.

Some – like Richard Grossman – would criminalize the corporate form.

But if you want to take the incremental approach, here’s my list of five candidates for the corporate death penalty.

Health insurance corporations. Most western industrialized countries – with the exception of the USA – already have this death penalty in place. In those countries, corporations are not allowed to sell primary private health insurance. Instead, there is a public single payer – everybody in, nobody out. Under this death penalty proposal corporations like Aetna, CIGNA, UnitedHealth, and Wellpoint would be put out of business. And with a public single payer to replace them, we’d save billions of dollars and the lives of more than 45,000 Americans who die every year from lack of health insurance.

Nuclear power corporations. Do we really need a Fukushima here in the United States? We do not. Without government loan guarantees and federal limits on nuclear liability, the industry would be put out of business. So, we could simply cut the federal subsidy and that would be the end of it. And we should. A wide range of safer, cleaner energy options is available to replace the energy currently being generated by unsafe nuclear power.

Giant Banks. Wells Fargo. Citibank. Bank of America. JP Morgan Chase. Morgan Stanley. Goldman Sachs. They should be executed – broken up and replaced by smaller banks. Break up the big banks. And impose a hard cap on their size. No bank should have assets of more than four percent of GDP. There is support across the political spectrum for this proposal. During the debate over financial reform, the measure garnered 33 votes in the Senate – it was called the Brown-Kaufman amendment.

Fracking corporations. Hydraulic fracturing – fracking – is wrecking havoc in the northeastern part of the United States. Any corporation engaged in fracking behavior that threatens drinking water supplies ought to be put out of business. Anti-fracking activists in New York have already drafted legislation that would criminalize fracking corporations.

Corporate criminal recidivists. Legislatures should adopt provisions to strip corporations of their charters for serious corporate violations or for recidivist behavior. Some states already have such provisions, although they are rarely invoked.

Some corporations have been put to death for wrongful behavior, but they have been mostly smaller companies.

In 1983, the Attorney General of Virginia asked the state’s corporation commission to dissolve a book company convicted of possessing obscene films.

But when it comes to the serious crimes that big corporations engage in – pollution, corruption, fraud, threatening the lives of real Americans – the death penalty is off the table.

If we are serious about corporate crime, the death penalty is a deterrent that will work.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. He is also founder of singlepayeraction.org, and editor of the website Morgan County USA.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Economic News Release

Transmission of material in this release is embargoed                       USDL-12-1070
until 8:30 a.m. (EDT) Friday, June 1, 2012

Technical information:
Household data:       (202) 691-6378 * cpsinfo@bls.gov * www.bls.gov/cps
Establishment data:   (202) 691-6555 * cesinfo@bls.gov * www.bls.gov/ces

Media contact:         (202) 691-5902 * PressOffice@bls.gov

                       THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION -- MAY 2012

Nonfarm payroll employment changed little in May (+69,000), and the unemployment rate
was essentially unchanged at 8.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported
today. Employment increased in health care, transportation and warehousing, and wholesale
trade but declined in construction. Employment was little changed in most other major
industries.

Household Survey Data

Both the number of unemployed persons (12.7 million) and the unemployment rate (8.2
percent) changed little in May. (See table A-1.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (7.8 percent) and
Hispanics (11.0 percent) edged up in May, while the rates for adult women (7.4 percent),
teenagers (24.6 percent), whites (7.4 percent), and blacks (13.6 percent) showed little
or no change. The jobless rate for Asians was 5.2 percent in May (not seasonally
adjusted), down from 7.0 percent a year earlier. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose from 5.1
to 5.4 million in May. These individuals accounted for 42.8 percent of the unemployed.
(See table A-12.)

The civilian labor force participation rate increased in May by 0.2 percentage point
to 63.8 percent, offsetting a decline of the same amount in April. The employment-
population ratio edged up to 58.6 percent in May. (See table A-1.)

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to
as involuntary part-time workers) edged up to 8.1 million over the month. These
individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because
they were unable to find a full-time job. (See table A-8.)

In May, 2.4 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, up from 2.2
million a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were
not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job
sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had
not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)

Among the marginally attached, there were 830,000 discouraged workers in May, about the
same as a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are
persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for
them. The remaining 1.6 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in May
had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school
attendance or family responsibilities. (See table A-16.)

Establishment Survey Data

Total nonfarm payroll employment changed little in May (+69,000), following a similar
change in April (+77,000). In comparison, the average monthly gain was 226,000 in the
first quarter of the year. In May, employment rose in health care, transportation and
warehousing, and wholesale trade, while construction lost jobs. (See table B-1.)

Health care employment continued to increase in May (+33,000). Within the industry,
employment in ambulatory health care services, which includes offices of physicians
and outpatient care centers, rose by 23,000 over the month. Over the year, health care
employment has risen by 340,000.

Transportation and warehousing added 36,000 jobs over the month. Employment gains in
transit and ground passenger transportation (+20,000) and in couriers and messengers
(+5,000) followed job losses in those industries in April. Employment in both industries
has shown little net change over the year. In May, truck transportation added 7,000 jobs.

Employment in wholesale trade rose by 16,000 over the month. Since reaching an employment
low in May 2010, this industry has added 184,000 jobs.

Manufacturing employment continued to trend up in May (+12,000) following a similar
change in April (+9,000). Job gains averaged 41,000 per month in the first quarter of
this year. In May, employment rose in fabricated metal products (+6,000) and in primary
metals (+4,000). Since its most recent low in January 2010, manufacturing employment has
increased by 495,000.

Construction employment declined by 28,000 in May, with job losses occurring in specialty
trade contractors (-18,000) and in heavy and civil engineering construction (-11,000).
Since reaching a low in January 2011, employment in construction has shown little change
on net.

Employment in professional and business services was essentially unchanged in May. Since
the most recent low point in September 2009, employment in this industry has grown by
1.4 million. In May, job losses in accounting and bookkeeping services (-14,000) and in
services to buildings and dwellings (-14,000) were offset by small gains elsewhere in
the industry.

Employment in other major industries, including mining and logging, retail trade,
information, financial activities, leisure and hospitality, and government, changed
little in May.

The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls edged down by 0.1 hour
to 34.4 hours in May. The manufacturing workweek declined by 0.3 hour to 40.5 hours, and
factory overtime declined by 0.1 hour to 3.2 hours. The average workweek for production
and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 33.7 hours.
(See tables B-2 and B-7.)

In May, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls edged up
by 2 cents to $23.41. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased
by 1.7 percent. In May, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and
nonsupervisory employees edged down by 1 cent to $19.70. (See tables B-3 and B-8.)

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for March was revised from +154,000 to
+143,000, and the change for April was revised from +115,000 to +77,000.

_____________
The Employment Situation for June is scheduled to be released on Friday, July 6, 2012,
at 8:30 a.m. (EDT).

Economic News Release

Friday, September 23, 2011

Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Other Right Wingers Want to Turn Back the Clock to 1900 -- What Was Life Like Back Then? | | AlterNet

September 22, 2011 |

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Wednesday's 230-195 vote in the GOP-controlled house against Speaker John Boehner's special funding measure to keep the government running past September 30th showed how far the far-right of the already far-right Republican Party will push a principle. They refuse to pass the bill (containing much-needed disaster relief, which is meager enough that the Democrats largely declined to vote for the bill) without deeper budget cuts written in. Boehner will have to rewrite the thing either to placate recalcitrant Democrats, intent on helping the vulnerable, or recalcitrant Republicans, intent on depriving the government of the means to help the vulnerable. One wonders what the odds are regarding his decision.

Weeks earlier, the destruction wrought by Hurricane Irene had provided an excellent opportunity to examine the real-life implications of arguments over the size of government in relation to the quality of liberty. Conservatives have always held that a government’s growth implies freedom’s decline and vice versa, but disaster relief has historically been an area where that formulation acquires the flavor of angels dancing on pinheads: when Americans are suffering and their local communities are ill-equipped to mitigate their despair, the federal government has routinely stepped in with aid.

But this time around, the libertarian populism exemplified by the Tea Party took center stage. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) at first insisted the debt situation was so dire that disaster relief funds would have to come from elsewhere in the budget.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) insinuated that the deaths and destruction from North Carolina to Vermont were God’s way of alerting us to his will that America “rein in the spending.”

And Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), assuming the vanguard of Tea Party reactionaries, deemed a FEMA response unnecessary, remarking, “We should be like 1900… I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.”

There it is: the GOP fantasy laid bare. Return the United States to the way it was in 1900. In the grotesque flight of fancy occupying the minds of ultraconservative politicians and activists, 1900 was a simpler time, a time when Uncle Sam wasn’t always busy poking his nose into everyone’s affairs, a time when anyone could start a business and make a good living if he worked hard enough, a time when America respected her Christian roots and everything went like it came. But this 1900 is a myth; the disparity between it and actual history is enormous.

In 1900, the American South was essentially run by a religious fundamentalist terrorist faction that perpetrated untold murders with impunity. Women were deprived of individual rights and therefore limited to the chattel position to which the Bible conscripts them. Children worked in factories, where they were often severely injured or worse. In short, 1900 was a time of Dickensian squalor in America. As for disaster relief in that year, Melissa Harris-Perry reminded MSNBC viewers that “somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people died in the Galveston hurricane – so many bodies that people couldn’t bury them all. Barrels of whisky were handed out to dull the horror of the funeral pyres that burned across the city for weeks on end. That seemed to be the extent that the government could respond, to dull your pain with some free liquor. ‘Sorry, we can’t do more.’”

A list of important developments in the field of rights and liberty in America since 1900 must necessarily be rather summary, but it should include women’s suffrage, child labor laws, antitrust laws and the Federal Trade Commission, the National Park Service, the Food and Drug Administration, social security, the minimum wage, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal highway system, racial integration, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start, Pell Grants, seatbelt requirements, health care privacy rights, women’s equality laws including education and employment opportunities and prohibitions of spousal abuse and marital rape, the Environmental Protection Agency, the creation of the internet, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and, recently, the extension to homosexual Americans of the right to serve in the military.

Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Other Right Wingers Want to Turn Back the Clock to 1900 -- What Was Life Like Back Then? | | AlterNet