Working Life

Look, the Supreme Court ruling is a good thing, not the least of which is that it makes the heads of three wingers on the Court and across the land explode. But, it’s important to pause for a moment and realize that the Affordable Care Act is woefully inadequate, and is the dream for insurance companies and drug companies who want to leech on people.

Bernie Sanders understands that.

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This won’t shock anyone. CEO pay is still a gold mine.

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Fast Track is now coming up for a cloture vote in the Senate. A recap follows. And I’ll try to give a paraphrased tracking of the position and votes, and ultimately which Democrats continued to abandon workers on behalf of big corporations.

FINAL VOTE UPDATED HERE. 60-37 approved. (McConnell says Corker would have voted YES but was detained)

DEMOCRATS WHO VOTED WITH BIG CORPORATIONS TO ABANDON WORKERS:

Michael Bennet (CO) Maria Cantwell (WA) Tom Carper (DE) Chris Coons (DE) Dianne Feinstein (CA) Heidi Heitkamp (ND) Bill Nelson (FL) Tim Kaine (VA) Claire McCaskill (MO) Patty Murray (WA) Jeanne Shaheen (NH) Mark Warner (VA) Ron Wyden (OR)
This means that tomorrow fast track will pass the Senate. We will see whether the TAA gets added.

Also want to add up top comments by Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders at the end of the debate:

Sherrod Brown: this is a celebration in corporate suites.

Bernie!!! This trade agreement was supported by virtually every big corporation, Wall Street, by the pharmaceutical industry. This agreement was opposed by every union. This will continue the policy of NAFTA,CAFTA. We need a policy that represents working people. It’s a great day for the Big Money interests.

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Tomorrow, the Senate will take a new vote on fast track. It will be a cloture vote on whether to proceed to consider a “clean” fast track bill, given the (positive-result) clusterfuck that took place in the House. Though one can imagine scenarios under which fast track can be defeated even if the cloture vote wins, it’s a lot harder.

So, this is a moment of truth. I’ll break it down into three parts.

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This is a bad state of affairs, if you are a regular worker (meaning, not someone worth millions of dollars who complains that her family is dead broke). Whether fast track becomes law may depend on the votes of 14 Senate Democrats–the very Democrats who abandoned workers just last month when the Senate passed fast track with the Trade Adjustment Assistance program attached.

Now, it’s game on again. Workers lives depend on 14 Senate Democrats who voted, in the last fast track vote,with Republicans to destroy middle class jobs.

That vote is coming again next week on a cloture vote.

And now this an easy question: Will Hillary Clinton call for the defeat of the cloture motion next week? That question needs to be asked every single day next week.

She is the one who can make a difference with a huge number of those 14 Senate Democrats.

If she stays silent, that will be a clear answer of what she believes.

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Today was a teachable moment (beyond the horrific, racist shooting in Charleston). Sometimes you have two moments that appear together and need to be connected. As I sat out West (on the road for work), it became clear that what the Pope had to say about climate change and the desperate attempts by the president to ram through fast track are deeply connected.

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Many people have made the point that the very economic system–the corrupt system–that leaves billions struggling to make ends meet while the elite party on and on and on is the same system that has ravaged the environment and threatened the very existence of humanity on the planet. Now, the Pope says it. His expected […]

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I’m always been suspicious of the “new economy” gurus who promise that the wonders of technologies will, praise be, free everyone from the chains of hard labor–this was essentially the dumb idea behind Robert Reich’s elitist nonsense about “symbolic analysts” (that was the now-discredited idea he probably thought up after he’d pushed for NAFTA and was looking for another way to promote himself). The economy, and the ability to make a living, is always about the ability of workers to have power over their work life, and leverage power to demand decent wages.

Which is why Uber was just a bunch of new exploitation wrapped in the new lingo of the “sharing economy”. A judge has seen through all that.

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You know, those fast track obsessed people seem in a big rush to make happen this bad brew of trade and corporate annihilation of decent wages. They aren’t giving up.

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It’s been amusing, sort of, to watch the corporate roaches scurrying about, looking here and there for an opening to try to revive the odious fast track legislation.

But, putting aside what we know already, there are two important lessons to learn:

1. We always need to call out phony arguments, like “burial insurance”, that politicians want to use to cover their asses when the upshot is they are happy to sacrifice workers to keep a bad system in place.

2. Organizing works–and organizing creates movements.

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