The World Bank (WB), an international financial institution with a questionable track-record of interventions in the developing world, is currently thinking about the future of work as it is preparing its 2019 World Development Report. They, and every other policy wonk these days it seems, are pondering how robots and technology will change how we live, love, learn and earn.

Often, these speculative discussions take place in far off mountains of Switzerland and in the executive suites of global power brokers. In most instances, the conversations are rarefied and divorced from reality.

Input from individuals who will make up an even greater share of the future economy, care workers, is non-existent or minimal. Yet, the level of protections and rights we secure for individuals in this most marginalized sector of our economy will most certainly reflect the level afforded to other workers across industries.

Jobs in the care industry are the among the fastest growing, according to the projections of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A growing and aging population in developed countries, coupled with increasing number of millennials having children while both partners hold jobs, will further amplify the need for care work.

The care industry broadly encompasses individuals who provide live-in or home care assistance for the elderly, for the disabled, for immobilized people and for children. They are also commonly known as domestic workers, who take on the roles of nannies, chauffeurs and housekeepers.

Many consider the domestic worker the “original gig economy worker,” due to a high degree of inconsistency and insecurity associated with their work and lack of access to benefits and a safety net. The work they do and services they provide are undervalued and rarely counted by economists.

In their current form, the professions in this sector are anything but desirable. People working in the care industry have been historically marginalized and are extremely vulnerable. The average median income for home-care workers in the U.S. is roughly $13,000 per year, compared to the annual median income across other professions, which hovers around $44,000 per year.

Women are grossly over-represented in this industry, as ares racial minorities. Currently, around 40% of home-care workers in the U.S. are immigrants, many of them undocumented and thus at increased risk of exploitation. While their daily jobs entail maintaining the dignity of another human being, their own dignity and opportunity to provide for their own families is grossly diminished.

There are also very few national or international standards for the work performed by domestic workers or ways to scientifically quantify its value. As Anna Blackshaw, writer and photographer documenting lives of domestic workers in California, observed, it’s difficult to measure “just another happy child or shining kitchen floor,” as compared to the metrics of the latest tech widget.

Even scarcer are labor protections, guaranteed days off or retirement benefits. Many domestic workers work until they are physically spent or bedridden. Stories of verbal, physical and sexual abuse by employers are all too common. Being fired for being sick occurs too often. Not being paid for months on end is reality for too many.

However, change is on the way. It comes from Seattle, WA and is the result of prolonged and tireless advocacy by Working Washington, a non-profit that initially galvanized around the issue of the $15 minimum wage.

The group’s efforts have resulted in a first-ever Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, adopted in July 2018 by the Seattle City Council. While the document falls short of the activists’ demands for securing guaranteed written contracts, it is still a step in the right direction for protecting domestic workers.

The bill requires that all domestic workers, even those classified as independent contractors, must be paid at least the equivalent of Seattle’s minimum wage. It forbids employers from retaining workers’ personal documents and calls for creation of a board to advise on future regulations.

These efforts complement the work of national organizations such as National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), which have also been on the front lines protecting the rights of domestic workers.

One must remain hopeful that examples from Washington State and the work of grassroots activists such as NDWA will find their way into the World Bank’s report as ideas worth spreading and replicating. This is particularly important at a time when workers, both in the United States and across the world, plunge deeper into an uncertain future and  a tech-dominated – and often exploitative – economy.

The post The future of work: Who will care about the caregivers? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

NBC Nightly News concludes most of its broadcasts with a segment that it calls “Inspiring America.” Because so much “bad news” is reported, particularly on the local news, NBC likes to include a “sunshine story” in as many broadcasts as possible.

The problem is that there seems to be just about as much sensationalizing in reporting “good news” as bad news. This was very apparently on Wednesday, July 12, when the “Inspiring America” segment was on the “new” development of American workers taking mental health days.

Here is anchor Lester Holt’s introduction to the story, both before and after the lead-in commercial:

When we come back, who hasn’t needed a mental health day? We’ll go to one company where they’re actually embracing that concept.

{Commercials}

Finally, tonight, a woman in Michigan just might’ve done more to highlight the importance of mental health in this country than anyone else recently, simply by what she told her boss when she called in sick recently. And it drew a surprising response that has touched so many others. Here’s NBC’s Kevin Tibbles with the story.

As a standalone, without context, the story might truly be a feel good. A woman who experiences depression and anxiety feels that she needs a mental health day. Instead of lying to her boss and saying that she has the flu (or some other conventionally acceptable reason), she says “I’m taking today and tomorrow to focus on my mental health. Hopefully I’ll be back next week refreshed and back to 100%.”

Hooray for her boss, Ben Congleton, and his response is indeed empathetic, “You’re already trusting people to stay home when they have the flu, trust them to stay home when they’re not mentally all there.”

The question is whether this should be news. The implication from NBC is that this was groundbreaking, the first time that an employee ever said that he/she needed a mental health day and the boss said, “Fine.” If this had occurred in the 1950s, perhaps it would have had the novelty to make it news.

But in many sectors of our society, we are more enlightened now than we were decades ago. Employees ask for and gladly receive mental health days all the time. I have been on both sides of the equation.

It is the way that many of us now can freely live our lives.

A better story by NBC would have been on those individuals in our workforce who feel that they need mental health days, but cannot openly ask for them. These individuals face the conundrum of either telling something that is not true or forcing themselves to go to work when it is not healthy for them, and perhaps not healthy for the employer as well.

Acknowledging and being sensitive to mental health issues in the workplace is something where we can all grow. In a civilized society, empathy is as key within the workplace as it is in all segments of our lives.

But the way NBC presented it, something that had never occurred before happened and they were the first to discover it. This may not have been fake news, but it certainly was hyped news, and in many ways, that can be equally destructive to our society.

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Each Thursday on the PBS NewsHour, plain-speaking economist Paul Salmon explains difficult issues in his “Making Sen$e” segment. This past week he focused on the economic changes in the town of Janesville, WI, which happens to be the home of House Speaker Paul Ryan.

As to what is wrong with Janesville, it begins with the standard story of an industrial town highly dependent on manufacturing lost its main factory. The initial problem that followed was high unemployment which has now been replaced by under-employment. For government solutions (or non-solutions) It now regularly votes for Ryan. However, in the 2016 presidential race, it favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.

As Salmon clearly points out in his May 4 report, Janesville serves as a poster child for how manufacturing jobs have disappeared from so many communities in the northeastern quadrant of the United States. Since 1919, its lifeblood was a General Motors assembly plant which initially produced tractors then later Chevrolet automobiles. During World War II, it produced munitions; then it became a primary producer of GMT900 trucks such as the Chevrolet Suburban. But by 2008, higher gas prices created a slow-down for full-size sports utility vehicles. First the plant shut down one of its two shifts; then it closed all together.

As the older factories across the upper Midwest became less efficient and newer ones were built either below the Mason-Dixon line or overseas, the people in towns like Janesville were left with choices that included moving to sometimes-available manufacturing jobs elsewhere, or adapting to a new local economy with no hub industry. In an attempt to build a “new economy,” Salmon shows the efforts that were made to provide new job training opportunities for those who had been displaced.

On the surface, it appeared that a number of citizens were enrolled in the job training programs and many “graduated.” But it’s important to never lose sight of what the real goal is, and in Janesville it was not to retrain workers. The goal was to find new jobs for the former industrial workers, jobs that had pay scales comparable to what the United Auto Workers had negotiated for them with General Motors. But the sad truth was that while job re-training succeeded, employment with UAW-level wages did not come back. Yes, after a hike in the employment level, people found jobs, but they were more in the service sector and the pay scale was often only half of what they previously made. This is a classic case of under-employment – workers having jobs that either do not utilize their full skills or do not pay that to which they had become accustomed.

One of the indicators of the unseen hardship within the community is an unmarked and usually closed room in Janesville’s Parker High School full of donated food, toiletries and other personal supplies for students in the school whose families cannot afford basic necessities. There is more than one dirty secret in this high school and a big one is that Parker is now serving the role of provider of all level of community services, much as is often done within inner-city neighborhoods.

To Ryan, this is the way the free market works. And if you’re primarily concerned about allowing the captains of industry to make decisions in their own interest and with minimal government interference, then Janesville is a success story. But if your priorities are the best interests of the citizens of a community, then the free market is failing in Janesville and a new approach is needed.

Two things are clear:

1. For people who are left without good jobs, a social safety net must be in place to help them through difficult times.
2. Perhaps more importantly, with modern technology and the growth of artificial intelligence, we may be past the time when our society could produce well-paying jobs for all. We may be able to supply ourselves with almost everything we need without a full-employment economy. That means that we are experience fundamental structural change in our economy.

Ryan, like so many Republicans, are living in a world that they dreamed was yesteryear. The future is changing at a much more rapid pace than even was the decline of Janesville and other similar communities. Our first goal is something that former President George H.W. Bush fumbled about in 1987, “that vision thing.”

The post What’s the Matter with Janesville? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

My 49-year-old daughter has limited abilities, but has worked since finishing high school and has lived independently all these years. In fact, she just paid off the mortgage on her house in Springfield.

After 23 years in the catering department at Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, she was fired for supposedly mixing broken mayonnaise packets in with good ones. No, I’m not kidding. She was “written up” twice before that, once for not preparing the supplies for a co-worker’s event, even though she wasn’t told to do that.

She has been a loyal employee all these years, even going in on her day off if a co-worker called in sick. I’ve always stressed to her what my mother told me about doing a good job, following orders, and giving a full day’s work for a full day’s pay. (That sounds so old fashioned now, doesn’t it?)

My daughter doesn’t handle change well. She doesn’t even like things in her kitchen to be rearranged. So you can imagine how stressful this life changing event has been for her.

She and I visited with the head of the Human Resources Department on Monday. Cathy had not been given anything in writing when she was abruptly “terminated.” (Isn’t that an awful word to use in a situation like this?)

The HR guy printed out what is in the hospital employee record system about Cathy’s “failure to…..” and the dates of the three warnings. Curiously, they were all during the 3rd week of the month, almost as if the supervisor was expected to find something to criticize at a certain point each month. The “precipitating event” which led to her being fired is, no kidding, the accusation that she mixed leaking mayonnaise packets with good ones thereby ruining them.

I told the HR guy this is so bizarre that it reminds me of the Caine Mutiny. He didn’t know what that was.

I also told him my theory that the hospital is cutting expenses by getting rid of employees at the top of their pay scale (for Cathy’s job it was $13.78/hr.) and replacing them with folks who will work for half that. He said he’d be shocked and saddened to learn that was true. At the time, my daughter and I believed him to be telling the truth.

We left with assurances he would not challenge her right to collect unemployment compensation. He also said HR won’t give a prospective employer negative information about Cathy’s reason for leaving. They supposedly only give out the dates of employment. I say “supposedly” because I know someone who called pretending to be a prospective employer and asked about her son’s firing. She was given quite an earful about him. So “policy” is one thing but actuality may be another.

My daughter and I next visited the Career Center which is the arm of the state employment agency that helps people find jobs. We were very impressed with the layout of the offices (in an open circular pattern making it very inviting) and the staff who were extremely helpful. They have lots of resources and seem honestly concerned about the clients they help. The last stop in the process was with a career counselor. She told us there have been many, many former employees of Mercy Hospital coming in for help. In fact, there were 30 from one department all fired at the same time. The work was contracted out. I assume she means to a private contractor, but I don’t know for sure. She said she knew highly skilled IT workers who left because of the pressure and the depressing work environment.

I know for a fact that doctors are leaving the Mercy system too. Both of my husband’s heart doctors left and went with other hospitals in the St. Louis area. The plastic surgeon who removed a skin cancer from my husband’s ear described Mercy as a company that was “metastasizing” in its zeal to expand. Kind of an ironic comparison from someone who removes cancerous tissue.

But it’s not just the Mercy system. My daughter’s husband works in food service at a nursing home that is part of a chain of facilities owned by a large corporation. He makes $8.50 an hour and is expected to finish the work assigned to him in a certain amount of time despite the fact that no one could possibly do that. He is written up if he doesn’t take his breaks and written up if the work isn’t done. Needless to say, there is a big turnover in that place which can’t be good for the residents.

In Southwest Missouri, the Republicans win the majority of seats in the state legislature. It’s impossible to get those voters to understand the consequences of their decision to elect people who won’t expand Medicaid and who want to cut all social service programs. They listen to right wing radio and blame everything on “Obamacare.”

Bernie Sanders is right that corporate greed is destroying America. He is trying to start a revolution in the sense that people need to wake up and see what’s being done to them. I’m too old and cynical to think we can escape the clutches of the powerful moneyed interests.

My daughter is just one of the millions of Americans being hurt by insatiable greed. We watch the stock market for encouraging news, but who is watching out for the people with no voice? Thank goodness there are non-profit organizations trying to make life better for the people at the bottom of the income scale. They may be our only hope.

The post How corporate greed got my daughter fired appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Donald Trump’s sneers about Latino rapists, criminals, and druggies coming-to-harm-your-property-and-your-kids have real-life consequences. His all-too-familiar ethnic scapegoating intentionally obscures the truth about a community that’s made up for the most part of hard-working, well-intentioned, and law-abiding people just trying to support their families by working jobs that would otherwise go unfilled.

For some, Trump is validating their prejudices. For others, he’s fueling their hatred.

Let’s be honest. Trump world isn’t new. American history is stained with prejudice. Think about the Native Americans, the African slaves and the black community, the immigrant Italians, Irish, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, and Jews. Painting a community or ethnic group with a broad brushstroke has been the modus operandi of demagogues and opportunists throughout history. And Trump is no exception.

So who are the people Trump has scooped up in his trash bag of hate?

I, for one, don’t recognize them. They’re certainly not the legal farm workers I see lining up at the service desk at my local supermarket on Friday evenings. Visibly exhausted and obviously relieved that it’s the weekend, they hand their paychecks to the teenagers that work the desk and then fill out money orders to send a portion of their hard-earned cash back to their families back home. Home is mostly Mexico and Jamaica. Most are fresh-faced, young men but some have the furrowed facial skin and roughened hands that come with years of labor out in the fields. These are the laborers who travel seasonally to the upstate New York farming community where I live to fill the jobs that find no takers from the pool of American workers.

The real story—not the trumped up one—is that these workers come across the borders to do the essential work of planting, pruning, weeding, and picking the affordably priced food we take for granted. They arrive here only after an extensive and rigorous screening process that’s getting ever more difficult both for them and for their employers. The process involves a pile of documentation that includes written proof of work experience, passport and immigration screening, and appointments for on-site interviews at the American Consulate in Mexico.

The real story is that, without migrant farm labor, New York State’s agricultural industry—which accounts for $5.7 billion annually—would come to a standstill. This was evident at the beginning of this season when a technical issue delayed consulates from issuing temporary H2A agricultural visas. In my locality, the strawberry crop and a variety of berries went unpicked. The necessary work on the apple, broccoli, cauliflower, and cucumber crops was delayed. The labor shortage was so serious that local farms pooled their labor force and shared workers with neighboring farms in need so that crops could be picked on time and losses minimized.

And the family farmers in the Hudson Valley were not alone. The early-summer labor shortage due to the visa-program backlog created problems that stretched across the U.S. In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, Congressman Dan Newhouse (R-Washington State) explained the devastating economic fallout and reiterated the critical need in his state for Mexican farm laborers:

Farmers have no choice but to use the H2A process because there is a critical shortage of farm workers. The state of Washington alone has documented a 15 percent labor shortage and grows a range of labor-intensive specialty crops that need to be picked to contribute to the state’s economy. Each day that workers sit at the border, waiting on their final documents, Washington farmers are losing a valuable cherry crop that is wasting away in their fields because there are insufficient workers.

Let’s not forget that these are people and not just workers. Why do they leave their villages and their families to do the work in our fields? They come to the U.S. because the $10.75 to $12.25 per hour wages (depending on experience) that the federal government requires farms to pay cannot compare to the $10 per day they would receive working the fields in Mexico. They come because they are doing the best they can for their families. They come because their fathers, their grandfathers, their siblings, their cousins, or their friends have worked on the farms before them, and they know they’ll be treated fairly and according to strict labor standards set by the U.S. government. They come because, over the years, they and the other workers before them have formed personal connections with their employers.

That’s the human face behind the trash talk. And Trump and others like him need to see it. So here’s my invitation to Mr. Trump.

Dear Donald,
Why not take time out from your bloviating and hop aboard your private $7 million Sikorsky helicopter next weekend? Tell the pilot to set a course due north up the Hudson River. When you set down here in Columbia County you’ll get a reality check. Take some time to sit down with our local farm employers who will set you straight. You’ll discover that any applicant caught for illegal border crossing or any other illegal activity is denied an H2A. You’ll find out that illegal labor won’t be picking the crops up here any time soon.

So relax, Donald. After your visit upstate you’ll be able to fly back to Manhattan and enjoy your meals guilt free. You’ll know from firsthand experience that the ingredients that make it onto your five-star dinner plate were never touched by a rapist, a drug dealer, or a criminal.

The post What Donald Trump doesn’t know about the Mexican farm workers who make his 5-star dinner possible appeared first on Occasional Planet.

June 2015 was a remarkable month for President Obama. In particular. the last week of the month was a real “winner” for the president. Among the topic victories or accomplishments for the president are:

1. U. S. Supreme Court once again upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)
2. U. S. Supreme Court ruling same-sex marriage as constitutional in all 50 states
3. Out of the tragic shooting of nine innocent church-goers in Charleston, SC, the president eulogized Rev. Senator Clementa Pinckney and while doing so, he directly confronted the issues of race, gun control, the symbolism of the Confederate flag, and hate in America.
4. Announced plans to extend overtime pay to millions of additional Americans
5. Passage by both the Senate and the House of Representatives of authority for the president to enter a Trans Pacific Partnership agreement with fast-track processing of the treaty (no amendments allowed nor filibustering)
6. Sending an additional 450 military advisers to Iraq

Of these six developments, four seem to have immediate benefits for the American people; two are more geared towards the interests of corporations and/or the military-intelligence/industrial complex.

The ones that directly help the American people in the here and now are ones in which the President has openly expressed joy and approval; the two others are more, “excuse me while I …….”

More than six million people in the United States already have access to health insurance through the federal exchanges provided for recalcitrant states through the ACA. President Obama was truly thrilled that the Court signed off on the legality of the federal exchanges. His joy was matched by the individuals and families whose insurance is now secure, and by the millions more who will sign on in coming years. This was also a victory for those who see health care as a right and who ultimately want a Medicare-for-All system.

The Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage is also a victory for the underdog. A burden of oppression is lifted from millions, and their quality of life will be improved.

President Obama clearly spoke out for justice, fairness, compassion, and sensitivity in Charleston. He was a man who was connected to the millions of Americans who have felt the pain of prejudice or violence.

The president’s move to more than double the eligibility threshold for overtime pay, to $970 a week from the current cutoff of $455 a week, will help an estimated five million workers immediately, and more in the future. As the Republican-controlled Congress fails to move forward with raising the federal minimum wage, the president’s actions reveal a keen awareness of income inequality in the United States as well as the sound economic principle of providing more money to those who have a higher propensity to spend.

The two outliers in the president’s “month of success” are the passage of fast-track consideration for the TPP, and the increase in American military presence in Iraq. We did not see the president coming forward on either of these actions with pronouncements of improving the quality of life for the American people, particularly those who are struggling in our economy and feel encumbered by some of our social norms.

All of this makes me all the more interested in the president’s memoirs following his term in office. He may have some “splaining” to do to help us figure out what was really going on.

The post Some wins for Obama are better than others appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In the 19^th Century, the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle coined the phrase “dismal science” for the field of economics. With the help of new insights and the world of computing power, it has become more accurate, like a physical science. However, there are still vast realms of uncertainty, and that certainly is true as we consider the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. Some call the TPP “NAFTA on steroids,” and if you like NAFTA, this must be good, and if you don’t then we have a problem.

The chief American proponent for the agreement is President Obama, but by listening to him you would hardly know it. He seems to speak about it only in secrecy, which is interesting because that is the way in which he wanted the U.S. Senate to consider the terms of the Partnership. The Senate complied last week by putting it on a “fast-track” for consideration, thereby forbidding amendments or filibuster. Debate and discussion will be quick and without nuance, resulting in an expeditious up or down vote. While that might be desirable in the case of a presidential nomination, it hardly seems appropriate for a complicated economic pact laced with unintended consequences.

Supporters and opponents of the Partnership agree that it will be a bonanza for multi-national corporations. If you believe in top-down or trickle-down economics, then “what’s good for business is good for the United States” (and by extension, the world). If you’re somewhat suspicious of the motives and practices of large multi-national corporations, then you have plenty of reason to pause in offering support for the Partnership.

For those who are not direct beneficiaries of the largesse of big business, there are two key questions to initially ask, (1) would the loss of wage gains of American workers be worth the savings for American consumers, and (2) on an ethical level, are we comfortable with American workers losing economic power while laborers in developing countries see their wages, and hence purchasing, power rise? There are other important considerations, such as what impact the TPP would have on American and global environmental issues, how would labor safety and working conditions be affected, and is the establishment of “private courts” really a fair way to settle international disputes?

Let’s take issue one, the loss and gains for American workers and consumers. The TPP should result in lower prices for American consumers, because it will make it easier for companies to produce goods and services and overseas, distant from prevailing American wages and salaries.

Should we be concerned about the prices that American consumers are paying? Below is a chart representing changes in the Consumer Price Index over the past three years, as calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In only one month over the past three years has inflation reached 3 percent, and this past February, we actually had deflation, prices falling.

The concerns of the American middle class and the poor have not been about high prices, rather about job opportunities, job security, and salaries that provide the necessary income to support a family. As shown so clearly by the Economic Policy Institute,

The pay of American workers was increasing along with productivity until the late 1970s. Since then, wages have essentially remained stagnant, while productivity has more than doubled. In other words, corporations are increasing their earnings at the expense of the sweat and intellectual prowess of their employees. More and more households now have two wage-earners, and in some cases, families are worse off now with two wage-earners than they were a generation ago with one. If one of the fundamental questions in considering the merits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is whether to look for ways to benefit the American worker rather than the American consumer, the evidence seems to be clear that consumers are doing well-enough, and workers are struggling. Workers need the help, and the TPP would not be good for them.

The second question is whether the increase in wages for workers in developing countries is more important than increasing wages for American workers. From a global and non-biased point of view, it may be better in the short run to favor the benefits that workers in developing countries would accrue with passage of the TPP. However, in virtually every developing country, it would be better to put laborers to work on projects needed in their countries, such as infrastructure, housing, schools, and health facilities. With the TPP, most of the products that they would produce would be for the benefit of foreigners. At the present time, it is fair to argue that helping American workers close the gap between their incomes and those of the wealthy is of greater importance. The United States still has a long way to go in creating more economic and political equality, and that should be our first order of business. As the U.S. does that, it can play a fundamental role in helping the economies of developing countries by providing them with the capital and skills to make their economies more self-reliant. Once that is done, they can participate more in international trade in a way that benefits their citizens as both workers and consumers.

The TPP is not an easy issue, but considering how it will furtively be considered by the U.S. Senate (and American people) and the damage that it will do to American workers, it seems that the prudent position would be to oppose the TPP. It’s a shame that, in this case, President Obama favors action that can be so detrimental to American workers.

For a quick, visual explanation of the problems with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, what this animation offered by  former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

The post Trying to look sympathetically at Trans-Pacific Partnership appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Robert Lafollette, Jr. and Joseph McCarthy. Russ Feingold and Scott Walker. How could one state–Wisconsin–elect politicians with such divergent views?

No state east of New York has had such a strong tradition of progressive views in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Despite the strength that Senator Robert Lafollette, Jr. and his father brought to the progressive wing of the Republican Party in Wisconsin, it seemed to have little staying power. In what must be one of the greatest political turnarounds in American history, Lafollette was defeated in 1946 in the Republican primary by conservative witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy. Did the people of Wisconsin fall for McCarthy’s criticism of Lafollette not joining the military in World War II, even though Lafollette was 46-years old at the time of Pearl Harbor and was a sitting U.S. senator? What caused the citizens to take a quantum leap to the right?

In Wisconsin, the state capital and the state university are both in the same town, Madison. The university has traditionally been a hotbed of progressive thinking and action, and at times that has flowed into the halls of the Capitol. This trend has continued into the current decade, but not because progressives at the university and in state government have been strengthening one another. Rather, it is students and faculty at the University, joined by thousands of state public employees demonstrating under the Rotunda in Governor Scott Walker’s office building.

Scott Walker has gone from being an embattled governor to a presidential contender. He was elected governor in 2010. The Wisconsin state legislature was also part of the red wave that covered the United States that year. Walker and the legislature collaborated in 2011 to pass the “Wisconsin budget repair bill,” which significantly changed the collective bargaining process for most public employees. The goal of the bill was to eliminate the deficit in the state budget. But the means of doing so was a punch in the gut to tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens, who had fought to bring a healthy equilibrium to the management-worker struggle, which has been with us since the first cave person hired another to do some work.

Public employees in Wisconsin and elsewhere are among the most under-paid workers in our economy. They often have jobs that are dangerous, tedious, and in the case of teachers, require far more than 40 hours a week with no overtime pay. Nonetheless, they were the target of Walker and the legislature. The law has survived a variety of challenges, including a recall election of Governor Walker. He defeated the recall in 2012 and then won reelection in 2014. His reelection only emboldened him to try to take the once union-strong state into a “right to work [for less]” state. Removing the confusing slogans, Walker wants to weaken labor unions in Wisconsin by not requiring workers to pay union dues, even if the employees of a company are represented in bargaining by a union.

Walker’s efforts to weaken unions in the private and the public sector has now drawn the ire of the National Football League. The NFL is certainly not  a bastion of liberalism, but players in the league have been organized and protected by the NFL Players Association since 1970. Players in the NFL may be well-compensated, but their working conditions have been terrible, with their health always at risk. Only with the Players Association has their pension been protected.

The one NFL team in Wisconsin is the storied Green Bay Packers. There is no billionaire owner of the team, just a bunch of interested citizens in the town of Green Bay and elsewhere in Wisconsin. Players on the Packers have always been enthusiastic union supporters.

Moving beyond the field of football, the NFL Players Association Is now playing politics in Wisconsin.

The union released a strongly worded statement on February 25 denouncing the state’s proposed right-to-work legislation — which would prohibit businesses and unions from requiring workers to pay union dues — and reaffirming its solidarity “with the working families of Wisconsin and organized labor in their fight against current attacks against their right to stand together as a team.”

The statement, written by executive director DeMaurice Smith, pointed to the various support staff employed at the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field who “will have their well being and livelihood jeopardized” by the law. It also acknowledged the “generations of skilled workers” who contribute to the state’s various industries and pointed to the law’s potentially devastating effects on wages and safety. Smith took direct shots at Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who may be looking to boost his presidential aspirations at the expense of the state’s workers: “Governor Scott Walker may not value these vital employees, but as union members, we do.”

It would be a stretch to say that Scott Walker has been a demagogue of the ilk of Joe McCarthy. But Walker has successfully rallied Wisconsin citizens to undermine legislation that has protected them since the beginning of the progressive era in the late 19^th century. What’s happening in Wisconsin is similar to “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” in which citizens allow religiously formed social values to undermine their best economic interests. Yes, apparently this can happen too in Wisconsin, even with its strong university system and its proud progressive heritage.

This phenomenon stands as further evidence that the American body electorate is often more tuned into the politics of mythology and fear than to reason and their economic self-interest and that of their families and their neighbors. As I have said before, progressive education may be the best way to enlighten our citizenry.

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Going into midterms, Obama took credit for the 5.9% unemployment rate achieved by his administration.

“The United States has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and every other advanced economy combined.” Obama said. That progress, he added, has been “a direct result of the American people’s drive and determination, and the decisions made by my administration.”

Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the 5.9% figure for October of this year, but what does it mean?

If you have a part time minimum wage job that you can’t possibly live on (and many of the jobs created during the Obama administration are that) you are considered employed. If you have a low-paying, full time job beneath your skills and education, you may be employed, but you are under-employed. If you gave up finding a job, you aren’t counted because you dropped off the unemployment rolls. The 5.9% unemployment figure may sound good, but when you take it apart, it becomes a meaningless measure of economic health.

Senator Bernie Sanders put it this way:

Real unemployment today is not 5.8 percent, it is 11.5 percent if we include those who have given up looking for work or who are working part time when they want to work full time. Youth unemployment is 18.6 percent and African-American youth unemployment is 32.6 percent.

Today, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the median male worker earned $783 less last year than he made 41 years ago. The median woman worker made $1,337 less last year than she earned in 2007. Since 1999, the median middle-class family has seen its income go down by almost $5,000 after adjusting for inflation, now earning less than it did 25 years ago.

The truth is that for the majority of Americans the economy is not getting better, and for many it feels like it’s going downhill. The outsourcing of jobs continues, wages are stagnated, and technology has made many jobs obsolete. Although gas prices have fallen, prices at the grocery store are rising. Kids are going to college, racking up debt, with a slim chance of getting a good paying job in their chosen field.

Elected officials and corporate owned media report that the economy is on the upswing, pointing to the booming stock market as proof we are in recovery. Yet stocks being in nosebleed territory have nothing to do with the real economy where people continue to struggle everyday.

The BLS Civilian Employment Population Ratio—what’s that?

The Civilian Employment Population Ratio is another more accurate measurement of what is going on in the economy. The BLS defines the civilian non-institutional population as persons 16 years of age and older who are not inmates of institutions (penal or mental facilities and homes for the aged) and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.

By this measure, you are considered employed if you (a) did any work at all in a week (at least 1 hour) as a paid employee, worked in your own business or profession or on your own farm, or worked 15 hours or more as an unpaid worker in an enterprise operated by a member of the family, or (b) didn’t work but had a job or business from which you were temporarily absent because of vacation, illness, bad weather, childcare problems, maternity or paternity leave, labor-management dispute, job training, or other family or personal reasons, whether or not you were paid for the time off or were seeking another job.

Even with the bar for what constitutes employment set quite low, according to this measure, 41 percent of all civilian, working-age Americans are without a job. Even though this index includes people all the way up to over age 75, and may include retirees, it paints a pretty grim picture. The University of California Santa Barbara interprets the chart as follows:

The employment population ratio fell during the Great Recession and has stalled at a low level since then. Combined with the stagnation in the real wage, this has meant that labor’s share of national income has fallen as the economy grew, as measured by per capita real national income. Of course, as labor’s share fell capital’s share has risen. As capital’s share has grown, inequity has worsened and the share of income going to the top 1 % is approaching 1/5 of US income excluding capital gains. If capital gains are included, the top 1% received 22.5% of income in 2012.

Perhaps the most damning comment on the Obama Administration failures comes from the Senate Committee on Finance, Senator Ron Wyden (D), Chairman. The following is a press release from October 8, 2014:

Fact Sheet: Obama Economy Boosts Wall Street, Not Main Street

When President Obama came into office, the national unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and rose to as high as 10 percent in October 2009. Today it is 5.9 percent, however:

• The number of people who are not in the labor force has grown, despite a growing working-age population, by 12.1 million.
• The number of people who are not in the labor force who want a job has grown by more than 640,000 during the Obama Administration. Many simply gave up on trying to find a job in the Obama economy.
• The employment-to-population ratio has remained consistently below 60 percent during Obama’s tenure and has barely budged and has been at 59.0 percent since June of 2014; in contrast, the ratio averaged 62.9 percent between the beginning of the year 2000 through when Obama assumed office.
• The labor force participation rate has continued to trend downward during Obama’s tenure, from 65.7 percent when he took office to its current low of 62.7 percent.
• Payroll job growth has been tepid over Obama’s tenure: it has averaged only 135,000 per month since the end of the recession.
• While over 7.4 million payroll jobs were lost during the recession, there has only been a net 4.7 million jobs created over Obama’s tenure.

All this data combined points to a nation in trouble. If Democrats want to remain relevant, they can start by being honest about the state of the economy, end their addiction to Wall Street influence and money, and begin to serve the people they were elected to represent.

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The short answer is the Fed has been propping up the stock market. And, high stock prices are not always tethered to traditional methods of stock valuation, like productivity, price, earnings, growth—all those “fundamentals” you learn about in the “Investing for Dummies” book. The market has become a highly manipulated gambling casino for the elite, where bank and hedge fund investors, high frequency traders, and the Fed’s massive injection of liquidity into the system have fueled a record-breaking, inflated, and unsustainable market.

Of course, if you are invested in this market—and a lot of working stiffs are—you have done well, but it’s a market without a foundation, a house built on sand. Unlike the wealthy, you probably can’t afford to lose your money when the market “corrects”—and it will.

These record-breaking Dow averages are not the result of the “invisible hand of the free market,” because there’s no such thing as a “free market.” Central banks around the world are injecting $200 billion into the system, per quarter, to avoid a market crash.

Tyler Durgen, at Zero Hedge, says that, “without the Fed’s (and all other central bank’s) liquidity pump, the S&P would be about 70% lower than where it is now.

Mike Whitney at Counterpunch writes: “. . . in the last five years, stocks have tripled because the Fed, has added a “hefty $4 trillion in red ink to its balance sheet. Naturally, when someone buys $4 trillion in financial assets, the price of financial assets goes up.”

Besides, the Fed doesn’t give a rip about the real economy. If it did, it would have loaded up on infrastructure bonds instead of funky mortgage backed securities (MBS). The difference between the two is pretty stark: Infrastructure bonds put people to work, circulate money, boost economic activity, and strengthen growth. In contrast, MBS purchases help to fatten the bank accounts of the fraudsters who created the financial crisis while doing bupkis for the economy. Guess whom the Fed chose to help out?

Whitney is talking about the Fed’s practice of Quantitative Easing (QE)— buying toxic assets from banks—and then lending money back at zero percent interest. This gives banks and hedge funds tons of free money with which to speculate. This same policy that enriches the already wealthy takes money out of the pockets of ordinary people who can’t earn any interest on their meager savings accounts.

The Fed announced on Wednesday, October 29, that it would end QE3, effectively removing one of the helium tanks from this inflated stock market. It remains to be seen how the markets will react.

While too big to fail banks are speculating like crazy, corporations are busy pumping stock prices. Instead of doing something constructive with the billions in cash they are sitting on, say, creating jobs here at home, executives are increasing share value (and the value of their stock options) by buying back company stock.

Back in the real world we are left with higher food prices and lower wages. The sticker shock you’ve been experiencing at the grocery store is not just because you shop at Whole Foods. In September, the BLS reported that the price of ground beef increased 17 percent since September of 2013.

The Obama administration claims credit for a lower unemployment rate, but it fails to mention that the jobs it helped create are mostly low paying, part time, or both. If you take a part-time, low-paying job, you are considered “employed,” so you fall off the rolls even though you can’t live on what you make. And, if you give up looking, as many have, you are no longer counted. The so-called lower unemployment rate in no way reflects the reality of the job market.

In April of this year, the New York Times reported the following:

The deep recession wiped out primarily high-wage and middle-wage jobs. Yet the strongest employment growth during the sluggish recovery has been in low-wage work, at places like strip malls and fast-food restaurants.

In essence, the poor economy has replaced good jobs with bad ones. That is the conclusion of a new report from the National Employment Law Project, a research and advocacy group, analyzing employment trends four years into the recovery.

What this reality check tells you about our economy, our markets, and our banking system, is that they are rigged to benefit the elite. They are unstable, unsustainable, and do not serve the majority of working people. Fed policy is to give banks hundreds of billions in gambling money which does nothing for the real economy and further enriches the already rich. Meanwhile, 16 million American children live in poverty, and 1.3 million school children are homeless.

The next global “crash” will happen when international central bank manipulation of all varieties ceases to work. The phony economy, this “house of cards,” will fall, and bank balance sheets will go up in flames. Because banks are interconnected, when liquidity locks up, they will all go down together, and the markets and what’s left of the economy will go down with them. Some say the coming crash will make 2008 seem like a dress rehearsal. The wealthy, of course, will be fine, but ordinary people around the world will suffer.

Mike Whitney blames the surge in wealth at the top and the growing gap between the rich and poor on the Fed’s zero interest rate and QE policies put into place in 2008—policies deliberately designed to transfer money from the poor to the rich. In other words, the crushing of the working and the middle classes isn’t an accident; it’s a feature of an economy run by and for bankers and billionaires.

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