Allied Approaches Archive (Page 10)

The ruling Democrats on a key congressional committee on trade issues are dubious – at best – about the labor provisions of GOP President Donald Trump’s new NAFTA. And they’re letting Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, know it. 

Not only that, but the Democratic majority on the House Ways and Means Committee doesn’t like the so-called free trade pact’s environmental safeguards either.

“As our committee prepares to consider the renegotiated trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, we write to express our concerns regarding whether the new agreement will lead to meaningful and lasting labor reform in Mexico,” the Democrats, led by Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., wrote.

“Our question also stems from the fact that congressional Democrats concerned with whether trade agreement labor provisions will be meaningful have always been required to take a leap of faith: Vote first and hope to see changes later.  This time needs to be different,” they warned.

Their April 11 letter followed a hearing days before, featuring five union officials, plus Thea Lee of the Economic Policy Institute, outlining – in detail – holes in the proposed trade pact’s labor provisions, and particularly in enforcement of its worker rights section.

Unlike the current 26-year-old NAFTA, worker rights are in the text of the new pact, formally called the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). But those rights comply with weak International Labour Organization standards, and could still allow rampant worker exploitation in Mexico, especially given Mexico’s terrible record on worker rights, company-controlled unions and outright repression.

U.S.-based multinational corporations have seized on Mexico’s weak labor and environmental laws, low pay, lax enforcement and overall repression to move everything from call centers to car production to Oreo cookie baking to Mexico. Those moves fulfilled labor’s prediction of massive U.S. job losses to Mexico after NAFTA.

The George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations pushed legislation implementing NAFTA over strenuous organized labor opposition. Under federal trade law, the Ways and Means Committee must consider – and cannot change – any such legislation, which both houses of Congress must then vote on.

That prospect has led labor to launch a campaign critical of the new NAFTA.

We’ve spent a good deal of time on the blog the past several weeks talking about Lordstown, the infamous General Motors plant that shut down in March, leading to 1,400 layoffs.

Now it looks like Lordstown is becoming an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign.

Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders — who is considered one of the party’s frontrunners for the nomination, at least as much as there can be a frontrunner at this point — visited Lordstownlast week. And over the weekend, the Vermont senator dropped a new digital campaign ad about the Lordstown closure in which he takes direct aim at President Trump.

The Sanders ad, titled “Lordstown Tough,” features Chuckie Denison, a third-generation GM worker who worked at Lordstown and other GM facilities. Denison is backing Sanders in the race — a given, since he’s in an ad for the guy — but Denison spends a good chunk of the ad talking about Trump.

“Trump lied to Ohio. … He came to this area and told people, ‘Do not sell your homes, I’m bringing the jobs back.’ And weeks after that, is when they announced the plant closing,” Denison says.*

Denison continues: “He came here and lied to these people. I didn’t buy it, but many people did because they were hanging on to hope. They were hoping that he would do something, but he did the opposite.”

The ad also features clips of Sanders, who calls out Trump for granting GM federal contracts despite the fact that the company is shipping production overseas.

New England grocery store workers have won significant concessions from the Dutch firm that rules their day-to-day lives after an 11-day strike, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) announced Monday.

More than 30,000 Stop & Shop employees walked off the job on April 11 after negotiators from Netherlands-based multinational food retailer Ahold Delhaize spent weeks insisting the grocer’s frontline workforce would have to absorb higher health care costs and major changes to retirement benefits.

Such collective action has become rare in the private sector, where union membership levels are at historic lows and complex ownership arrangements involving multinational holding companies have attenuated the connection between the people who do a business’ actual work and the well-to-do executives calling the shots.

But the nearly two-week work stoppage drew high-profile support from both local and national leaders. Multiple 2020 presidential primary contenders visited striking workers in person, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), and former Vice President Joe Biden (D). Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D) and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) also showed their faces and shared supportive remarks at rallies with the strikers. Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) tweeted their support for the cause.

It’s truly dismaying to see companies exploit the value and integrity of the “Made in USA” label in their marketing all while importing their products from countries like China. But, even more upsetting, is that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been letting these companies off the hook with little more than a slap on the wrist for decades.

Four companies, including Patriot Pucks and Sand Piper, came under scrutiny for their false “Made in USA” labeling this year, but they join a horde of others that have abused the label in the past.

We’ve had more than enough of this deception and complacency, and so has FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra.

Following a FTC vote Tuesday to offer Patriot Pucks and Sand Piper no-money, no-fault settlements despite the fact that these companies were found to have violated federal lawregarding labeling, Chopra issued a statement outlining how the FTC can actually defend the “Made in USA” label.

We lost a vote today at the FTC. After catching companies lying about their products being Made in USA, the agency voted to essentially let them off scot-free. Tough loss for honest companies and their employees who make products here at home.

— Rohit Chopra (@chopraftc) April 17, 2019

Activists are vowing to fight back after the Tennessee House of Representatives advanced a bill Monday that would impose fines on voter registration organizations that turn in incomplete forms.

The legislation would impose fines ranging from $150 to $2,000 if groups turn in between 100 to 500 unfinished forms. If a group turns more than 500 incomplete forms, they could face fines up to $10,000. Additionally, the legislation would require the groups to submit voter registration forms within 10 days and would also prohibit poll watchers from out of state.

Voting rights activists mobilized quickly to demonstrate their opposition to the measure. “Everyone was all hands on deck,” Tequila Johnson, statewide manager of the Tennessee Black Voter Project, told ThinkProgress Tuesday. “We got as many supporters as we could to come and show support and there were probably 200 people [there].”

Protesters gathered inside and outside the state capitol building, Johnson said, including inside the chamber, where they were told they needed to be silent. The legislators themselves, however, were cheering and clapping, she said.

“They were antagonizing us… It shows how divisive our state legislature is,” she said, adding that she felt the lawmakers were treating the bill like a competition, rather than thinking “about what’s right for our state.”

The bill was originally put forward by Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett (R). According to a Nashville Public Radio report, Hargett’s office said the legislation was prompted by attempts led by the Black Voter Project to quickly register thousands of people in Memphis, Tennessee, before the registration deadline last year.

Before hitting his first tee shot on Thursday at The Masters Tournament in Augusta, Ga., defending champion Sergio Garcia spoke of playing well and “defending the green jacket.”

The green jacket is synonymous with a win at The Masters, arguably the most prestigious of professional golf’s four major tournaments. Every year since 1949, The Masters winner has been presented with his own green jacket in a ceremony shortly after the final putt is made.

The green jacket that Augusta National Golf Clubhas awarded its Masters winners and club members has historically been as American-made as the tournament itself.

Since 1967, the Augusta National green jackets have, for the most part, been produced by the Hamilton Tailoring Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. In more recent years, the tropical-weight wool blazer has also been supplied by Bobby Jones Apparel, located in Duluth, Ga., and the historic Poole & Co. on Saville Row in London.

In keeping with the conservative nature of Augusta National members, exactly where each individual jacket is manufactured is a close-kept secret. Hamilton Tailoring began producing the green jackets in 1967, but founder Ed Heimann would not confirm the Ohio-based retailer still supplies them. Augusta National staff members also refused to talk, although a 2017 article on the club's website confirmed Hamilton Tailoring makes the jackets.

So, we consulted an expert on the green jacket, Ryan Carey, who along with partner Bob Zafian, launched Green Jacket Auctions in 2006 to capture the golf memorabilia market.

“Historically, they’ve all been made in the United States, but I have seen some green jackets with the Henry Poole name on them,” Carey said. “Of the other 15 or so producers that have made them over the years, all of them are in the U.S.

The actress Felicity Huffman—along with 13 other parents charged in the college admissions scandal—entered plea deals last week, putting pressure on actress Lori Laughlin and her husband, designer Mossimo Giannulli, to do the same. Prosecutors are hinting that if Laughlin doesn’t accept a deal she could face 20 years in prison, 3 years of probation, and a $250,000 fine.

I have enjoyed EVERY SINGLE SECOND of this scandal and its coverage. It has exploded so many of the lies we tell ourselves about America being a fair and just society—especially when it comes to access to higher education. For those who think about class, this scandal has been like Halloween, Christmas and Easter rolled into one. Journalists and bloggers are using words like class, blue collar, elite and privilege.

Nothing of the actual details of this scandal—the bribes paid, the photos photoshopped, the tests taken by fakers—have shocked me. What has surprised me, however, is that journalists and bloggers have been using this scandal to talk about class and inequality. As sociologist Shamus Khan wrote in The Washington Post, “the true tragedy is that almost all rich families buy their kids into elite colleges by purchasing advantages they pass off as talents, whether by way of sailing lessons or elaborate vacations planned with an eye on admissions essays. We view these vastly overrepresented children of the rich as having earned their spots.” This, another blogger concurred, “is the real scandal.”

These comments point to the many ways that rich people get their kids into college. On the lower end of the scale is all the money many of us are able spend on music lessons, test prep, elite soccer programs, and summer-abroad service project opportunities for our kids—to name a few of the advantages families like mine can afford. At the next level are the parents who can afford to send their kids to expensive and prestigious prep and boarding schools. And, finally, at the top tier, are the parents who can donate tens of thousands or even millions of dollars to college campuses in return for a guarantee of their child’s entry into said college. As many have noted in reporting on the admissions scandal, Jared Kushner’s parents got him into Harvard by donating 2.5 million dollars a few years before Kushner applied.

The Associated Press turned to Richard V. Reeves, whose book Dream Hoarders showed how the upper echelon hoards all the best opportunities for itself. As Reeves commented on the scandal, “[f]or most people outside the elite, these institutions might as well be on the moon. This story just reinforces that, the way in which money buys opportunity in America.”

In a hearing last week, an exchange between Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) and JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon caught my eye. Dimon was touting the bank’s new minimum wage of $16.50, increasing to $18 in high-cost areas, for entry level workers. That’s a decent minimum wage, above the $15 that most progressive plans call for (and those proposals typically include a phase-in of numerous years). According to recent EPI analysis, $16.50 is well north of the national 40^thpercentile wage of just under $15.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting the highly profitable bank—market cap about $380 billion; Dimon made over $30 million last year—is fairly compensating its entry-level workers (Dimon says such workers tend to just out of high school). My point is an empirical one: given the nation’s wage structure, its (ridiculously low) federal minimum wage of $7.25, and the weak bargaining clout of low-wage workers, especially those without a college degree, a minimum/entry-level wage of $16.50 is actually pretty high.

Rep. Porter, however, pointed out that in pretty much any part of America you choose, a single mom with one child can’t make ends meet on that wage. She’s unquestionably correct, as she demonstrated after the hearing in this tweet (full disclosure: I’ve met Rep. Porter; she’s all that and a big bag of chips; whip-smart, data-driven…one of those new members with just the right recipe of heart, brain, conviction, analytics, etc…).

You can read more about their exchange here, but it led me to ask why is the US wage structure so insufficient and what can we do about it? It’s a question that all of us should have at the top of our minds when listening to the proposals from those who would lead the nation.

What can we do about this mismatch between earnings and needs?

One answer is to work on two tracks, near term and long term. In the near term, we need robust wage supports in the form of fully refundable tax credits (i.e., you get the credit whether or not you owe any taxes), along with other work supports, including child care, health care, and housing.

Over the longer haul we must correct structural imbalances that have, over at least the last 40 years, reduced the bargaining clout for workers relative to employers. The power shift is a function of many forces, including the decline of unions and collective bargaining, but it also relates to the way we’ve handled globalization, the rise of hands-off economics, specifically the notion that progressive interventions are anti-growth (a line of thought that’s led to supply-side policies like cutting taxes for the rich and benefits for the poor), austere fiscal policy, and the many other aspects of what is often labeled the “rigged economy.”

Whether you celebrate Easter or Passover or just enjoy the fun traditions that originate from these holidays, we’re sharing our favorite Made in America items for spring’s religious holidays from our archives.

EASTER

Easter is a traditional religious holiday in the Christian faith celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But it's also a holiday that includes a bit of fun — and much of that fun starts with Easter Eggs. 

Eco eggs are a great option for those who want to include treats in their eggs during Easter egg hunts. Not only are they Made in the USA, they also are eco-friendly, manufactured from 100 percent renewable content and are fully compostable. The eggs — made from non-toxic, durable, plant-based plastic — are available in two sizes and come in five assorted colors (pink, yellow, green, blue and purple). The company also manufactures eco grass to help fill out that Easter basket. Eco grass is made from 100 percent post recycled paper and is 100 percent recyclable after use, so you can easily dispose of it in your paper recycle bin. 

But if you are looking for a more formal egg, be sure to check out the selection offered by the White House Historical Association for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. The 2019 White House Easter Egg collection is available now; you can buy a single egg or the entire set of five colors -- all Made in the United States. In 2017, Wells Wood Turning & Finishing of Maine supplied eggs for the White House's iconic event. 

Looking to dye your eggs? Check out Doc Hinkle Easter Egg Dye. Unlike ordinary dyes that must be diluted, Doc Hinkle's paint-on kit helps egg decorators create "beautiful, bright colors and patterns instead of dull single-colored eggs." Colors included in the kit include red, blue, yellow and purple, which can be combined to create new hues.  

You are going to need a place to put all those eggs, and Peterboro Basket Co. and Charleston Sweetgrass offer a variety of sizes, shapes and colors.

We’ve been closely monitoring trade talks between the United States and China, and we’ve gone on record to note that there are a couple of ways things could go. The two countries will either reach a historic deal that requires China to play by the rules of global competition — or the agreement will be a dud, making a few superficial changes but mostly maintaining the status quo.

Well, score one for the status quo.

Reuters reports that “U.S. negotiators have tempered demands that China curb industrial subsidies as a condition for a trade deal after strong resistance from Beijing.”

Instead, negotiators are focusing on issues they see as more achievable, including ending forced technology transfers, strengthening protection of intellectual property and opening up China’s markets.

Look, addressing technology transfers and intellectual property is vital, and U.S. negotiators are right to focus on them. Ditto for further opening up China’s market.

But by abandoning the issue of industrial subsidies in these talks, the United States is giving a green light to China to continue to cheat the global trading system and put countries and companies that play by the rules at a disadvantage.

Case in point: Steel.

President Trump put a 25% tariff on steel imports in April 2018 in response to surging foreign imports. Now, you’ve probably heard about those "Section 232" tariffs — they’ve garnered a lot of criticism from the Acela Corridor set — but what is often missing from the conversation is that despite Trump’s bluster, there was a very legitimate reason why he issued those tariffs.

Dozens of activists, organizers, elected officials, and ultra-wealthy individuals came together in Washington, D.C. last week around a simple theme: it’s time to tax rich people. The gathering was put together by the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of proud “traitors to their class,” committed to breaking up the concentration of wealth and power in the United States.

We all know how democracies are supposed to work: People come together, identify their common problems, then debate and decide solutions. But this elegant give-and-take can break down. What breaks it? Inequality. Democratic deliberations start going haywire whenever wealth starts furiously concentrating at a society’s summit.

In societies growing significantly more unequal, people simply share ever fewer common problems. And some people, thanks to their increasing wealth, have the political power to make their problems the problems their society addresses.

And what happens to the problems of people without grand private fortune? Their problems go ignored. Democracy becomes plutocracy.

In our contemporary United States, we see this plutocratic dynamic play out all the time. Oxfam, the activist global charity, has just offered up a particularly vivid example: the crisis around prescription drugs.

For Americans of modest means, prescription drugs have emerged as a top-tier problem on any number of fronts. Start with cost. The drugs doctors prescribe have become so expensive that millions of Americans can’t afford to buy all the pills their doctors want them to take.

Meanwhile, drug companies have become drug pushers, overselling the benefits and shortchanging the hazards of profitable painkilling medications, in the process creating an opioid epidemic that has devastated millions of American households — and communities.

Big Pharma’s relentless chase after profits drives and distorts medical research agendas, too. On cancer, for instance, drug companies will only conduct costly clinical trials on substances that can be patented and pay off in big earnings. Promising but unpatentable natural substances can’t deliver big profits. So they don’t get tested. They remain on the medical fringes, their curative potential untapped.

For the first time in a decade, CEOs of America’s mega-banks were summoned to Capitol Hill on April 10 to face scrutiny from lawmakers. House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) explained that her goal was to find out what — if anything — the seven Wall Street leaders had learned since the 2008 financial crisis.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employer Costs for Employee Compensation gives us a chance to look at workers’ bonuses in 2017 and 2018, to gauge the impact of the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Last year, our analysis showed that bonuses rose by $0.02 between December 2017 and September 2018 (all calculations in this analysis are inflation-adjusted). The new data show that bonuses actually fell $0.22 between December 2017 and December 2018 and the average bonus for 2018 was just $0.01 higher than in 2017.

This is not what the tax cutters promised, or bragged about soon after the tax bill passed. They claimed that their bill would raise the wages of rank-and-file workers, with congressional Republicans and members of the Trump administration promising raises of many thousands of dollars within ten years. The Trump administration’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers argued last April that we were already seeing the positive wage impact of the tax cuts:

A flurry of corporate announcements provide further evidence of tax reform’s positive impact on wages. As of April 8, nearly 500 American employers have announced bonuses or pay increases, affecting more than 5.5 million American workers.

Following the bill’s passage, a number of corporations made conveniently-timed announcements that their workers would be getting raises or bonuses (some of which were in the works well before the tax cuts passed). But as EPIanalysis has shown there are many reasons to be skeptical of the claim that the TCJA, particularly its corporate tax cuts, will produce significant wage gains.

We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump said recently.

Someone should alert him that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. This pretty much describes General Motors’ receipt of $600 million in federal contracts, plus $500 million in tax breaks, since Trump took office.

Some of this corporate welfare has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22 million in total compensation in 2017 alone.

But GM employees are subject to harsh capitalism. GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019.

The nation’s largest banks saved $21 billion last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, thousands of lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.

After months of planning, a small group of labor leaders, activists and scholars opened a new labor college in St. Paul, Minn., inspired by the belief that working people can build the labor movement of the future, in part, by looking to the past.

Classes began April 12 at the New Brookwood Labor College. It’s modeled after a school for labor organizers that operated from 1921-1937 in Katonah, N.Y. That college attracted over 600 students, who went on to lead major union and civil rights campaigns across the country in the decades to come.

That school’s lifespan was brief, said Robyn Gulley, a co-founder of New Brookwood and local labor and human rights organizer. But its impact was great.

“It’s hard to read a book about labor history without coming across Brookwood Labor College,” Gulley said. “Brookwood left behind a tremendous legacy. And it was coed, it was racially diverse, it was ethnically diverse at a time when that was basically unheard of.”

Notable Brookwood alumni, according to Wikipedia, included Walter, Roy and Sophie Reuther of the UAW, Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray, activist for women’s rights and civil rights and the first African-American female Episcopal priest and civil rights activist Ella Bajer.

“One sign of Brookwood's influence is just how much it changed American labor unions. Many of Brookwood's beliefs—mass unionization, unionization of skilled and semi-skilled workers, an end to gender and racial discrimination, support for social insurance programs—were later adopted by mainstream labor,” the Wikipedia citation adds.

Brookwood’s brand of inclusiveness and forward thinking hasn’t lost its relevance in an era of intense cultural and political divides in the U.S. And the gaps between rich and working people have widened back to the bloated levels of the 1920’s, when the original Brookwood began educating organizers.

If ever there were a time for a reboot, labor historian Peter Rachleff said, this is it.

“The Brookwood Labor College came along at a time when the labor movement needed critical thinking – how to organize when traditional forms of work (skilled manual labor) were being challenged by assembly lines and scientific management; how to organize a workforce that was increasingly diverse by race, gender and ethnicity; how to organize when corporate management was dead-set against negotiating with unions; how to organize when employers were able to use laws and court decisions to undercut workers’ rights,” Rachleff said.

“Does this sound familiar?”

Pitched as the long-awaited salvation of a broken system, President Donald Trump’s overhaul of the corporate tax code appears to have in fact doubled the number of major profitable corporations that find a way to pay zero dollars in income tax.

There were 60 such firms listed on the Fortune 500, a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) showed Thursday, with a combined $79 billion in pre-tax revenue and nothing paid to the U.S. government in income tax. The group’s previous research had found an average of 30 profitable zero-tax firms per year in the decade before Trump’s tax law.

But such pay-nothing corporate takers would disappear under a new tax proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), announced Thursday in a blog post from her presidential campaign’s web team.

Warren’s proposal breaks from stubborn technocratic complexity, leaving messy, convoluted corporate tax code to one side – in a file marked “fix this later” – in favor of a new, separate, and simple levy on only the highest profits.

The first $100 million a firm nets in a year would be untouched by the new proposal. For every dollar of profit they claim to shareholders beyond that, firms would have to send seven pennies to the government.

As ITEP senior fellow Matt Gardner told ThinkProgress, “We know that in many cases companies are playing games with two sets of books. Requiring them to stick with one story in terms of profitability has a lot of appeal.”

What do Americans agree on?

Not much, man! They don’t agree on what’s the best place to get a sandwich or where to live (to settle this debate: the best place to get a sandwich is actually here, everybody). But they doagree that it’s a good idea to avoid talking politics over Thanksgiving dinner.

They also agree on this: A new poll shows that basically everybody, regardless of political affiliation, thinks the federal government should put a boatload of money into infrastructure projects and they should attach Buy America procurement policies to those dollars. Buy America rules get the support of 80 percent of us, the poll found, while only 15 percent of respondents oppose them.

It’s true. While President Trump – the same guy from this commercial – and congressional Democrats wrestle over the release of his tax returns the rest of us, according to the bipartisan poll conducted by Mark Mellman and Bill McInturff, would rather they prioritize infrastructure spending. According to the poll, we want it more than a lot of other policy proposals.

It’s pretty remarkable, and it isn’t anything new; every year polling returns similar results. Here's 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015. And this consistent popularity isn’t lost on politicians. The president, for example, is down in Texas today to show off a couple of executive orders that are meant to fast-track energy infrastructure development.

O.K., Mr. President, that’s some good politicking … But voters want that infrastructure to be American-made, by American workers, so that the economic benefits from federal spending stay in American communities. And the last couple of executive orders the president has already rolled around on these very topics – building out energy infrastructure and making more federal spending American-made – have been all bark and no bite. They haven’t gone anywhere!

It’s called, in political parlance, “a cattle call.”

The phrase refers to what happens when presidential hopefuls parade their positions, one by one, before a group, large or small.

And that’s what nine Democrats – John Hickenlooper, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Tim Ryan, Terry McAuliffe, Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Eric Swalwell, in that order – did before 3,000 construction workers at the April 10 session of North America’s Building Trades Unions’ legislative conference in D.C.

All supported pro-worker and particularly pro-building trades causes, recognizing the activists represent three million unionists, many of whom will vote in next year’s presidential primaries and caucuses.

But overriding the specifics was the fact that tens of thousands of construction workers in 2016 defected to GOP nominee Donald Trump, especially in the key Great Lakes states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where his narrow popular vote wins gave him Electoral College victory.

Several hopefuls acknowledged it, reminding the delegates Trump had broken his key promise to the building trades: A comprehensive plan to rebuild the nation’s crumbling roads, bridges, railroads, airports and other infrastructure.

Trump has yet to send a plan to Congress. Warren noted he lies when he talks about $1 trillion for infrastructure. Trump’s talking points produce only a $200 million plan, she said.

All the hopefuls endorsed Project Labor Agreements, where unions and contractors agree on union representation for workers in return for a set of work rules and grievance procedures to cover problems on the job. And the PLAs also set specific budgets for the projects.

Another cause, which all backed and which the unionists also took to Congress, is preserving the Davis-Bacon Act and its requirement that contractors pay prevailing wages on federally funded construction. Cut-rate contractors and their GOP allies have campaigned for years to eliminate Davis-Bacon, thus driving workers’ wages down.

This week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2019. A companion bill of the same name has already been introduced in the House by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). That’s good news for the country. Unfortunately, these bills are facing opposition from what, for some people, will be an unexpected direction.

I don’t mean Republicans. They’ve already lost the health care debate, in one sense, now that large majorities of voters support Medicare for All. The real threat may well come from its Democratic friends. They’re the people who say they support Medicare for All’s “goals,” but claim to have found a better way to achieve them.

Intentionally or not, Medicare for All’s “frenemies” are sowing confusion about it. Among them is Ezekiel Emmanuel, who argues, “At least four different approaches to health reform could truthfully carry the Medicare for all label.”

Why would that be so? The term was crafted by Sanders, Jayapal, and their allies to describe a single-payer system, administered by the government, with no copayments or deductibles, and without the participation of private insurers.

To be sure, the idea’s frenemies have added to the chaos. A variety of watered-down alternatives to Medicare for All have been proposed, most with names that sound like “Medicare for All”: “Medicare X,” “Medicare Extra for All,” “Medicare for America” … (I’m still waiting for a proposal called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Medicare for All!”)

These plans are Medicare for All decoys. They claim to resemble Medicare for All, at least in their outcomes, but they’re not. Each depends on some naive combination of employer cooperation, insurance company goodwill, “smart shopping,” and Rube Goldberg-like fiscal contraptions. Each would continue to force working Americans to spend thousands of dollars on premiums, copays, and deductibles, at a time when most families say they’d have trouble finding $1,000 to cover an emergency.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will testify before Congress on Wednesday about her priorities for the department just weeks after she proposed billions of dollars in cuts for education spending in fiscal year 2020.

DeVos has labeled the cuts “tough choices,” but new analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF) shows DeVos’ personal savings from the 2017 GOP tax bill alone could have covered a significant chunk of them.

(ThinkProgress is an editorially independent news site housed within CAPAF.)

According to her 2018 personal financial disclosures, DeVos’ income was somewhere between $46.8 million and $109 million, mostly stemming from LLCs, limited partnerships, and distributive shares. CAPAF’s analysis estimates the Trump tax cuts likely saved her $10 million or more in the last year alone.

Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who focuses on federal tax and budget policy, said DeVos was “illustrative of the windfall that extremely wealthy business owners were handed in 2017.”

“Because her family’s company, Amway, is — as we found out from a letter they sent to Congress — structured as an S-corporation,” he explained, DeVos’ holdings were eligible for a special new deduction created in the tax bill. The tax changes Trump and Republicans implemented in 2017 actually reduced the top rate for these types of holdings from 39.6% to 29.6% taxation.

“They sold this new deduction as a small business tax cut, but the kinds of businesses that really benefit are Amway, the Trump Organization, and their owners,” Hanlon said.

The White House agency in charge of reviewing regulations, the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), conspired with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to circumvent important rulemaking requirements – and ram through a deregulatory giveaway to “glider” trucks, which are super-polluting diesel freight trucks created by dropping old, dirty truck engines into new truck bodies. If allowed to go forward, this loophole for the trucking industry will pollute our air and harm children’s health.

The story begins several years ago when, under the Obama administration, the EPA applied its new, cleaner emissions standards to glider trucks. When the Trump administration took power, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt attempted to exempt glider trucks from the Obama era emission standards as a handout to the industry that makes them. The EPA’s Inspector General (IG) is already investigating the EPA’s role in this tawdry tale, but new reporting makes clear that the White House’s role in this incident needs to be investigated as well.

When Public Citizen examined the glider truck carve-out, we discovered potential manipulation of the EPA’s rulemaking process, as outlined in testimony to the EPA’s scientific advisory board in 2018, before the IG investigation was requested. From documents publicly available at the time, we found that the EPA intentionally avoided conducting certain analyses to conceal the harmful health impacts of allowing dirtier emissions from glider trucks, especially on children.

U.S. Senate Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee reached a similar conclusion in December 2018 and requested that the EPA’s IG investigate the agency’s process for repealing cleaner emissions standards for glider trucks.

Now, newly released documents show that EPA’s IG is almost certain to confirm our suspicions: that the agency knowingly refused to do numerous analyses on the harmful impacts of its carve-out for glider trucks that normally are required when taking this type of regulatory action.

A year after Section 232 tariffs on imported steel were put in place, Alliance for American Manufacturing President Scott Paul returns to Coatesville, Pa., to sit down with local steelworkers and examine how the city is faring in the latest episode of The Manufacturing Report podcast.  

Though a flood of foreign imports threatened the future of Coatesville’s mill, a critical contributor to U.S. national security as a supplier of specialized armored plating, the tide has begun to turn. 

The mill, which has shaped the community for more than 200 years, has hired over 50 new employees over the last year with employment sustained at 535 workers. And more than 600 applicants have applied to join them, steelworkers Vonie Long and Fred Grumbine report in the episode. 

Though workers at Coatesville’s mill are certainly seeing the benefit of their mill’s recovery following Section 232 trade action, the entire community is in the midst of a revival. Peter Lymberis, co-owner of Little Chef restaurant in Coatesville, has seen the bustle of work at the mill and the resulting orders for his restaurant for himself.

“This mill means everything,” Grumbine said. “For a few years now, we’ve been going through a revitalization here, but I see big things back on the horizon. We were at a stalemate there for a while, and I feel that if we didn’t have the mill here, we couldn’t get back to it. The mill is everything in this community.”

Most Americans still cling to the meritocratic notion that people are rewarded according to their efforts and abilities. But meritocracy is becoming a cruel joke.

The Justice Department recently announced indictments of dozens of wealthy parents for using bribery and fraud to get their children into prestigious colleges.

But the real scandal isn’t how far a few wealthy parents will go to get their kids admitted (apparently $1.2 million in illegal payoffs), but how commonplace it has become for them to go almost as far without breaking any laws – shelling out big bucks for essay tutors, testing tutors, admissions counselors, and “enrichment” courses (not to mention sky-high tuition at private schools feeding into the Ivy League).  

Inequality is lurking behind all this, and not just because the wealthy can afford it. Researchers Daniel Schneider, Orestes Hastings, and Joe LaBriola found that in states with the biggest gaps between rich and poor, well-to-do parents spend the most trying to get their children into elite colleges.

America’s unprecedented concentration of wealth combined with seemingly bottomless poverty have increased parental anxiety – raising the stakes, and the competition, for admission.

While some entrepreneurs in America’s billionaire class lack a prestigious degree, it’s become harder to become a run-of-the-mill multimillionaire in America without one.

Wealth is a crucially important measure of economic health—it allows families to transfer income earned in the past to meet spending demands in the future, such as by building up savings to finance a child’s college education.

That’s why it’s so alarming to see that, today still, the median white American family has twelve times the wealth that their black counterparts have. And that only begins to tell the story of how deeply racism has defined American economic history.

Enter EPI Distinguished Fellow Richard Rothstein’s widely praised book, “The Color of Law,” which delves into the very tangible but underappreciated root of the problem: systemic, legalized housing discrimination over a period of three decades—starting in the 1940s—prevented black families from having a piece of the American Dream of homeownership.

Over the years, this disparity was compounded by not only ongoing discrimination but also the legacy of prior practices.

As negotiations enter the finer points of the deal next week, it’s vital that Trump leverage the momentum his administration has cultivated in the trade talks and truly address China trade cheating.   

Alliance for American Manufacturing President Scott Paul writes in the Washington Examiner:

Trump, meanwhile, has prepared the ground to make it more favorable to U.S. negotiating positions. The threat of lasting tariffs on most Chinese exports into the American market has made an impression; it has added billions in costs to Chinese businesses, and therefore has drawn the Chinese side to the bargaining table.

It’s no easy feat to persuade China’s economic managers to make structural reforms to a wildly successful mercantilist model that would result in more parity for U.S. trade interests. It remains to be seen how far a deal will go.

Most likely, it won’t go far enough. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has been working diligently through a prescribed set of issues with his Chinese counterparts. Based on some reports, they’ve been able to make more progress on some issues, such as forced technology transfers and IP theft, than on others, such as scaling back state-owned enterprises and improving enforcement mechanisms. Those unaddressed issues may be the most important results of what will eventually come out of this.

And still, the window of opportunity is open. The time to deal is now.

Serious societal change typically only takes place when the pressure for change hits “critical mass.” At one level, we’ve had critical mass for years now on seriously taxing America’s rich. Polls regularly show broad public support for having our wealthiest pay quite a bit more at tax time.

But we haven’t had critical mass on taxing the rich within our political class. That finally may be changing. High-profile pols old and new have of late been one-upping each other with sober proposals for trimming the super rich down to a much more manageable democratic size.

The latest significant player to add to this growing political class critical mass: U.S. Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon. He’s just announced his intention to push a bold new tax on capital gains.

Most Americans know precious little about capital gains income because most Americans get precious little income from capital gains. On average, capital gains income — profits from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets — makes up just 6.1 percent of the dollars Americans report on their tax returns.

But this average wildly overstates how much income everyday households collect from capital gains. In 2016, the latest year with IRS stats, capital gains made up a miniscule 0.7 percent of the income for households earning less than $100,000. Households making over $10 million, by contrast, counted on capital gains for nearly half, 46.4 percent, of their income.

The richest of our rich, our top 0.001 percent, grab an even higher income share, 55.1 percent, from capital games.

These fabulously rich don’t just grab the overwhelming bulk of the nation’s capital gain dollars. Our tax code gives them and their capital gains preferential treatment. A dollar of income from salary and wages can currently face a tax rate of up to 37 percent. A dollar of capital gains income never faces a tax slice more than 23.8 percent.

In 1896, England native Joseph Lodge opened his first foundry in South Pittsburg, Tenn., a town of 3,000 residents located alongside the Cumberland Plateau of the Appalachian Mountains. 

Lodge chose the small town to begin his business of manufacturing cast iron cookware. It was a family business, in a family town. 

It’s now been 123 years, and America’s largest cast iron cookware company is still making top-quality culinary items in this family city. This small town is all about family — and so is Lodge Cast Iron. 

Lodge’s family continues to run the business today, making cast iron skillets, Dutch ovens, and a variety of cookware and decorative items. With sales rapidly growing, the family is committed to be the financial engine of this small Tennessee burg. 

“The family ownership has always been dedicated to keeping jobs here, so they’ve always tried their best to keep workers employed and reinvest in technology or product innovation and we’ve been able to stay relevant in the marketplace,”  said Lodge Cast Iron public relations manager Mark Kelly.

“A lot of companies claim to be family-owned environment companies, but here it really is the real deal. Anybody that works here can tell you any number of stories about how that concept has not only impacted them, but their family members.”

The U.S. is suffering from excessive wealth disorder.

This isn’t your parents’ inequality influenza, but a more virulent strain of extreme disparities of income, wealth, and opportunity.

Just 400 billionaires have as much wealth as nearly two-thirds of American households combined. And just three individuals — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates — have as much wealth as half of all U.S. households put together.

Since the economic meltdown of 2008, the lion’s share of income and wealth growth hasn’t gone just to the top 1 percent — it’s gone to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. This 0.1 percent includes households with annual incomes starting at $2.2 million and wealth over $20 million.

This group has been the big winner of the last few decades. Its share of national income rose from 6 percent in 1995 to 11 percent in 2015. But their biggest gains are in wealth, increasing their share from 7 percent in 1978 to over 21 percent today.

That’s 210 times their share of the population.

When you have over $20 million, you’ve easily taken care of all your needs and those of the next generation of your family. You’re living in comfort, probably with multiple homes, and don’t want for anything.

It’s at this point we see the telltale signs of excessive wealth disorder. Despite being already comfortable beyond measure, segments of this 0.1 percent will often invest their wealth to rig the political rules to get even more wealth and power.

They contribute the legal maximum donations to politicians and then do an end run around campaign finance laws to siphon even larger sums through “dark money” SuperPACs, using corporate entities that don’t have to disclose donors.

When this donor class demands tax cuts, their political puppets kick into overdrive to deliver the goods.