Mediaboss Marketing

Protesters outside the office of Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Penn.(Photo: Marc Levy, AP)

Progressive activists are staging sit-ins outside the offices of GOP senators on Thursday, recreating recent scenes from Capitol Hill in several states including Republican strongholds like Kentucky and Tennessee.

Its part of a strategy to use the current congressional recess to pressure GOP senators who are in the midst of negotiations over replacing the Affordable Care Act. A version of the plan, which a Congressional Budget Office estimate says could cause 22 million Americans to lose health insurance, has already passed the U.S. House and Democrats are unified in opposition to it.

Senate health care bill would lead to 22 million more uninsured, CBO says

The groups, including Our Revolution, which is affiliated with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the Working Families Party and Democracy Spring, say hundreds will risk arrest as they converge on 21 states, with key events targeting SenateMajority Leader Mitch McConnell as well as Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Marco Rubio of Florida, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. The protests are notable in that they also target GOP strongholds, including Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas.

Trumpcare has never been about health care, said Working Families Party national director Dan Cantor. Its a naked attempt to steal health care from millions of Americans in order to pay for massive tax cuts for the richest people in history. It's despicable. Even Republican senators must know in their hearts that this is wrong. But still they press forward, Cantor said in a statement.

As Republicans attempt to find a consensus on health care, Democrats are hitting hard the effects the GOP blueprint would have on rural communities, which overwhelmingly voted for President Trump in the November election. Later on Thursday, Sen. Bob Casey, D-Penn., plans to join former U.S. Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack to detail the impact the plan would have on rural Pennsylvania.

If passed in its current form, the GOP health care scheme would make health care unaffordable for millions, kill jobs, threaten rural hospitals and funding for local school districts, and make it harder for people with opioid addiction to access treatment, Caseys office said in a statement.

Republicans have been arguing that Obamacare is collapsing since a number of insurance providers have pulled out of the individual insurance markets in different states. Democrats say the Trump administration's threats to withhold insurer payments via Obamacare has helped cause the problem.

Read more:

United against 'Trumpcare', Democrats divided on next steps

Poll: Only 12% of Americans support the Senate health care plan

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2tVgO2A

Continue reading here:
Progressives stage health care sit-ins outside Republican lawmaker offices - USA TODAY

Soon after two Silicon Valley billionaires launched an online initiative to rejuvenate the Democratic Party Monday night, veteran progressive political operatives began mocking it as an out-of-touch vanity project.

Mark Pincus, co-founder of online gaming company Zynga, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman created Win The Future, or WTF, as a platform for crowdsourcing ideas that can sway the party in a new direction, according to Recode, which first reported the organizations launch.

The premise of the group, based at a website of the same name, is that Democratic politicians havent been responsive enough to ordinary Americans. But Pincus, the chief architect, told Recode that he also has a specific policy agenda rooted in fears that the party is already moving too far to the left and that hed like to make it more pro-business.

The thought of tech billionaires pushing a would-be grassroots agenda that happens to reflect their cosseted worldview and self-interest at a time of mounting inequality and populist anger tickled liberal strategists.

The weakness of the Democratic Party is not due to an underrepresentation of venture capitalists and tech company board members, said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, which advocates for expansion of that federal program. The philosophical core of the Democratic Party is, and will remain, the working people who are sick and tired of politics that answers to money instead of the people.

Stephen Lam / Reuters

Pincus contention that the political ethos of Silicon Valley executives can help the party be more in touch with mainstream America is especially off-base, said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The rich peoples social milieu is to think that the swing voter is kind of like them, which is to say progressive on social issues and regressive on corporate power, and thats not actually where the bulk of median swing voters in America are, Hauser said.

Billionaires such as Pincus and Hoffman have very, very poor instincts for politics, he said.

As an example, he noted the burst of excitement among some of the U.S. elite about the prospect of centrist billionaire and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg running for president in 2016. Indeed, in mid-2015, Pincus pitched Hoffman on his idea of raising a billion dollars on Kickstarter to try to elect Bloomberg. (Hoffman observed that Bloomberg had already looked into a White House bid and decided against it.)

Abundant polling on Americans political views supports Lawson and Hausers arguments.

Americans overwhelmingly back increasing spending on social programs, according to an April poll by the Pew Research Center. The same survey showed that a majority believe that some corporations and wealthy people dont pay their fair share in taxes with about three-quarters of Democrats expressing that view.

In addition, Win The Futures technocratic bent seems to ignore the unexpected success of President Donald Trump and the competitive bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), both of whom ran populist campaigns against the reigning financial elite and the power it exerts in politics. (That Trump has stacked his cabinet with billionaires and largely abandoned his professed pro-worker economic views does not diminish how his candidacy demonstrated the appeal of anti-establishment rhetoric with the public.)

Pincus and Hoffman, both major Democratic donors, have together sunk $500,000 into Win The Future. The site provides curious internet browsers the opportunity to supportvarious policy proposals, including a demand that the government offer every American a free engineering degree and tell Congress to fire Trump or youre fired. WTF promises to put ideas that get the most backing on billboards in Washington.

Jamison Foser, a senior adviser at the San Francisco-based NextGen Climate group, tweeted that even the suggestion of free engineering degrees reminiscent of Sanders call for universal free college tuition smacks of self-interest, given who is proposing it.

Limiting this to engineering makes it seem like tech billionaires dont care about education or inequality: just want to pay engineers less, Foser wrote.

Pincus begins the venture after departing as CEO of Zynga in March of 2016. The company, which created onetime hit social network game FarmVille, had difficulty transitioning to the field of mobile apps and its lagging profits reflected that.

I am not sure the creators of the lamest and the most annoying social media experiences are the exact people who should be rewiring the philosophical core of the Democratic Party as they say they want to, Lawson said.

Pincus and Hoffman toyed with the idea of campaigning against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, two California Democrats up for re-election in 2018 who they see as out-of-touch, but decided against it for the launch, according to Recode.

Wed like to see either political outsiders or politicians who are ready to put the people ahead of their career, Pincus told the outlet.

One of the political outsiders Pincus is trying to recruit is Stephan Jenkins, frontman for 1990s rock band Third Eye Blind.

Wealthy centrists have already invested vast sums of money in technocratic schemes to reform government, with mixed success.

Hauser compared Win The Future to No Labels, a Washington-based group that pushes bipartisan process changes such as filibuster reform and has largely fizzled in its efforts.

I literally do not understand the point of this. Its basically No Labels 2.0, Hauser said.

Whats more, Hauser noted, the sites creators failed to buy domains with similar names like winningthefuture.com, a basic feature of successful political-website building that prevents devastating trolling.

That doesnt mean theres no place for Hoffman and Pincus to try their hand at politics, Hauser suggested they are just trying it in the wrong party.

It would be much more valuable for the world if sane, but conservative, self-protective rich people who are against bigotry and recognize that climate science is real became forces within the Republican Party and supported sane Republicans in primaries rather than water down the message of the Democratic Party and its commitment to economic equality and social justice, he said.

Continued here:
Progressives Skewer Silicon Valley Billionaires' Newest Political Pet Project - HuffPost

Bill Knight / Opinion columnist

Conservatives occasionally concede that organized labor has been a reason for rising standards of living and making the middle class, and The Atlantic magazine shows that unions provide common ground for progressives and conservatives alike.

Historically, conservative pundits and politicians have praised unions. Columnist George Will in 1977 said, I think American labor unions get a large share of the credit for making us a middle-class country.

In 1991, Republican economist George Schultz (Secretary of Labor under Richard Nixon and Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan) said a healthy workplace [needs] some system of checks and balances and unions provided an effective system of industrial jurisprudence, a check on corporations focus on profits.

In The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch recalls a 2016 brunch with conservative Eli Lehrer, who runs Washingtons Republican-leaning R Street Institute, and Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union.

Lehrer believes the time has come for the American Right to reconsider its decades-long war on unions, Rauch says. Their collapse, he says, has fueled the growth of government and of the welfare state, which has stepped in to regulate workplaces and provide job security as unions have died out.

Stern thinks unions cannot survive unless they innovate and change, but laws intended to protect and preserve them get in the way, Rauch adds.

The journal National Affairs this summer published Lehrer and Sterns essay about the need for change. In How to Modernize Labor Law, the two write, The fundamental federal rules governing employer-worker relations were written for a different era.

That era was the Great Depression. It resulted in 1935s National Labor Relations Act, but it hasnt substantially changed except for court rulings and sometimes-partisan National Labor Relations Board decisions since 1947s anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.

Meanwhile, regular working people are worried about pay but also anxious, if not angry, about how theyre treated. Last years campaign showed that many workers feel voiceless and powerless, that unhappy workers are angry voters, and that angry voters can lash out against trade, immigration, and even democracy.

Private-sector unions are close to extinct, Rauch writes. In the 1950s, more than one in three private-sector workers belonged to a union; today, unionization is down to 6 percent of the private-sector workforce, lower than it was a century ago before the modern labor movement took off.

The decline of unions is one of the countrys most pressing problems and at least as much a social and political problem as an economic one, he continues. Old-style, mid-20th-century industrial unions had their flaws. But when unions work as they should, they serve important social functions. They can smooth the jagged edges of globalization by giving workers bargaining power. They are associated with lower income inequality. Perhaps most important, they offer workers a way to be heard.

Other models exist for workers organizing, from Europes works councils, which give workers a voice in company affairs, to Germanys permitting unions to organize sectors rather than employers, offering incentives to workers and companies to cooperate for better competitiveness.

Unfortunately, in America in 2017, we dont know how a truly modern union would look, writes Rauch, because it is mostly illegal to find out.

Efforts to legislate reforms have fizzled (most recently, during President Obamas first term, when Democrats had more power), and the GOP-dominated Capitol makes change doubtful. But Stern and Lehrer suggest a workaround like giving states authority to grant labor-law waivers permitting experimentation. For example, if employers and unions had an interesting model that met certain guidelines, they could try it.

The Stern-Lehrer waiver idea is a no-brainer if we want to address the deeper causes of the malaise and distemper afflicting Americas lower-middle class, Rauch writes. Although income stagnation is certainly one culprit, another is the decline of the civic organizations and social institutions that help people feel connected. Service fraternities, volunteer clubs, youth groups, churches, political parties, widespread military service, unions and the rest in their prime all fostered social interaction a sense of social cohesion even when times were much tougher. None matters more than unions.

GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s seem to know this, but also saw the relationship as unchanging.

Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice, Ike said. I have no use for those regardless of their political party who hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.

Contact Bill at Bill.Knight@hotmail.com.

See more here:
Knight: Unions offer balance to conservatives, progressives - Peoria Journal Star

A man was arrested for telling staffers to Sen. Jeff Flake that liberals will solve their Republican problem by getting "better aim," and made a reference to the shooting at a practice for the congressional baseball game last month.

Jason Samuels, Flake's communications director, told Tuscon News Now a protester was arrested on Thursday morning after making threatening statements to staffers.

"You know how liberals are going to solve the Republican problem? They are going to get better aim," he said. "That last guy tried, but he needed better aim. We will get better aim."

The protester was likely referencing last month's shooting in Alexandria, Virginia.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., was wounded along with four others at baseball practice in preparation for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. Scalise remains in the intensive care unit at a Washington, D.C., hospital.

Flake, R-Ariz., was one of the first people to tend to Scalise on the field after the gunman, James Hodgkinson, had been subdued by Capitol Police.

Excerpt from:
Man arrested outside Jeff Flake's office said liberals will get 'better ... - Washington Examiner

Liberals are aggressively trying to debunk a recent study by the University of Washington that found that Seattle's recent move to a $13-an-hour minimum wage had left the city's low-wage workers much worse off.

The study is potentially a major threat to the national movement for a $15 minimum wage, presenting the first significant evidence that such efforts may be doing more harm than good.

Liberals have criticized the report's methodology, arguing that its findings are out of step with past studies on the minimum wage, although increases to Seattle's current level were unprecedented until recently. Mark Long, co-author of the study, shrugged off such criticisms, saying it was to be expected given the groups' politics.

"The [minimum wage] advocates have been critical because our report makes their job harder," Long, a professor with university's Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, told the Washington Examiner. If the study had found results more to the advocates' liking, they wouldn't be complaining about the methodology, he said.

For $15 minimum wage fans, the report released June 26 as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research was a rude shock. It found that the city's increase to $13 an hour in 2016, up from $9.32 in 2013 and part of a planned phase-in to $15 for most employers by 2018, had sharply reduced wealth among low-wage workers because of job losses and reductions in hours worked. Businesses did both to mitigate the sharp increase in labor costs they faced.

"The lost income associated with the hours reductions exceeds the gain associated with the net wage increase of 3.1 percent.... [W]e compute that the average low-wage employee was paid $1,897 per month. The reduction in hours would cost the average employee $179 per month, while the wage increase would recoup only $54 of this loss, leaving a net loss of $125 per month (6.6 percent), which is sizable for a low-wage worker," the study concluded. It found that payrolls for low-wage workers declined by an average 5.8 percent after the $13 rate went into effect, reducing those workers' income by $120 million.

That was before the final $15-an-hour rate is phased in, suggesting the situation for those workers would get even worse. Liberals have been trying to shoot down the results ever since.

"Don't believe the headlines about a flawed minimum wage study. The Seattle economy is booming," tweeted David Rolf, president of SEIU Local 775 and author of "The Fight for $15," on Monday.

Fight for $15, an activist group funded and run by the Service Employees International Union, argued in a web posting that the study was "not credible" because it was "funded by a hedge fund manager's foundation who made a fortune at Enron." The group did not explain any relevance to the university's findings.

The liberal Center for American Progress posted an article called "Five flaws in a new analysis of Seattle's minimum wage," while the liberal Economic Policy Institute published an even lengthier critique. Liberal economists such as Jared Bernstein weighed in as well.

David Cooper, a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, said the study was too far out of line with what other minimum wage studies had found. He argued that it didn't matter that no other studies had looked at rates as high as $13 because Seattle's increase wasn't that large relative to its prior level. "Because this was only looking at the increase from $11 to $13 in Seattle it is not outside the scope of what has been studied before," Cooper said. He said a study on the Seattle minimum wage released last week by the University of California, Berkeley, which showed no ill effects from the increase, was more credible because it was in line with earlier studies.

Other critiques noted that the University of Washington study was not peer-reviewed, didn't include data from "multi-site" employers such as chain restaurants, and had some unusual results, such as finding increases in employment for those earning more than $19 an hour.

That's all nonsense, argued Ryan Bourne, an economist with the free-market Cato Institute think tank. The University of Washington study "is one of the only robust papers we have had on this level of the minimum wage in the U.S." The different results from prior studies suggests those reports missed important effects. "The critics have this completely back to front," Bourne said.

Long said the multi-site employers weren't included because their wage and hour data wasn't available. The researchers compensated by conducting a separate survey of those employers. "What we found was that the multi-site employers were more likely to relocate or shift their work capital. That suggests we are, if anything, underestimating the impact" of the $13 rate on employer cutbacks, he said.

It is true that the paper had not been peer-reviewed but it is undergoing the process now, he said. That's why it was released as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research: so the authors could get feedback from fellow economists. Thus far, the reactions from academics and researchers has been highly positive, Long says. The loudest complaints have come from the biggest advocates of a $15 rate.

Originally posted here:
Liberals try to refute Seattle minimum wage study - Washington Examiner