On the menu this morning

MORNING MESSAGE: The Latest Lie – IRS Targeted Conservatives

The Bite of Apple: Worming Through Tax Loopholes

Homeowners Arrested; Say Bankers Should Have Been

Good Deficit News Bad News for Right

Latest Immigration Bill Twists

Breakfast Sides

MORNING MESSAGE: The Latest Lie – IRS Targeted Conservatives

http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130520/the-latest-lie-irs-targeted-conservatives “The corporate media is blasting out the story that the IRS “targeted conservative groups.” Some in the media say there was “IRS harassment of conservative groups.” Some of the media are going so far as claiming that conservative groups were “audited.” This story that is being repeated and treated as “true” is just not what happened at all. It is one more right-wing victimization fable, repeated endlessly until the public has no choice except to believe it.” Continue reading

The Bite of Apple: Worming Through Tax Loopholes

“Senate investigators find Apple employs elaborate tax avoidance scheme. Time: “The world’s most valuable company is holding overseas some $102 billion of its $145 billion in cash, and an Irish subsidiary that earned $22 billion in 2011 paid only $10 million in taxes … The strategies Apple uses are legal, and many other multinational corporations use similar tax techniques to avoid paying U.S. income taxes on profits they reap overseas. But Apple uses a unique twist … Apple capitalizes on a difference between U.S. and Irish rules regarding tax residency…”

Apple tax avoidance strategy “went beyond anything most experts had ever seen” reports NYT.

“Apple prepares for Washington onslaught” at hearing today, reports Politico: “Apple isn’t taking any chances with senators looking to embarrass CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday at a hearing on the tech giant’s offshore $100 billion stash … Apple has turned to a top Washington law firm for help, O’Melveny & Myers – veterans at trying to keep big companies out of trouble, like Enron, Ford and Goldman Sachs.”

Homeowners Arrested; Say Bankers Should Have Been

District and federal law enforcement officials arrested 17 people at the Justice Department Monday. The Washington Post: “About 100 protesters with groups called the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes marched on the building about 2 p.m. … ‘A couple months ago, Eric Holder said banks are too big to prosecute,” [Jason Collette, a protester,] said. “We think that is fundamentally wrong.’” …

Campaign for Fair Settlement launches “Week of Action” to pressure Justice Department to “prosecuting the bankers who destroyed our economy.

Foreclosure victims arrested in Justice Dept. protest. ThinkProgress: “…a group of activists and foreclosed homeowners marched on the Justice building in downtown Washington, D.C. … protesters moved past a police barricade and attempted to establish a sit-in, at which point police began arresting homeowners and activists.”

OurFuture.org’s Jas Sajjan talks to homeowners who showed up at the protest.

Good Deficit News Bad News for Right

The “deficit scolds” aren’t happy that the deficit is down, notes Paul Krugman: “You’re Bowles/Simpson, with a lucrative and ego-satisfying business of going around the country delivering ominous talks about The Deficit; you’re an employee of one of the many Pete Peterson front groups; and now, all of a sudden, the deficit is receding, and you had nothing to do with it. It’s a disaster!”

W. Post’s Jamelle Bouie reminds cutting the deficit never was what Republicans really wanted: “…Obama and Congress have already taken three major actions to deal with the deficit … [But] the GOP was never really interested in a ‘grand bargain’ to take debt and deficits off the table. Rather, as evidenced by the rhetoric of many Congressional Republican, the real goal was to dismantle the social safety net with aggressive cuts. At the moment, that hasn’t been successful.”

“Projected Medicare and Medicaid Spending Has Fallen by $900 Billion” notes CBPP.

Latest Immigration Bill Twists

Immigration deal with Sen. Orrin Hatch, favoring tech companies over labor concerns, may be near. NYT: “…behind-the-scenes negotiating and arm-twisting picked up in earnest, with Mr. Schumer’s office taking the lead in trying to work out an agreement with Mr. Hatch … By late Monday night, Senate aides said, Mr. Hatch was closing in on a deal with the bipartisan group, and was expected to offer his high-tech amendments on Tuesday.”

“Rubio breaks with Dems on immigration bill’s asylum, student visa provisions” reports The Hill: “Rubio was dismayed the Senate Judiciary Committee defeated an amendment sponsored by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to halt proposed changes until a coordinated review detailing the intelligence and immigration failures [related to the Boston bomb attack] was submitted to Congress by the inspectors general of the relevant agencies … Rubio plans to address the issue after the Judiciary Committee’s markup.”

But bill is withstanding committee process. Time: “Slow but sure seems to be working for the supporters of the Senate’s immigration bill. With Washington distracted by scandals large and small, the Senate Judiciary Committee continued to chew its way through amendments to the bipartisan measure … The Judiciary Committee is hoping to wrap up its work as early as Wednesday night.”

Breakfast Sides

More seniors are living in poverty than previously thought. Politico reports on a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis: “The estimate, which takes into account health spending and regional cost of living, finds 1 in 7 seniors lives in poverty. It was previously thought that just 1 in 10 did. … under some proposals to reform Medicare, these poverty levels would keep climbing. “Under the supplemental poverty measure, which deducts health spending from income, poverty rates could increase if beneficiaries were required to pay higher cost sharing or premiums for Medicare,” the analysis states.”

Labor unions express unease with Obamacare implementation. The Hill: “A variety of unions are publicly balking at how the administration plans to implement the landmark law. … Many UFCW members have what are known as multi-employer or Taft-Hartley plans. According to the administration’s analysis of the Affordable Care Act, the law does not provide tax subsidies for the roughly 20 million people covered by the plans. Union officials argue that interpretation could force their members to change their insurance and accept more expensive and perhaps worse coverage in the state-run exchanges. … [S]ome employers won’t have the incentive to keep their workers’ multi-employer plans without tax subsidies.”

U.S.-China summit set for next month. NYT: “President Obama plans to meet President Xi Jinping of China next month for the first time since Mr. Xi’s installation as the leader of the world’s most populous nation, as the two leaders try to establish a working relationship on critical issues like North Korea, the global economy and allegations of state-sponsored cyber attacks…”

Gov. Chris Christie joins the climate change deniers. Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky: “It wasn’t so long ago that Christie spoke like a rational person on these matters … [But now, when Christie was asked should] New Jersey have prepared with climate change in mind? No, the governor said, ’cause I don’t think there’s been any proof thus far that Sandy was caused by climate change.’ It’s that ‘proof’ that’s the giveaway. No proof is what the science deniers say.”

The deficit is now down 60 percent as a percent of gross domestic product. It is down more than the deficit hawks Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles asked for. This rapid reduction is seriously hurting the economy and jobs, but demands for cuts continue. It is time for Congress and the President to “pivot” to focusing on our real problems: the jobs gap, the wage gap and the trade gap.

Mythical Deficit Problem Solved

The “deficit problem” is man-made. When Bill Clinton was president we were paying off the debt. George W. Bush turned Clinton’s budget surpluses right around, calling deficits “extremely positive news” because they would later force cuts in government. Ronald Reagan’s “strategic deficits” began a strategy to make the borrowing appear so bad that the public would be panicked into allowing cuts in the things government does to make our lives better – so the wealthy few could have even more wealth and power. (Reagan tripled the national debt, Bush doubled it again.)

So after Bush we had a problem. When ‘W’ left office the budget deficit was $1.4 trillion. Then after Obama took office Wall Street and the right started terrifying the public about deficits and outlining their “solutions”: Cut government, cut regulation of the giant corporations, cut entitlements, cut investment in infrastructure, privatize public assets, cut the safety net, etc… Cut the things that government does to make our lives better (government spending) and cut the things government does to protect us from the immense power of the insanely wealthy and their giant corporations.

But something got in their way. The deficit started coming down before all of the “solutions” could be forced on us. The deficit is now down 60 percent as a percent of GDP from the level Bush left behind (see the chart in this post).

The 2010 “Simpson-Bowles” plan called for austerity to lower our budget deficit to 2.3 percent of GDP by 2015. But the latest CBO budget projections say the deficit will be 2.1 percent of GDP in 2015.

Ezra Klein, in “CBO says deficit problem is solved for the next 10 years,” writes, “…the debt disaster that has obsessed the political class for the last three years is pretty much solved, at least for the next 10 years or so.”

Problem solved – austerity and the sequester can go away. For those of us outside Washington and in the real world we’ve been saying all along this isn’t the problem, the problem is that there aren’t enough jobs, people’s wages are stagnant or falling and the country is losing more than a billion dollars a day from bad trade deals. We have real problems to solve, so let’s get to it. Let’s address the job gap and the wage gap and the trade gap.

The mythical budget deficit is problem gone; let’s worry about our real problems.

The Economy Can’t Recover Without An Emphasis On Fixing Jobs, Wages And Trade

The economy can’t recover until housing recovers. Housing can’t recover until people can afford to buy houses. People can’t afford to buy houses until they can get jobs, and those with jobs can’t afford to buy houses until wages go up. Wages cant go up until the trade problem is fixed. And the trade problem is killing jobs.

Explained a different way:

1. The economy can’t recover until housing recovers.
2. Housing can’t recover until people can afford to buy houses.
3. People can’t afford to buy houses until they can get jobs,
4. and those with jobs can’t afford to buy houses until wages go up.
5. Wages cant go up until the trade problem is fixed.
6. And the trade problem is killing jobs.

They say that housing is the key to recovery from recessions. Forbes: Buffett Says Housing Is Key To Recovery, USA Today: Housing holds key to full job growth rebound, Time: Can the Economy Get Healthy Without a Housing Recovery? CAP: A Strong Housing Market Is Critical to Our Economic Recovery and so on. But on NPR Monday, in Is The Housing Recovery Just A Mirage?, they made the key point: “What we really need to do is focus on jobs and unemployment to get people able to have the money to spend on a house.”

Yes, jobs are being created. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month when President Obama took office, and now we are gaining just enough jobs each month to keep up with and get a little bit ahead of growth in the labor force. But there are not enough new jobs and too many of the new jobs are low-wage jobs. So the middle class is still shrinking, and people can’t afford to buy houses to get a real housing recovery underway.

We need more jobs. We have a jobs emergency.

The Jobs Gap

The Hamilton Project explains the jobs gap as “the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month.” They say:

If the economy adds about 208,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate for the best year of job creation in the 2000s, then it will take until April 2020 to close the jobs gap. Given a more optimistic rate of 321,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate of the best year of job creation in the 1990s, the economy will reach pre-recession employment levels by December 2016.

One more thing: “As of April, our nation faces a “jobs gap” of 10.0 million jobs.”

10 million jobs still needed just to catch up to where we should be. That is huge.

Where did the jobs go?

The Trade Deficit

According to economist Dean Baker the trade deficit represents American consumers spending their money overseas rather than here. And that means those dollars are “creating jobs” there, not here. His point was driven home last year when he wrote that, “The main factor leading to job loss [in the 2000s] was the growing U.S. trade deficit.”

The trade deficit represents millions of jobs. That more than $1 billion per day we send out of the country represents how many jobs at $50,000 per year? That’s good jobs sent out of the country every day of every week of every year. That is the trade deficit.

We can start by fixing currency manipulation. A “strong dollar” is a lot of the problem because it means things made here cost more and things made elsewhere cost less. So we aren’t able to sell as much and we are buying more than we should.

A February report from the Economic Policy Institute, “Reducing U.S. trade deficit will generate a manufacturing-based recovery for the United States and Ohio,” written by Robert E. Scott, Helene Jorgensen, and Doug Hall, looked at the job-cost of the portion of the trade deficit that is caused by currency manipulation. The report concludes that fixing just this problem would reduce the trade deficit by between about $190 billion and $400 billion over the course of three years and bring us between 2.2 million and 4.7 million U.S. jobs. Doing this would lower the unemployment rate between 1 percent and 2.1 percent and increase GDP between 1.4 percent and 3.1 percent.

That is just the portion of the trade deficit caused by currency manipulation and you can see the immense cost. Imagine if we took that step as well as other steps to eliminate the trade deficit.

The Wage Gap

A trade deficit also means that our workers not only face high unemployment but are also pitted against exploited workers in countries where those workers don’t have a say in how things are done. This inevitably drives down wages as employers move jobs offshore and remaining workers compete for jobs, all the while afraid to make waves and ask for raises lest their job be shipped out of the country as well.

American workers face high unemployment and then on top of that they face competition from people who are paid a fraction of what Americans earn. The trade deficit represents a significant contributor to this problem.

Fixing the trade deficit also fixes some of the wage gap. But we also need strong unions and strong government to combat the power of the giant corporations and demand that regular working people a fair share of the proceed of our economy.

The “Sequester” And Other Budget Cuts Just Make Things Worse

On top of this, our own government is aggravating the problem, with this wealthy-donor driven focus on deficit reduction instead of job expansion.

For example, Politico: Sequestration gets real for furloughed workers,

Sequestration went from wait-and-see to here-it-is Tuesday when the number of furloughed federal workers hit an eye-popping 820,000. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told 680,000 civilian workers they’d have to stay home 11 days without pay. About 140,000 workers from other government agencies have already been given furlough notices.

The number is expected to grow …

The deficit is not a problem. The Simpson-Bowles target has been reached and passed. The austerity is harming the economy and hurting people. Congress and the President should pivot to jobs. They need to fix the jobs gap, the wage gap and the trade gap, and if they continue to ignore these real problems it is up to We, the People to apply the necessary pressure to make them do it.

—–

Follow me and CAF on Twitter:

You will be hearing a lot about the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. TPP’s negotiations are being held in secret with details kept secret even from our Congress. But giant corporations are in the loop.

TPP is a “trade” agreement between several Pacific-rim countries that is actually about much more than just trade. It will be sold as a trade agreement (because everyone knows that “trade” is good) but much of it appears to be (from what we know) a corporate end-run around things We the People want to do to reign in the giant corporations — like Wall Street regulation, environmental regulation and corporate taxation.

One-Sided Process

The TPP process appears to be set up to push corporate interests over other interests. The TPP is being negotiated in secret, so what we know about it comes from leaked documents. Even our Congress is being kept out of the loop. But 600 corporate representatives are in the loop while representatives of groups that protect working people, human, political and civil rights and our environment are largely not in the loop.

This one-sided participation unfortunately indicates that the interests of giant corporations are likely to override the interests of working people and those who want to protect non-corporate interests. Otherwise there would be more representation by representatives of organizations representing these concerns, and greater transparency into the process.

TPP Is A Very, Very Big Deal

The coming TPP is a very, very big deal. If it is agreed to by the Senate and signed by the President it will override American laws in many areas. We won’t be allowed to enforce laws and regulations that impede the “rights” granted to big corporations under this agreement, and it will be very hard to rescind the agreement once signed, no matter how much damage might result. Just look at how NAFTA, China’s entry into the WTO and other agreements are causing huge trade deficits and sending jobs, factories and industries out of the country while dramatically increasing income and wealth inequality.

Making the TPP work for We, the People should be up there on our “litmus test” of things we require of our elected officials — right along with pledging no cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

TPP Not Just Trade

It looks like TPP will go way beyond what most of us would consider to be in a normal “trade” agreement. TPP — negotiated by giant corporate interests — appears set to give giant corporations a veto over a country’s ability to set many laws and regulations that are designed to reign in those corporations. Quelle surprise!

Leaked documents appear to show that negotiators are writing provisions that will set rules that are binding on Congress and our state legislatures tell us what laws and regulations our own country can pass or enforce in areas like:

• intellectual property rights like patents and copyrights,
• government procurement like Buy American which would be banned,
• investment and land use,
• service-sector regulation,
• food and product safety,
• corporate competition,
• labor,
• even environmental standards.
• Leaks show that TPP even limits government regulation of financial services!

Dean Baker explains that non-trade items like patents in an agreement like TPP can have a huge effect on us by dramatically increasing prices of items like pharmaceuticals, in Political Corruption and the “Free Trade” Racket,

Tariffs and quotas might raise the price of various items by 20 or 30 percent. By contrast, patent and copyright protection is likely to raise the price of protected items 2,000 percent or even 20,000 percent above the free market price. Drugs that would sell for a few dollars per prescription in a free market would sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars when the government gives a drug company a patent monopoly.

Again: There are over 600 corporate representatives participating in the TPP process, but few if any representatives of human rights, environmental, civil rights or worker rights organizations. And the resulting agreement will be binding on governments! The corporate powers apparently granted in the TPP can override domestic laws on environmental health and safety, and labor and citizens’ rights. If this agreement becomes law multinationals can claim that those domestic laws and regulations hamper free trade and can sue for millions of dollars in “damages.”

Bad History Of Trade Agreements Harming Economy, Democracy

Our one-sided, corporate-negotiated trade agreements have dramatically enriched Wall Street and a few CEOs. But the devastation that is apparent in many regions of our country along with the hollowing out of our middle class tells the real story of what these agreements can do to an economy. For example, we all know what has happened since China was allowed to enter the WTO. In the 2000s we lost 50,000+ factories and at least 6 million jobs just to China. Because of the massive cost of building a manufacturing infrastructure it will be very difficult to restore even key industries. But the 1% who pushed this made out extremely well.

Even the just-signed Korea Free Trade agreement is already hurting our economy. It has increased the trade deficit, increased imports and decreased exports! A recently-released fact sheet from Public Citizen looks at the damage our economy is already experiencing from the Korea, Panama and Columbia agreements. The section on Korea tells the story: exports to Korea down 10%, trade deficit up 37%:

“One year into the Korea FTA, U.S. goods exports to Korea have declined by 10 percent (a $4.2billion decrease) in comparison to the year before FTA implementation. U.S. meat producers lost a combined $206 million in beef, pork and poultry exports in the first year of the Korea FTA relative to the year before FTA implementation, while the U.S. auto and auto parts industries suffered a 16 percent increase in the U.S. auto trade deficit with Korea. Overall, the U.S. trade deficit with Korea has swelled 37 percent under the FTA.”

Just one of many examples in the fact sheet:

• Imports of cars and auto parts from Korea have soared 15 percent (more than $2.5 billion) under the FTA, driving a 16 percent increase in the U.S. trade deficit with Korea in autos and auto parts relative to the year before FTA implementation.

Also from the fact sheet — loss of 12,000 jobs:

“The combined U.S. trade deficit with Korea, Colombia and Panama under the FTAs has jumped 11percent above pre-FTA levels for the same months as exports to Korea have declined and imports from Korea and Panama have risen substantially. Using the same ratio employed by the Obama administration, this $2.3 billion combined trade deficit expansion implies the net loss of more than 12,000 U.S. jobs in just the first several months of the new FTAs.”

And that’s just the recent Korea agreement, and in just a few months since it went into effect.

Trade Can Be Good Or Bad, Depending…

No question about it, a good trade deal can boost exports, boost the economy, boost employment … And of course this promise is how these trade deals are sold to us.

But the bad trade deals we have gotten ourselves into have instead boosted the trade deficit, boosted unemployment, boosted income and wealth inequality, boosted the loss of factories and industries, boosted the hollowing-out of our middle class and boosted the domination of our politics by the large corporate interests.

All trade deals have winners and losers. NAFTA and letting China into the WTO were obviously big winners for Wall Street, the 1%ers, and their giant multinational corporations. But these and similar trade deals helped break the back of the unions, the middle class and our economy — especially manufacturing and its supply chains. The result of these changes has been that all of the gains from our economy as productivity increases have increasingly gone to fewer and fewer people who are higher and higher up the food chain.

We need an open, democratic process that ensures that We, the People are the winners from our trade deals.

Needed Fixes

The TPP negotiations should not just be negotiated to serve the interests of giant multinational corporations. The process should be opened up to the public and democracy, so people and groups with a huge stake in the outcome — like labor unions, environmental organizations, human rights groups and consumer organizations — can participate. With only corporate participation, only corporate interests will be served. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

The process of democracy should not be subverted by a “fast track” rule that keeps our Congress from fully considering the implications and effects of such an agreement. “Fast track” just extends the lack of citizen involvement in negotiations into a lack of citizen involvement in the finalization!

Last June 130 members of the Congress wrote a letter to the US Trade Representative asking for transparency in the TPP negotiations and consultation with members of Congress. In addition, more than 400 organizations have asked Congress to replace the “Fast Track” system that limits Congress’ (democracy’s) ability to get involved in the process, and to call for a new direction for TPP as well as other trade agreements.

We also need strong tests and irrevocable language about withdrawing from the agreement if it is harming our economy, environment, smaller businesses, tax base and/or our working people.

TPP and all future trade deals must include clear and enforceable rules covering currency manipulation and other ways that countries game the system.

Elizabeth Warren Drives It Home

Watch Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asking about trends in trading patterns with Korea since the new “free trade” treaty went into effect, and about how TPP looks like an end run around Wall Street regulation.

Get Involved

The next round of TPP talks will be held May 15–24 in Lima, Peru. It is time to start making sure that your voice is heard in DC. Trade deals can lift people on both sides of trade borders. But only if a true open and democratic process is used to reach agreement. Otherwise these agreements will continue to be gamed to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

One of the best comprehensive sources of information on TPP is at Public Citizen and their Global Trade Watch. They have a landing page just waiting for you: TPP: Corporate Power Tool of the 1%. Go take a look.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has a TPP page, explaining their concerns about the sections involving Intellectual Property (IP) as well as the general lack of transparency and openness.

Public Knowledge has a TPP landing pageo expressing similar concerns.

The AFL-CIO has a TPP detail page and offers Trans-Pacific FTA Outline concluding:

“Although not all the news coming from APEC was good, it is too early to tell if the TPP will live up to its promise to create great opportunities for America’s working families. Now is the time to speak up. If you have concerns about some of these announcements, too, now is the time to speak up—the TPP is still being negotiated.”
—–

Follow me and CAF on Twitter:

We give away our jobs and factories and industries to China. Some geniuses apparently thought that meant we should also let our military security be contracted out to China as well.

A new report from the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), Remaking American Security, Authored by Brig. Gen. Adams (US Army, Retired) looks at supply chain weaknesses and chokepoints, to see how vulnerable our security is to disruption by China and other “potentially unreliable” foreign suppliers.

Yes, we farm out critical defense supply contracts to that China, the country that has been hacking into our computers.

Take a look at AAM’s landing page for the report, Report Says U.S. Military Dangerously Dependent on Foreign Suppliers to see the Executive Summary and links into the report.

Conclusion: Our “over-reliance on foreign suppliers for critical defense materials” means that the country is dangerously dependent on “potentially unreliable” foreign suppliers for the raw materials, parts, and finished products needed to defend America.

Here is just one example from the report: “The United States is completely dependent on a single Chinese company for the chemical needed to produce the solid rocket fuel used to propel HELLFIRE missiles.”

Solutions: This is so important that I am going to list the entire summary of conclusions, details are available in the report and condensed on a separate PDF.

But first, I want to point out that following these recommendations will also increase our own job base, reduce our massive trade deficit and strengthen our economy.

• Increasing long-term federal investment in high-technology industries, particularly those involving advanced research and manufacturing capabilities;
• Properly updating, applying, and enforcing existing laws and regulations to support the U.S. defense industrial base;
• Developing domestic sources of key natural resources that our armed forces require;
• Ensuring that defense industrial base concerns are considered at the highest levels when formulating the U.S. National Military Strategy, National Security Strategy and throughout the Quadrennial Defense Review process;
• Building consensus among government, industry, the defense industrial base workforce, and the military on the best ways to strengthen the defense industrial base;
• Increasing cooperation between federal agencies and between government and industry to build a healthier defense industrial base;
• Strengthening collaboration between government, industry, and academic research institutions to educate, train, and retain people with specialized skills to work in key defense industrial base sectors;
• Crafting legislation to support a broadly representative defense industrial base strategy;
• Modernizing and securing defense supply chains through networked operations that provide ongoing communications between prime contractors and the supply chains they depend on; and
• Identifying potential defense supply chain chokepoints and planning to prevent disruptions.

Please visit AAM’s page on this report, and if you can please read the report.
—–

Follow me and CAF on Twitter:

President Obama set a goal of 1 million new manufacturing jobs in his second term. Last month we added zero. Not one. Nada. Zip. We did add low-wage jobs, though. Maybe we can talk about a national manufacturing strategy now?

A Million Manufacturing Jobs?

In the 2012 campaign President Obama set a goal of creating 1 million new manufacturing jobs. (This goal comes after the country lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2009.) Manufacturing jobs bring money into the economy. Manufacturing jobs also bring along with them many jobs in other sectors that support manufacturing, from the supply chain to the maintenance to the marketing and sales of the goods. This is what the President understood when he set this goal.

But with the March jobs numbers out this morning the economy has created a total of only 39,000 manufacturing jobs this year — zero in March. That leaves the country with 961,000 manufacturing jobs to go in the time remaining.

Perhaps this dearth of new manufacturing jobs has something to do with the economic stagnation we see around us?

Job Report Summary

While the jobs report was not too bad overall, it was terrible for manufacturing. Job growth for January and February was revised up by 114,000, so average job growth for the last three months was 212,000. But job gains were largely in low-wage sectors with zero gained in manufacturing. Employment services, restaurant employees and the retail sector accounted for more than half of April job growth. Health care added 19,000 jobs.

The sequester started to hit, with 8,000 jobs lost in the federal government (3,500 of those from the Postal Service.) State and local governments lost 3,000 jobs, which means 224,000 jobs lost over the last year. Construction lost 6,000 jobs, apparently from public projects.

The #AAMeter Manufacturing Jobs Tracker

The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) Jobs Tracker — the #AAMeter — tracks progress toward the President’s goal of adding 1 million manufacturing jobs. AAM uses the monthly jobs report data to keep track of how we are dowing towards reaching the 1-million-jobs goal, which would require an average monthly increase of 20,833 manufacturing jobs. The picture tells the story:

Not so great. What do we need to do to boost our manufacturing sector, bringing better-paying jobs and the jobs that support manufacturing?

First We Need A National Manufacturing Strategy

We need more jobs, higher-wage jobs, and jobs in sectors that do more for the economy. This requires a national manufacturing strategy.

Other countries have national strategies to increase the strength of their national manufacturing sector. We do not. We are wedded to an ideology that says that we as a nation should not protect our good-paying jobs and our manufacturing sector. In fact, the “free-market” and “free-trade” ideology even says it is wrong to have a strategy as a country to keep and strengthen our important economic sectors.

Alliance for American Manufacturing’s Scott Paul said, “The United States is the only major industrial nation that does not have a cohesive national manufacturing strategy. We’ve outlined steps the president should to help meet his manufacturing jobs goal. If the Administration and Congress show a genuine willingness to act on these common sense policies, we’ll see our Jobs Tracker move toward 1 million jobs gained.”

Democrats in Congress have, in fact, outlined a Make It In America legislative plan,

The Democrats’ Make it in America plan is a bold initiative to get America working again by building the products of the future here at home. Make it in America will create the conditions necessary to unleash American skill and ingenuity to power our 21st century economy. As President Obama has said, America must out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world and our initiative will help our nation do just that. When we Make it in America, American families will make it too.

Please click through to see information about the Jobs Opportunities Between our Shores (JOBS) Act, New Alternative Transportation to Give American Solutions (NAT GAS) Act, National Manufacturing Strategy Act, Build American Jobs Act, Build America Bonds to Create Jobs Now Act, National Infrastructure Development Bank Act, The Airports, Highways, High-Speed Rail, Trains and Transit: Make it in America, One Global Internet Act, Permanent R&D Tax Credit, Rare Earths and Critical Materials Revitalization Act, Energy Critical Elements Renewal Act, Resource Assessment of Rare Earths (RARE) Act, Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act, Innovative Technologies Investment Incentives Act, Small Business Start-Up Savings Accounts, Make it in America Block Grant Act, Clean Energy Technology Manufacturing and Export Assistance Act, Security in Energy and Manufacturing (SEAM) Act, American Manufacturing Efficiency & Retraining Investment Collaboration (AMERICA Works), Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success (SECTORS) Act, The Keep American Jobs from Going Down the Drain Act, Berry Amendment Extension Act, American Jobs Matter Act and the All-American Flag Act.

Democratic Whip Sten Hoyer has been a leader in promoting the Make It In America agenda, with a Make It In America web page as well.

Ideology, or Something Else?

But here is the thing: everything is being blocked by Republican obstruction in the name of “free market” and “free trade” ideology.

And here is the other thing: those who are driving and funding the ideology are making big money off of the damage this ideology is doing! The financial sector funds much of the push to “free trade” and against a national manufacturing strategy. And as a result the financial sector is soaring at the expense of manufacturing and the jobs it brings. The oil and coal industries are funding much of the fight against alternative energy, energy efficiency, green manufacturing and the jobs it brings. And as a result the oil and coal sectors are booming at teh expense of the rest of the economy.

The Koch brothers alone gained $15 billion — a 43% increase — between March 2010 and Sept 2011. Are their motives really ideological? It turns out to be a very profitable ideological agenda for them.

And we don’t even know if other countries are helping drive America’s ideological opposition to national strategies by funding the right-wing “free market” “think tanks” that push it, because the funding for these efforts is not disclosed.

Other Steps

Along with implementing a national manufacturing strategy there are many other things we can do to promote our manufacturing sector to revive our economy and create meaningful, good-paying jobs. Among these:

Tax policies: End the tax incentives that encourage American companies to move jobs, factories and profit centers out of the country. Immediately end the “deferral” of taxes on foreign income. Companies get a tax advantage on foreign profits over profits they earn here, so they more operations out of the country.

The big one in tax policy is offshore tax deferral: Companies are currently holding $1.7 trillion out of our economy and away from shareholders, just because we let them avoid taxes until the bring it back. So they move profit centers of tax havens, etc. Repeal this deferral and make them bring that money home now and stop moving profit centers out of the country from now on.

Other tax policies that would help: Section 199 Domestic Production Deduction; Accelerated Cost Recovery; Depletion Allowances; Net Operating Losses; Last-In, First-Out Accounting; Interest Cost Deductibility; Research & Development Tax Credit; Current Tax Treatment of Employee Health Care and Pension Contributions; Credit for Prior Year Minimum Tax.

Currency manipulation: Countries like China manipulate their currency to give them a price advantage in international markets. This must stop. There are steps we can take to stop this but our administration is hog-tied by foreign policy needs that conflict with our country’s trade-balance needs. For example they can’t crack down on China and then ask China’s help with North Korea. The answer is for Congress to pass a law requiring balancing tariffs on goods from countries that manipulate currency.

Buy American policies: COngress and states should improve Buy American requirements in procurement. Our tax dollars should boost our economy.

A recent example — Reps. Pete Visclosky (D-IN) and Tim Murphy (R-PA) have introduced the American Steel First Act of 2013, a bill to require the Department of Transportation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security to exclusively use American-made iron and steel in infrastructure projects.

Defense procurement especially needs Buy American requirements. Contractors should be required to increase their domestic procurement. This is about national security vulnerabilities just as much as about our tax dollars supporting our economy.

Fix and modernize our country’s infrastructure: We could have full employment right away if we just did what we need to do anyway and will have to do eventually. Maintain and modernize our infrastructure (with American-made supplies.) Our infrastructure is crumbling. We need to completely modernize our infrastrucutre so our economy is competitive, and in the process we will revitalize jobs and manufacturing.

Invest in education: to improve our high schools, colleges and universities. We need 21st-century education with a renewed focus on manufacturing in America.

Invest in energy efficiency and green manufacturing: There is a green revolution taking place in the world and we are not in the lead. The President’s 50mpg mandate is a great start, but we need renewable energy standards, tax credits for alternative energy, and policies to promote green manufacturing, especially working to capture a share of wind, solar, advanced battery, electric car and similar manufacturing.

—–

Follow me and CAF on Twitter:

News reports tell us that more than 500 people have now died and more than 2,500 were injured in Savar, Bangladesh, while the toll in West, Texas stands at 15 dead and over 200 injured. Behind these two disasters is  a common thread of greed – and a common need for unionized resistance.

“It was like a nuclear bomb went off,” said the mayor as a mushroom cloud soared above his tiny Texas town.  The explosion “ripped through three feet of concrete floor slab and then tore apart 10 additional feet of earth,” scattering the wreckage more than 1,000 feet and leaving a blast crater 93 feet wide.

This was the second mushroom cloud to be seen over Texas in recent years. The first was also a workplace explosion, at an oil refinery.

Bystanders weren’t safe in Bangladesh, either. The Savar building collapsed during rush hour, hurling debris through the air while crushing and killing hundreds of the workers inside.

The Whole Story

News reports offer information, but don’t tell the whole story. There’s an underlying theme behind the barrage of words and images from the fertilizer plant explosion and the collapse of a textile factory, and it’s this: When one worker is unsafe anywhere, we’re all unsafe everywhere.

One word that’s conspicuously absent from these news account is “union.”  Without it this story of death and disaster will be repeated, again and again and again.

These aren’t just stories about strangers. The Texas plant endangered us all with lax security which failed to safeguard highly explosive materials used by terrorists like Tim McVeigh, and permitted the repeated theft of chemicals used to make methamphetamines.

The Texas plant was surrounded by a school, a retirement home, and private residences. The explosion ripped the roofs from some of those homes and the elementary school, and lawsuits are already being filed by the plant’s newly-homeless neighbors.

And the Savar story is as close to us as the clothes on our backs. The factory manufactured clothing for American distributors that included Benetton, Joe Fresh, The Children’s Place, Primark, Monsoon, and DressBarn.

Godless

The Texas Attorney General’s Office brags about its “Right to Work” laws, which became “Right to Die” laws last week. Union membership in Texas is roughly half the national average, and the national figure has been declining precipitously for far too long.

Trade union activity in Bangladesh was suspended for two years in 2006 when the government declared a “state of emergency,” and its unions are frequently cozy with political parties. They possess neither the strength nor the independence to fight for workplace wages and safety.

The workers in Savar weren’t just endangered. They were underpaid, working 14 or more hours a day and yet still living in deprivation. As “War On Want” documents, 3.5 million garment workers in Bangladesh subsist on poverty wages while laboring in 4,825 factories. More than 85 percent of them are women.

Pope Francis correctly described their condition as “slavery,” adding that their employer’s behavior “goes against God.”

A Pattern of Death

Their deaths weren’t random or unpredictable, no matter what the politicians want you to believe.

Texas Governor Rick Perry denied that lax oversight caused the West explosion, while the Bangladeshi Finance Minister who outraged the world by saying the accident “wasn’t really serious” added that “These are individual cases of … accidents. It happens everywhere.”

That’s a lie. It’s the lie they tell to hide the underlying pattern behind these deaths – a pattern of under-represented workers and unrestrained greed.

And they endanger us all. As the AFL-CIO notes, the West plant hadn’t been inspected by OSHA for twenty-eight years. The plant did not report the fact that it was storing 270 tons of ammonium nitrate to the Department of Homeland Security as required by law, even though that’s more than 200 times the amount Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. We’re expected to suspend our civil liberties in the name of national security, but businesses aren’t even being asked to follow safety regulations.

And, absurdly, the deficit debate in Washington is still centered around how much to cut from vital regulatory agencies, rather than on how much to should increase to their budgets.

A Story That Changed the World

There was a time when such a tragedy changed the world.

Like that workplace in Savar, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory primarily employed women. And like their Bangladeshi counterparts, those women worked seven days a week for at least 13 hours each day. In 1911, 146 garment workers burned to death in that factory during a half-hour of horror. Their deaths led to a public outcry, gave new momentum to the union movement, and triggered a wave of new worker safety laws.

Their deaths weren’t unexpected. Union organizers had been fighting for better working conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory for years.  The 1909 Shirtwaist Strike, also called “the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” led to marginal improvements in hours and pay. But even after a 1910 factory fire killed 25 people in nearby Hackensack, New Jersey, it took the Triangle tragedy to galvanize a movement.

A documentary called “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl” tells the story of the 1909 strike. But heaven alone couldn’t protect the working girls at the Triangle factory, any more than it can protect workers in Savar or Texas.

Sometimes heaven needs human help.

People Protect the Working Person

Organizers stepped up their efforts after the 1911 tragedy. Support and membership increased dramatically.  With the help of local newspapers, the National Women’s Trade Union League of America sent out questionnaires and documented working conditions in a number of factories. Twenty-five public figures were recruited into a Citizens Committee for Public Safety. They organized “mass meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, which was attended by thousands of citizens, including a variety of public figures, reformists, clergymen, union people, and politicians.”

They got results. A “Bureau of Fire Prevention” was created and the Municipal Fire Code was amended to prevent future disasters.  The state organized a Factory Investigating Commission whose findings led to the passage of thirty-six new labor laws in the following three years. Those laws became a national model.

We saw similar responses as recently as 1968, when a West Virginia mining disaster led to a general coal miners’ strike. That led to the passage of the Federal Coal Mine Safety and Health Act, and shortly afterward to the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

As American as a Union Contract

There was a time when American unionism was considered one of our most valuable exports. It was even used as a Cold War tool, providing other countries with a humane and democratic alternative to totalitarian Soviet-led Communism. Unions were an essential part of the process of democratizing Soviet Europe.

I worked with union organizers on State Department education missions to provide working people with information on union-supported benefits. We spoke to coal miners in the Silesian mountains, dock workers from Gdansk, and factory workers in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

The President and Secretary of State were Republicans in those days. But they understood that unionism was as American as apple pie, and that a strong global union movement benefits all of us.

One Big Oligarchy

The IWW – the “Wobblies” – used to talk about “One Big Union” for the “workers of the world.” But it’s corporations, not workers, who have globalized in the 21^st Century. Multinationals span the globe, bypassing sovereign rights and local economies, collaborating with one another at the expense of consumers and workers everywhere.

They’ve formed “One Big Oligarchy” to control the price of labor and restrict the rights of consumers. We all pay the price – with our wallets, and our lives.

Apple is warned of deadly fire dangers in its China suppliers’ factories, and Steve Jobs does nothing. Government officials are warned of imminent building collapse in Bangladesh, but they protect their cronies as they too decide to do nothing. Company owners in Texas criminally falsify safety records and they, too, do nothing.

In each case, those endangered workers needed independent unions to fight that One Big Oligarchy for their rights – and their lives.

A Disaster Speaks

The politicians came to give their eulogies in West, Texas. But even the President’s moving and eloquent remarks said nothing about ensuring that government will do more to protect the people of that town. Neither the President nor any of the other speakers promised to provide more funding and stronger laws to protect other people from experiencing a tragedy like the one that scarred that little Texas tow

What about us? What should we do?

They’re counting us to become numbed by the sheer numbers of the lost. People were galvanized by the Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy because they saw the humanity in the fallen. The One Big Oligarchy is relying on Stalin’s dictum that “One death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic.”

To resist them, we must tell of the tragedy. Poet Nicole Cooley quotes the French writer Maurice Blanchot in a moving essay about disasters and poetry. “It is not you who will speak,” said Blanchot. “Let the disaster speak in you.”

The disaster speaks first with the faces of the dead. Then it speaks with the words of loss. Then it speaks with action.

Union Starlight

And action, in this case, means union.

Cooley also quotes from Rebecca Solnit’s powerful book, A Paradise Made in Hell, in which Solnit notes that “the word emergency comes from emerge, to rise out of,” and that “disaster” is derived from “the Latin compound of dis-, or away, without, and astro, star or planet; literally without a star.”

Unions can be one such star. Without them we’ll remain locked in a global race toward the bottom on wages, benefits, and even the sanctity of our own lives.  The blight of globalization doesn’t just reveal itself in the loss of American jobs, nor is it best fought with a crude “us against them” mentality.

What’s needed is a recognition that every life is worth fighting for, in every field and factory and mine on the planet.  It’s fought with the understanding that better-paid workers buy more goods and raise the global standard of living, no matter where they live.

The stories from Texas and Bangladesh shouldn’t just horrify us. They should galvanize us into action.  They aren’t complete until we choose to live them ourselves. As union hero Mary “Mother” Jones once said, “Mourn the dead, but fight like hell for the living.”

The April jobs report of the Bureau of Labor Services is sobering.  The mediocre jobs number  – 165,000 new jobs or barely enough to cover new entrants into workforce — is a self-inflicted wound. Government austerity — tax hikes and spending cuts — is suffocating the economy, just when it needs air.

And the perversity will get worse.  The sequester cuts are only now beginning to hit.  Austerity is driving Europe deeper into recession.  China is slowing.  US exports will suffer.  And Washington is about to descend into new self-manufactured crises around next year’s budget and the debt ceiling.

The partisan trench warfare takes human casualties.  Over 20 million people are in need of full-time work.  37% of the officially unemployed have been out of work for more than 27 weeks.  Wages of those who are working are not keeping up with prices..  Families are losing their homes.  Marriages break under the strain.  The young are idled; their hopes crushed.  Americans are paying a terrible price for Washington’s folly.

A look deeper into the numbers dispels illusions.  Construction is reviving we’re told. But construction employment is down for the month, up 3.8% for the year and not near recovering 2007 levels  (B-4 BLS establishment survey of weekly payrolls).  Companies are “insourcing” to the U.S., we’re told. But manufacturing weekly aggregate payrolls were down for the month, and up a paltry 1.3% for the year, and still below 2007 levels.  Government job cuts — down 89,000 for the year — are likely to get worse before they get better.   Government employment is down 11,000 for the month.

The basic measures of employment show an economy that is dead in the water in terms of employment over the course of the last year.  The civilian labor force participation rate at 63.3% is basically unchanged from the 63.4% in April of 2012. The employment-population rate at 58.6% is basically unchanged from the 58.5% rate of a year ago.

For workers, the economy is at best treading water. The Federal Reserve keeps sending out life rafts — and the Congress keeps letting the air out of them. This folly cannot go on.

It is time for Washington to add fuel to the economy, not starve it.  The president made sensible jobs proposals in his State of the Union address – calling for spending now to rebuild our aged infrastructure, put teachers back to work, expand pre-school, retrofit buildings for energy efficiency.  Congress should act on these, and expand on them.

The illusions about austerity are shattered. Its intellectual foundations have been exposed as fraudulent.  Everyone understands that austerity is costing jobs.  Even conservative Republicans complain that the sequester is costing jobs in the military or in their districts.  Now the only question is whether the Congress can rouse itself to act rationally in the midst of this ongoing national crisis.

The trade deficit fell to “only” $38.8 billion in March. This could mean that manufacturing is starting to shift from China (good) — or it could mean our economy is slowing and we just aren’t buying as much as we would have (not so good). It is also because we are importing less oil (really good). The balance of trade is important because trade is how our country makes a living as a country. This huge continuing deficit matters, because it is literally draining money and jobs (and factories and industries) from our economy. (Funny how the 1%ers complain about budget deficits while they promote trade deficits.)

The March Report

The March trade deficit numbers were released today by the Census Department’s US Bureau of Economic Analysis. (It takes a bit of time to gather all the data, so we’re only seeing March numbers now.)

So here are the main lines from this report:

• The U.S. international goods and services deficit fell from $43.6 billion in February to $38.8 billion in March.
• The U.S. goods deficit with China fell from $23.4 billion in February to $17.9 billion in March.

According to the Alliance for American Manufacturing the $5.4 billion drop in our trade deficit with China “was almost exclusively due to a drop in imports of toys, games, and sporting goods; apparel; and, footwear.” Also AAM’s Scott Paul points out that the March trade deficit with China is always the year’s low point, so this might just be a blip not a trend.

“The U.S.-China data, looking back over more than a decade, shows March to regularly be the smallest or next-to-smallest bilateral monthly deficit in each year, so I’m not optimistic that it represents any sort of trend moving forward.”

The story here is that we still have a huge trade deficit, particularly with China. USA Today explains: U.S. trade deficit falls to $38.8 billion,

The U.S. trade deficit narrowed in March for a second month as the daily flow of imported crude oil dropped to the lowest level in 17 years. … Overall, the deficit shrank to $38.8 billion, an 11% drop from February’s $43.6 billion, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

… A smaller trade gap can boost economic growth as U.S. companies earn more from overseas sales while consumers and businesses spend less on foreign products.

Trade Deficit Hurts Economy And Jobs

Note that last line — it’s important to get this. A trade deficit hurts the economy and jobs. Not only does it mean money is draining from the economy, but it also means our working people are pitted against low-wage workers. A trade deficit enables companies to cut wages. It is the primary reason everyone’s pay has been stagnant or falling since the end of the 70′s — when the balance of trade turned from surplus to deficit.

Now, look at this chart:

See if you can spot the relationship. Hint: Trade deficits enabled employers to squeeze workers. Wages decoupled from productivity increases, and the result is that today 40% of Americans make less than the 1968 minimum wage, had it kept pace with productivity growth.

And people wonder why they feel such a squeeze.

Who Benefits From Trade Deficits?

Another chart. See if you can spot the relationship between this chart and the charts posted above:

This chart shows that financial-sector and non-financial-sector compensation used to rise together, but in the early 80′s they decoupled (The “Reagan Revolution.”) Financial-sector compensation took off, while non-financial-sector compensation did not.

This is why the middle class is disappearing. When we allowed American companies to close factories here and open them there, and then ship the same goods back here to sell in the same stores, we made American workers afraid they would be next and afraid to make waves. So they accepted lower wages and longer hours. People are even afraid to take vacations and sick days. This enabled a few at the top get fabulously rich. This was the cause of the “hollowing out” of the middle class, the extreme income wealth inequalty, and the resulting economic stagnation.

Who benefits from the trade deficit? The 1%: the Mitt Romneys, the Wall Streeters, the corrupters.

—–

Follow me and CAF on Twitter:

Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good. Most had forecast growth of at least 3 percent (on an annualized basis) in the first quarter. But we learned this Monday morning (in the Commerce Department’s report) it grew only 2.5 percent.

That’s better than the 2 percent growth last year and the slowdown at the end of the year. But it’s still cause for serious concern. 

First, consumers won’t keep up the spending.Their savings rate fell sharply — from 4.7% in the last quarter of 2012 to 2.6% from January through March.

Add in March’s dismal employment report, the lowest percentage of working-age adults in jobs since 1979, and January’s hike in payroll taxes, and consumer spending will almost certainly drop.

Median household incomes continues to decline, adjusted for inflation. Another report out today showed consumer confidence fell in April.

Second, the recovery continues to be wildly lopsided. The only thing really keeping it going is the rip-roaring stock market. But the stock market only boosts the wealth of the richest 10 percent of Americans, who own 90 percent of stocks (including 401-K retirement accounts).

But no economy can maintain momentum just on the spending of the richest 10 percent.

Third, American exports can’t possibly pick up the slack. In fact, they’re dropping. Europe is falling into recession because of austerity economics. Japan is still a basket case. China’s economy is slowing. Much of the developing world’s economy is dependent on exports to the developed world – so don’t hold your breath for developing countries to bail us out.

So what is Washington doing? Worse than nothing. It has now adopted the same kind of austerity economics that’s doomed Europe — cutting federal spending and reducing total demand. And the sequester doesn’t end September 30. It takes an even bigger bite out of the federal budget next fiscal year.

Earth to Washington: The economy is slowing. The recovery is stalling. At the very least, repeal the sequester.

You don’t have to be an astrologer to see the dangers ahead.

Originally posted at RobertReich.Org.

“Spending cuts hold back US growth,” warns an across the page headline of the conservative Financial Times. No surprise there.

Americans are in trouble.  Wages are losing ground.  Over 20 million need full-time work.  The percentage of working-age Americans with jobs is at its lowest level since 1979.

A continuing series
Read the full seriesTell your member of Congress

And now cuts in government spending – led by the idiotic sequester that was designed to be so abhorrent that it would never be adopted – are crippling an already lame “recovery.”  The sequester isn’t just dumb; it’s damaging.  Please join in calling for its repeal.  Go here to tell your legislator to repeal the sequester.

Last week, the Congress heard from businessmen and women stranded on flights delayed because of the furloughs of air traffic controllers.  Spurred by the anger of the moneyed class, it took only four days for the supposedly gridlocked Congress to “circumvent” the sequester for airline passengers.

Commentators noted that the Republican House leadership couldn’t seem to hear the cries of 800,000 jobless workers in 19 states who suffered cuts of an average of $120 a month in their unemployment checks.  Or the thousands of children about to lose access to Head Start programs.  Or the 140,000 households who will be deprived of housing vouchers.  Or the 70,000 college students who will lose access to grants they depend on.

It’s no secret that when money talks, Congress listens.  What is incredible is that Congress seems intent on driving this economy back into recession, which will lead to more unemployment and spreading misery.

The sequester cuts are merely the most perverse of Washington’s austerity lunacies.  The economy is slowing.  Exclude episodic spending on inventories, the growth in the first quarter of 2013 was 1.5 percent (down from 2.4 percent in the third quarter of 2012 and 1.9 percent in the fourth quarter).

Wages aren’t keeping up with prices.  Families have been saving less.  Add the payroll tax hike and consumers aren’t going to drive the economy.  Exports are down since Europe is sinking under austerity, Japan is a mess and China is slowing.  Business has been able to sustain profits by cost-cutting, moving jobs abroad, or displacing them with technology.  But that can’t keep up for long.  The stock market has soared, but can’t keep rising if the economy doesn’t follow.

This is a poisonous mix.  The Federal Reserve is taking extreme measures to fend off economic decline, but it can’t do it alone. The situation, as The New York Times editorialized on Sunday, “urgently calls for more federal spending, not less.”

It is offensive that Congress should act with alacrity to relive the inconvenience suffered by airline passengers while doing nothing for the agonies being visited upon the weak and the impoverished.  But it is both dumb and dangerous that the Congress continues to inflict austerity on Americans who are already struggling.

Enough.  The fight over what kind of America we want can go on.  The partisan feuds can continue.  But it’s time to stuff the dumb and dangerous.  Repeal the idiotic sequester now.