Apparently, uncertainty is a fate worse than death for a CEO. Billionaires bellyache about it constantly on TV, contending they must know, right now, whether next year’s tax rates will rise. Republicans bewail uncertainty, insisting CEOs must know, right now, whether they’ll get a tax holiday for overseas profits.

Their deep, abiding concern about the ill effects of uncertainty doesn’t extend, however, to the middle class. To Republicans and far too many billionaires and CEOs, weighing down workers with uncertainty about wages, health insurance and retirement is a fate well deserved.

In fact, Republicans in the past two years have gone hog-wild heightening middle class fear and uncertainty. In addition to demanding cuts to programs crucial to middle class certainty like Medicare and Social Security, Republican lawmakers in GOP-controlled states across the country have passed laws prohibiting union security clauses in collective bargaining agreements. This results in weaker unions and lower benefits and wages, not just for union workers but for everyone in union insecurity states. That creates financial insecurity, the worst kind of uncertainty.

Union security clauses give labor organizations some financial certainty. They require any worker who benefits from a collective bargaining agreement to either join and pay dues or to decline membership and pay a smaller fee covering the cost of union services like negotiation and grievance resolution.

Some states – union insecurity states – forbid these clauses. There’s a total of 24 now, with GOP-controlled Michigan and Indiana joining this year. These governors say their efforts are intended to assist workers in union shops who don’t want to pay anything toward the cost of union services.

So, of course, these governors wouldn’t exclude a union, which would allow that union to retain security while denying it to all the rest. Right?

Wrong. That’s what Michigan and Indiana Republicans did. Indiana exempted government workers. Michigan deliberately omitted firefighters and police officers. In fact, one Republican lawmaker who voted to deny union security to Michigan Steelworkers and Auto workers and Iron workers tried unsuccessfully to have her husband’s union – prison guards – added to the exemptions. She wanted union security for her family, but she denied it to others.

The GOP in Michigan tried to position itself as the savior of workers, some sort of perverse Superman rescuing those who receive union benefits from the responsibility to help pay for union costs. Superheroes always win in the end, so Republicans should have no fear of a referendum in which voters get the chance to have their say on whether Michigan should be a union insecurity state. Right?

Wrong. The Michigan GOP barred a referendum by attaching an appropriation to the union insecurity bill, which under state law forecloses a ballot measure. That doesn’t make sense if Republicans really believe they’re helping workers. But maybe they remembered what happened next door in Ohio last year when voters smacked down a union busting law in a referendum vote of 62 percent to 38 percent.

Outlawing union security is union busting. That’s because federal law requires unions to represent everyone in a workplace, even those who don’t pay dues or fees. For example, if a worker who refused to pay dues or fees got fired for tardiness and demanded the union file a grievance challenging the dismissal, the union would have to do it. And pay the costs.

That erodes union funds, and ultimately bankrupts some unions. That’s the result sought by Republicans and union-busting, billionaire-funded groups like Americans for Greed – oh, sorry, they call themselves Americans for Prosperity. (Not to mention the other result they want – diminished support for Democrats, who unions typically back.) Republicans and Americans for Greed want to return to the robber baron days before a Democrat-controlled Congress passed the Wagner Act facilitating unionization in 1935.

For the next quarter century, unions and the nation’s great middle class blossomed. By 1960, a third of the nation’s workers were unionized. Unions bargained successfully for certainty for their members – for work weeks limited to 40 hours, for good wages, for safe workplaces, for benefits like health insurance and pensions. Labor organizations helped all workers because industries without unions strove to match union wages and benefits. In those days, families had the certainty required to buy a home, see a doctor and send kids to college.

But Republican-sponsored amendments to the Wagner Act weakened unions, including one in 1947 that allowed states to outlaw union security clauses. Now just under 12 percent of workers are represented. And the GOP is working on getting that number into the single digits, as it was in the days of robber barons.

Income inequality already matches that in the robber baron era. In the nearly 30 years between 1979 and 2007, income for the richest 1 percent grew 275 percent. For the bottom 20 percent, it grew just 18 percent. For the vast middle, wages stagnated, and in the past dozen years, their income – median income – declined 8.9 percent from $54,932 to $50,054.

Laws banning union security clauses will worsen that situation. In union insecurity states, the average workers’ wages are $1,500 a year lower and the typical worker is less likely to receive health insurance or a pension than their counterparts in states that give workers and employers the freedom to negotiate union security clauses.

Republicans in Michigan were gleeful last week. But Republicans in Ohio were jolly when they thought they smashed public sector unions there. An unintended consequence of Republicans attempting to destroy Ohio’s unions was that it prompted an angry workforce to organize politically to overturn the union-busting law, and that Ohio organization a year later helped re-elect union supporter Barack Obama.

The 12,000 who marched in Lansing last week to protest union busting will now make sure that Michigan’s union insecurity law has consequences for the Republicans who voted to deepen middle class uncertainty.

Michigan Republicans are pushing low wages, claiming that “right-to-work” laws will “attract businesses.” Does it work?

Conservatives argue that strong unions cost jobs and anti-union “right-to-work” laws will bring jobs, because companies will move to places where workers are less able to fight for good pay and benefits. What do the numbers tell us?

Last week the far-right CNSNews carried a post, Right To Work States Have Lower Unemployment, Higher Income and Healthcare Coverage, NRTW President Says, quoting the head of the corporate-funded, anti-union organization, National Right To Work. He claimed that passing right-to-work laws not only increases employment but actually increases wages and benefits.

Mix notes that workers in Right to Work states not only tend to have as much as $4,300 more purchasing power, but also are more likely to have health insurance:

“And if you look at the other 22 Right to Work states, you find when it relates to private sector job growth, when it relates to increase in private sector per-capita purchasing power, or adjusted for cost of living, you find those states are doing much better.

“So, there’s lots of data out there that talks about this, including a study from the George Mason Department of Economics. They did a study when, adjusting wages for cost of living, they found workers in Right to Work states have about $2,300 more to spend than workers in forced-unionism states.

More on this in a minute…

The Detroit Free Press took a deeper look at the numbers, in Right-to-work law’s impact on Michigan debatable based on other states, and found that it was inconclusive. While they fond that some “right-to-work” states do have lower unemployment, the reasons are not clear.

“You can cherry-pick individual states that have done well,” said Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. “What nobody has done is report convincing, statistical evidence that right-to-work by itself makes a statistically discernible difference in economic outcomes, whether for good or ill.”

Hicks studied right-to-work laws and their effects on manufacturing. His findings: Right-to-work can indicate a more accommodating business climate, but the law itself will not attract more manufacturing or result in better wages or employment numbers.

Another factor to consider is the race-to-the-bottom effect as other states (like Alabama) suppress unions even more, forcing wages even lower, and also offer tax incentives to “attract” businesses. From the Detroit Free Press report,

The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based liberal think tank, published an article last week about Indiana’s right-to-work experience that highlighted tax credits and state assistance packages as a less-hyped factor in some businesses’ expansion decisions.

The article noted how Busche Enterprise obtained $750,000 in assistance from the Indiana Economic Development Corp., the state’s main economic development agency and recruiter. The article also noted that Indiana’s right-to-work law didn’t keep Busche from recently acquiring another plant site in October for a separate project in Alabama, its first non-Indiana production site.

Indiana offered up the moon, but Alabama offered up the moon and the stars, so they went with Alabama.

Neither the Detroit Free Press nor CNSNews factored in that their statistics were influenced by states like North Dakota that are currently enjoying an “energy boom.” Also, this idea that these low-wage states have a lower cost-of-living is another way of saying that they are poor. And they are poor because their leadership is offering them up as low-wage states “to attract businesses.”

Energy Boom States

Advocates of pushing down wages and suppressing workers rights use numbers that include the gains in energy-boom states to make their point.

The statistics that show job and wage growth in RTW states rely heavily on gains in North Dakota, Wyoming and other states that are currently having an “energy boom.” This would clearly indicate that the gains have nothing to do with suppression of unions. (Unless suppressing unions causes supplies of energy to suddenly appear under the ground.)

Note which states show significant job and wage gains in the Detroit Free press report:

Right-to-work states added a total of nearly 2 million jobs — a 3.4% increase over that period. The big winners were North Dakota (21.8% jump), Wyoming (15.8%), Utah (12%) and Texas (11.5%).

Meanwhile, employment dropped by 2 million jobs in non-right-to-work states, or a 2.5% decrease.

The average annual pay in right-to-work states grew from $30,172 to $41,243 from 2001 to 2011, a 36.7% increase.

Average pay in the other states rose 32.4%, from $35,505 to $47,002.

Obviously the employment and good wages in energy-boom states swings the “averages.” But this has nothing to do with “right-to-work” union-suppression laws.

Other Studies

There have been some good studies of the effect of these union-suppression laws apart from the energy-boom effect occurring in states like North Dakota.

A Feb., 2011, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) study, Does ‘right-to-work’ create jobs? Answers from Oklahoma, found “overwhelming” evidence:

Despite ambitious claims by proponents, the evidence is overwhelming that:

• Right-to-work laws have not succeeded in boosting employment growth in the states that have adopted them.

• The case of Oklahoma – closest in time to the conditions facing those states now considering such legislation – is particularly discouraging regarding the law’s ability to spur job growth. Since the law passed in 2001, manufacturing employment and relocations into the state reversed their climb and began to fall, precisely the opposite of what right-to-work advocates promised.

• For those states looking beyond traditional or low wage manufacturing jobs – whether to higher-tech manufacturing, to “knowledge” sector jobs, or to service industries dependent on consumer spending in the local economy – there is reason to believe that right-to-work laws may actually harm a state’s economic prospects.

A Sept., 2011, study, also by EPI, ‘Right to work,’ The wrong answer for Michigan’s economy, found that,

• Right-to-work laws lower wages—for both union and nonunion workers alike—by an average of $1,500 per year, after accounting for the cost of living in each state.

• Right-to-work laws also decrease the likelihood that employees get either health insurance or pensions through their jobs—again, for both union and nonunion workers.

• By cutting wages, right-to-work laws threaten to undermine job growth by reducing the discretionary income people have to spend in the local retail, real estate, construction, and service industries. Every $1 million in wage cuts translates into an additional six jobs lost in the economy. With 85 percent of Michigan’s economy concentrated in health care, retail, education, and other non-manufacturing industries, widespread wage and benefit cuts could translate into significant negative spillover effects for the state’s economy.

A January, 2012 study by American Rights at Work, New Research Counters Arguments for “Right-To-Work” Laws, examined a number of studies and found that “recent studies rebut claims of economic growth and instead find that laws suppress wages.”

A May, 2011 Bureau of Labor Statistics study found that “right-to-work” states have lower wages (examples: 9.4% lower for all occupations, 11.4% lower for teachers) than states with union rights.

In Nonunion Wage Rates and the Threat of Unionization Henry Farber, Professor of Economics at Princeton University found that after Idaho passed a RTW law in 1985, there was a statistically-significant drop in nonunion wages relative to other states.

The Larger Effect Of Race-To-The-Bottom Policies

While it might sound sensible to say that lowering wages and benefits and suppressing worker rights (along with giving tax incentives) will “attract businesses” to a state, what is the effect on the larger economy? What happens in the states where these businesses – if any – come from? And what happens to the tax base in states that push lower wages?

If these low-wage policies are successful, two things happen. The states that lose the jobs are poorer, and the workers in the low-wage states they came from (if any actually do) are poorer. And these low-wage states put pressure on wages for the jobs that remain, so wages are driven down economy-wide, across the country. This means that overall economic demand decreases so businesses have fewer customers, and tax revenue decreases because of lower wages and lower demand. As tax revenue decreases schools are defunded, infrastructure is not maintained, and economic conditions deteriorate for businesses throughout the economy.

Cutting wages — and offering tax incentives — to “attract businesses” sounds like it makes sense, but really it is penny wise and pound foolish. In the long run everyone is hurt, except the few already-wealthy billionaires pushing these policies.

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Some of today’s most greedy are running giant multinationals. Some are just running their mouths. Their stories remind us just how much needs to change, economically and politically, in the year ahead.

The essence of greed? Simple. Greed amounts to taking more than you need when you already have enough — and others don’t. Who among us, by this yardstick, rate as our greediest? Those greediest would be those who have the wherewithal to take whatever they want — and deny others the basics they need.

We abound in these greedy. Most of them wear power suits and dart in and out of the executive suites that sit high atop America’s most elegant corporate towers. Year in and year out, these greedy grab ungodly rewards for their own labor — and deny their employees anything close to decent compensation for theirs.

The Institute for Policy Studies weekly on excess and inequality, Too Much, has been compiling lists of America’s most greedy grabbers since the Great Recession first hit in 2008. This fifth annual Too Much list of our greediest showcases those ten deep pockets who’ve done the most in 2012 to subvert the decency we all like to call, at this time of year, the “holiday spirit.”

10/ Jack Welch: Comforting Comfortables

Jack Welch

An oversized ego can be a terrible thing to waste. Jack Welch, the retired General Electric CEO, is doing his best not to waste a bit of his — and pick up a few extras pennies in the process.

Welch, the super CEO of the 1990s, has become a regular on the corporate chattering circuit since he retired in 2001. He collects a sweet $150,000 per appearance.

Not that Welch needs any more money. He left GE with a retirement package worth over $400 million and now divides his time between très chic abodes in Manhattan, Nantucket, and Florida’s North Palm Beach, lapping up luxury while he plots his next moves to protect plutocracy.

Welch particularly enjoys going after Warren Buffett, the billionaire who publicly acknowledges that he and his fellow rich don’t pay nearly enough in taxes. Countered Welch earlier this year: “I don’t feel undertaxed in any way at all.”

Some had hoped that Welch’s retirement would end the actual social damage he could wreak. A reasonable hope. At General Electric, Welch had the power to do everything from nuke 100,000 GE worker jobs to foul the Hudson River with toxic waste. Without that power, what damage could he do? Plenty, turns out.

Much of that damage comes from the wealth of tax-dodging expertise Welch bequeathed his successors at General Electric. In the decade since 2001, one report released this year revealed, GE paid only 1.8 percent of its $80.2 billion overall profits in federal income taxes.

9/ Jamie Dimon: Pounding Reformers

Jamie Dimon

The European Union has just taken a fairly significant step toward limiting excessive banker compensation. Under proposed new rules up for a vote early in 2013, European bankers won’t be able to pocket bonuses greater than twice their straight salary.

Better not try that in the United States, Jamie Dimon — America’s highest-paid bank CEO in 2011 — warned last week. Any limits on Wall Street pay, JPMorgan Chase CEO Dimon intoned, will end freedom as we know it.

“If you don’t want a free society,” Dimon pronounced, “then start dictating what compensation can be.”

And besides, the JPMorgan chief added, any attempt to limit pay would chase talent out of America’s financial system. The banking business, he explained, simply “cannot run” on “second-rate talent.”

For his own presumably “first-rate” talent, Dimon pulled in $23.1 million in 2011, up 11 percent over 2010. The highlight of his first-rate stewardship: JPMorgan suffered a $2 billion trading loss after a bank management blunder that Dimon admitted this past spring he could not “publicly defend.”

That admission left some observers wondering how much the bank would have lost with a second-rate talent in charge.

Dimon hasn’t let JPMorgan’s debacle with risky trades slow his charge against the Dodd-Frank Act, the legislation enacted in 2010 to rein in risky trading after the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. Wall Street’s intense opposition to Dodd-Frank, with Dimon a key ringleader, has so far kept the bulk of the legislation unenforced.

8/ Wilbur Ross: Exploiting the Bankrupt

Wilbur Ross

Remember the bank bailout? Private equity kingpin Wilbur Ross surely does. He spent a chunk of the past year trolling for windfalls on the busted-bank landscape — and found a hot prospect in Ohio. In October, he cut a dealto pick up the troubled First Place Financial at just $45 million.

U.S. Treasury officials balked at the deal. The bank, they complained to the courts, had borrowed $72.9 million from the federal bailout program three years earlier and not yet repaid any of the money.

The deal with Ross would likely “chill bidding” for the bank, federal officials pointed out, and cost taxpayers millions.

Not my problem, retorted Ross. So things might not “work out well” for taxpayers? “Unfortunate,” said Ross. Two months later, the Treasury prediction came true. No other bidders for the bank stepped up, and Ross had another notch in his “vulture investing” belt.

Ross has specialized for decades on buying up companies in or near bankruptcy, then “flipping” them for big profits. The secret to his success: Bankrupt companies can dump their liabilities — like mandates to fund pension plans. Ross has followed this flipping formula to fortune in steel, textiles, and coal. His latest estimated personal net worth: $2.3 billion.

In October, Ross celebrated his fabulous stash with a fundraising dinner at his Florida mansion for GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The fee to join him: $50,000 a plate. About 150 people, reports the Palm Beach Post, attended.

7/ Samuel Palmisano: Busting Nest Eggs

Samuel Palmisano

IBM, the world’s first computer giant, now has just 92,000 employees stateside, down from 160,000 back in 2002, the year Sam Palmisano took up the IBM CEO reins.

Palmisano stepped down as chief exec last year and retired as the chairman of IBM’s board at the start of this month, but not before green-lighting a change in the IBM 401(k) plan that sets a damaging precedent for millions of Americans outside the IBM ranks.

Up until now, IBM has been matching employee contributions to 401(k)s on a semi-monthly basis. Starting in 2013, IBM will make only one match a year, on December 31. Workers who leave IBM’s employ next December 15 will get no IBM match to their 401(k) for the entire year, even if they were laid off or had to leave because of a disability.

No major U.S. corporation currently short-changes workers through this sort of maneuver. A good many other large corporations “will be looking very closely” at the IBM move, says Brooks Herman of Brightscope, a financial info firm. If they follow IBM’s lead, notes Reuters, working families throughout America will find it “very difficult to build significant nest eggs through the 401(k) system.”

Sam Palmisano doesn’t have to worry about his nest egg. He’s walking out the door with a package of retirement, bonus, and assorted other benefits one analysis values at $224.7 million.

Palmisano isn’t actually walking out the door. He’ll be consulting for IBM. His rate: $20,000 for any day he puts in four hours. In 2013, observes the Wall Street Journal, Palmisano “could pocket $400,000” for a mere “20 half-days of work.”

6/ Larry Page: Dodging Corporate Taxes

Larry Page

The co-founder — and current chief exec — of Google on a top ten greedy list? How can that be? Hasn’t Google CEO Larry Page’s personal foundation just announced plans to fund free flu shots for every kid in metro San Francisco?

True enough. But no local philanthropic gesture can offset a global greed grab. The same Larry Page who’s fighting flu in San Francisco is running a giant corporation that’s sidestepping billions of dollars in taxes all over the world.

In 2011, Bloomberg reports, Google “avoided about $2 billion” worldwide via just one Bermuda tax dodge alone. On paper, Google is supposed to be paying 39 percent of its profits in combined U.S. federal and state corporate taxes. Last year. Google actually paid federal and state taxes at just a combined 22 percent rate.

If profit-rich corporations like Google don’t pay their tax fair share, notes international tax expert Richard Murphy, “somebody else has to pay or services get cut.” And if services get cut, only a fortunate few — like kids in San Francisco — end up getting served.

Larry Page, by the way, can afford a bit of local beneficence. Forbes estimates his total personal fortune at $18.7 billion.

5/ Steven Cohen: Modeling Lance

Steven Cohen

At poker, you can’t win a hand unless someone else at the table loses. Same on Wall Street, as billionaire Steven Cohen knows as well as anyone.

The 56-year-old prepped for the financial world at the Wharton business school and spent his spare collegiate hours beating his buddies at the card tables.

Cohen has upped the ante somewhat since then. In the late 1990s, his “super-secretive” hedge fund returned investors an astounding 70 percent a year. For his investing magic, Cohen would eventually be demanding 50 percent of any profits he generated for his deep-pocketed investors.

That hefty profit share would bankroll an anything-goes lifestyle for Cohen. On top of $14 million for a personal manse, he shelled out $300 million on fine art.

By 2006, stock trades by Cohen’s hedge fund were accounting for $2 of every $100 all Wall Street stock traders combined were betting. Admirers began calling basketball fan Cohen the “Michael Jordan” of the financial industry.

The better sports analogy, says ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger, might be the drug-cheating cyclist Lance Armstrong. Federal regulators and prosecutors have so far snared six of Cohen’s hedge fund operatives for insider trading. All these years, Eisinger suggests, Cohen may have been “cutting corners and pushing employees to the point where they break the law.”

The biggest losers in the Cohen story? American taxpayers. Cohen pays federal income tax on much of his ample annual earnings — $600 million last year alone — at just a 15 percent rate, not the 35 percent rate that faces ordinary income over $388,000, thanks to a special loophole that benefits the movers and shakers who run hedge and private equity funds.

4/ Brian Driscoll: Tanking Twinkies

Brian Driscoll

Should captains go down with their ship? In contemporary Corporate America, captains of industry don’t go down with their ship. They sink it, then jet ski to the nearest yacht.

Hostess Foods, the corporate baker most famous for Twinkies, was already foundering when Brian Driscoll came in as CEO in 2010. Private equity wiseguys had gobbled up Hostess in 2004, loaded the company up with debt, and squeezed $110 million in worker wage concessions.

Driscoll came in with a plan: squeeze workers some more — and raise his own pay to reward the brilliance of his planning. Alas for Driscoll, the plan went awry when Hostess workers refused to cooperate.

Hostess then declared bankruptcy this past January — a move designed to void the company’s union contracts — and went to court to argue that Driscoll still merited a $3.5 million pay deal, with additional annual bonuses.

This CEO pay bid outraged Hostess workers and cost Driscoll whatever corporate credibility he still had left. Amid the resulting furor, Driscoll suddenly resigned. Two months later, in May, he resurfaced as the CEO of Diamond Foods, the Pop Secret popcorn maker, with a three-year pay deal worth over $10 million.

Hostess, meanwhile, is careening toward liquidation. Thousands of Hostess workers have already lost jobs. All Hostess workers have lost wage income and pension savings.

Driscoll, to be sure, hardly deserves all the blame. A half-dozen CEOs have come and gone over the last decade, notes one Hostess worker whose annual take-home has dropped $14,000 since 2005, “and all of them left the company worse than when they took over.”

3/ Jim Skinner: Milking the Minimum Wage

Jim Skinner

As CEO at fast-food colossus McDonald’s, Jim Skinner didn’t just worry about burgers. He worried about the minimum wage — getting higher. Under Skinner, McDonald’s helped bankroll industry lobbying campaigns against attempts to raise state and federal minimum hourly pay rates.

That lobbying has paid off — for Mickey D’s. In Chicago, not far from McDonald’s corporate global headquarters, a McDonald’s worker with 20 years of experience can still only be earning $8.25 an hour, as economics reporter Leslie Patton devastatingly detailed earlier this month.

McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner took home $8.75 million last year, a generous sum that equals about 580 times the annual pay of a full-time minimum-wage worker. Just 20 years ago, in 1992, the then-McDonald CEO pulled in 230 times the minimum wage annual take-home.

Skinner retired his CEO perch this past June 30. Unlike many other senior citizens today, he won’t have to take a fast-food job to make any ends meet. He walked off into the sunset with a retirement package worth an estimated $82.3 million.

2/ Larry Ellison: Collecting Oceanfront

Larry Ellison

Oracle software CEO Larry Ellison has earned, over the years, almost a permanent spot on our top-ten greediest list. His basic corporate m.o.— buy out his rivals, grab their customers, fire their workers — has never changed.

But Ellison, the sixth-richest man in the world, has turned over a new leaf of sorts. He’s actually sharing the wealth. The catch? He’s only sharing with his sidekicks. In the fiscal year that ended this past May 31, Oracle presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd each took home $51.7 million.

And Ellison? His 2012 pay: $96.2 million. His total fortune? Forbes tabs that at $41 billion.

With a pile of billions that high, couldn’t Ellison “share” a bit more? Maybe. But Ellison does have some ongoing expenses for annual maintenance. This past fall, for instance, Ellison picked up — for $36.9 million — his ninth luxury property on the stretch of Malibu oceanfront that local wags like to call “Billionaires’ Beach.”

Some of those locals are speculating that Ellison is planning to turn his Malibu beachfront into a private, super-exclusive resort hideaway for the world’s uber rich. But Ellison would be far more likely, other Ellison-watchers posit, to plop that resort on Lanai, the Hawaiian island Ellison also picked up this past year.

So why does Ellison need all that Malibu beachfront? Most likely, the scuttlebutt goes, he just wants to keep the riffraff out of his ocean-view sight-lines.

1/ Sheldon Adelson: Distorting Democracy

Sheldon Adelson

Few Americans hold a fortune larger than Sheldon Adelson. In fact, only eleven do. Forbes puts Adelson’s net worth at $20.5 billion. What can you do with over $20 billion? For starters, you can spend $150 million on an election.

Adelson did just that in 2012. No American invested more in politicking this year than he did. The 79-year-old became, as Time magazine notes, “the public face of what critics cast as a plutocrat class trying to buy U.S. elections.”

Get used to that face. Adelson told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that he plans to spend over twice as much on his favorite candidates the next time around.

How does anyone get rich enough to plop that much money on pols? The bulk of Adelson’s wealth comes from the Las Vegas Sands, the world’s largest casino company. Adelson, the Sands chief exec and top shareholder, essentially treats the company as his own personal ATM. He even outsources to himself.

In 2009, for instance, Adelson had his Sands empire rent corporate jets from two outside companies. The controlling owner of the outside companies: Sheldon Adelson. The transactions netted Adelson $7.45 million.

Just last month Adelson had Sands declare a special dividend. He’ll personally collect $1.2 billion from this distribution — and pay only a 15 percent federal income tax on it. On January 1, with the likely expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, the dividend tax rate will jump from that 15 to 35 percent. The Sands dividend quickie will save Adelson nearly a quarter-billion in taxes.

But the real key to Adelson’s billions has to be his manic hostility to unions. His flagship casino, the Venetian, currently operates as the only nonunion major casino in Las Vegas. Of the 40,000 Sands workers worldwide, not one is working under a union contract. And Adelson is aiming to keep things that way.

Last year, 130 security guards at Adelson’s new casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a different idea. They voted to organize a union. Adelson’s Sands management predictably refused to recognize the union.

The National Labor Relations Board subsequently found Sands guilty of an unfair labor practice and ordered the company to start bargaining. Sands chose instead to start tying up the case in the federal courts.

The security guards make $13 an hour. They think Adelson and Sands can afford to share some wealth. Adelson will share nothing. Who could possibly expect anything else — from 2012’s greediest American of them all?

Once again this year, we’ve tried our best to identify America’s most avaricious. Think we’ve missed an obvious choice? Let us know. Your pick might just stay greedy enough in 2013 to make our next year’s list!

Veteran labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, has just been published.

Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan — Republicans continue their assault on unions and worker solidarity – and America’s middle class gets mugged.   Corporate profits are at the highest % of GDP on record; worker wages are at the lowest % ever.  And now the CEOs are using their dough and clout in the name of Fix the Debt to demand LOWER taxes for corporations as part of any deficit reduction package.

What kind of an America do they envision?  Take a look at the fastest growing jobs in America.  A server at Mickey Ds would have to work 550 years to make the money earned by its CEO in one year.  Abysmally paid jobs won’t support a family, won’t build a broad middle class.  Taxpayers end up paying for food stamps and health care and tax credits to subsidize the biggest retailers in the world.  The American Dream becomes a big lie.  The middle class  gets crushed.  America gets a Gilded Age politics for an era of Gilded Age inequality.

Take a look at this hall of shame.  Unions gave us the weekend.  Crushing unions is leaving us in misery.  Anyone with a pulse and a wit of sense should be outraged about this — and joining with those fighting what will be the defining civil rights struggle of our time:  the right of workers to join together to negotiate decent wages from rapacious employers.

11. DUNKIN’ BRANDS

CEO Nigel Travis’ total compensation: $2.0 million

Crew member: $7.83 an hour

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 250,000 hours or 120 years

10. PAPA JOHN’S

CEO John Schnatter’s total compensation: $2.7 million.

Average delivery driver salary: $7.19 an hour.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 382,000 hours or 184 years.

9. DOLLAR GENERAL

CEO Richard Dreiling’s total compensation: $3,832,000.

Average sales associate salary: $7.62 an hour.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 503,000 hours or 242 years.

8. BEST BUY

CEO Brian Dunn’s total compensation: $7.1 million.

Average sales associate salary: $9.73 an hour.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 730,000 hours or 350 years.

7. HOME DEPOT

CEO Francis Blake’s total compensation: $10.8 million.

Average sales associate salary: $11.47.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 941,000 hours or 452 years.

6. MCDONALD’S

CEO James Skinner’s total compensation: $8.8 million.

Average crew member salary: $7.65 an hour.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 1.1 million hours or 550 years.

5. CVS CAREMARK CORPORATION

CEO Larry Merlo’s: $11.4.

Average cashier salary: $8.86 an hour.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 1.3 million hours or 619 years.

4. WALMART

CEO Michael Duke’s total compensation: $18.1 million.

Average sales associate salary: $8.84 an hour.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 2.1 million hours or 986 years.

3. WENDY’S

CEO Roland Smith’s total compensation: $16.5 million.

Average crew member salary: $7.66 an hour.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 2.2 million hours or 1038 years.

2. TARGET

CEO Gregg Steinhafel’s total compensation: $19.7 million..

Sales floor team member: $8.29.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 2.4 million hours or 1,143 years.

1. YUM! BRANDS

CEO David Novak’s total compensation: $20.4 million.

Average KFC / Pizza Hut / Taco Bell crew member: $7.50.

How long a crew member would have to work to make CEO annual pay: 2.7 million hours or 1,308 years.

MORNING MESSAGE: How “Right to Work” Laws Kill Jobs

OurFuture.org’s Richard Eskow: “‘Right to work’ is a misnomer for laws which let employees enjoy the benefits of union membership – at least for a little while, until they’re stripped away – without joining or contributing. So we’ll call them ‘right to shirk’ laws instead … let’s stop calling the states that have adopted this legislation ‘right to work.’ They don’t give people any new rights. They take rights away, by making it illegal for employees to organize and negotiate together. They even take away employers‘ rights – to sign a certain kind of contract. So let’s give the other states a name instead: In a nod to the Jim Crow origin of these laws, let’s call the ones which don’t have these laws ‘free states.’”

Checkmate?

Democrats say, “checkmate.” National Journal: “Democrats look at the political landscape and see a win whether a deal gets cut now or after the country goes over the cliff … Democrats don’t believe that Republicans have the time, the megaphone or the leverage to force Democrats into making significant entitlement cuts right now … ‘If we go over the cliff, it doesn’t last long. That’s why these guys are fundamentally checkmated,’ said a senior Democratic leadership aide.”

Senate Dems open to Medicare means testing, resist other benefit cuts. Politico: “…even though Democrats are open to this one cost cutting move, they are saying no to increasing the eligibility age on Medicare; no to touching Social Security; and no to cutting into Medicaid programs that cover the poor and disabled … Durbin said Thursday the White House informed him that raising the Medicare eligibility age is ‘no longer being considered’ by Obama. But Democrats are still plainly nervous that Obama will be overly generous on entitlement cuts in his negotiations with Boehner.”

Dems backing off Medicaid cuts, complains House Majority Leader Eric Cantor reports WSJ.

CEPR report debunks claims from “Chained CPI” advocates: “Proponents of this proposal argue that the Chained CPI is a more accurate formula and any impact on beneficiaries of the government programs affected would be mitigated by increased tax revenue from the wealthy. However, this issue brief effectively refutes those arguments by showing that switching to the Chained CPI would result in cuts to already modest Social Security benefits, that it is likely that the Chained CPI is not an accurate measure of the inflation rate seen by seniors and that the Chained CPI would lead to income tax increases for working Americans.”

Republicans Resist Specifics

Still no specifics from Boehner. NYT: “Even as Mr. Boehner pressed Mr. Obama to specify reductions in spending for Medicare and other entitlement benefit programs, the Republicans continued to be mute on what reductions they favor. Republicans are not proposing the sort of program overhauls … that have been part of their House budgets for the past two years … In any case, the Ryan budgets delayed the changes so they would not save much in the next 10 years.”

Intellectually bankrupt Republicans don’t know how to propose specific spending cuts, argues NYT’s Paul Krugman: “…Republicans have suffered more than an election defeat, they’ve seen the collapse of a decades-long project. And with their grandiose goals now out of reach, they literally have no idea what they want — hence their inability to make specific demands.”

Boehner “can’t be seen as conceding too much too soon” reports Bloomberg: “A slow-walk approach to averting more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts set for January is crucial for Boehner whether the talks succeed or not, according to Republicans in Congress. If they don’t reach agreement, Boehner will have gathered a coalition of lawmakers he’ll need for a more limited deal. If he succeeds, he’ll have convinced anti-tax Republicans that he fought to extract spending cuts.”

Obama tells as much to Minnesota’s WCCO: “… he doesn’t want to look like he’s giving in to me somehow because that might hurt him in his own caucus.”

Republicans “dig in” on debt ceiling power. Roll Call: “…since the president made that offer, Republicans have dug in on the issue, becoming almost preoccupied by their need to preserve that point of leverage during Obama’s second term. ‘It’s all our guys want to talk about,’ one senior Senate Republican aide said.”

Republicans plot strategy if no deal is reached. NYT: “If no deal is reached, Republicans are increasingly talking about a more hostile outcome in which the House passes legislation that extends tax cuts for the middle class, sets relatively low tax rates on dividends, capital gains and inherited estates, and cancels the across-the-board defense cuts, but leaves in place across-the-board domestic cuts. Then House Republicans would engage in what Mr. Boehner, in a private meeting last week, called ‘trench warfare,’ a running battle with the president on spending, first as the government approaches its statutory borrowing limit early next year, then in late March, when a stopgap government spending bill runs out.”

Breakfast Sides

Immigration reform will follow budget resolution. Politico: “Top Obama aides are already laying the groundwork for a campaign-style operation to broaden the base of support for a mega-bill. The White House will not only target Latino voters but also religious leaders, law enforcement and others … Latino leaders say the activity is a clear sign that Obama plans to keep his word and make immigration a signature policy of his second term …”

State campaigns push higher minimum wage. LAT: “The New Jersey state legislature handed Gov. Chris Christie a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage to $8.50 an hour from the federal minimum of $7.25 this month, but he hasn’t signed it and has signaled he might not … Democratic lawmakers in Illinois are also trying to push a bill that would increase the minimum wage — an earlier effort this year failed.”

Michigan’s recent battle makes this a good time to explain the union movement’s important role in our economy’s overall health. We’re about to explain why today’s war on unions is bad for all of us, no matter what we do for a living, and we’ll do it in four steps.

But first a word about language: “Right to work” is a misnomer for laws which let employees enjoy the benefits of union membership – at least for a little while, until they’re stripped away – without joining or contributing.

So we’ll call them “right to shirk” laws instead. And we’ll call the people who back these laws Shirkers.

And while we’re at it, let’s stop calling the states that have adopted this legislation “right to work.” They don’t give people any new rights. They take rights away, by making it illegal for employees to organize and negotiate together. They even take away employers‘ rights – to sign a certain kind of contract.

So let’s give the other states a name instead: In a nod to the Jim Crow origin of these laws, let’s call the ones which don’t have these laws “free states.”

Free Ride

Right to Shirk laws allow freeloaders to profit from the efforts of others – without contributing to the effort, and in a way that harms the common good. The billionaires and corporations behind these laws wouldn’t deliberately do anything like that, would they? Why, that would be like letting people make billions from the works of government – things like roads, the Internet and publicly-educated customers – without paying their fair share of taxes.

Oh, wait.

Right to Shirk laws are job-killers. Here are four steps to understanding why:

1. Think nationally, not just locally.

Advocates say these laws create jobs. They don’t. Their “evidence” is based on studies which show modest job growth in Right to Shirk states when compared to free states.  But all that proves is that places that are politically hostile to organized labor also offer other types of corporate favoritism.

It also suggests that Right to Shirk states can steal jobs from free states — as long as the jobs last, anyway.

The Shirker movement was started in the late 1940s by a handful of Southern politicians who were in the palm of big textile mills. They were able to draw textile jobs away from free Northern cities like my hometown of Utica, NY – until those jobs left this country altogether.  That’s not “creating” jobs — that’s killing good jobs and replacing them with ones that don’t pay enough.

The concept of “solidarity” has been tarred with McCarthyite smears. But “solidarity” is just another way of saying “We’re all in this together.”  The Right to Shirk crowd wants to stop that kind of thinking so it can pit state against state and employee against employee, shredding our social fabric for personal gain.

It’s no accident that the Shirker movement was started by the reactionary white politicians of the Jim Crow South. Back then they were still pining for the days when they could offer some folks the “right to work” … for nothing.

2. We’re fighting over a shrinking pie instead of making the pie bigger.

Things are bad. We need millions of jobs – and the jobs we do have don’t pay enough.

The graphic which Business Insider likes to call “the scariest chart ever” shows how far we are from creating the number of jobs needed to make this country’s economy grow and thrive again.  Job growth like that we’ve seen recently is always welcome, but it’s not nearly enough to get us out of this ditch. How do we get moving again?

To answer that question we need to know what’s worked in the past.

3. The real “job creators” are people with jobs – good jobs.

How did this nation finally escape the after-effects of the Great Depression and begin its greatest decades of economic growth? Government spending  - on roads, bridges, schools, and other vitally needed services – played a key part.

Unions were a crucial part of this process, too. By fighting for higher wages and better benefits, unions ensure that working people have the means to purchase consumer items, housing, and other goods and services.  Companies have to hire more people to keep up with demand – and the good jobs keep coming.

That’s why the Republican Party platform of 1956 boasted that “unions have grown in strength and responsibility, and have increased their membership by 2 millions” during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first term. Back then Republicans understood that a growing middle class was good for the entire economy.  That party platform also said that “America does not prosper unless all Americans prosper.” Their rule: No shirkers.

But then in those days our economy wasn’t dominated by Wall Street megabanks – institutions that don’t build or sell anything. And politicians weren’t completely in bankers’ pockets back then, because the public wouldn’t have tolerated it.

We shouldn’t tolerate it now.

4. When you kill unions, that reduces consumer income – which kills jobs.

The Shirker assault on unions has taken its toll. Only 25 states remain free to unionize, and union membership has fallen dramatically:

Their logic would suggest that the plunge in union membership we’ve seen since 1960 must have led to a rise in good jobs.  Did it? Let’s take a look at manufacturing:

That’s my freehand drawing (and therefore not exact) of the trend line in union membership, superimposed by the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States.  Manufacturing jobs kept on increasing for more than twenty years, even as union membership increased. These jobs experienced periods of decline and stagnation as union membership fell, even before the devastating impact of NAFTA.

Consumer demand is vital to growth. That demand is tied to consumers’ income, and to their belief that life in the future will be as good or better than it is today.  Those are the two things we need to reinforce, and unions are crucial to that effort.

We need to get our economy growing again. Until then most Americans, unionized or not, will continue to struggle with stagnating wages and an ongoing economic drag that can feel a lot like a recession.  As Paul Krugman likes to say (he said it in our radio interview), This isn’t rocket science. We know how to do this.

Destroying unions is just another way for the Shirkers to make sure that we never do.

The political friends of America’s rich aren’t aiming to convince us that higher taxes on the nation’s highest incomes make no sense. They’re just hoping to keep us distracted.

Why do so many lawmakers in Congress oppose raising taxes on America’s wealthy, even just a little? The answer: We’ll never really know for sure.

Lawmakers might deep down oppose tax hikes on the wealthy, for instance, because their wealthy campaign contributors don’t want to pay any more in taxes. Or they might oppose bigger tax bills for millionaires simply because they don’t want to pay Uncle Sam a cent more of their own million-dollar incomes.

Lawmakers under the influence of either of these motives would, of course, never openly admit to them. How could they — and politically survive? Simple political reality demands that rich people-friendly lawmakers must solemnly proffer much more noble rationales for zealously shielding rich people’s income from taxes.

Raising taxes on high incomes, we’ve been assured since long before the “fiscal cliff” debate, will discourage small business “job creators.” Higher taxes on the rich, we’re told, always backfire and never generate the revenue anticipated.

These claims make for effective sound-bites. But do they match up with facts on the ground? Last week Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research hosted a congressional briefing that sought to speak to those facts.

The briefing — entitled Taxing the Wealthy: What Does the Research Show? — brought to Capitol Hill top academic tax analysts, and they had a good many facts to share, to the distinct unease of the apologists for the awesomely affluent who happened to stop by.

What do the facts tell us about those small business “job creators” who’ll suffer so, as friends of the fortunate claim, if tax rates on high incomes rise? The facts don’t show much potential suffering.

Just under 70 percent of American taxpayers making over $1 million a year, U.S. Treasury Department figures show, do indeed report small business income on their tax returns. But these millionaires who do report small business income average only around 5 percent of their income from small business operations.

In other words, we’re talking investment bankers with hobby ranches in Montana here, not small business folks creating good jobs in their own local communities.

But won’t those investment bankers just flee to lower-tax pastures if Congress opts to hike the tax rates on their incomes? Won’t that exodus just negate the revenue boost that raising taxes on the rich is supposed to create?

Charles Varner, a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, has been researching what typically happens when governments raise taxes on taxpayers of major means.

Varner and his colleagues looked closely at tax receipts in New Jersey and California after these two states enacted new “millionaire’s taxes” in 2004 and 2005. In California, the top tax rate rose from 9.3 to 10.3 percent. After the increase, out-migation of high-income Californians actually fell.

But California, skeptics might argue, occupies a great deal of territory. A deep pocket upset about a tax hike has to travel a good bit to leave California.

True enough, but deep pockets in New Jersey operate in a totally different environment. A millionaire who works on Wall Street could easily have chosen to move in lower-tax New York State or Connecticut after New Jersey’s millionaire’s tax went into effect. A New Jersey millionaire working in Philadelphia could have chosen to relocate in lower-tax Pennsylvania or Delaware.

But these New Jersey millionaires, in real life, opted overwhelmingly to stay put. Researchers, Stanford’s Varney explained at last week’s congressional briefing, have found similar patterns in Canada between provinces with different tax rates and in Switzerland between cantons.

What about the bigger picture? Does an entire nation that raises taxes on the rich risk triggering a rich people’s exodus? France, starting next month, will be levying a 75 percent tax on income over $1 million euros, about $1.28 million. Will high-rollers in France be rushing to end their French connection?

Research can help on this question, too, suggests Varney. Tax rates on high incomes do already vary between one European nation and the next, and investigators have closely studied the migratory behavior of one category of European affluent: star professional soccer players.

These soccer stars can ply their trade in any number of countries. They can move from a high-tax nation to a low-tax nation and easily make as much money in their new locale. They may, in fact, be the most mobile mega millionaires on the face of the earth.

These uniquely mobile soccer stars, the research shows, do appear to be sensitive to taxes, but not nearly as “super-sensitive” as might be expected.

And that doesn’t surprise Stanford’s Varney. Moving carries costs, he notes, everything from the monetary cost of having to pick up stakes and shift somewhere else to the social cost of losing easy geographic access to networks of friends and colleagues.

Varney’s basic point: “Economies of place,” as he noted at last week’s Capitol Hill briefing on the research around taxing the wealthy, remain “significant even for people at the top of the income distribution.”

Varney doesn’t expect any mass exodus of the wealthy from France after the new year’s 75 percent top French tax rate kicks in. The chances of a mass deep-pocket exit in the United States? Even slimmer. If President Obama gets all of the tax hike he’s now seeking in the “fiscal cliff” negotiations, the top U.S. tax rate will nudge up only to 39.6 percent.

Veteran labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, has just been published.

Americans today can take more than inspiration from the struggles against plutocracy that progressives waged years ago. They can take a host of still relevant — and cutting-edge — policy proposals.

Our contemporary billionaires, most Americans would agree, are exploiting our labor and polluting our politics. Can we shrink our super rich down to a much less powerful — and more democratic — size? Of course we can. We Americans, after all, have already done that shrinking once before.

Between 1900 and the 1950s, average Americans beat down plutocrats every bit as dominant as ours. A century that began with huge private fortunes and most Americans living in poverty would come to see a mass middle class and sweeping suburban developments where grand estates and mansions once stood.

Most Americans today, unfortunately, have no inkling that this huge transformation ever took place, mainly because that exuberantly middle class America of the mid 20th century has disappeared. Those grand mansions have come back.

Does this super-rich resurgence make failures out of our progressive forebears, the men and women who fought so hard and so long to limit the wealth and power of America’s wealthiest? Our forebears didn’t fail, suggests a new book I’ve just done. They just didn’t go far enough.

In The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, I trace the incredible feats those progressives accomplished over the first half of the 20th century. They “soaked the rich” at tax time. They built a union movement that acted as a real check on corporate arrogance and greed. They even tamed Wall Street.

But these great victories have long since faded. How can we get back on a plutocracy-busting track? We could start by revisiting those struggles of years past that came up short, those proposals that, had they become law, might have more lastingly leveled down our super rich.

The Rich Don’t Always Win explores a host of these proposals. Here’s a sampling of just five.

One: Require the rich to annually disclose the income they’re reporting to the IRS and how much of that income they actually pay in taxes.

Eighty years ago, just like today, America’s rich were massively evading taxes. If wealthy taxpayers knew their tax returns would be open to public inspection, reformers argued, they would be far less audacious with their evading. Disclosure would also help lawmakers identify the tax loopholes that most needed plugging.

In 1934, progressives actually added a disclosure provision to the tax code. But the super rich counterattacked with a media blitz that tied disclosure to the infamous Lindbergh baby kidnapping. If all rich Americans had to disclose their incomes, the argument went, kidnappers would gain a wider pool of targets.

This PR juggernaut carried the day. Congress repealed the disclosure mandate. But the basic idea behind income tax disclosure remains as promising as ever.

Two: Leverage the power of the public purse against excessive corporate executive pay. Congress can’t set direct limits on private corporate executive pay, yesterday’s progressives understood. But Congress could impose limits indirectly by denying federal government contracts and subsidies to corporations that lavished rewards on top executives.

In 1933, then-senator and later Supreme Court justice Hugo Black won congressional approval for legislation that denied federal air- and ocean-mail contracts to companies that paid their execs over $17,500, about $300,000 in today’s dollars.

But the New Deal never fully embraced the Hugo Black perspective. We could now, by denying federal contracts and tax breaks to any companies that pay their CEOs over 25 times what their workers are making.

Three: Give Americans a safe alternative to private banks. For Louis Brandeis, a giant in the struggle against plutocracy who also became a Supreme Court justice, prohibiting financial institutions from speculating with the savings of average Americans always remained a top priority.

In the early 1930s, Brandeis advocated the expansion of postal savings banks, a system — in effect since 1911 — that paid 2 percent interest on modest savings accounts maintained with the post office. That expansion never took place, and postal savings banks withered away. They deserve a second shot.

Four: Tax undistributed corporate profits. America’s biggest corporations are currently sitting on stashes of cash that have hit mega-billion levels. Money that could be invested in creating jobs sits instead in income-generating financial assets that only sweeten corporate bottom lines.

A similar problem plagued the nation back during the Great Depression, and progressives responded by pushing for a stiff tax on these “retained earnings.” In 1936, Congress passed a watered-down version of this tax that didn’t last and didn’t make much of an impact. A stronger tax today just might.

Five: Cap income at America’s economic summit. In 1942, in the midst of a war-time fiscal squeeze, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent tax on all individual income over $25,000, the equivalent of about $355,000 today.

Congress didn’t go along. But lawmakers did set the top tax rate at 94 percent on income over $200,000, and federal income tax top rates hovered around 90 percent for most of the next two decades, years of unprecedented middle class prosperity.

America’s rich fought relentlessly to curb those rates. They saw no other way to hang on to more of their income. But what if we restructured the top tax rate of America’s postwar years to give the rich a new, more public-spirited incentive.

We could, for instance, set the entry threshold for a new 90 percent top rate as a multiple of our nation’s minimum wage. The higher the minimum wage, the higher the threshold, the softer the total tax bite out of the nation’s highest incomes.

Our nation’s wealthiest and most powerful, under this approach, would suddenly have a vested interest in enhancing the well-being of our poorest and weakest.

Years ago, progressives yearned to create an America that encouraged just that sort of social solidarity. They couldn’t finish the job. We still can.

Veteran labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, has just been published by Seven Stories Press.

Happy Thanksgiving in corporate-owned America. Walmart workers are preparing for “Black Friday” actions nationwide as the company continues to drive wages and benefits down. And Thanksgiving-day-parade-company Macy’s CEO is standing with Donald Trump at the same time as he is urging Congress to cut our Social Security and Medicare. Let’s tell them who is boss under our We, the People Constitution. Here is how.

Walmart Black Friday Actions

I don’t have to write about how Walmart pays low wages, etc… (I don’t have a problem with companies following the laws that allow low wages, etc., I have a problem with companies using their size and influence to get those laws written for them.)

Walmart workers are finally taking action. This Friday, “Black Friday,” they are planning a number of activities and walkouts at Walmart stores around the country.

In my recent post, Help Change The Economy — Join Walmart Workers Striking On Black Friday, I wrote,

You can help change the economy! Big companies use their size and the fear of losing our jobs to force us to accept no raises or even lower pay and benefits. They can use their size to force communities, states and even the federal government to lower their taxes. You can help change the economy by standing with Walmart workers next week. They have the money but we have the people.

Here are some ways you can participate and help Walmart workers change the economy:

American Rights At Work has sent the following out,

Wow – the word has gotten out about the viral strikes happening at Walmart. Walmart even held late-night mandatory meetings for all store associates to threaten that “there could be consequences” if employees did not report for work on Black Friday. This is clearly illegal and continues to demonstrate the bravery of the workers and why you and I need to back them up.

In major cities, in rural towns, and in nearly every state, workers are standing up to Walmart to say they will not be intimidated. On Friday, they will demand an end to the retaliation they face for speaking out about unacceptable working conditions.

Can you join them this Friday? Find out the details and sign up to join your local rally:

YES, I’ll join a Walmart store action!

NO, but I can stand with Walmart workers.

This is a now-or-never moment for workers across the country.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is standing in solidarity with Walmart’s workers, and sent out the following:

Before you consider hitting Walmart for Black Friday deals, consider this: The workers who ring up all those mega-deals are suffering. And now they are risking everything to make a change. Some Walmart workers will put their jobs on the line this Friday and stand up to the giant big-box store, going on strike to protest poor, unsafe working conditions; low wages; irregular hours and the company’s retaliation against workers who speak out.

Help Walmart employees win the respect they deserve.

These workers are not union members, but they’ve banded together in OUR Walmart, a worker-led organization, to make Black Friday (the biggest shopping day of the year) the most memorable Walmart holiday on record.

Here are ways you can help Walmart workers:

• Take the Black Friday Pledge to stand with workers at your local Walmart.
• Sponsor a brave striker with a $50 grocery gift card donation.
• Visit Share for Respect on Facebook and keep Walmart workers you know informed.
• Use Tumblr to post art and ideas about how to change Walmart.
• Spread the word on the Black Friday Walmart Strike and Making Change at Walmart Facebook pages.
• Use hashtag #walmartstrikers and follow Making Change at Walmart on Twitter.

Help Walmart workers secure decent wages, a safe workplace, manageable hours and the respect they deserve.

In unity,

Randi Weingarten
AFT President

Also, see David Dayen’s post at Firedoglake, Labor Unions Show Solidarity With Walmart Workers.

Macy’s CEO Tries To Ruin Company Brand

Walmart is not the only company ruining the meaning of Thanksgiving for We, the People. Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren has been trying to ruin the Macy’s brand for the holidays by playing footsie with the right. He is standing up for Donald Trump, in teh face of more than half a million signers of a petition to get Trump off Macy’s shelves. I mean, Donald Trump? Really?

And to make matters worse, Lundgren has signed on with those CEOs who are urging Congress to cut Medicare and Social Security just in time for the holidays!

Macy’s CEO standing by Trump despite petition,

Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren is sticking by billionaire Donald Trump and his apparel line despite an online petition to “dump Trump.”

The petition was started by Angelo Carusone of SignOn.org, a liberal website “Powered by MoveOn.org.” Carusone is trying to gather 650,000 signatures to persuade Macy’s to drop Trump’s merchandise and ads after the businessman’s repeated criticisms of President Barack Obama, culminating in an online tirade that called for a “revolution” after Obama was re-elected Nov. 6. So far, Carusone said, the petition drive has gathered more than 500,000 signatures.

Macy’s CEO has also signed on as part of the corporate “Fix the Deficit” campaign to cut the things we are entitled to as citizens, including Social Security and Medicare. This triggered the organization Progressive Congress to put out the online action, Tell Macy’s CEO: Hands off Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security,

Terry Lundgren
CEO, Macy’s, Inc.
7 West Seventh Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202

Dear Mr. Lundgren:

Our families’ futures aren’t up for negotiation. American workers, retirees, and families have sacrificed enough. Please drop out of the CEO coalition to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Thank you.

It also triggered CREDO to launch the online petition, Macy’s vs. Medicare?,

From Miracle on 34th Street to the Thanksgiving Day Parade, Macy’s is a powerful symbol of the holidays for many Americans.

But this holiday season, Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren is part of a coalition of ultra-wealthy CEOs who are actively working to undermine the economic security of countless American families.

These CEOs are lobbying Congress to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits (not to mention other important safety net programs), all to get themselves and their companies massive tax breaks.

Tell Terry Lundgren, the CEO of Macy’s: Stop trying to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.

Suggested tweet: RT @CREDOMobile: Why is the CEO of @Macys trying to cut #Medicare and #SocialSecurity benefits? http://bit.ly/RURijq #p2 #MacysParade

–

Click these to follow Dave Johnson and/or Campaign for America’s Future on Twitter:

A new advertising campaign from three major unions is targeting key congresspeople with a clear message: the way to reduce the deficit is by “creating jobs and growing our economy” not by “cutting programs that families rely on most.”

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the National Education Association (NEA) effort is the first major salvo that expands the debate, forcing a debate over whether we need jobs or cuts, instead of a cramped discussion over whose cuts are better.

The language is actually in sync with President Obama’s. He led off his Nov. 8 remarks by saying:

… at a time when our economy’s still recovering from the great recession, our top priority has to be jobs and growth. That’s the focus of the plan that I talked about during the campaign…

…If we’re serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue. And that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes…

…That’s the only way we can still afford to train our workers, or help our kids pay for college, or make sure that good jobs and clean energy or high tech manufacturing don’t end up in countries like China.

Now, already I’ve put forward a detailed plan, that allows us to make these investments while reducing our deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade.

That plan which Obama talked about the campaign was the American Jobs Act, investing more than $400 billion to create jobs in infrastructure and education.

We can spend that up front and still meet long-term deficit reduction targets, so long as we also raise taxes on the wealthy, cut wasteful military spending and — without needlessly cutting benefits — responsibly control health care costs.

The President’s emphasis on jobs and growth hasn’t received much media attention yet. With this new ad campaign, that may change.