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US politicsDemocrats position themselves as last line of defense for abortion rights Party sees new urgency – and political opportunity – amid growing threat to Roe v Wade
Opinion: In Texas, flustered ‘pro-lifers’ are backpedaling
Lauren Gambino in Washington DC@ More
OpinionBiden administrationWhy corporate social responsibility is BSRobert ReichWhile big corporations tell Americans how virtuous they are, they lobby up a storm against Biden’s social policy bill Sun 26 Sep 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 27 Sep 2021 09.46 EDTIn recent years, “corporate social responsibility” has been viewed by some as the answer to the multiple failings of capitalism. Chief executives have responded to all sorts of problems – worsening climate change, widening inequality, soaring healthcare costs and so on – by promising their corporations will lead the way to solutions because they’re committed to being “socially responsible”.House Democrats are scared to tax billionaires – that’s a costly mistake | Robert ReichRead moreNinety-eight percent of this is rubbish. CEOs won’t do anything that hurts their bottom lines. They’re in the business of making as much money as possible, not solving social problems.In fact, real social change would prevent them from doing many of the hugely profitable things they now do. Which means they won’t change their ways unless they’re required by law to change (and even then, only when the penalty times the probability of getting caught is higher than the profits from continuing anyway). Their soothing promises of social responsibility are intended to forestall such laws.I’ve seen this repeatedly. When I was secretary of labor, big corporations would violate laws on worker safety, wages and hours and pensions, whenever doing so was cheaper than obeying the laws. And they’d fight like hell against such laws to begin with – all the while telling the public what wonderful citizens they were.You may recall that in August 2019, the Business Roundtable – one of Washington’s most prestigious corporate groups, on whose board sit the CEOs of Apple, Walmart and JPMorgan – issued a widely publicized statement expressing “a fundamental commitment” to the wellbeing of “all of our stakeholders” (emphasis in the original), including their employees, communities and the environment.The statement was widely hailed as marking a new era of corporate social responsibility.Since then, the Roundtable and its members have issued a continuous stream of jejune statements about their dedication to such things as providing childcare, pre-K and affordable healthcare, promoting community college and workforce training, alleviating poverty and reversing climate change.It turns out these are exactly the priorities in Joe Biden’s $3.5tn reconciliation bill. But guess what? The Business Roundtable isn’t lobbying for the bill. It’s lobbying intensely against it.Jessica Boulanger, a spokeswoman, told the Washington Post the Roundtable is engaged in “a significant, multifaceted campaign” to stop tax increases that would finance the bill, and will “continue to ramp up our efforts in the coming weeks”. The group is launching a seven-figure digital advertising campaign to oppose the bill.Hypocrisy? Only if you believed the Roundtable BS about corporate social responsibility. If you know the truth – that corporations will do whatever they can to maximize their profits and share values, social responsibility be damned – there’s nothing surprising here.Why didn’t business groups fight the president’s infrastructure bill? Because government spending on infrastructure helps their bottom lines by lowering their costs of procuring supplies and getting goods to market. Social responsibility had nothing to do with it.It’s tempting to chalk all this up to “corporate greed”. But that makes sense only if you think corporations are capable of emotions, such as greed. They’re not. Corporations aren’t people, no matter what the supreme court says. They’re bundles of contracts.The specific people who enter those contracts (on behalf of big corporations as well as thousands of people who run vast investment funds on behalf of millions of shareholders) are neither greedy nor socially responsible. They’re merely doing what they understand to be their jobs. Greed and social responsibility have been laundered out of these transactions.If we want these transactions to change – to align better with public needs rather than private profits – laws must change. For example, taxes on big corporations must rise in order to fund public investments and safety nets.But such laws won’t change if corporations continue to spend vast sums on politics. Corporate spokespeople like Boulanger of the Business Roundtable – along with platoons of corporate lobbyists and influence peddlers, corporate lawyers and hired-gun economists, corporate political operatives and PR flaks – together form in effect a fourth branch of government, wielding huge and increasing power. About one out of every four people now working in downtown Washington fills one of these roles.US’s wealthiest 1% are failing to pay $160bn a year in taxes, report findsRead moreThe result is clear. The most telling trends over the last three decades have been the growing share of the economy going into corporate profits – generating ever-greater compensation packages for top executives and ever-higher payouts for big investors (all of whom live off shares of stock) – and the declining share going to most Americans as wages and salaries.The meaningless blather over “corporate social responsibility” is intended to mask these trends. Biden’s $3.5tn plan is aimed at reversing them.But big business is doing everything in its power to sabotage Biden’s plan. The only way to stop this sabotage is to ignore all mention of corporate social responsibility and make one hell of a ruckus in support of Biden’s plan, as well as laws to reduce the power of big money in politics.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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Joe BidenBiden knows fate of spending plan will show extent of his power – and define his legacy The president is about to embark on a legislative push with almost no room for errorLauren Gambino in Washington@ More
BooksWildland review: Evan Osnos on the America Trump exploited The New Yorker writer delivers a sweeping and brilliant portrait of a people subjected to 50 years of rightwing aggression
Interview: Evan Osnos on the US 20 years after 9/11
Charles KaiserSun 19 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 19 Sep 2021 02.01 EDTEver since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, bookstores have been flooded with volumes attempting to explain America’s unraveling.George Packer’s Last Best Hope, published earlier this year, provided one of the best diagnoses. But this new volume by New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos offers the most personal and the most powerful description yet of a country “so far out of balance that it [has] lost its center of gravity”.Peril review: Bob Woodward Trump trilogy ends on note of dire warningRead moreTo tell a story bookended by the attacks of 9/11 and the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January this year, Osnos travels to three places in which he has lived: Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago; Clarksburg, West Virginia. His subjects range from the decline of local newspapers and the opioid crisis to the tremendous hidden costs of idiotic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.But the leitmotif of the book is best captured by a phrase he cites from the great liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who described “one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful” quests: “The search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.”Osnos’ book is replete with ghastly statistics. The three men – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos – who have “more wealth than the entire bottom half of the US population combined”. The CEO salaries which spiraled from 20 times as much as a frontline worker in 1965 to 278 times in 2019. The fewer than 200 companies with Washington lobbyists in 1971 to the 2,500 that had them just 11 years later.But what makes the book come alive are the personal stories. Billionaires, coal miners and soldiers who suffer from post-traumatic stress, and all the evidence Osnos offers of failure to control excess at the top or provide meaningful help at the bottom.Above all this is a story of how mega-rich Americans have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to give themselves the power to pillage the earth, destroy the air and corrupt democracy in a thousand ways without ever being held to account.Lee Hanley is a perfect example. A Yale graduate and Greenwich resident, in 1980 he dumped George HW Bush for Ronald Reagan. Osnos’ keen eye provides a crucial detail about how Hanley’s wife, Allie, pinpointed Regan’s greatest flaw before presenting him to the Connecticut gentry: “He had on a brown tie and it was ghastly. When you go to a different part of the country, the most important thing you need to do is dress like they do. So I ran to Bloomingdale’s and bought four ties.”Reagan “wore them in all the posters after that”.Hanley spent millions more than his wife. In alliance with Richard Scaife, Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers, he trained “a generation of Republicans to adhere to ideological orthodoxy” with “a string of historic political investments”.“He saved the conservative publisher Regnery with an infusion of cash, he founded a Connecticut affiliate of a network of think tanks to advocate for low taxes and small government, and he became the principal backer of a political consulting firm formed by Roger Stone, Charlie Black and Paul Manafort, whose early clients included Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.”Rarely has a handful of clever investments done more damage to more people.In West Virginia, where Osnos once worked for the Exponent Telegram of Clarksburg, he offers a nuanced history of a state’s transformation from hardcore Democratic to reliably Republican. A West Virginia think tank funded partly by the Kochs made a moving argument against mine-safety regulations – “Improved safety conditions result in lower money wages for workers” – then asked, “Are workers really better off being safer but making less income?”Then-governor Joe Manchin asked the author of the study to brief his cabinet and a joint session of the state legislature finance committees.Juxtaposed with the lobbyists’ many successes are heartbreaking tales of ecological catastrophe spawned by coal companies removing mountain tops. Osnos also reminds us of Manchin’s first big contribution to the national political discussion, when he ran for Senate in 2010: an ad in which he fired bullets through climate-change legislation.“For decades candidates had been photographed with guns,” Osnos writes, “but this was the first time anyone had assassinated a piece of proposed legislation on film.”Four years later, an Arizona Republican “upped the stakes” by shooting the Affordable Care Act with “a handgun, a rifle and a semiautomatic”.There is so much more in this book, including the horrific fact that America has now accumulated 310m private firearms, the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world.“The second highest,” Osnos writes, “was Yemen, which had barely half the rate.”Joe Biden by Evan Osnos review – a story of survivalRead moreThe story of the electoral backlashes, when Democrats took the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020, is one of Osnos’ only hopeful sections. The right has spent so much money to end government regulation and purchase elections, especially since the disastrous supreme court decision of Citizens United, it is astonishing American democracy has survived at all.America’s richest “launched a set of financial philanthropic and political projects that changed American ideas about government, taxes and the legitimacy of the liberal state,” Osnos writes.“In every element of his commercial and political persona, Trump was a consummation of that project … Most of all, of course, he stood for a belief in unbridled self-enrichment, and on that basis some of his most genteel supporters were willing to overlook” every other disgusting thing about him.Osnos says the assault on the Capitol reminded him of an observation by Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward: “There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.”My hope is that everyone who reads this great book will be enraged enough to redouble their efforts to undo the damage the greedy have wrought, and to take back America for its decent citizens, once and for all.
Wildland is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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OpinionUS taxationHouse Democrats are scared to tax billionaires – that’s a costly mistakeRobert ReichPolitical cowardice means those funding Joe Biden’s ambitious social policy plan want to leave the mega-rich unscathed Sun 19 Sep 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 19 Sep 2021 05.30 EDTThis week, House Democrats released their proposed tax increases to fund Joe Biden’s $3.5tn social policy plan.‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met GalaRead moreThe biggest surprise: they didn’t go after the huge accumulations of wealth at the top – representing the largest share of the economy in more than a century.You might have thought Democrats would be eager to tax America’s 660 billionaires whose fortunes have increased by $1.8bn since the start of the pandemic, an amount that could fund half of Biden’s plan and still leave the billionaires as rich as they were before the pandemic began.Elon Musk’s $138bn in pandemic gains, for example, could cover the cost of tuition for 5.5 million community college students and feed 29 million low-income public-school kids, while still leaving Musk $4bn richer than he was before Covid.But senior House Democrats decided to raise revenue the traditional way, taxing annual income rather than giant wealth. They aim to raise the highest income tax rate and apply a 3% surtax to incomes over $5m.The dirty little secret is the ultrarich don’t live off their paychecks.Jeff Bezos’s salary from Amazon was $81,840 last year, yet he rakes in some $149,353 every minute from the soaring value of his Amazon stocks, which is how he affords five mansions, including one in Washington DC which has 25 bathrooms.House Democrats won’t even close the gaping “stepped-up basis at death” loophole, which allows the heirs of the ultrarich to value their stocks, bonds, mansions and other assets at current market prices – avoiding capital gains taxes on the entire increase in value from when they were purchased.This loophole allows family dynasties to transfer ever larger amounts of wealth to future generations without it ever being taxed. Talk about an American aristocracy.Biden wanted to close this loophole but House Democrats balked.You might also have assumed Democrats would target America’s biggest corporations, awash in cash but paying a pittance in taxes. Thirty-nine of the S&P 500 or Fortune 500 paid no federal income tax at all from 2018 to 2020 while reporting a combined $122bn in profits to their shareholders.But remarkably, House Democrats have decided to set corporate tax rates below the level they were at when Barack Obama was in the White House. Democrats even kept scaled-back versions of infamous corporate loopholes such as private equity’s “carried interest”. And they retained special tax breaks for oil and gas companies.What’s going on? It’s not that Democrats lack the power. They’re in one of those rare trifectas when they hold the presidency and majorities, albeit small, in the House and Senate.It’s not the economics. Americans have been subject to decades of Republican “trickle-down” nonsense and know full well nothing trickles down. Billionaires hardly need to have their fortunes grow $100,000 a minute to be innovative. And as I’ve stressed, there’s more money at the top, relative to anywhere else, than at any time in the last century.Besides, Democrats need the revenue to finance their ambitious plan to invest in childcare, education, paid family leave, healthcare and the climate.So what’s holding them back?Put simply, Democrats are reluctant to tax the record-breaking wealth of the rich and big corporations because of … the wealth of the rich and big corporations.Many Democrats rely on that wealth to bankroll their campaigns. They also dread becoming targets of well-financed ad campaigns accusing them of voting for “job-killing” taxes.Republicans sold their souls to the moneyed interests long ago, but the timidity of House Democrats shows just how loudly big money speaks these days even in the party of Franklin D Roosevelt.US’s wealthiest 1% are failing to pay $160bn a year in taxes, report findsRead moreThat’s because there’s far less of it on the other side. Through the first half of 2021, business groups and corporations spent nearly $1.5bn on lobbying, compared to roughly $22m spent by labor unions and $81m by public interest groups, according to OpenSecrets.org.Progressive House Democrats will still have a say. Senate Democrats haven’t weighed in. But there’s reason for concern.The looming debate over taxes is really a debate over the allocation of wealth and power. As that allocation becomes ever more grotesquely imbalanced, this debate will loom ever larger over American politics.Behind it will be this simple but important question: Which party represents average working people and which shills for the rich? Democrats, take note.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘Weird, patronizing behavior’: AOC lets rip at Manchin’s ‘young lady’ remark Democratic senator referred to congresswoman as ‘young lady’ Intra-party fight over $3.5tn social spending bill gets personal Lauren Gambino in Washington@ More
OpinionUS educationRepublicans threaten our children’s freedom as well as their basic safetyRobert ReichAttacks on mask mandates expose children to Covid. Attacks on the teaching of history expose them to dangerous ignorance Sun 29 Aug 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 29 Aug 2021 01.01 EDTMy granddaughter will go to school next week. So may your child or grandchild. For many, it will be their first time back in classrooms in a year and a half.On Covid and climate we can achieve change – but we’re running out of time | Robert ReichRead moreWhat do we want for these young people? At least three things.First and most obviously, to learn the verbal, mathematical and other thinking tools they’ll need to successfully navigate the world.But that’s not all. We also want them to become responsible citizens. This means, among other things, becoming aware of the noble aspects of our history as well as the shameful aspects, so they grow into adults who can intelligently participate in our democracy.Yet some Republican lawmakers don’t want our children to have the whole picture.Over the last few months, some 26 states have curbed how teachers discuss America’s racist past. Some of these restrictions impose penalties on teachers and administrators who violate them, including the loss of licenses and fines. Many curbs take effect next week.These legislators prefer that our children learn only the sanitized, vanilla version of America, as if ignorance will make them better citizens.Why should learning the truth be a politically partisan issue?The third thing we want for our children and grandchildren heading back to school is even more basic. We want them to be safe.Yet even as the number of American children hospitalized with Covid-19 has hit a record high, some Republican lawmakers don’t want them to wear masks in school to protect themselves and others.The governors of Texas and Florida, where Covid is surging, have sought to prohibit school districts from requiring masks. Lawmakers in Kentucky, also experiencing a surge, have repudiated a statewide school mask mandate.Why should the simple precaution of wearing a mask be a politically partisan issue?Paradoxically, many of these same Republican lawmakers want people to have easy access to guns, even though school shootings have become tragically predictable.Between last March and the end of the school year in June – despite most elementary, middle and high schools being partially or entirely closed due to the pandemic – there were 14 school shootings, the highest total over that period since at least 1999.Since the massacre 22 years ago at Columbine high school near Denver, more than a quarter of a million children have been exposed to gun violence during school hours.How can lawmakers justify preventing children from masking up against Covid while allowing almost anyone to buy a gun?The answer to all of this, I think, is a warped sense of the meaning of freedom.These lawmakers – and many of the people they represent – equate “freedom” with being allowed to go without a mask and to own a gun, while also being ignorant of the shameful aspects of America.To them, personal freedom means taking no responsibility.While Delta spreads, Republicans deflect and resort to Trump demagoguery | Robert ReichRead moreYet this definition of freedom is precisely the opposite lesson our children and grandchildren need. To be truly free is to learn to be responsible for knowing the truth even if it’s sometimes painful, and responsible for the health and safety of others even if it’s sometimes inconvenient.The duty to help our children become responsible adults falls mainly on us as parents and grandparents. But our children also need schools that teach and practice the same lessons.America’s children shouldn’t be held hostage to a partisan political brawl. It’s time we focused solely on their learning and their safety.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist
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