Category: Labor and Working
Secret Trump memo details plans to destroy government workers’ unions
Evan Vucci/AP
WASHINGTON—The Government Employees (AFGE), the nation’s largest union for federal workers, has summarized and is publishing, in five installments, a secret Trump administration memo outlining in detail how President Donald Trump and his ideologues systematically plan to destroy federal worker unions. AFGE adds its own analysis. Part 1 and Part 2 have already appeared, with three more to come.
And private-sector workers and unions are next on Trump’s hit list, the memo promises.
The memo by Trump White House aide James Sherk, a former “fellow” at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, is being posted and analyzed on AFGE’s website. It includes restoring Republican President George W. Bush’s ban on unionization of the nation’s 45,000 airport screeners. And that’s just for starters.
It also would ban unions for the Defense Department’s 200,000 civilian workers, the hundreds of thousands of workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and workers at the Department of Homeland Security and the federal Office of Personnel Management—the government’s human resources agency—itself. Trump also wants to abolish OPM.
Killing OPM and transferring its oversight of federal workers to unaccountable White House aides would bring back the spoils system of the 1880s and before, union leaders say.
“The memo, laced with familiar half-truths and outright lies, is proof AFGE has been right all along in saying the administration’s true goal in making changes to personnel rules is to ‘end collective bargaining’ in the federal sector. It’s right there in their own words,” the union states. It also goes far beyond Trump’s prior executive orders trashing federal worker rights.
Trump’s executive orders don’t plan to obliterate unions outright. His memo does.
“End collective bargaining,” the memo sets as a goal. “Government unions impede the efficiency of federal operations and direct the government to put the interests of government employees first. Curtailing collective bargaining in government serves the public good. The [Civil Service Reform Act] allows the president to exempt agencies from its coverage on the basis of national security concerns.” The New York Times and Politico first disclosed the memo’s existence.
Destruction of federal workers and their unions, including cuts in their pay and benefits—also part of Sherk’s memo—is part of an overall right-wing and corporate-backed drive to destroy unions in the U.S. and thus remove the biggest and most-effective obstacle to their agenda. That larger drive includes the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision and anti-worker rulings by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board.
One motive of the larger drive, Tom McCabe, CEO of the conservative Freedom Foundation, admitted to The Guardian in 2016, is to “de-fund the left” and thus destroy opposition.
AFGE revealed Sherk also “discusses ways to make it impossible for workers to unionize” in the private sector. “It details steps to boost corporations’ profits by cutting workers’ overtime pay and redefining workers as ‘independent contractors,’” who legally cannot unionize. “It explains ways to shield mega-corporations from being liable for workers’ poor working conditions in franchises,” AFGE summarizes.
“The administration’s divide-and-conquer strategy with respect to organized labor is as disgusting as it is shameful. But it won’t work.
“Across this country, our members and the members of every other labor union are getting educated, organized, and mobilized. As the largest union representing federal employees, AFGE will continue to resist the president’s mob mentality and disrespect for the federal workforce and the work they do.”
Sherk’s White House anti-union memo outlines further moves beyond Trump’s executive orders, which AFGE, the Treasury Employees, and other federal unions have fought both in court and in Congress.
Those executive orders tossed unions out of their small offices in federal buildings—where shop stewards met with members—yanked their phones, fax machines, and computers, banned federal workers from communicating with lawmakers, and told the stewards they would have to represent workers on their own time and on their own dime, among other restrictions.
Trump’s biggest order also made it easier to fire federal workers, depriving them of many of their due process rights, including the simple right of having some time to prepare to defend themselves and to argue their cases before unbiased decision-makers.
His “national security” excuse would let Trump abolish unions for the screeners—Bush used the same national security rationale to ban unions for them—defense workers and at VA.
AFGE waged a long campaign to get the Democratic Obama administration to overturn Bush’s anti-union edict for the screeners, formally called Transportation Security Officers. And AFGE has defended VA whistleblowers who revealed bosses’ mismanagement of care for veterans, including mismanagement that led to dead vets.
While the memo hasn’t been formally implemented yet, government-wide, AFGE notes Trump is already taking away some civil service protections for the screeners, whose pay is so low the TSOs have the lowest morale of any group of federal workers. One of every four TSOs quits within 16 months of being hired, AFGE says.
Bush also imposed a National Security Personnel System “merit pay” plan on the DOD workers, to give bosses total sway over workers’ pay and promotions, leaving everything open to favoritism. AFGE and a 31-union alliance battling for the DOD workers fought that scheme in court, too, and won. Congress eventually banned DOD from implementing it.
trump, the victim ???
Attack on the Middle Class !
republi-con Flash Mob on the prowl !
Mike Thompson
The Other 98%
October 25, 2019
Bill Barr’s alternate universe “investigation” has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule
Salon
Italy has no use for AG Bill Barr’s conspiracy theory
MSNBC
The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog
Italy has no use for AG Bill Barr’s conspiracy theory
By Steve Benen October 25, 2019
Attorney General Bill Barr has long been focused on the origins of the Russia scandal, to the point that there is reportedly a criminal investigation underway that could target American law enforcement and intelligence officials who examined Russia’s 2016 attack. That probe was technically assigned to U.S. Attorney John Durham.But that’s not to say Barr is somehow taking a hands-off role in the process. As Rachel noted near the top of last night’s show, the sitting U.S. attorney general, an unabashed Donald Trump loyalist, has apparently been personally involved in traveling the world, meeting with foreign officials, hoping to find evidence to support a conspiracy theory that would disprove the facts surrounding his boss’ Russia scandal.
The theory itself is plainly bonkers, and even many congressional Republicans have no use for it. But Barr keeps racking up frequent-flier miles, including making stops in Italy – where the prime minister was asked by Italian lawmakers to explain what in the world the American attorney general wanted. The New York Times published this striking report yesterday:
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said his country’s intelligence services had informed the American attorney general, William P. Barr, that they played no role in the events leading to the Russia investigation, taking the air out of an unsubstantiated theory promoted by President Trump and his allies in recent weeks.
“Our intelligence is completely unrelated to the so-called Russiagate and that has been made clear,” Mr. Conte said in a news conference in Rome on Wednesday evening after spending hours describing Italy’s discussions with Mr. Barr to the parliamentary committee on intelligence.
Mr. Conte publicly acknowledged for the first time that Mr. Barr had twice met with the leaders of Italy’s intelligence agencies after asking them to clarify their role in a 2016 meeting between a Maltese professor and a Trump campaign adviser on a small college campus in Rome, Link Campus University.
As bizarre as this may sound, the American attorney general appears to have gone to allied nations, looking for damaging information about American officials, which he thought might help Donald Trump.
Italy, not surprisingly, had no such information, and seemed baffled as to what the United States’ top law-enforcement official was looking for.
The precise details of the conspiracy theory are a bit mind-numbing, and they involve George Papadopoulos, who served as an adviser to the Trump campaign, a London-based Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud, and assorted characters. It’s all quite ridiculous, and for more information along these lines, I’d recommend last night’s A block and this Vox piece from last month.
But stepping back, the big picture is profoundly embarrassing, not just for the administration, but for all of us. The United States – the world’s preeminent superpower, ostensibly the global leader on matters of international affairs – has an attorney general who has gone to foreign countries, hat in hand, looking for dirt on his own country’s officials, begging for help with a ridiculous conspiracy, only to be told by our allies, “We don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Republicans Storm National Statuary Hall
The Onion – News in Brief
Republicans Storm National Statuary Hall, Demand to Be Allowed Into Elijah Cummings’ Casket.
Trump Admin Begins Official Withdrawal From Paris Agreement
The destruction of the middle class is destroying democracies and paving the way for authoritarian rule
Salon
We have to undo the attack on the middle class that started with Reagan if we want democracy back.
The destruction of the middle class is destroying democracies and paving the way for authoritarian rule
Thom Hartmann October 4, 2019
Ronald Reagan (AP/J. Scott Applewhite
“In the United States,” they write, “among all age cohorts, the share of citizens who believe that it would be better to have a ‘strong leader’ who does not have to ‘bother with parliament and elections’ has also risen over time: In 1995, 24 percent of respondents held this view; by 2011, that figure had increased to 32 percent.” By the time the paper came out in 2016, fully 49 percent of Americans thought elites should make decisions, rather than “government.”
And the growing disillusionment with democracy as a way to protect the interests of average voters doesn’t just push them toward solutions hatched by the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute; increasingly, Americans would even consider a military junta ruling America, something that would shock the founders.
“In the past three decades,” Foa and Mounk write, “the share of U.S. citizens who think that it would be a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ thing for the ‘army to rule’ — a patently undemocratic stance — has steadily risen. In 1995, just one in sixteen respondents agreed with that position; today, one in six agree.”
And it’s not just in the United States; democracies across the world are falling to the power of right-wing strongman leaders. Just in the past few decades we’ve seen this happen in Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, India, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia and, most recently, Brazil. Arguably, it has happened here in the United States with the Electoral College’s selection of Donald Trump as president. Meanwhile, hard-right groups seeking such autocracy are rising fast across Europe, particularly in France, Italy, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
In a recent article for the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria notes this trend, along with Foa and Mounk’s research, and tries to analyze its cause.
“Why is this?” Zakaria writes. “The best I can guess is that we are living in times of great change — economic, technological, demographic, cultural — and in this swirl, people feel insecure and anxious.”
But America and the world have been in the midst of “great change” many times before, including during and after two world wars, but this trend toward authoritarianism has been happening uniquely since the 1980s.
That decade saw the adoption of the radical economic and political ideologies of Thatcherism and Reaganism — neoliberalism — which have since swept the world’s democracies. Even the European Union (with the Maastricht Treaty in 1993) has adopted neoliberal”reforms” that benefitted wealthy elites while forcing austerity on its poorer member nations, inflicting massive pain and inciting right-wing movements in Greece, Spain and Italy, among others.
In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher led the way in 1978. She rejected government ownership of parts of the commons like railways, busted unions, and later argued that, “There is no such thing as society… [only] individual men and women, and… families.”
Reagan came to power in 1980 with the help of vast amounts of money from corporations and the morbidly rich, made possible by the twin 1976 and 1978 Supreme Court decisions of Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which said that billionaires and corporations owning politicians was “free speech.”
With a nod to his oligarch funders, in his inaugural address, his first day on the job as president, Reagan famously said, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
When Reagan flipped our economic system on its head, rejecting two generations of classical Adam Smith economics and replacing it with the Laffer Curve and “supply-side” economics, almost a third of American had union jobs and around 60 percent of American families lived in the economic “middle class.” But starting in 2015, as NPR noted, reporting on a Pew study, “middle-income households have become the minority.”
Since David Koch’s failed 1980 run for VP on the Libertarian ticket, American oligarchs have invested billions of dollars in the message that government is bad and can’t be trusted. The most obvious example was the faux-grassroots Tea Party “movement” funded by Koch front groups, causing thousands of Americans to protest “government-run” health care with slogans like, “Keep your goddamn government hands off my Medicare!”
Koch and his oligarch friends suggested, through their surrogates and think tanks, that instead of a functioning democracy we should have a government both owned and run by them and their billionaire buddies.
And that’s largely what we have now, with the Trump administration. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently tweeted, “A corporate lawyer runs DOL, a pharma exec runs HHS, a coal lobbyist runs EPA, an oil lobbyist runs DOI, a Raytheon lobbyist runs DOD, a steel lobbyist is the US trade rep, and a banking exec runs USDT.” I’d add that a former Verizon lawyer runs the FCC, and midlevel positions across the federal government are now filled with lobbyists and lawyers from industry.
Prior to the Reagan Revolution, Americans usually got what they wanted from the government.
The successes of LBJ’s Great Society programs during the 1960’s are a great example: Medicare, Medicaid, Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, cutting poverty in half, Head Start, the National Teacher Corps, hundreds of billions in student college aid, PBS and NPR, Air Quality Act, Water Quality Act, Wilderness Act, National Trails System Act, creating the Cabinet-level Department of Housing and Urban Development, Community Action Agencies, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Child Safety Act, mandating warning labels on cigarettes, the Immigration Act that ended race-based immigration quotas, food stamps, and massive investments in public schools and hospitals… among other things.
In the 1970’s, Jimmy Carter followed up by creating the Department of Energy and passing energy programs that would have moved 20 percent of America’s electricity generation to solar by 2000 (it was ended by Reagan), establishing the Department of Education, massively expanding Head Start, passing major laws to regulate coal mining and make it safer, forcing polluters to clean up superfund sites, and doubling our public lands in Alaska. Not to mention winning the Nobel Prize for working out a peace deal between Egypt and Israel that holds to this day.
Before the 1980s, Western Europe and other democracies saw similar expansions of people-based government programs. But nearly all of it came to a screeching halt—and much was even reversed—with the neoliberal Thatcher and Reagan Revolutions.
Today’s standard-bearers for neoliberalism are the Republicans (and a few corporate-owned Democrats), and, as Americans figure out that the probability today of legislation passing that’s supported by the majority of Americans is today equivalent to random chance, they’re revolting.
And the oligarch billionaires have been waiting for just this moment, funding massive voter suppression, right wing media, politicians who tell us that up is down, and efforts to keep their colleague, billionaire Donald Trump, in office. While the outreach to “very fine people” in the neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements is a bit less visible, it’s there, too.
So long as the governments of America and other countries are captives of oligarchs and big corporations, and hang onto anti-worker, anti-middle-class neoliberal policies, citizens will continue to drift toward hard-right “populist” politicians.
Democracies will only begin to revive when we reverse the Reagan Revolution and return to the classical economic and political systems that existed in the Western world before the neoliberal 1980s.
And if that reversal doesn’t happen soon, the trend toward autocratic oligarchy will continue to speed up. As Foa and Mounk note in the conclusion of their research paper, “[W]hat was once unthinkable should no longer be considered outside the realm of possibility.”
THOM HARTMANN
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.