The Washington Post-Wonkblog

Bosses want capitalism for themselves and feudalism for their workers

By Matt O’Brien         July 26, 2017

(HBO)

If some employers had their way, you would have to pledge eternal fealty to them just to get a paycheck.

You would bend the knee, bow your head, and swear to serve them faithfully, now and forever, even if someone else tried to hire you away for more money. And in return for this loyalty, you of course would get none. Your company could fire you whenever it wanted and wouldn’t have to take care of you when you got old. If you were really lucky, it might, just might, give you a small 401(k) match. In other words, it’d be capitalism for bosses, and feudalism for workers.

Now, as much as this might sound like a caricature, it’s actually the way things are in Idaho. Well, except maybe for the genuflecting. As the New York Time’s Conor Dougherty reports, the state’s non-compete laws are so strict that people can’t leave their jobs for a new one unless they can show that it wouldn’t “adversely affect” their current employer. That’s an impossible standard that would leave workers — and, more to the point, their wages — entirely at the mercy of their bosses.

This is not, to put it mildly, the way things are supposed to work. When unemployment is as low as it is now, companies are supposed to have to fight over workers by paying them more. If there’s one thing chief executives excel at, though, it’s cutting every cost other than their own bonuses. They’ve figured out that it’s a lot cheaper to simply tell their employees that they’re not allowed to leave than it is to pay them enough that they wouldn’t want to leave in the first place. Which is to say that Idaho isn’t the only state going medieval on workers. Many of them are. Non-competes, which started off as a way to stop a company’s top executives from revealing legitimate trade secrets to rivals, have turned into a tool for suppressing wages that now cover 14 percent of all people making $40,000 or less, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

There’s no reason that sandwich shop makers or doggy day-care workers or summer camp counselors should have to sign non-compete agreements like some of them have recently. No reason other than that businesses know they can get away with it. Jobs were so scarce for so long in the aftermath of the Great Recession that companies realized they could put almost any condition on them and still find plenty of people willing — no, desperate — to take them. To the point that even people who were trying to get jobs at Jimmy John’s felt like they had to promise that they wouldn’t take any of the secrets they were about to learn about putting slices of meat in between pieces of bread to go work for, say, Subway instead.

It’s a reminder that economics isn’t just about supply and demand. It’s also about who has the power to make demands. Which actually has more to do with government policies than market forces. Things like how high the minimum wage is, how easy it is to form a union, and, yes, how tough non-compete laws are all affect the balance of power between capital and labor independent of the unemployment rate. So does the welfare state itself. Indeed, businesses have historically been opposed to Social Security, Medicare and, more recently, Obamacare not only because those programs cost them money, but also control over their workers. When the government helps people be able to afford to retire, companies can’t afford to hire quite as many of them — not if they want to maintain their profit margins. That’s because workers have more bargaining power when there aren’t as many of them actually looking for, well, work.

The same kind of logic, by the way, applies to stimulus spending. As economist Michal Kalecki argued back in 1943, a government that hires unemployed people is a government that doesn’t have to give business what it wants to get them to hire unemployed people. The more the government does, then, the less sway businesses have over the economy and everyone in it.

The important thing to understand is that capitalists don’t believe in capitalism. They believe in profits. There’s a difference. Capitalism is about free competition, while profitability, taken to the extreme, is about the lack of it. After all, the best way to make money is to drive everyone else out of business, and to then force your workers to accept subsistence-level wages. It’s the contradiction at the heart of capitalism, which, if it weren’t for the fact that governments can intervene to save the system from itself, could very well lead to revolution.

That’s what happens when you turn workers into vassals.

Matt O’Brien is a reporter for Wonkblog covering economic affairs. He was previously a senior associate editor at The Atlantic.

Esquire

Government by Absurdity Takes Many Forms

Watching tens of millions of Americans lose their healthcare in slow motion.

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By Charles P. Pierce       July 26, 2017

WASHINGTON—A corporal’s guard of protestors remained on the South Lawn of the Capitol late Tuesday night as the U.S. Senate finished its work for the day by voting down measures that would’ve replaced the Affordable Care Act with something far worse. Half-drunk frat boys heckled them, and they heckled back, and all went quiet at the end of an ugly day.

Inside, there was a curious vote on something called the Better Care Reconciliation Act, which the Congressional Budget Office has estimated would cost 22 million Americans their health insurance. This contained an amendment from Tailgunner Ted Cruz that would allow the propagation of street-surance, cheap plans that cover nothing. It also contained an amendment from Rob Portman, Republican Senator from Ohio, that was aimed primarily at keeping Rob Portman the Republican Senator from Ohio. Because these elements of this jerry-rigged monstrosity had not been scored by the CBO, the measure needed 60 votes to pass, unless the Senate agreed to waive certain procedural requirements. The vote on the waiver failed, miserably, with nine Republicans joining a united Democratic minority to sink it, 57-43.

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(Those people clinging to the notion that John McCain nobly came back to vote to begin debate in order ultimately to vote against the final passage of whatever Mitch McConnell cobbles together now have to reckon with the fact that McCain voted in favor of a bill he had said he opposed six hours earlier. Was the senator confused? He could’ve consulted his BFF Lindsey Graham, who was one of the nine Republicans who voted against it.)

After the vote, the Tailgunner gathered a brief gaggle outside the Senate chamber in which he expressed confidence that his effort to legitimize insurance fraud remained a viable option. “This is the first step in the process,” he said. “I believe it’s too soon to tell [when his amendment would re-emerge] when you’ve got unlimited amendments. I believe we will see the Consumer Freedom Amendment included in the legislation that is ultimately enacted. When in the process we will see that, the legislative path to get there, time will tell. But this is the way the legislative process works.”

Half-drunk frat boys heckled them, and they heckled back, and all went quiet at the end of an ugly day.

Clearly, what Cruz is hoping for is that something—probably the “skinny repeal,” which would eliminate only certain unpopular elements of the ACA—will come out of the Senate, whereupon the show will move into conference with the House of Representatives, where the wild things do run, and where the Freedom Caucus is running things. (At the moment, this cry of loons is trying to submarine the CBO.) The extreme and the crazy—and, it must be said, the vastly unpopular—likely will be injected there. Odds are pretty decent that the Tailgunner’s desire to free the American people from the shackles of health will be met through some bill of which very nearly 20 percent of the American people approve.

There’s more of this coming today; it’s likely that the Senate will get to roundly vote down an even less popular variation on Wednesday and then move along to something they can send into the crazy grinder at the other side of the Capitol. All this, of course, is to pass something almost universally unpopular to replace something that cracked 50 percent approval not so very long ago. Government by absurdity takes many forms.

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Esquire

The Price of John McCain’s Republican Loyalty

He has a terminal illness. He’s on government healthcare. But he’s a Republican.

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By Charles P. Pierce      July 25, 2017

WASHINGTON—It was an ugly day in the United States Senate on Tuesday, as ugly a day as has been seen in that chamber since the death of Strom Thurmond, who used to make a day ugly simply by showing up. The Senate took up the Motion To Proceed on whatever the hell hash Mitch McConnell wants to make out of the American healthcare system. (The decision now seems to be between whether we kick 30 million, 22 million, or 18 million of our fellow citizens to the curb.) There was a loud protest in the Senate gallery, and the Capitol police, who were everywhere, went out of their way to prevent any media coverage of the ensuing arrests. (In this, they were helped immeasurably by a bunch of little omadhauns from the office of the Senate sergeant-at-arms, one of whom was so insufferable that he was even money to get thrown out a window.) That was really ugly.

The vote was 51-50, with Vice President Mike Pence breaking the tie. Back when he was becoming the very unpopular governor of Indiana, Mike Pence grabbed the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion with both hands. Now, he was the deciding vote in the first real test of whether the Republican congressional majorities will eviscerate Medicaid entirely. That was really ugly, too.

But the ugliest thing to witness on a very ugly day in the United States Senate was what John McCain did to what was left of his legacy as a national figure. He flew all the way across the country, leaving his high-end government healthcare behind in Arizona, in order to cast the deciding vote to allow debate on whatever ghastly critter emerges from what has been an utterly undemocratic process. He flew all the way across the country in order to facilitate the process of denying to millions of Americans the kind of medical treatment that is keeping him alive, and to do so at the behest of a president* who mocked McCain’s undeniable military heroism.

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For longtime McCain watchers, and I count myself as one of them, this is something of a pattern. In 2000, George W. Bush’s campaign slandered him and his young daughter, and radical fundamentalist Christians joined in so eagerly that McCain delivered the best speech of his career, calling those people “agents of intolerance.” By 2006, he was on Meet The Press, which ultimately always was the constituency he cared most about, saying that the late Jerry Falwell was no longer an agent of intolerance. He was hugging Bush, and he was speaking at Liberty University. All of this seems to support the theory that the best way to win over John McCain is to treat him as badly as possible.

So he got a standing ovation when he walked into the chamber, and that was all right, and then he cast the vote to proceed. And then, having done so, he climbed onto his high horse and delivered an address every word of which was belied by the simple “yes” he had traveled so far to cast.

“Our deliberations today – not just our debates, but the exercise of all our responsibilities – authorizing government policies, appropriating the funds to implement them, exercising our advice and consent role – are often lively and interesting. They can be sincere and principled. But they are more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember. Our deliberations can still be important and useful, but I think we’d all agree they haven’t been overburdened by greatness lately. And right now they aren’t producing much for the American people. “Both sides have let this happen. Let’s leave the history of who shot first to the historians. I suspect they’ll find we all conspired in our decline – either by deliberate actions or neglect. We’ve all played some role in it. Certainly I have. Sometimes, I’ve let my passion rule my reason. Sometimes, I made it harder to find common ground because of something harsh I said to a colleague. Sometimes, I wanted to win more for the sake of winning than to achieve a contested policy.”

His “yes” won the day for a secret process that produced a bill that nobody’s seen yet.

“Let’s trust each other. Let’s return to regular order. We’ve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. That’s an approach that’s been employed by both sides, mandating legislation from the top down, without any support from the other side, with all the parliamentary maneuvers that requires.”

He could have struck a blow for these noble sentiments—and, most notably, for “regular order”—by voting no. It would have been the most resounding vote of his long career. But he said, “yes.”

“I voted for the motion to proceed to allow debate to continue and amendments to be offered. I will not vote for the bill as it is today. It’s a shell of a bill right now. We all know that. I have changes urged by my state’s governor that will have to be included to earn my support for final passage of any bill. I know many of you will have to see the bill changed substantially for you to support it. We’ve tried to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors in consultation with the administration, then springing it on skeptical members, trying to convince them it’s better than nothing, asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition. I don’t think that is going to work in the end. And it probably shouldn’t.”

God, this is gorge-inducing. Alone, he could’ve stopped the process he so dislikes in its tracks. He could’ve done it in a way that echoed through the ages. But he said, “yes.”

“The Obama administration and congressional Democrats shouldn’t have forced through Congress without any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as Obamacare. And we shouldn’t do the same with ours.”

Alas, this is an absolute lie, and an embarrassing one, and the Straight Talk Express is in the ditch. The Affordable Care Act was the product of endless hearings and at least 100 amendments proposed by Republicans. It was scored by the CBO. The Senate debated it for almost a month, and the senators knew what was in it. Right now, the bill that John McCain facilitated likely will be one that isn’t scored by the CBO, and the Freedom Caucus crackpots in the House are trying to defund the CBO and hand the job of scoring legislation to the Heritage Foundation. I would bet a substantial number of buffalo nickels that John McCain votes for whatever bill finally comes before him, no matter how many people’s lives that bill makes miserable.

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I wanted this to be different. In 2000, I thought McCain might be the person to lead his party back to marginal sanity at least. But he wanted to be president, so he became like all the rest of them. Yes, he scolded that person who said Barack Obama was a Muslim, but he chose as his running mate a nutty person who still may believe he is. Yes, he put his name on a campaign finance reform bill, but he also voted for every member of the Supreme Court who subsequently eviscerated that law, and others like it, and he’s been absent from that fight ever since. There have been very few senators as loyal to the party line as John McCain. He has been a great lost opportunity to the country. Now, he will end his career as the face of whatever wretchedness is brought on the country by whatever the bill finally is.

By the end of the afternoon, the Democrats had taken over one of the wide marble staircases outside the Capitol. They had walked across the piazza and onto the East Lawn of the Capitol to talk to some protesters, many of whom are struggling with diseases and disabilities that would be covered under the Affordable Care Act, and certainly under the Cadillac healthcare plan enjoyed by John McCain. It was a nice gesture, and they were warmly received, but there was something of the stunt to it.

The Republicans have the votes now. Dean Heller and Rob Portman and Shelley Moore Capito have lined up with their party once, and the likelihood is their respective prices will be met again because this is not a policy issue any more, it is pure politics now, a promise made by an extremist majority to its unthinking base. That’s what the end of this ugly day looked like, a day on which the final bloody death of Barack Obama’s legacy was placed on the fast track by people who know better, and on which Susan Collins of Maine was more of a maverick than John McCain ever was. It was an ugly day in the U.S. Senate, and there was nothing but ruin everywhere you looked.

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The Guardian

John McCain had the chance to do the right thing on healthcare. He failed

Lucia Graves     July 25, 2017

There are many reasons to respect the Arizona senator, but his remarkable stoicism and service can’t excuse his yes vote in the Senate

‘John McCain lost more than his good health – he’s lost his decency.’ Photograph: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

John McCain often gets cast as a truth-teller to Donald Trump, but his voting record says otherwise. And nowhere was that more clear than on Tuesday when, despite his own ill health, when it came to the decision of whether to take other people’s healthcare away, he cast a decisive vote in the wrong direction.

Addressing his fellow lawmakers, McCain called passionately for a return to regular order, and for senators to work constructively across the aisle. “Why don’t we try the old way of legislating in the Senate, the way our rules and customs encourage us to act,” he said in his Tuesday speech. “If this process ends in failure, which seems likely, then let’s return to regular order!”

Though he has often railed against Trump as if he can’t actually affect what he is complaining about, McCain isn’t a helpless observer – he’s an influential senator. And on Tuesday, as the country draws closer than ever before to the death of the Affordable Care Act, he was a pivotal one.

Had McCain simply voted no to the question of whether the Senate should begin debate on a repeal or replacement of Obamacare, which squeaked by in the Senate with a vote of 51-50, the chamber’s leader Mitch McConnell might well have been forced to do the very thing McCain claimed to want: restore the chamber to order.

Instead, McCain, who was recently and tragically diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, and who returned to DC explicitly to help save the GOP healthcare bill, voted yes.

To put it another way, faced with a rare opportunity to make a real tangible difference, he risked traveling amid failing health to make possible the very thing he decried.

More damningly, he voted yes to take away healthcare from millions of Americans – including an untold number of other cancer patients – even as he continues to access benefits of the quality care afforded him as a senator, care subsidized by American taxpayers.

Never mind that at this point in time Republicans have little idea what the bill they would replace Obamacare with will contain. Never mind that we have arrived at this point through a secretive process devoid of public hearings, or even that Republicans would have the healthcare of millions of American women dreamed up entirely by men.

Politics appears to have triumphed over logic. Sadly, the politics that won out today are is not even a sort personally dear to John McCain – that much was made clear in his floor speech. It’s not even his own electoral politics that won out, either; after a tough re-election battle, he won’t be up again until 2022, freeing him up as much as electorally possible to act solely with his moral compass as the guide.

Instead, McCain did the very thing he had just railed against, acting out of partisan loyalty.

There are many reasons to respect McCain, a former prisoner of war who endured torture in the five and a half years he spent captive in North Vietnam, and has campaigned against torture by the US. His 2008 campaign against Barack Obama now looks like the very model of civility in the wake of Trump.

But even his remarkable stoicism and service can’t excuse what he just did.

The grim reality is that health insurance is of the utmost importance when it comes to surviving cancer, the second leading killer in America after heart disease. Put simply, the uninsured are much more likely to die than those with insurance – and sooner.

A recent study in the journal Cancer found the uninsured were 88% more likely to die of testicular cancer than those with insurance. For patients with Medicaid, the number dropped to a 58% greater chance of dying than privately insured patients like McCain.

The study found the same trend held true for patients with glioblastoma, the malignant brain cancer McCain was recently diagnosed with. It’s a terribly disease with a median life expectancy with his type of just 15 months, and that’s as true for McCain as anyone, but the uninsured still die faster than anyone.

Voting to subject any one of millions of Americans to go to meet such a fate without even the benefit of the best tools medicine has to fight it is cruel, given McCain’s new-found appreciation of the benefit.

The estimated cost of McCain’s recent surgery to remove the cancer above his eye is a sum that would bankrupt many Americans, using the Medicare rates for which McCain qualifies.

There’s a way to fix the fact that many Americans under the age of 65 don’t have access to any such care: let everyone under it buy in, a scheme for which many on the left have argued. But on Tuesday, McCain helped move the country in precisely the opposite direction.

We still don’t know which of several bills Republicans will bring up for a vote, but all of them involve millions of Americans losing the very sort of health insurance upon which McCain depends.

The only question is whether it’s a matter of 22, 32 or “just” 15 million people who will lose access. What we can say with confidence is whatever version moves forward, McCain’s lost more than his good health – he’s lost his decency.

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