It’s now a part of commonplace wisdom that globalization and economic slumps in the U.S. have created a buyers’ market when it comes to labor, and that the folks selling their only asset, their time and effort, are at a new disadvantage that is eroding the hard-won successes the labor movement enjoyed in first half of the 20th century. Jobs now regularly move to areas of the world where impoverished and often politically powerless folks cannot afford to make demands – and the power of our own citizens to demand equitable treatment is correspondingly diminished.

We have a national version of the same game going on today, where corporations pit cities, states and regions against each other in bidding wars. The prize is jobs – which may or may not materialize, and which are often yanked away a few years later when a new round of bidding is engendered. The losers are usually the taxpayers who subsidize the enticements that are offered and labor, which is either cajoled or forced to play the part of sacrificial lamb.

This situation is now being played out in Missouri which is desperately trying to lure a new Boeing factory that would most likely bring with it a boatload of jobs. Governor Jay Nixon, who somehow had the internal wherewithal to hold fast against stupid tax cuts earlier this year, is nevertheless in a tizzy to let Boeing walk all over any progressive aspirations he may have fostered – and he is aided and abetted by a legislature where almost all except for a few on the left and right are willing to abandon principle. And we can’t really blame them – the playing board has been tilted to such an extent that this is now the way the game has to be played; until we can change the rules, the Boeings of the world can and will run roughshod over taxpayers and workers.

The Boeing demands, though, are extreme even in this era of compulsive corporate welfare. Notable in the Boeing wish list is the demand that the locale they chose provide the site and facilities at “no cost, or very low cost” and pick up the tab for “infrastructure improvements.” As Matthew Iglesias observes:

That’s a little nutty. If your strategy for attracting the construction of an airplane factory to your town includes footing the entire bill for an airplane factory, then you might as well just launch an airplane manufacturing company. You can read the whole list here. They are ideally looking for a highly skilled yet low-wage workforce at a location with a dedicated railroad spur and a seaport. Plus low taxes!

This situation suggests the following to me:

1. A corporate buyer’s market is not good for the large majority of Americans.

2. Rightwing efforts to enact right-to-work laws, to lower or eliminate corporate taxes, weaken regulations, etc. are intended to create just such a market.

3. This is a problem that progressives have to approach systematically at the federal level. Ameliorating this market situation has to be a major progressive goal that needs to be dealt with in a strategic fashion.

4. Meanwhile, we have to hold the line in the fight against the highly organized network of corporate influence peddlers such as ALEC and its Missouri affiliate, the Show-Me-Institute – and accept the fact that until we have dealt with the issues above, we will loose as often as we win.

5. “Opportunities” like that offered by Boeing will continue to present themselves and we will continue to weaken our social and labor infrastructure until we have dealt with the larger issues.

Years ago I was part of the administration in a non-profit on the West Coast. Our salaries were higher than elsewhere because the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area where we were located was also higher. Frequently, staff from one of the East Coast Ivy League schools would apply for jobs in our organization with no intention of accepting. The goal was to get a job offer which they could then take back to their own organization as fuel in salary negotiations, a surefire ploy since their school had an articulated policy of bidding to keep high-performing employees. To say that this left a bad taste in our mouth was an understatement – we were out the time and expense of interviewing candidates in name only. Since we were capable of learning from experience, we soon stopped selecting individuals from this school for interviews. The issue of corporate extortion of the Boeing variety is far more complex, but what this past experience suggests to me is that there are solutions to such problems, although they may be far from perfect. We can learn from experience, and we can develop  strategies for coping.

It is unlikely that Boeing will actually locate in Missouri – we do have some remnants of a labor movement, some few of our legislators realize that they’re playing a chumps’ game, and, most significantly, we don’t have the seaport that figures on Boings list of secondary preferences. Nevertheless, Missouri’s political class needs to learn from this experience and come up with a real job-creation strategy for Missouri that doesn’t involve allowing thuggish corporations to work over Missourians.

*Last sentence edited post-publication. Point no. 2 also edited for clairity.  

Today the senate rejected a bill that would have created jobs for returning veterans:

As proposals go, this should have been a no-brainer. The Veterans Job Corps Act of 2012, sponsored by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), sought to lower unemployment among military veterans, giving grants to federal, state, and local agencies, which in turn would hire veterans — giving priority to those who served on or after 9/11 — to work as first-responders and in conservation jobs at national parks.

The bill was fully paid for, and entirely bipartisan — Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) had his own set of ideas for the bill, and Murray incorporated all of them into her legislation.

Unfortunately, the only no-brainers in the Senate seem to be the members of the Grand Obstructionist Party, GOP to you and me. The bill actually passed, 58-40, but nowadays a fillibuster-proof 60 votes is always required to get anything through the Senate. Missouri’s own Senate GOPer, Roy Blunt, who campaigned on a platform of job creation, affirmed his essential GOPness today in spades when he voted against this job-creating legislation. It might behoove some of the folks who voted for Senator Blunt to ask him why he won’t sign on to a upfront paid-for jobs bill for veterans, the folks who actually fought in the unpaid-for little wars he helped W. execute?

Just guessing, but it would fit the GOP profile if Blunt answered with some cockamamy story about forestalling that old GOP bugaboo, the culture of dependency, or growing government,  or maybe with the implication that government jobs, in this case sorely needed policemen and firemen, are not real, or “solid” jobs. These guys, after all, insist that government doesn’t need to do anything for anyone but the rich guys  who will then take care of creating our jobs.

Nevertheless, one wonders. Could it have been that Blunt also shares his party’s concern that the economy might perk up a little more before the election and undo all their hard work during the past four years? Nor will it necessarily be that good for the anti-union proclivities of those “small” business job creators Blunt touts, who, based on his legislative priorities, don’t seem to be that small, and who wouldn’t be able to depend on a totally desperate and malleable work force if veterans returned to good, public sector jobs.

Claire Mccaskill, by the way, did the right thing and voted to help employ returning veterans while providing for a community need. Of course, for McCaskill, it’s only one more manifestation of her ongoing support for veterans. She doesn’t just talk tough about the need for a strong defense when it comes to shoveling money to defense contractors, she’s there to support the guys who provide the defense.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, during Mitt Romney’s campaign stop today in North St. Louis County today, he continued his most recent dishonest campaign line, the one where he claims that Obama is responsible for the slow rate of recovery:  

For three and a half years, President Obama has expanded government instead of empowering the American people. He’s put us deeper into debt. He’s slowed the recovery and harmed our economy. And he has attacked the cornerstone of American prosperity: our economic freedom.

Follow the link above for the full text of his talk, although the segment above summarizes his main themes – about which what can I say? So much drek – where to begin?

The president slowed the recovery? Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office tried once again to disabuse congressional GOPers (and through them the well-and-truly duped American public) of their seeming belief that the stimulus didn’t work:

But on Wednesday, under questioning from skeptical Republicans, the director of the nonpartisan (and widely respected) Congressional Budget Office was emphatic about the value of the 2009 stimulus. And, he said, the vast majority of economists agree.

In a survey conducted by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 80 percent of economic experts agreed that, because of the stimulus, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise.

Romney’s been misquoting Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists to bolster the point he hints at above when he speaks about “expanded government”; he actually has the gall to say that Scheiber indicts the President for consciously slowing the recovery by priortizing Obamacare. Of course, no less a person that the author, Mr. Scheiber, contends that Romney is willfully misrepresenting his argument:

Romney’s imputing one big claim that I just do not make and that I just do not believe to be true,” he said. “Which is that there’s something substantively, sort of intrinsically about the Affordable Care Act that would derail the recovery. That, I personally don’t believe, and I don’t believe they believe it. …

Either Romney has reading comprehension problems or he’s lying. In fact, Schreiber argues that the only problem with Obamacare was that it took energy that could have been dedicated to securing even more stimulus which, in his view, would have pushed the recovery harder and made it go faster. Is Romney implying that he actually supports more stimulus?

If Romney is so concerned with jobs, why doesn’t he address the role of the GOP’s deficit cutting which took thousands of public sector jobs out of play during a major recession? How does he deal with the growing realization that the GOP has fought tooth and nail against measures that would aid recovery in order to sabotage the administration of a Democratic president – a fact that has become so obvious that the usually circumspect Harry Reid explicitly questions GOP motives.

Next we move on to the charge that Obama has threatened “economic freedom.” Of course, this particular point is simply a nod to rabid free market conservatives. By economic freedom, Romney is referring to untrammeled laissez-faire capitalism of the sort that characterized the gilded age in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – a time of great inequality, intense poverty and powerlessness on the part of a large segment of the population. Do we really want to go there again?

It’s easy to criticize those who have the actual responsibility for making things work – especially when, as in the case of Mitt Romney, you don’t consider yourself bound by the truth. It’s much harder to do the deeds or even come up with a viable plan. Although Mitt Romney has been very shy about putting concrete suggestions forward, the six immediate “job-creating” actions he proposed when pressed in a recent CNN interview don’t seem to meet his own criteria according to two economists who were asked by Washington Post blogger, Greg Sargent, to evaluate them:

… Joel Prakken, the chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, […] described Romney’s ideas as a “a bundle of reasonable policy proposals that could well stimulate the economy from the supply side over a number of years, but would do little to stimulate aggregate demand in the short run. The reason that unemployment is as high as it is is inadequate aggregrate demand, not inadequate supply.”

“On net, all of these policies would do more harm in the short term,” added Mark Hopkins, a senior adviser at Moody’s Analytics. “If we implemented all of his policies, it would push us deeper into recession and make the recovery slower.”

So to summarize, Romney is traipsing around Missouri telling us that Obama has done something bad by pulling us through a major economic meltdown. The economy is recovering at a slow pace thanks to congressional GOP obstructionism that he fails to acknowledge. He lies blatantly about measured evaluations of Obamacare and its relation to the recovery, and puts forward proposals that would do nothing, zero, nada, zilch, to deal with the Bush recession – a recession that came about because George Bush and like-minded GOPers tried to restore gilded age, unregulated capitalism – the path to the “economic freedom” to which Romney hopes to return the nation.

Got to give it to the guy – Romney may not have much going for him in area of smarts or integrity, but he’s got chutzpah.  

In an effort to get herself out of the deep you know what Vicky Hartzler stepped in when she tried to fan the birtherism flames among her more receptive constituents, she resorted to what has become the standby of a GOP that wants to hide its real proclivities. She denied interest in anything less lofty than jobs. According to her press aide, Hartzler “is focused on job creation and the economy – not on the birth certificate controversy.”

My response to this? Well and good. Since Hartzler is focused like a laser on the economy, I will expect to hear her touting the President’s job creation record any day now. This chart tells us that it’s not been nearly as bad as she and her GOP pals keep trying to claim:

I see slow but relatively steady job growth. According to most economists, the first six months of Obama’s presidency reflects the mess he inherited from George Bush’s toxic mixture of trickle-down economics and deregulation, but with the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a., the stimulus, we began to see improvement that has continued, albeit slowly, to the present day. Since 2010, the private sector has added about 3.9 million jobs.

Here, however, is another relevant chart for Hartzler to chew on:

Seems like unemployment figures might have been even better were it not for the loss of public sector jobs. McClatchy reports that since 2010, some 485,000 government jobs have been cut. These job losses are directly attributable to the GOP’s hatchet job on the budget, both at the federal and state levels.

As far as I can remember, Vicky’s been all for the austerity budgets with their destructive cuts to federal spending and down,down, down on the stimulus.

Given these facts, I think I’d like Hartzler to stay focused on the President’s birth certificate and forget about the economy. She’ll probably do a lot less harm that way.  

Claire McCaskill needs our help. Specifically, she needs some facts. Just listen to this video in which McCaskill gives us her opinion about the Keystone (KXL) pipeline controversy and you’ll see what I mean:

First point: McCaskill says she thinks development of the Keystone pipeline is inevitable: “it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when and where,” she says. And maybe she’s right. Certainly there will be lots of money spent to make sure KXL happens – we know that Big Oil can really grease those congressional skids. However, because grilling seems inevitable, one doesn’t, like St. Lawrence, have to turn over and ask the cooks to roast the other side.

One of the ways that Big Oil insures that they get their way is by spreading loads of BS, spurious research or outright falsehoods, disseminated by members of the Republican party with the aid of their tame media. Often, though,  poorly informed – or cynical – Democrats like Claire McCaskill will echo the GOP line du jour, as she does in the video above. To her credit, one must add, McCaskill is much more tentative than the usual congressional big oil spokesperson, which leaves me with the impression that she might be receptive to a critique of her remarks.

Second point:  Per McCaskill, if the pipeline doesn’t go from North to South, it’ll go East to West, remaining within Canada. She implies that such an eventuality would deprive the U.S. of oil that would otherwise contribute to our energy independence. It seems to have escaped her attention that the pipeline is designed to run North to Southern port refineries – where it will be sold to any country that’s willing to pay the price.

As Money Morning’s David Zeiler puts it:

The pipeline will connect refiners, as Money Morning Global Energy Strategist Dr. Kent Moors recently noted in his Oil & Energy Investor newsletter. The oil that reaches Gulf refineries could ultimately be consumed in the United States, but the finished products could just as easily be exported to China, Japan, or any other oil-hungry nation.

Energy companies will look to sell their oil to the highest bidder.

In fact, the United States is currently a net exporter of gasoline. In September, the U.S. exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline than it imported. …

Third point. McCaskill suggests we should make the most of KXL and take advantage of the jobs that it promises to create. Sounds reasonable enough until one examines the various job creation claims.  

The State Department calculates that it will create somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 temporary jobs – which, according to an independent assessment by Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, may be somewhat too generous. That study estimates that between 2,500 and 4,650 temporary, non-local jobs may result.

Given these numbers one can only look askance at the study commissioned by the company that seeks to build the pipeline, which estimates 20,000 construction jobs and 118,000 associated jobs in supporting industries. And, indeed, there are problems with these figures. As Money Morning explains:

… . That study used a “one person, one year model.” So if it takes 6,500 workers two years to build the pipeline, that’s 13,000 jobs, with the other 7,000 coming from supply manufacturers.

And if that math isn’t fuzzy enough for you, take a look at the calculations for the 118,000 spin-off jobs.

That number is based on the one person, one-year model in addition to something called the multiplier effect, which takes the capital costs of the project and feeds it into a formula. In short, these job numbers are about as reliable as a politician’s campaign promise.

Morning Money also remarks on the irony of GOP support for the mostly temporary KXL jobs given their oft-expressed contempt for the temporary jobs that resulted from stimulus spending.

But there’s more. The Cornell study cited above actually suggests that the pipeline might cost jobs:

… According to TransCanada, KXL [i.e., the Keystone Pipeline] will increase the price of heavy crude oil in the Midwest by almost $2 to $4 billion annually, and escalating for several years. It will do this by diverting major volumes of tar sands oil now supplying the Midwest refineries, so it can be sold at higher prices to the Gulf Coast and export markets. As a result, consumers in the Midwest could be paying 10 to 20 cents more per gallon for gasoline and diesel fuel, adding up to $5 billion to the annual US fuel prices. … those higher fuel prices for the Midwest could cost that region thousands of jobs. …

The Cornell study explicitly concludes that the job potential of KXL is nil and that the decision should be based on other factors. Yet according to KXL supporters, denying the pipeline permit is an outrage against the unemployed, a point that McCaskill seems to echo, albeit more gently than hardcore supporters.

Fourth point: McCaskill seems to believe that she’s being pragmatic when she concludes that KXL is inevitable because we will need to depend on oil for a very long time. That’s what I call a self-fulfilling prophecy – all it takes to make it come true is a cabal of politicians who take their orders from Big Oil, their enablers in the go-along-to-get-along crowd, and those who can’t take the time to work out all the issues.

That’s why we have to help Claire McCaskill get on top of the Keystone XL controversy. I assume none of us want our congresspeople to decide on issues from a poorly informed position any more than we want them to base their decisions on purely political considerations. Nor do we want our Senators to go with the flow and claim that the destination was always inevitable.

Claire McCaskill can support the Keystone pipeline if she wants – there actually seems to be some evidence that the environmental costs are a bit exaggerated – but I hope that when the time comes, if she does so, she’ll be able to make a real case for it, not just concede defeat and repeat a few false GOP talking points.  

Today on the Website for the Campaign for America’s Future, Bill Scher published a list of 25 current senators who voted for the boondoggle-rich “Bridge to Nowhere” transportation bill in 2005  while voting against President Obama’s much less expensive infrastructure bill last week. In other words, they had no problem voting for frivolous spending six years ago, but now they can’t bring themselves to vote to respond to pressing infrastructure needs while creating desperately needed jobs in the process.  

You’ll not be surprised to learn that all but two of these humbugs, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson and Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman (who else, right?), are Republicans. Further, as Steve Benen notes, there are some malefactors who deserve the opprobrium due to this select group, but escape due to a technicality:

… some House members – Missouri’s Roy Blunt, for example – voted for the 2005 bill as House members, and have since been promoted to the Senate.

So I guess we can count Roy Blunt among the lawmakers that Scher designates as “champions of hypocrisy … the people who are standing in the way.”

Roy Blunt wants to cripple federal agencies charged with overseeing activities that touch the lives of every American. Legislation he is currently touting would impose a moratorium on new regulations that have an associated cost of more than 100 million dollars. Before we say well-done, Roy, consider the following:

— The final report on the BP Gulf oil spill has concluded that the responsibility for the disaster lay with BP’s failure to adhere to federal regulations. The report recommends increased regulation and strengthened federal oversight if we are to avoid a repetition of a disaster that environmentalists believe would destroy the Gulf eco-system. I suppose I don’t need to point out that there would be massive economic costs as well as irreparable environmental impacts were such an event to occur?

— There were 85 food recalls that sickened at least 1,850 people between July 30, 2009 and  September 1, 2010. Decades of weakened regulation and oversight of food safety rules were taking a toll on the well-being of Americans, leading the Senate to finally pass in 2010 a food safety bill that has beefed up essential regulatory tools.

— No matter how Republicans seek to spin it – and they’ve got some doozies when it comes to fanciful stories about what caused our current recession – fair minded folks have to admit that we’re in the economic situation we’re in now because of lax financial regulation. Massive deregulation of banks, beginning in the 1980’s and culminating in S.E.C. rule changes in 2004, turned the banking environment into a new Wild West. Even anti-regulation guru, Alan Greenspan, had, however reluctantly, to admit that he had been wrong about the need for financial regulation.

These are just a few examples of situations where lack of intelligent regulation or the failure of regulatory enforcement bit us badly in the pocket-book as well as in terms of quality of life. Hobbling regulatory agencies is dangerous and possible upfront regulatory costs do not provide sufficient criteria to evaluate their actions. So why is Roy Blunt bellyaching about industrial regulation and proposing to do just that? To hear him tell it, it’s because regulations are “job-killing” – never mind the proven dangers to American jobs posed by the poorly regulated environment of the Bush years, which gave us no real boom, just anemic job creation followed by a monster bust with massive job loss.

The sad aspect of the GOP effort to use the Bush recession to win regulatory concessions favoring corporations is that they show so little respect for the intelligence of the American people that they don’t even bother to give us a coherent rationale. Washington Post fact checker, Glenn Kessler examined House Speaker John Boehner’s claim that there are:

…”219 new rules” that were in the works, which he said “will cost our economy at least $100 million.” He suggested the impact could be immediate. As he put it, “our economy is poised to take a hit from the government of at least $100 million – 219 times.”

When Kessler looked into the matter, he found that Boehner’s assertions not only failed to pass his “Pinocchio” test, they were so egregiously false that they merited the award of three whole Pinocchios:

Boehner left the distinct impression that 219 new regulations were hanging like a Sword of Damocles over the U.S. economy. But it turns out the number of potential regulations is inflated, as well as the potential impact. Many of the regulations may turn out to have substantial costs, but others could have benefits, as a report on the speaker’s Web site makes clear. Boehner wins points for admitting he may have overstated his case, but overall his statement contained significant factual errors.

Boehner earned his Pinocchios by telling fibs about the same types of regulation that Blunt is targeting. Before we allow compliant pols like Blunt to use spurious claims about “job creators” to further the GOP’s corporate wish-list agenda, maybe we should check the size of his nose.

Here in Missouri, we’ve sent a group of GOPers to Washington who all have in common the fact that they demonstrate considerable spleen when it comes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Billy Long (R-7th), for example, has bizarrely characterized the ACA as a “purely socialist single-payer healthcare system unlike anything the nation has ever experienced before.” Nor is Billy alone. Next Tuesday it is probably safe to assume that all of our Missouri GOP House members will stand with the rest of their party and vote to repeal the “job-killing” ACA.

Of course this vote amounts to nothing more than political theater, meant to assuage the GOP Tea Party foot soldiers. The bill will go nowhere in the Senate and, if by some fluke it did, it’s a sure bet that the President would veto it. Nevertheless, no matter what else you may think of them, Grand Old Partiers are no fools; they can see as well as anyone else that the anti-Obamacare ruckus they ignited could get out of hand if they don’t follow-up on the fire-and-brimstone they served up to susceptible Tea Partiers. They may soon, however, find themselves between a rock and hard place when it comes time to take credit for this sad piece of performance art.

It’s that “job-killing” part, particularly as it pertains to small businesses, that could trip them up. GOP pols and fellow-traveling lobbyists have been loudly proclaiming that the ACA will be poison for small businesses. Just do a search on “small business” and “Obamacare” and you’ll encounter a plethora of articles replete with doomsday predictions. Roy Blunt actually promised to repeal the ACA as one of the lynch pins of his putative jobs-plan during his Senate campaign last fall. Ultimately, though, the proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Which is why it is interesting to note that small businesses are rushing to take advantage of the provisions of the ACA.  The Los Angeles Times reports that:

Major insurers around the country are reporting that a growing number of small businesses are signing up to give their workers health benefits, a sign of potential progress for the nation’s battered healthcare system. …

An important selling point has been a tax credit that the nation’s new healthcare law provides to companies with fewer than 25 employees and moderate-to-low pay scales to help offset the cost of providing benefits. The tax credit is one of the first few provisions to kick in; much of the law rolls out over the next few years

To take an example close to home, Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Kansas City, Mo. reports a 58% increase in small businesses buying insurance for their employees. Thirty-eight percent of those businesses had never offered their workers insurance before. As for those mandates and reporting requirements that many deplore, Rick Ungar of Forbes’ The Policy Page nails it:

If these small businesses found the new law to be so onerous, why have so many of them voluntarily taken advantage of the benefits provided in the law to give their employees these benefits? They were not mandated to do so. And to the extent that the coming mandate obligations might figure into their thinking, would you not imagine they would wait until 2014 to make a move as the rules do not go into effect until that time?

Nor, with apologies to Billy Long, is the ACA proving to be especially “socialistic.” Actually, the folks who might be contributing most to an anti-business climate may be the Republicans with their constant posturing on the topic of the ACA.  As Ezra Klein puts it:

… the health-care industry is having to balance investments that it wants to make against the concern that Republicans will repeal the bill and yank away those opportunities. Before the election, John Boehner said employers “are afraid to invest and hire in an economy stalled by ‘stimulus’ spending and hamstrung by uncertainty.” Now he’s the guy stringing the hams

I wouldn’t be too surprised, as long as Democrats play their cards right, if next Tuesday might be remembered as the day when the GOP tried to effect the job-killing repeal of the Health Care Act, rather than a vote to repeal the job-killing health care act.

MORE:  Steve Benen has a similar take  on the Republican ACA repeal effort. Interesting quotes he includes:

As Kevin Drum noted a couple of weeks ago, “[I]t really is possible that both the healthcare sector and the business community in general, after they take a look at what kind of chaos might ensue from ad hoc partial defunding, will put some real pressure on Republicans to stand down on this. That would be an interesting turn of events, no?”

The WSJ report added, “Talking about repeal of the health law may be a winning political strategy for Republicans, a rare way to please both workers and business executives. As long as they don’t actually succeed in doing it.”