#jobs program

[brooklynmuseum]

What are your big dreams for the future of New York City? The census determines billions of dollars in funding for our schools, health care, jobs programs, housing, transportation, cultural organizations, and so many other vital services. 

Fill out the census today at my2020census.gov. #GetCountedNYC

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

THE CASE FOR A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

BY MATT BRUENIG

In America today, around two-thirds of the national income is paid out to workers in the form of labor compensation: wages, salaries, tips and benefits. The remaining one-third is paid out to capitalists in the form of passive income: dividends, interest, rents and capital gains. The capitalists do not work for their share of the national income. They simply own things and, by virtue of that ownership, passively extract income.

This arrangement would not be so disequalizing if the ownership of passive income-generating capital was evenly distributed, but it is not. Federal Reserve data show that millionaires own 80 percent of the country’s capital while the bottom 38 percent of Americans own none. This means that a small group of people receives the overwhelming majority of the nation’s passive income, which is one of the reasons inequality is so high.

For the last hundred years or so, market socialists like Rudolf Hilfderding, Oskar Lange, Rudolf Meidner and John Roemer have argued that we should solve this problem by collectivizing the ownership of wealth into common pools. The Norwegian government made the idea work over the past few decades through nationalizing oil resources, creating dozens of state-owned enterprises, and just ordinary taxing and saving. Today, Norwegian citizens collectively own 59 percent of their wealth in these types of funds (and 76 percent if you exclude owner-occupied housing).

The main Norwegian social wealth fund is especially interesting because it does not invest in speculative real estate or coal, and is planning to divest from oil and gas. It also excludes companies from its portfolio if they violate human rights and labor rights or engage in environmentally destructive practices.

Once the wealth is collectively owned, that raises an interesting question: What to do with the income it generates? In Norway, the money goes into public spending, mostly on robust social welfare programs. Another answer is to fund a universal basic income, or UBI (also called a “universal basic dividend” or “social dividend”) for everyone in society. Such a program exists in Alaska and helps to ensure everyone benefits from the state’s wealth, not just the super-rich. In part because of this, Alaska is the most equal state in America.

Unlike a JG, this kind of UBI has been tried successfully. Since 1982, Alaska has used investment returns from the Alaska Permanent Fund to pay out a universal basic dividend to everyone who lives in the state. In some years, the dividend has been as high as $2,072 for a single person or $8,288 for a family of four. If Norway paid a dividend from its much larger fund, it would have been $23,970 per person last year or $95,880 for a family of four. Both the Alaskan and Norwegian programs are wildly popular, work as advertised and could easily be copied by our national government.

THE PROBLEM IS PROFITS

BY ROHAN GREY AND RAÚL CARRILLO

Like Matt, we oppose the concentration of wealth and ownership. However, his approach of redistributing capital income, rather than reducing it, stands to make a bad situation worse.

Financial inequality is a symptom, not a cause, of capitalism. It exists because capitalists and managers control production while exploiting workers and the broader public for their own power and profit. This system scars communities and the environment in ways dividends cannot heal, causing death, disease and ecological collapse. Consequently, proposals that rely on ever-greater profits risk entrenching the current economy’s worst abuses.

In particular, we oppose linking the performance of stocks, bonds and real estate to poverty reduction, as Matt’s social wealth fund proposal would do. Goldman Sachs, Monsanto, Halliburton, Facebook, Amazon and the rest of the Fortune 500 are not merely money-making machines; they are sprawling private governance regimes that warp the lives of billions. What’s good for General Motors is rarely good for the country (or planet). Furthermore, the hostility of central bankers to the working class, especially workers of color, should cause leftists to balk at reforms featuring a technocracy of fund managers.

The Norwegian and Alaskan experiences also cause us concern rather than comfort. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF), for example, amassed its wealth by investing in fossil fuels. Today it invests in overseas real estate and earns passive income off the backs of workers in the Global South. The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF), still rakes in healthy profits from fossil fuel extraction, while Alaska remains plagued by poverty, unemployment and underinvestment in public services. Meanwhile, the highest dividend paid by the APF—$2,072 per person—is still far too low to provide substantial respite from work, the alleged advantage of a universal basic income (UBI) over a job guarantee (JG).

Regardless of the size of the payout, we are concerned that mailing everyone an identical check will increase inequality, rather than reduce it. Early social dividend proponents, such as C.H. Douglas, envisioned an “aristocracy of producers and a democracy of consumers.” A standalone UBI, financed by a wealth fund or otherwise, does not challenge the capitalist system of production. History demonstrates technocratic elites favor a standalone UBI precisely because it actually subsidizes corporate power, rather than threatens it.

Instead of a stock dividend, we should guarantee housing, healthcare, education, family and disability support, reparations, and other public goods through a full employment economy, undergirded by a JG. Rather than leaning into financialization, we should reduce our dependence on mega-corporations and money managers by establishing a right to a job, then building alternative systems of community-oriented production. The solution to capitalist-driven inequality is not making everyone a capitalist. It’s less capitalism.

(Check out the full debate series HERE)

[dragoni]

Trumps says he told his Commerce Department to lift a trade ban on Chinese phone company ZTE

ZTE, which has more than 70,000 employees and has supplied networks or equipment to some of the world's biggest telecoms companies, said in early May that it ha

Trump Supporters, Trump just saved 70,000 jobs — except they’re in China #MCGA

"We can't continue to allow China to rape our country”, Donald J Trump  #ChickenHawk #LiarInChief

Looks like China has its own dossier on Trump. Republicans, what about the Trade War and China stealing jobs, unfair trade and trade deficit #ChinaPuppet

President Donald Trump has instructed his Commerce Department to help get a Chinese telecommunications company get "back into business" after the US government cut off access to its American suppliers for 7 years

The US accused ZTE of misleading American regulators after it settled charges of violating sanctions against North Korea and Iran.

As one of the world's largest telecom equipment makers, ZTE relied on US companies for components.

President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!

— Donald J. Trump‏ @realDonaldTrump May 13, 2018

"How about helping some American companies first?" 

— Chuck Schumer‏ @SenSchumer - May 13, 2018

“Our intelligence agencies have warned that ZTE technology and phones pose a major cyber security threat. You should care more about our national security than Chinese jobs.”

— Adam Schiff @RepAdamSchiff  May 13, 2018

Learn More:

Adam Schiff warns of cybersecurity threat from ZTE, CNN

In About-Face on Trade, Trump Vows to Protect ZTE Jobs in China, NYTimes

Penalties against China telecom giant ZTE become a bargaining chip as White House, Chinese officials discuss potential trade deal, Washington Post

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

THE ARGUMENT ABOUT A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME (UBI) VERSUS A JOB GUARANTEE (JG) has become one of the liveliest and most contentious debates on the Left. Each has been touted as a solution to all ills: the way to decrease depression, close the racial wealth gap, recognize historically undervalued forms of work, transform the economy, save the planet.

Though UBI and JG are typically counterposed, it’s entirely plausible they could coexist. If paid work is as important to well-being as JG advocates say, most people would want a job even with UBI. In particular, the black freedom movement, from civil rights leaders to Black Lives Matter, has called for both a basic income and guaranteed jobs.

Whether both can do all the things proponents promise—in particular, the essential work of transitioning quickly to a low-carbon economy—is a different, harder question. Whether it’s possible to achieve both is yet another.

A UBI program could actually be a danger to the climate if, in distributing revenue from publicly owned resources, we rely on profits from destructive industries such as oil, as in Alaska. But there are alternatives: a depletion tax on companies that degrade so-called natural capital, a tax on carbon and other pollutants, or a land value tax targeting large landowners—all of which foster environmental conservation and make public claims to natural wealth.

I initially supported UBI because separating livelihoods from jobs is important, not only for human wellbeing but for breaking an environmentally destructive growth cycle. That’s where many JG proposals make me nervous. I have yet to see a JG proposal that doesn’t promise, at least tangentially, to increase growth and productivity. A proposal published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for example, suggests a JG would produce “increases in the growth rate of GDP, and substantial productivity and capacity gains.” But not all such gains are desirable. We ought to crowd out the many jobs that are actively harmful to people, society and the environment, whether in fast fashion or Amazon warehouses.

Raúl and Rohan agree that we should work less in general, and it’s possible to build work reduction into a JG program. But the valorization of work nevertheless permeates JG discourse, often framed in terms of dignity or solidarity. If the point is for everyone to contribute to necessary work in the spirit of equality and solidarity, we should be making everyone work—but no one yet has proposed drafting landlords and the idle rich to shovel compost. (I’m on board.)

It is encouraging, however, to see that many current JG advocates are thinking about what constitutes low-carbon, socially beneficial work. Economists Stephanie Kelton and Pavlina Tcherneva have both called for a JG oriented around care: for people, for the planet and for communities. Important questions remain. Could parents get “jobs” caring for their children? Could friends get jobs caring for one another? Yet the move to put care work at the heart of a climate program is important. We need to move away from the work of resource-intensive consumer goods toward the work of bettering lives, planting trees, constructing playgrounds, making art.

Perhaps most promising is the combination of a JG and universal basic services: free and publicly provided housing, transportation, internet access, education, healthcare and other necessities. Dense housing and public transportation are particularly crucial to reducing carbon emissions in a just way.

If that sounds too good to be true, that’s where politics comes in. The most significant political challenge for both policies, of course, is that private employers don’t want people to have alternatives to bad jobs. Realistically, the Left doesn’t have the power to win both a UBI and a JG in the immediate future—particularly at a time when unemployment is relatively low, even if bad jobs are rampant. So we need to be alert to the challenges of actually passing something, and to how our ideal policies might be distorted in the process.

I’ve grown more wary of a UBI as it’s increasingly championed by tech scions who see it as a way to throw crumbs to workers replaced by robots. That version of UBI, which would replace social services with lump sums of cash, isn’t what I want— but of late it’s been the one with more momentum. Similarly, while left-wing JG programs aren’t workfare, we need to be careful not to reinforce the idea that people only matter if they work enough, as the Right tries to impose work requirements on food stamps and other assistance programs

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[berniesrevolution]

TYT Rebel HQ | Federal Jobs Guarantee EXPLAINED

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

With global temperatures rising and midterm elections approaching, 2018 is the year the climate movement must take bold action towards a fossil-free future.

Across the country, young people face daily reminders that our society doesn’t serve our futures. We suffer from unemployment and underemployment that is well beyond the national average, with young people of color struggling disproportionately to find work and economic opportunity. We are straddled with historic student loan debts. And in a moment when we should be working quickly to avert climate catastrophe and transition to an inclusive, fossil-free economy, many of our elected officials remain passive as the Trump administration attacks our air, water and land.

As youth leaders in the climate justice movement, we believe now is the time to embrace a bold political vision that addresses climate change while working to end racialized economic inequality.

A centerpiece of that vision is a federal jobs guarantee, a policy through which the government directly employs anyone who wants a job but doesn’t have one. The jobs guarantee has deep roots in the U.S. progressive tradition and is seeing growing support from scholars and movement leaders who tout its potential to put Americans to work while helping to rebuild our infrastructure, schools and healthcare system. With Sen. Bernie Sanders developing a jobs guarantee proposal, as well as a score of down-ballot candidates and Democratic presidential hopefuls also voicing support, the policy is sure to feature prominently in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

Climate scientists say that the next few years may be the only ones we have left to avert catastrophic global warming. A jobs guarantee program with a strong focus on stopping and preparing for climate change—a climate jobs guarantee—might be the last, best hope to quickly marshal public support and resources behind climate action. Simply put, this is a can’t-miss opportunity for the climate movement—and for our generation.

Toward a climate jobs guarantee

Solving the climate crisis will be no easy feat. It will require massive investments, to the tune of trillions of dollars over the next few decades—to transition toward a 100 percent renewable energy economy; to overhaul how we farm, transport and consume food; to restore depleted ecosystems; and to empower the communities already affected by the climate crisis to adapt to changes that cannot be reversed.

Each of these undertakings will also require massive job creation. A climate jobs guarantee has the potential to create a labor force that could be the engine of rapid decarbonization, and the services it generates can enhance communities’ resilience to climate impacts. Importantly, such a program can elevate those communities who have been systematically excluded from economic prosperity as well as those workers who risk being left behind by the transition to a renewable energy economy.

A climate jobs guarantee could be the climate movement’s “Medicare-for-All” policy—a universal program big enough to address the massive and complicated crisis of climate change, but still tangible and popular among the vast majority of Americans.

Like Medicare for All, a jobs guarantee is wildly popular. Polling firm Civis Analytics identified it as “one of the most popular issues [they’ve] ever polled,” with a majority of Americans’ support, and with disproportionate interest among low-income groups and communities of color, who tend to bear the brunt of unemployment, underemployment and climate chaos. While we’ve seen growing momentum around calls for 100 percent renewable energy and keeping fossil fuels in the ground, a jobs guarantee is the most promising means of popularizing the deficit spending and enlarged role of government that rapid decarbonization of the economy will require.

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[berniesrevolution]

Bernie Sanders to unveil plan to guarantee every American a job

It's the type of large-scale government works project Democrats shied away from under President Barack Obama.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will unveil a plan for the federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker “who wants or needs one,” embracing the kind of large-scale government works project that Democrats have shied away from in recent decades.

Sanders's jobs guarantee would fund hundreds of projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, health care, the environment, education and other goals. Under the job guarantee, every American would be entitled to a job under one of these projects or receive job training to be able to do so, according to an early draft of the proposal.

Sanders joins two other rumored 2020 Democratic presidential contenders who have expressed support for the idea of a jobs guarantee. The push reflects a leftward move in the party's economic policy, away from President Barack Obama's use of public-private partnerships or government incentives to reshape private markets and toward an unambiguous embrace of direct government intervention.

Job guarantee advocates say their plan would drive up wages by dramatically increasing competition for workers, ensuring corporations have to offer more generous salaries and benefits if they want to keep their employees from working for the government. Supporters say it would also reduce racial inequality, since black workers face unemployment at about twice the rates of white workers, as well as gender inequality, since many iterations of the plan call for the expansion of federal child-care work.

“The goal is to eliminate working poverty and involuntary unemployment altogether,” said Darrick Hamilton, an economist at the New School who has advocated for a jobs guarantee program along with Stony Brook University's Stephanie Kelton and a group of left-leaning economists at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. “This is an opportunity for something transformative, beyond the tinkering we've been doing for the last 40 years, where all the productivity gains have gone to the elite of society.”

Others, including some Democrats, are not convinced. The idea is also dead on arrival with Republicans in control of Congress, and conservatives have trashed the idea of a jobs guarantee as impractical, impossibly expensive and dangerous to the private sector.

“It completely undercuts a lot of industries and companies,” said Brian Riedl, of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, a think tank. “There will be pressure to introduce a higher wage or certain benefits that the private sector doesn't offer.”

Ernie Tedeschi, an economist who served in Obama's Treasury Department, said there would be large logistical and practical challenges in ensuring millions of new federal jobs serve productive ends.

“It would be extremely expensive, and I wonder if this is the best, most targeted use of the amount of money it would cost,” Tedeschi said.

Obama's economic initiatives, generally, focused on using the government to influence private markets and industries in pursuit of policy goals. Obama's economic stimulus plan — in which he and Democrats tried to pull the United States out of a deep recession — channeled money through private enterprises to boost hiring and investment, as well as offering tax cuts and rebates to individuals in the hopes of getting them to spend more.

But in a new political climate, ideas like a jobs guarantee plan is gaining traction among prominent Democrats. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) backed the idea on Twitter earlier this month. As first reported by Vox, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) last week also announced his intention to introduce a separate bill that would create a pilot program for a job guarantee in 15 rural and urban areas.

Under the early draft of Sanders's job guarantee, local, state, and American Indian tribe governments in every section of the country would send proposals for public works projects for their areas to 12 regional offices that encompass the country. These 12 regional offices would act as a clearinghouse for these projects, tasked with sending recommended projects to a new national office within the Labor Department office for final approval.

Once approved, the projects would hire workers at a minimum salary of $15 an hour and paid family and medical leave, and offer the same retirement, health, and sick and annual leave benefits as other federal employees.

(Continue Reading)