Temp Nation

We need a national Temp Workers Bill of Rights. These are the most vulnerable people in our country, people who really want to work, and they need protection under the law.

Compare today's Temp Nation to what we had from 1950 to about 1980, with a blue-collar U.S. middle class with steady wages, hours and benefits like medical insurance and a pension.  Those people and those jobs made America the greatest economy the world has ever known.  And we're shipping those jobs overseas and replacing the ones that are left with temps.  America cannot sustain its greatness in this way.  We need to think bigger and not leave the "free market" to destroy our labor force and middle class.  

Check it out [emphasis mine]:

Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm.

In June, the Labor Department reported that the nation had more temp workers than ever before: 2.7 million. Overall, almost one-fifth of the total job growth since the recession ended in mid-2009 has been in the temp sector, federal data shows. But according to the American Staffing Association, the temp industry’s trade group, the pool is even larger: Every year, a tenth of all U.S. workers finds a job at a staffing agency.

The proportion of temp workers in the labor force reached its peak in early 2000 before the 2001 slump and then the Great Recession. But as the economy continues its slow, uneven recovery, temp work is roaring back 10 times faster than private-sector employment as a whole – a pace “exceeding even the dramatic run-up of the early 1990s,” according to the staffing association.

The overwhelming majority of that growth has come in blue-collar work in factories and warehouses, as the temp industry sheds the Kelly Girl image of the past. Last year, more than one in every 20 blue-collar workers was a temp.

And wanna talk about racial inequality?  Blacks and Latinos each make up 20 percent of all temp workers in the U.S., or 40 percent, total.  As conservatives like to note, minorities make up a disproportionate number of welfare recipients, relative to their share of the U.S. population.  Well, the same is true of temp and minimum-wage laborers.  These are poor and minority Americans who want to work and they are forced to live on the knife edge of poverty, with constant insecurity.  We must do better by those who want to work!

The Expendables: How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed

By Michael Grabell

June 27, 2013 | Pro Publica

URL: http://www.propublica.org/article/the-expendables-how-the-temps-who-power-corporate-giants-are-getting-crushe

Voting Rights ruling was 'legislating from the bench'

I don't often comment on Supreme Court decisions because they are so blatantly political to me, albeit dressed up in pomp and black robes as something serious, deliberative and solomonic.  As my Uncle T., a lawyer and dyed-in-the-wool conservative, once told me, he can't see much that's legal or constitutional in the way the Supreme Court operates.  I tend to agree with him.  

It's because they are all utterly political appointees, justices whom the appointing President thinks he can rely on to interpret the Constitution with a particular ideological bent, the facts be damned.  Most of the time the Supreme Court's majority can't wait for certain controversial cases to hit their docket so that they can affect the political direction of our country.

That said, I think the SCOTUS went way too far on Tuesday by striking down Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  This time they clearly usurped the powers of Congress.

The power of Congress vested in them by the Constitution is not the power to be right, it's the power to be wrong. One can argue that Congress was wrong to overwhelmingly uphold the Voting Rights Act "coverage formula" in 2006, but then it was wrong with serious bipartisan conviction: 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate.  Congress provided 15,000 pages of documentation in 2006 to show that voter discrimination was still happening in the jurisdictions that the coverage formula designated for pre-clearance.

This week the U.S. Supreme Court said to hell with that.  The high court majority went beyond the Constitution to examine what it felt were facts on the ground that made the law unnecessary.  I'm sorry, but that's not the high court's job.  We have lots of unnecessary and stupid laws.  That's Congress's prerogative to make them; it's our job every 2 years to vote out the bums to replace or repeal them.  What the "anti-activist judges" majority did on Tuesday was to "legislate from the bench," pure and simple.  In doing so they are were not only hyper-partisan, they werehypocrites against their own judicial philosophy!

Even so, those facts on the ground are debatable, even without study, therefore the SCOTUS should not have so cavalierly struck down a law passed by Congress. What do I mean, without study?  Well, the majority said that the Voting Rights Act has clearly achieved its goal, therefore it was no longer needed. Yet one could argue that without it, racial discrimination against minority voters could easily spring up again.  This possibility is certainly imaginable, and certainly not possible to exclude, logically, yet the Supreme Court majority did just that and excluded it.  "We know everything's going to be fine from now on," they basically said.  

Also, Chief Justice Roberts said the SCOTUS "warned" Congress in 2009 to update the formula by which it determines a history of voter discrimination, and that with case of Shelby County [Alabama] v. Holder hitting the court's docket in 2013 without any action by Congress, the high court had no choice but to strike down the law.  But think about that for a second.  We have an historically gridlocked Congress and Republican majority that wants the Voting Rights Act to remain struck down... but wasn't dumb enough, politically, to offer up a bill to do so.  

Now surely the Republican House will not offer up a new bill now to update the pre-clearance formula that would require the DOJ's approval for any changes in state's voting laws.  (If you think they will, the Supreme Court needs to ban that medical marijuana you're smoking).  And the GOP majority's inevitable inaction in the coming weeks/months -- I would love it if they proved me wrong -- will prove just how absurd was Justice Roberts' utterly political premise for usurping the will of Congress in 2006 that was the law of the land.  

Furthermore, the majority cited states' rights (federalism) as its main justification for striking down the will of Congress.  However, Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act allows individual counties in affected states to "bail out" of the law if they can prove there is no recent history of racial discrimination against voters, as dozens of counties have since 1967.    

All that constitutional stuff aside, I agree with Dr. Martin Luther King that the arc of history bends toward justice... and obviously I agree with the U.S. Census that the arc of demography bends towards a non-white U.S. majority.  Politically, in the long run, this conservative SCOTUS decision -- and the inevitable inaction from a GOP-majority House that will follow it -- will be good for Democrats.  

I predict that this SCOTUS decision and Congress's almost certain failure to respond, combined with Republicans' likely continued inaction on immigration reform, will spur minority turnout rates in 2014 that will exceed 2012.  Republicans are showing once again they just can't get out of their rut... as they shoot themselves in the foot that's stuck in that rut.  

White America fading away

Thanks and enjoy your golden years, white people!  Your time is nigh.  Soon John must pass the torch to Jose, Jamal, Jin and Jung:

“It’s a bookend from the last century, when whites helped us grow. Now it’s minorities who are going to make the contributions to our economic and population growth over the next 50 years.”

Let's see if they can do a better job.  Minorities' tendency to vote Democratic is a good omen.  

Whites’ deaths outnumber births for first time

By Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik

June 13, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/13Zguc1

Taibbi: GOP's attitude, not policies, is screwing them

Like me, Taibbi has been checking out Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing outlets to see how they're reacting to Obama's re-election.  BTW, yesterday there was a good summary at HuffPo of the 11 excuses Republicans are giving for Romney's defeat.

Post-election, finally Republicans are addressing the elephant in the room: that only white men vote GOP.  They're "soul-searching" what to do about it.  Folks like Limbaugh ask rhetorically if the GOP should just give in and throw tokens at minorities and women to get their votes.  Rush even coined a new term: "Hispandering."  Yeah, that's gonna help, Rush.  Please, for us Democrats, keep it up.  

His dismissive attitude echoes that of conservative pundit Edward Klein, who complained on FOX that, "[David] Axelrod and his team had already succeeded in pandering to special interest groups, such as Hispanics, gays, and women."  It was such an unconscious, perfect giveaway of the GOP mindset: anybody who is not a straight white guy is a "special interest group" to them!  Here's how Taibbi put it:

[T]he fact that so many Republicans this week think that all Hispanics care about is amnesty, all women want is abortions (and lots of them) and all teenagers want is to sit on their couches and smoke tons of weed legally, that tells you everything you need to know about the hopeless, anachronistic cluelessness of the modern Republican Party. A lot of these people, believe it or not, would respond positively, or at least with genuine curiosity, to the traditional conservative message of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility.

But modern Republicans will never be able to spread that message effectively, because they have so much of their own collective identity wrapped up in the belief that they're surrounded by free-loading, job-averse parasites who not only want to smoke weed and have recreational abortions all day long, but want hardworking white Christians like them to pay the tab. Their whole belief system, which is really an endless effort at congratulating themselves for how hard they work compared to everyone else (by the way, the average "illegal," as Rush calls them, does more real work in 24 hours than people like Rush and me do in a year), is inherently insulting to everyone outside the tent – and you can't win votes when you're calling people lazy, stoned moochers.

It's hard to say whether it's good or bad that the Rushes of the world are too clueless to realize that it's their attitude, not their policies, that is screwing them most with minority voters. If they were self-aware at all, Mitt Romney would probably be president right now. So I guess we should be grateful that the light doesn't look like it will ever go on. But wow, is their angst tough to listen to.

Not all Democrats are smart, but you don't have to be smart to sense it when somebody despises you and looks down on you.  Republicans can't even begin to start persuading people that their policies are right when the best they can do is faking genuine concern and respect for others.  Repeat: faking it is the best the GOP can do.  On an ordinary day the GOP is downright hostile to them. 

Hey, Rush Limbaugh: 'Starting an Abortion Industry' Won't Win You Female Voters

By Matt Taibbi

November 8, 2012 | Rolling Stone

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/hey-rush-limbaugh-starting-an-abortion-industry-wont-win-you-female-voters-20121108#ixzz2BoosszAu

'Business experience' loses on POTUS scoreboard

This post is for the reality-based community, for that sliver of the American electorate still concerned with facts, not gut feelings, blind ideology and personal anecdotes.  I.e, the smarts.  All you stupids, take a FoxNews break.  Go check SporstCenter.

Here are the real stats (oh, wait, all you mind-numbed sports fans are supposed to be obsessed with stats, but anyway...):

The startling bottom line is that the nation’s GDP has grown more than 45 times faster under presidents with little or no business experience than it has under presidents with successful business careers. And on average, when there has been a successful businessman in the Oval Office (so, Truman is excluded), GDP growth has been negligible.

On average, under presidents with successful business experience, GDP has increased 0.12 percent. And under presidents with little or no business experience, GDP has grown 5.46 percent.

That's right, sports fans, it gets even worse for the Red Team:

The most startling figures emerge when we combine party and business experience. Historically, a Democrat without business experience has been extraordinarily better for the economy and the stock market than a Republican who had a career in business. In the past 84 years, GDP has grown 7 percent per year under Democrats without business experience (FDR, JFK, LBJ, Clinton and Obama) and fallen by 0.2 percent per year under Republicans with business experience (Hoover and the two Bushes). The Dow has risen an average of 16.8 percent per year under Democrats without business experience and has fallen by 3.7 percent per year under Republicans with business experience.

I would yell "Scooorebooooard!" except Republicans don't care about the scoreboard unless it's a black or Hispanic athlete doing the scoring in a meaningless socialistic sporting event that is subsidized by taxpayers.  Go figure.

Can a businessman help the economy?

By Robert S. McElvaine

October 20, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/PH9cXU

GOP, IRS abet U.S. sports socialism

You know, I might not be against rampant U.S. sports socialism if all the rabid Red State Republican sports fans out there would just acknowledged how much of their personal self-esteem and enjoyment was tied up in government-funded schools, with teams filled with government-supported minority athletes -- minorities whom they fear or despise in most other contexts.

Take any Red State you want, and on any given Sunday you'll see bumpkins who barely graduated high school proudly wearing the local college sweatshirt, cursing at minority athletes and overpaid coaches on the TV in the local sports bar, all provided to them thanks to the local publicly-funded college team.  

Furthermore, it's a mockery of Republican-Christian notions of "charity" to say that mandatory, tax-deductible donations to a schools sports program in exchange for select seats is some kind of charitable "donation."  We've let Republicans pervert our tax code to this extent.  These so-called boosters of charity are neither charitable nor Christian.  

This is yet more evidence that our country has become dangerously obsessed with sports (and it wasn't always this way): watching a bunch of poor minority athletes competing for a one-in-a-thousand slot in the professional athletics lottery for our selfish enjoyment, subsidized by Joe Taxpayer.  Shame on us!

Read a damn book, take a walk, play a sport yourself, spend time with your family, get a hobby!  Sports socialism reveals the core of America's hollow, atomized, sedentary popular culture.  

College football gets tax breaks; fans ‘contribute’ millions for tickets

By Gilbert M. Gaul

October 18, 2012 | McClatchy Newspapers

URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/10/18/171894/college-football-gets-tax-breaks.html

Study: U.S. majority is not Christian

More non-white than white, more non-Christian than Christian.... America's going to hell in a hand basket!

Most And Least Christian States In America 

By Jahnabi Barooah 

May 29, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/29/most-and-least-christian-states_n_1547045.html