Freedom for the Boss; Drudgery for the Rest of Us

I keep looking for ways to talk with supporters of the Administration. President Carter started the deregulation frenzy. That has become half of the Republican cut-and-deregulate refrain ever since, consistently repeated by the current White House and the Republicans in Congress. I’d like to focus on the things that will affect those of us who are, financially speaking, ordinary, middle-class Americans.

Here are changes the Administration and congressional Republicans are considering that affect working conditions:

• The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has been postponing and considering cutting down a Labor Department rule that limits “workers’ exposure [to] toxic material, which can cause a deadly lung disease.”
• The same White House Office is also “considering a proposal to roll back protections for workers in construction and shipbuilding.”
  • Those rules allow our employers to save cash by risking our health.

• “The Working Families Flexibility Act … would give employees a choice between taking time off or being paid time-and-a-half when they work more than 40 hours in a week.”
• Either way, Republicans oppose changing overtime rules to raise eligibility for overtime above the current $23,660 per year.
  • Those rules allow our employers to save cash by shortchanging us.

Here are some that affect the health of financially ordinary Americans:

• The Administraton has already taken steps to “roll back healthy school lunch standards”
• The new head of the FDA “has invested in or consulted for dozens of healthcare companies” which suggests that the Food and Drug Administration won’t be much help in preventing unnecessary complications and expenses.
• The House health care bill would eliminate Obamacare requirements that insurance plans cover prescriptions drugs and mental healthcare. Like all insurance, drug and mental health care coverage are intended to protect people from unplanned changes in the costs of survival.
• Senate Republicans narrowly lost an effort to roll back a regulation that “limit[s] methane emissions from oil and natural gas drilling.” Methane is even more damaging to the climate than carbon.
  • Those rules risk our health for the sake of other people’s profits.

On savings for retirement:

• “Trump’s Labor Department delayed the so-called fiduciary rule, ordering financial advisers to act in … [your] best interest[s] … [if you] are saving for retirement.”
• The CHOICE Act would allow the banks that brought us the crash of 2008 to opt out of regulations adopted after the crash and intended to prevent another. And the bill renames the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and “reduces its power to enforce pre-existing consumer protection laws.”
  • Those rules risk our financial security for the sake of other people’s profits.

Meanwhile, Republicans on the Supreme Court show little respect for working men and women.

• With Breyer’s help they have blessed “Professional debt collectors … [who] built a business out of buying stale debt, filing claims in bankruptcy proceedings to collect it, and hoping that no one notices that the debt is too old to be enforced by the courts.”
• The Court continues to apply a 1925 statute intended for interstate business transactions to consumer contracts and the Court bars state regulation entirely.

What Republicans continue to give us is freedom for the boss and drudgery for the rest of us. As the old folk song has it, “same song, second verse, could get better but it’s gonna get worse.”

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, May 16, 2017.

Libertarians on and off the Court

Most Supreme Court justices are libertarians in some sense. But what kind and for whom varies widely.

We all believe we have rights to decide lots of things for ourselves. But what are the limits? The more “conservative” the justices and others are, the closer to the Tea Party, the only limits they recognize are force and fraud. Various conservative philosophers have been very plain about that. Regulations, almost all regulations, interfere with that freedom of action.

People sign contracts every day that have draconian consequences for them, but, say the far right, you agreed to that. You signed a contract for which the only remedy is a stacked deck, arbitration in front of an arbitrator arranged by the company, and you have no right to unite with other people in the same situation to fight expensive battles together and share the costs – that’s called a class action, and the Court’s conservatives forbid it in arbitration, won’t allow the states to try to protect consumers from such restrictions on their rights. That protects the company’s liberty. And of course you had the liberty not to sign – if you read and understood the contract and had a realistic choice.

You signed a mortgage with a lender and it had all sorts of hidden costs, fees, rates and traps that put a lot of people underwater and helped to build and then break the housing bubble, and with it the economy. But, tough, you signed, say the conservatives.

Most states used to forbid usury, interest rates that no one could reasonably pay but that piled up so quickly bankruptcy was inevitable. Not any more – the Supreme Court made sure states could no longer forbid usury.

And where the conservatives on the Supreme Court couldn’t block federal law, like the antitrust laws which were intended to give us the benefit of competition and protect us from monopoly, they made it impossible to prove.

There are an endless set of examples. The company gets the liberty and you get the shaft.

But when you get the shaft, that doesn’t just affect the liberty that judges and legislatures say you have. Getting the shaft affects your real liberty – liberty to make wholesome life choices for yourselves and your families. Most of us think our liberty is limited by the effect on other people’s liberty. Giving people the shaft deprives people, ourselves and lots of others, of our very real liberty.

Most states tried to limit legal liberty to do things that harm others. There should be no liberty to foul the water we drink or the air we breathe. There should be no liberty to bury costs in fine print legalese, or propose terms that the company knows will do damage. There should be no liberty to put people into unsafe working conditions when the company could have saved their lives, saved people from collapses and explosions in coal mines, oil rigs, and similar disasters. It doesn’t matter that the workers agreed, signed a contract, took the job – the company knew and we should be able to stop it.

We too believe in liberty, but it is liberty bounded by what’s good for everyone. We have a choice between freedom for those who have the money and power to exercise it, or freedom for everyone based on some realism about what’s going to happen.

Do we care? The protectors of corporate legal liberties on the Court have a child’s idea of liberty – without responsibility. Children throwing tantrums at civilization have no place on the Court.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, December 2, 2014.

Detroit Bankruptcy

The Detroit bankruptcy is likely to mean a big hit for people’s pensions. Think about that: people have worked all their lives and now you tell them the terms just changed, and at precisely the part of their lives when they will find it hard to replace the lost income.

There are two issues involved in the bankruptcy. One is the outrageous fact that wages and pensions are not treated as secured so they take second place to banks and others whose only skin in the game is money, not the sweat of their brows over  lifetimes of work. That’s the legal rule but I’ve never liked it. It creates maximum hardship. Cities and companies go bankrupt for the very reason that they can dishonor their pension obligations. Federal laws require companies to do some things to protect us. But if they don’t do well enough, well, there’s always bankruptcy. That, in my view, is a travesty.

Comments on two races: Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Neil Breslin here

In most political campaigns, I don’t know any of the contestants personally. I vote based on what I can glean about them. But I do happen to know some of the candidates this time. So let me comment about a couple of people I know about two races in the area reached by this station.

First, a word on the race for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. I met Elizabeth Warren years ago when she came to speak at Albany Law School about proposals to change the bankruptcy laws. At the time, she was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, before she moved to Harvard. Her talk was stunning. What she showed us in the clearest black and white numbers was the way that the proposed changes to the bankruptcy laws were targeting women who had suddenly lost everything because of divorce or illness. Not the “deadbeats” of popular imagination and the proponents’ rhetoric, but people who were working around the clock to take care of themselves and their families.