While the poor judgment of top-level officials at Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget frequently makes the news, there is another, unrecognized economic crew doing terrific work: Officials at the Department of Labor are restoring workers' rights after nearly a decade of neglect.
To top it all off, President Barack Obama appears ready to make another set of strong, though less high-profile, economic appointments that will help rein in Wall Street excess.
DoL All-Stars
As Esther Kaplan documents in a masterful piece for The Nation, the Department of Labor (DoL) has been transformed from an agency that enabled corporate excess to one that holds companies accountable. In less than a year, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and her team of deputies significantly leveled the playing field between ordinary workers and high-flying executives.
For decades, when conservatives have attempted to confront social problems, they've relied on the mantra of enforcement. If we had more cops, we'd fix everything. But as Kaplan documents, under President George W. Bush and his Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, the DoL simply stopped enforcing worker protection laws. From wage theft to mine safety, the Department essentially allowed corrupt employers to do anything they wanted.
That neglect has already ended. Armed with a budget of just $1.5 billion-that's roughly 0.2% of the Troubled Asset Relief Program-Solis and company have cultivated a list of economic accomplishments that seemed impossible when they took office. As Kaplan details:
"Facing badly depleted enforcement ranks, Solis hired 710 additional enforcement staff, including 130 at OSHA and 250 for the crucial wage-and-hour division, upping inspectors by more than a third. Another hundred will come on next year to staff a crackdown on the misclassification of millions of employees as "independent contractors"--a dodge to avoid paying taxes and benefits--a move that has set off enormous buzz on business blogs. Her team took a plunger to the stagnant regulatory pipeline, moving forward new rules on coal mine dust, silica, and cranes and derricks. She restored prevailing wages for agricultural guest workers and is poised to restore reporting rules on ergonomic injuries."
Fixing the Fed
Obama also appears ready to make another slate of strong economic appointments at the Federal Reserve, an agency stuffed with free-marketers who helped engineer both an economic catastrophe and resulting bailouts. Obama's rumored picks-economists Janet Yellen and Peter Diamond and bank regulator Sarah Bloom Raskin-are aggressive about making the economy work for everyday citizens, as I emphasize for AlterNet.
If Congress passes financial reforms similar to what Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) has proposed, the Fed's regulatory responsibilities will actually expand, despite its failures over the past decade. The Fed has never effectively regulated anything and it's not very concerned with unemployment as an economic problem.
That makes Obama's pending slate of officials who prioritize bank regulation and broader employment very important. Raskin, in particular, stands out with her strong record as a state banking regulator. If Obama ultimately nominates her, she'll be the first pure regulator ever appointed to the Fed. The potential picks don't make up for Obama's reappointment of bailouteer Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman, but they do show that the President is capable of sound judgment.
Strengthening the Dodd bill
But the strength of Obama's potential Fed nominees doesn't justify the weakness of Dodd's financial regulation bill. As Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! reveal in interviews with economist Robert Johnson and ColorLines Editorial Director Kai Wright , the bill leaves plenty to be desired. Dodd is currently making the rounds and declaring that his bill will end the abuses giant banks deployed against the broader economy, but the truth is, the bill has largely been gutted by bank lobbyists. Here's Johnson:
"We're engaged in a Kabuki theater right now, hoping the material is too complex for the American people to understand, declaring victory, and yet basically encoding into law current practices of the banks. Every one of your listeners should ask the question, given this legislation, if the President, House and Senate pass it, will we be in a place where AIG couldn't have happened, Lehman Brothers couldn't have happened, Bear Stearns couldn't have happened, and, more importantly, nine, ten percent unemployment caused by the banking crisis couldn't have happened? I argue this bill does very little."
The importance of trust-busting
So Dodd's bill needs to be substantially strengthened as it moves through the Senate. But there's plenty of other economic work to be done outside of Wall Street. As Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman explain for The Washington Monthly, the steady expansion of corporate monopolies has resulted in a fundamentally unstable economy.
The U.S. simply does not create jobs at the rate it once did, and companies aren't held accountable to market forces like competition. Many of our monopolies are hidden, as Lynn and Longman note. Macy's and Bloomingdale's seem like competitors, but they're owned by the same holding company. The same dynamic holds true in auto manufacturing, banking, pet food, health care and IT. Consumers think they're choosing between competing goods and services, when in fact they're shopping in different divisions of the same corporate Goliath.
All hope is not lost. As Laura Flanders emphasizes for GRITtv, the passage of health care reform proves that the Obama administration and Congress can make substantive progressive changes when they put their minds to it. The question is whether Obama is willing to limit his economic accomplishments to lower-level issues, or go big and take on the deep-pocketed corporate campaign contributors.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The Obama Administration seems quite capable centrist positioning on many issues, including immigration reform. While some argue centrist position allows Obama to effectively reach consensus, immigration reform is an issue that he cannot play sides with.
This was just a whole lot of fun to report. People just loved talking about what a great political leader Hilda Solis is. I didn't have nearly enough room to include all the good stuff that was said. First Latina President? It could happen....
A Working Class Hero for Secretary of Labor
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
When President Barack Obama announced his nomination of Representative Hilda Solis to be Secretary of Labor, support from the labor movement-as well as other progressive leadership- was strong and enthusiastic, with comparisons drawn to the legendary Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor, who played a major role in developing modern labor law and worker protections such as the minimum wage and Social Security.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called Solis "a passionate leader and advocate for all working families." Change To Win Executive Director Chris Chafe called her "an important ally for the labor movement," both because of her empathy and her understanding, as he explained to Random Lengths, "She has a full appreciation of the context that shapes the challenges workers face-the wage gap, the training gap, the health care gap, the retirement security gap, and the competitiveness gap in the context of a global labor economy."
Have the Republicans lost all sense of reality? In the midst of a crushing recession, our country is hemorrhaging jobs. According to Think Progress, the Labor Department reported we lost 598,000 jobs in January, and 1.8 million in the last three months. The livelihoods of millions of Americans and our entire economy are at stake, and yet GOP obstructionists are stonewalling President Obama's economic stimulus plan and the nomination of Hilda Solis for Labor Secretary.
The Senate Labor committee postponed Solis' nomination yesterday because of a recent USA Today report about her husband's outstanding California tax liens. (NOTE: it was her husband's auto repair business, not anything to do with Solis herself.) Though the tax liens have since been repaid, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) and his Republican cohorts are still delaying the confirmation vote, claiming they need to investigate Solis' involvement with American Rights at Work (ARAW), a pro-labor non-profit. But this really boils down to the GOP's inherent fears over the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill Solis co-sponsored in the House that would enable workers to unionize more easily and negotiate for equitable wages and benefits and safer working conditions.
As David Dayen wrote over at Calitics, "The American Rights at Work thing is a complete red herring. She was a representative figure for those who supported Employee Free Choice in Congress. She is not a lobbyist. She supported a bill. And so denying her free-speech rights seems ridiculous to the extreme."
Solis might understand the needs of workers better than anyone in Congress. There's no question she could help ensure President Obama's plan to create 3.6 million jobs by next year actually happens. We must fight like hell to get her approved. Join this Facebook page and help confirm Hilda Solis now. Then, sign American Rights at Work's petition to support the Employee Free Choice, where you snag their Employee Free Choice widget for your own personal blog.
The president-elect also gave his support for legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize, but he said there may be other ways to achieve the same goal without angering businesses. And while many Democrats on Capitol Hill are eager to see a quick vote on that bill, he indicated no desire to rush into the contentious issue.
"If we're losing half a million jobs a month, then there are no jobs to unionize, so my focus first is on those key economic priority items I just mentioned," he said. "Let's see what the legislative docket looks like."
And Politico reports that GOP Senators start threatening the Solis nomination, saying EFCA would destroy the bipartisan tone Obama wants. The first line of objection is she's not answering questions--but Dems point out that cabinet nominees are often limited in what they can say (Bush's certainly were). Then we get to the meat:
With several Republicans having indicated that they'll vote for her, and Democrats holing at least 58 seats in the Senate this year, there is little doubt that Solis will get confirmed eventually.
But a hold on her nomination would signal that Solis can expect a contentious relationship with the GOP and would foreshadow the fight ahead over the card-check bill, a top priority for organized labor that would largely abolish secret ballots during votes on whether employees want a union, potentially leading to millions of new union members.
"It puts them on notice that this is going to be an explosive issue," one senior GOP aide said of the possibility of holding up Solis' nomination....
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire blogger
UPDATE: Friday afternoon, President-Elect Barack Obama confirmed the nomination of Rep. Hilda (D-Calif) for Secretary of Labor.
President-elect Barack Obama named Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., as the next administration's Secretary of Labor this morning. To put it simply, progressives are ecstatic about the pick.
I did some interviews with the Labor Secretary to be a few, Hilda Solis, in August of 2007. The video above is a discussion of the Progressive Caucus (forgive the shitty editing, I was experimenting). Here's the other video I took, on on global warming and race.
I'm impressed with this pick. Solis is an organizer within Congress, and has the smarts to build political coalitions among different constituency groups, including the netroots. I could see Labor becoming a department that has to build its own power, since Obama's not exactly going to welcome that perspective to a seat at the table unless Solis forces her way in. As an example, Obama has introduced his 'economic team' and met with it many times, without even having chosen a Labor Secretary, a clear sign that to him, the perspectives of organized labor are somewhat peripheral to his thinking on the economy. In 1992, Clinton had Bob Reich as his Labor Secretary, but Reich was also a part of the President's economic team (though he did become marginalized fairly quickly).
This is a very good pick. Solis might turn out to be an excellent ally.
Today is the global warming forum in LA by Congresswoman Hilda Solis. I blogged about it here, and did an interview with her which you can watch here.
Moving to a non-fossil fuel economy is going to create unionized jobs, improve the economic prospects of low income Americans and working class minorities, and generate an entirely new growth sector of the economy. Scratch that. I shouldn't have used the future tense. It is creating jobs and economic opportunities. I got an email from Don Lyster, Congressman Solis's Chief of Staff, letting me know what Solis was up to during the recess.
The Congresswoman visited the East LA Skills Center today. The Center is run by LA Unified School District and is the only educational facility in Southern California which provides solar panel installation training. The teacher of the class will be one of the featured speakers at Solis' forum this Thursday.
The Congresswoman met with the students in the solar installation training class, a group of mostly Latino males, but also African Americans and Anglos. After completing the training, they will be placed in a pipeline for solar installation jobs - mostly union (IBEW) and well-paying jobs. Others will become contractors. Some want to start their own solar installation contracting firms. One trainee was a 56 year old Latino male who said he was inspired to return to the classroom because of the economic promise of the renewable energy industries. He has spent his career working as a custodial worker in LA schools. Others mentioned that they are excited to play their own role in conserving energy and reducing American dependence on foreign oil in their own way.
You can find out more about the forum here. There's a new economy coming, and the leaders in bringing it to us are progressive Democrats like Solis, rural Democrat Tim Walz, and Governors like Eliot Spitzer, who just announced the completion of the first green affordable public housing project in New York state.
This is a video interview of Congresswoman Hilda Solis, a progressive leader in the House. I'll have a few more clips over the next week or so.
Believe it or not, we do have some progressive leaders in Congress. Not enough, of course, but they're there. One of them is Hilda Solis, Congresswoman from the 32nd district in California and a dedicated progressive. Though elected in 2000, Solis is quite powerful, serving on the Energy and Commerce Committee (including Environment and Hazardous Materials, Health, and Telecom Subcommittees). She's also on the new select committee on global warming, which puts her squarely in the Ed Markey camp, politically speaking.
The reason I'm interested in Solis is that she's working on a structural problem facing the environmental movement: race. With the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, she successfully pushed a green jobs initiative which made its way into the energy bill. On August 16th, she's hosting a community forum on global warming, an issue that is not really on the radar for most people in her predominantly Latino district, though generically, pollution is a huge problem and global warming offers interesting political opportunities.
By turning global warming into a jobs issue, Solis is working to reframe the often depressing and disempowering rhetoric of the environmental movement into language that different groups can get behind. There are interesting and unexpected allies here. A few weeks ago, I accompanied a Sierra Club lobbyist to a visit with freshman Tim Walz, and he's using the same strategy in his rural Minnesota district - sustainable energy means jobs. Conservative rural residents are now proud of wind turbines, because it means economic growth. The political combination of rural and urban constituency groups is quite potent.
What Solis is doing on August 16 is a very different model of environmental organizing - she's actually working to put together a coalition, which is rare in a Congressional leader. A new economy is coming, and the fruits of that economy are how we can build the political consensus necessary to deal with the scope of the problem.
So the clip above is the first part of my interview with her. I'll have more from Solis over the course of the week, including her discussion of ethnic media and blogs, and her defense of the progressive caucus.
Thoughts and comments are welcome, especially from videographers who want to rip my amateurish skills apart. I'm just learning how to do video editing, so be nice.
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