Episodes
Saturday May 31, 2014
Saturday May 31, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus and guest, Deb Silverstein, discuss how the ACA (Obamacare) program is now increasingly undermining union negotiated employer health insurance plans. Union contract negotiations now in progress, with expiration dates in 2018, face the imposition of a 40% tax beginning 2018 per the ACA. Employers are already responding by insisting union workers pay for the tax hike in their new contracts by reducing benefits, deleting coverage for spouses, converting full time workers to part time (who will have no coverage), and introducing other means of ‘cost shifting’ from employers to workers. Union multiemployer health plans are being hit with an additional, second tax now as well. Meanwhile, pleas by unions (Laborers International and others) to Obama that he allow their low paid members, to begin to receive government health insurance subsidies under the ACA are rejected by the administration. Jack and Deb discuss why national union leaders allowed themselves to be maneuvered into this strategic dead end with the passage of the ACA in 2010 in the first place. Jack predicts the now emerging crisis for union negotiated health plans as a result of the ACA (which he predicted last year in a prior Alternative Visions show) will result in more strikes, more union contracts being unsigned, new contracts with less coverage for spouses and dependents, and more workers shifted from full time to part time status by employers in order to ‘cut and shift the costs’ to accommodate the coming 40% tax increase required by the ACA. Jack suggests local union leaders should convene a national convention of local union leaders to begin discussing solutions to the now intensifying attack on union health benefits, and to relaunch a national movement to replace ACA with ‘Medicare for All’. Deb Silverstein has taught in public schools in Ohio for 30 years, and is the Ohio state director for SPAN, ‘Single Payer Action Network’, for the state of Ohio.”
Saturday May 24, 2014
Alternative Visions – Europe’s Continuing ‘Epic’ Recession - 05/24/14
Saturday May 24, 2014
Saturday May 24, 2014
Jack Rasmus explains how Europe’s ‘stop-go’ recovery and its version of an ‘Epic recession’ (i.e. short, shallow recoveries followed by economic relapses and double dip recessions) is proving worse than the USA’s experience with ‘stop-go’ recovery since 2009. While the USA’s economy has slowed to zero or less on three different occasions since 2009 (in 2011, 2012, and now 2014), Europe’s economy experienced an even worse bona fide double dip recession, even weaker recoveries between, and now appears headed to another slowdown after only a year of a paltry 0.2% GDP growth. As Depression conditions continue in Southern Europe and the Euro periphery economies, Northern Europe economies (France, Netherlands, Finland, etc.) are also beginning to experience declining real investment, falling exports, and slowing household consumption as well. Meanwhile, governments continue ‘austerity’ policies, struggle with a continuing fragile banking system and government debt, and continue to ‘talk down’ the crisis. Jack explains the role of European Central Bank monetary policies in Europe behind Europe’s current drift toward deflation and economic stagnation, which are the ultimate source of its continuing fiscal austerity policies. The role of emerging markets’ capital flows to Europe, western global investors and shadow banks chasing risky corporate junk bond ‘yield’ and Eurozone periphery government bonds as key elements to today’s emerging ‘3rd phase’ of the crisis. Jack also explains the effects of changing China and Japan policies on Europe, the Ukraine crisis effect on Europe, and why the drift toward deflation Eurozone-wide will continue. Dr. Rasmus concludes with an explanation of why the United Kingdom’s is experience an artificial recovery based on an induced property bubble in London and south England, with Cameron policies echoing George Bush-Alan Greenspan USA policies of 2002-03, in what represents a desperate attempt to engineer a short term, unstable recovery before an upcoming national election, that will inevitably collapse afterward with serious economic consequences.’ (For the bigger global economic picture, listen to earlier Alternative Vision radio shows since February 19 on the Emerging Markets, China, Japan, and USA economies, archived on this station).
Saturday May 17, 2014
Alternative Visions – US Climate Crisis Intensifies—What’s To Be Done’? – 05/17/14
Saturday May 17, 2014
Saturday May 17, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus welcomes guest, Jill Stein, Presidential candidate of the Green Party USA, to discuss President Obama’s just released, ‘US National Climate Assessment Report’, this past week. While the Obama report provides overwhelming evidence of accelerating climate crisis in the USA in all regions of the country, both Jill and Jack explain it falls way short of proposals to address the growing environmental crisis—from thawing permafrost in Alaska, to drought and destruction of forests in the west, to disappearing maple trees in new England, to the melting of the Antarctic ice shelf that threatens to raise sea levels by up to 10 ft. in coming decades that will devastate coastal US cities. Jill provides a critique of the President’s report and offers an alternative set of proposals. Stein and Rasmus together then take note of the growing convergence between the environmental movement and other grass roots USA protest movements today, in the recent ‘Earth Day to May Day’ actions, the upcoming ‘Alternative Climate Summit’ this coming September, and growing discussions at the grass roots how to form joint community-labor organizations locally to fight for change. Ms. Stein calls for ‘unifying solutions’, a ‘Green New Deal’ to resolve environment and decent jobs creation, and the need for various movements to come together in a national organizing conference of some kind—a US version perhaps of the Latin American ‘Justice Movement’ in recent years that has proved successful. For more on the grass roots convergence, listeners are encouraged to go to www.globalclimateconvergence.org for more information how to do something about the intensifying joint economic-environmental problems in the USA instead of just complaining about it.
Saturday May 10, 2014
Saturday May 10, 2014
Jack Rasmus welcomes back labor historian, Staughton Lynd, to discuss specific ideas how American unions might evolve their current organizational structure to better confront the growing crisis of American workers and their unions in the 21st century. Jack and Staughton agree it’s time for solutions, not just talking about dimensions of today’s crisis in union strategy—whether political, industrial, bargaining, organizing—i.e. strategies that that are now failing across the board for American workers today. Both agree that some new form of local union organization is needed that strengthens local unions to confront the massive legal web that has grown over decades favoring employers, government, and national union leaders. Stronger local unions must somehow be developed, both argue, that organizationally integrate the community. Jack and Lynd discuss what a new kind of local union might look like organizationally, how it might include local community groups as equal members, how it might develop regionally, as well as evolve at a national level in the form of a ‘National Workers Legislative Congress’. Jack explains how organizational restructuring is not new to the history of labor, but has occurred repeatedly in the past as Corporate power and Capital has evolve rendering the old union strategies and organizations ineffective. Jack argues a new structure, based on ‘local mobilization-solidarity committees’, can also complement and expand Union Labor’s current structure, not necessarily replace it. Both agree some kind of new organizational evolution of labor, starting at the local union level, is necessary to deal with the current crisis of American labor today. (See Jack’s article ‘Reorganizing the AFL-CIO: An Initial Proposal’ on the PRN website, and his own website: www.kyklosproductions.com).
Saturday May 03, 2014
Saturday May 03, 2014
Dr Jack Rasmus reviews the employment and GDP reports of the past week and considers the condition of American Labor on May Day, May 1 2014, five years the end of the recession. Diving deeper into the numbers, Rasmus shows how millions have been leaving the US labor force and how a ‘great churning’ of jobs is going on across several dimensions: younger workers leaving while older retirees reentering; higher paid jobs being replaced by lower pay; manufacturing & construction jobs replaced by managers, professionals, and part time-temp services work; and nonunion replacing union jobs. Rasmus explains how the actual unemployment rate is 14% and more than 20 million are still jobless—not 6.3% and 10 million--and that 2 million have left the labor force in the past six months, and explains why the US population is growing faster than jobs being created. Rasmus explains the 110 million ‘core’ working class in the US is going backward in terms of wages and incomes—which have declined 10% to 15% since 2009 ass the wealthiest 1% gain 95% of all national income. Rasmus concludes with a preliminary comment on the new bestseller book just out, ‘Capital in the 21st Century’, by Thomas Picketty and provides his brief critique as to what’s missing in it (and in the recent works by other liberal economists like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, and James Galbraith also writing on income inequality in America in recent years).