Prospect.org

Want to know the problem with enterprise zones? Then check out Sunday’s Riverside Press Enterprise, one of the best midsized newspapers in California.

A story in it covers Governor Jerry Brown’s successful campaign to have the legislature put enterprise zones out of their misery. (Brown recently signed the bill abolishing the zones.) Conceived by the late Jack Kemp and other unusually well-meaning right-wingers to bring jobs to the inner-city, enterprise zones have provided subsidies to businesses for creating jobs they might have created in any case. Disproportionately, the jobs created were low-paying.

Read More

Detroit has filed for bankruptcy. Most of the spot-news coverage has focused on the immediate fiscal crisis of the city, but the immediate fiscal crisis really isn’t what got the city into such deep trouble. Certainly, Detroit’s contracts with its employees and its debts to its retirees don’t explain anything about how and why this once-great city has come to such grief. Those contracts and retirement benefits are par for the course for major American cities—certainly, no more generous than those in cities of comparable size.

Read More

The first test vote that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is scheduled to bring before the Senate this morning is that of Richard Cordray, President Obama’s pick to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Reid decided to lead off with Cordray for a very good reason: The Republicans’ insistence on filibustering him makes clear their real intent is to throttle the Bureau. They are using a filibuster of an appointment to effectively repeal legislation they don’t otherwise have the votes to repeal. Nothing could better make Reid’s case that the filibuster has been twisted into a vehicle for minority rule.

Read More

The United States Senate and the nation it so imperfectly represents both had a good day today, thanks to something that’s been in short order around here lately: A Democrat who knows how to play hardball.

By threatening Republicans with ending their right to filibuster presidential executive-brand nominees, Majority Leader Harry Reid ensured that President Obama’s appointments to departments and agencies that Republicans don’t much like would nonetheless be approved. It’s important to note that the Republicans’ real objections have been less to the individual nominees and more to the bodies they were supposed to lead: The Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Workers, consumers and the environment rate a big “Feh” from Republicans, but unable to muster the votes to put their respective bureaus out of business, the GOP has used their power to filibuster to cripple them.

Read More

Gallup and Pew concur: Just over one-half of Americans approve of labor unions.

In late June, the Pew Research Center released the results of its biennial poll on unions and corporations, and reported that 51 percent of Americans had a favorable view of unions—up from just 41 percent in 2011, the last time Pew popped the question. Pew’s new number is almost identical to Gallup’s, which found that 52 percent of Americans approved of unions when it last asked that question in August of 2012. Gallup polls on union approval every year and has reported a 52 percent approval rating each of the past three years. Before then, union approval had hit an all-time low for Gallup surveys, with just 48 percent in 2009.

Read More

The Obama Administration’s decision to delay for a year the penalty that employers (in firms of 50 or more employees) must pay if they don’t provide health insurance to their workers shines a light on a problem that may be even more profound than getting health coverage for every American: that is, the decline of the American job..

Read More