Last month, 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney indicated that he is open to repealing at least large swathes of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, even as the country is still recovering from the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. “The level of over-regulation and burden which has been placed on the financial services sector I think is unnecessary and will cost us jobs down the road,” Romney said.

Upping his attack on financial reform, Romney said yesterday that bank regulators are akin to “gargoyles,” looming over banks and scaring them into not making loans:

Romney said the Democratic-led overhaul has created “uncertainty” that paralyzes Main Street. “Banks are afraid to make loans right now because of the government hanging over them like gargoyles,” Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and business executive, said during the roundtable discussion…“Almost everything the president did had the opposite effect of what was intended,” Romney said. “He said, okay, we’re not going to re-regulate the banking sector. Well, what he caused was the banking sector to pull back, and that’s the very sector that’s got to step forward to help get the economy on its feet again.”

Romney has previously defended Wall Street from criticism, saying that those pushing for stricter regulation were acting “as if Wall Street greed is something new.’’ Late last month, Romney delivered a speech in New York in an attempt “to woo Wall Street donors,” which netted him $1 million.

Contrary to Romney’s assertions, bank profits are booming: Banks made $29 billion in the first quarter of this year, “a 66.5 percent increase from the same period last year and the best quarterly performance since the second quarter of 2007.” And according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Senior Loan Officers, “for the last year or so, standards on loans to small firms have been easing.” The problem is that there is still little demand in the economy, so businesses have no customers and aren’t expanding. Banks are also hesitant to lend when the economic recovery is so sluggish

Republicans in Congress have made their contempt for bank regulators well known, gutting their budgets even as the regulators seek to implement the Dodd-Frank law. And it seems Romney is willing to play the same game, acting like the financial crisis simply didn’t occur.

Today, the National Labor Relations Board announced a new rule aimed at speeding up the process for union elections, in an attempt to prevent employers from using the various tactics they break out to delay and ultimately undermine unionization drives. According to research by John-Paul Ferguson of Stanford Business School, 35 percent of the time that workers file a petition for a union election, the election does not occur due to the many steps that employers take — including bringing in anti-union consultants — to delay elections for weeks, if not years.

Currently, the average time between workers filing a petition for an election and the election taking place is 58 days, ample time for employers to engage in coercion and intimidation, or to fire pro-union workers (which happens in 25 percent of union drives). But congressional Republicans — who are whipped into an uproar by any step that favors workers over corporations — still screamed bloody murder over the change:

HOUSE LABOR COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN JOHN KLINE (R-MN) “urged the [NLRB] to ‘scrap’ what he called a ‘reckless’ and ‘job-destroying agenda.” “Not only will this misguided proposal to expedite union elections undermine an employer’s lawful right to communicate with his or her employees, it will cripple a worker’s ability to make an informed decision,” he said.

SEN. MIKE ENZI (R-WY): “This is just the latest outrage from a runaway agency.”

As the Center for American Progress’ David Madland wrote, the rule would simply “address the roadblocks that commonly are thrown up when the NLRB attempts to set up an election”:

The proposed rule would address the roadblocks that commonly are thrown up when the NLRB attempts to set up an election. There is currently no limit on employers’ or unions’ ability to demand a pre-election hearing on most any issue, including the eligibility of employees to vote, or the scope of the bargaining unit, which can be used to delay an election. Many of these issues could be resolved after voting, and others are manufactured for purposes of delay and don’t need to be resolved at all, ever. As former NLRB General Counsel Fred Feinstein explains, “The problem has been that a party in any election case has the ability to undermine the expression of employee free choice by manipulating Board procedures to create delay.”

As CAP CEO John Podesta wrote, “The rule won’t fix every barrier facing workers trying to organize, but it’s a common-sense step to help make the union election process more democratic and restore middle-class Americans’ foothold in the economy.” But for Republicans, any step that might aid workers in joining together to collectively bargain is to be treated with the utmost contempt.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court sided with Walmart in an enormous employment discrimination suit that denied 1.5 million female workers the chance to form a class action to sue the company for billions in damages for discriminatory pay and promotion practices. Walmart’s triumph is just the latest in the corporation’s decades-long campaign to prevent workers from banding together to fight for fair pay and decent working conditions. The corporation’s union-busting has become notorious, along with directly connecting to their sexist practices, appalling working conditions, and menial wages.

For more than 20 years, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the nation’s main union for retail workers, has been trying to help organize Walmart employees. Repeatedly prevented from forming unions, employees are now trying the non-union organizing route, with UFCW’s help. The New York Times reported last week on the “innovative” new group:

The group, Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart for short, says it has quietly signed up thousands of members in recent months, and it is going public this week with a Web site, ourwalmart.org, and a Facebook page. Organizers say they have more than 50 members at some stores, and they hope to soon have tens of thousands of members. Walmart has nearly 1.4 million workers nationwide.[...]

In recent weeks, OUR Walmart has organized gatherings of 10 to 80 workers in Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles and other cities…One big concern, they said, was low wages.[...]

“The managers at our store and others are running over their associates as if they didn’t exist,” [Margaret Van Ness, an overnight stocker at a Walmart store] said. “They treat them like cattle. They don’t seem to care about respect for the individuals. We need to bring back respect.”

Unlike a union, OUR Walmart will not be able to directly negotiate on behalf of its workers, but “members could benefit from federal labor laws that protect workers from retaliation for engaging in collective discussion and action.” Unsurprisingly, Walmart is fighting this new non-union group tooth and nail. Over the years, Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, has spent countless millions shutting down organization efforts.

They spent millions fighting the Employee Free Choice Act in 2008, demanding their workers toe the company line, and are so recalcitrant they even spent $2 million and thousands of man-hours fighting a $7,000 fine from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. When the meatcutting department of a Texas store tried to organize in 2000, Walmart retaliated by phasing out all of its meatcutting departments.

Former Walmart Executive Vice President John Tate may have summed up the corporation’s outlook best when he said, “Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living.”

The OUR Walmart declaration asks only that the company heed the words of founder Sam Walton: “Share your profits with all your Associates, and treat them as partners.”

Former Utah Gov. and Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman (R) announced his candidacy for president this morning, and in doing so, he became the latest candidate to declare that he is running to fix the American economy. Though Huntsman’s polling numbers are rather unimpressive, his sometimes progressive stances on various issues have earned him the “moderate” tag and made him a media darling.

But a closer look at his past reveals that when it comes to economics, Huntsman is a garden variety conservative who wants to cut taxes, gut popular social welfare programs, and pursue economic policies that would do nothing to restore the American economy. ThinkProgress compiled a list of six positions Huntsman has taken that would actually hurt our economy:

The state’s budget deficit increased dramatically during his tenure: In fiscal year 2003, two years before Huntsman took over as governor, the state of Utah had a $173 million budget deficit, leading then-Gov. Michael Leavitt (R) to speak to the state legislature about the state’s “budget crisis.” But when Huntsman took office in 2005, he began pursuing policies that reduced state revenues and increased the state’s budget deficit. In fiscal year 2009, Huntsman’s final one before he took the ambassadorship, Utah was forced to rely on rainy day funds and federal stimulus dollars to close a $1 billion budget gap.

He supports a flat tax, and instituted one in Utah: In 2007, Huntsman signed legislation that transformed Utah’s graduated income tax into a flat tax, with a standard rate of 5 percent. The flat tax sharply reduced taxes on the state’s richest residents and became, as Citizens for Tax Justice called it, a “case study in why states should reject the flat tax.” The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that, while the poorest 20 percent of Utahns paid a 9 percent of their income in taxes, while the richest one percent paid just just 4.9 percent of theirs. CTJ also found that the tax cut blew a hole in Utah’s budget, reducing income tax revenues by $300 million in 2009.

He supports slashing corporate taxes, and tried to eliminate them completely in Utah: While governor, Huntsman made an unsuccessful attempt to eliminate Utah’s corporate tax rate altogether, an effort that was stymied when lawmakers saw the price tag. The policy would have cost the state at least $200 million in revenue. Huntsman, whose family started and still owns one of the nation’s largest chemical corporations, now supports slashing the federal corporate tax rate.

He would end Medicare as we know it: Huntsman didn’t hesitate to endorse the House GOP’s budget plan, which would end Medicare as it exists now by turning it into a voucher program. Huntsman embraced the program despite saying that, in years past, it would have (and should have) been “laughed out of the room.” The House plan nearly doubles the cost of health insurance for senior citizens by 2023, increases the nation’s health care costs by trillions of dollars, and relies on mathematical magic. And after all of that, it still doesn’t balance the budget.

He believes in climate change, but not in doing anything to stop it: Like many of his fellow candidates, Huntsman at one time was an advocate for a cap-and-trade system and signed his state onto the Western Climate Initiative. Huntsman has, however, walked back his support of cap-and-trade, using economic concerns to say that “cap-and-trade ideas aren’t working” and “this isn’t the moment” to address the changing climate because it does not promote growth. In reality, this stance ignores the successes of similar policies in the northeast and in Europe, and the fact that investments in renewable energy create four times as many jobs as investment in oil and gas.

He supports a radical Balanced Budget Amendment: Huntsman recently announced his support for a Balanced Budget Amendment, a potentially disastrous policy Senate Republicans have used to hold the increase in the debt ceiling hostage. The BBA would prevent the government from running deficits when deficits are necessary, such as during deep recessions. Even former GOP advisers have said the idea “is, quite simply, insane,” as “debt in itself is not harmful,” and have suggested that it would only serve to make recessions worse. The BBA is, in the words of Ezra Klein, the worst idea in Washington, and it’s one Huntsman has openly embraced.

Wisconsin State Sen. Robin Vos (R)

Wisconsin may soon become the latest state to turn down federal funding to extend unemployment benefits. While extended unemployment benefits ran out April 16 for 10,000 Wisconsinites, Wisconsin Republicans have been delaying a decision to accept additional federal funding for months, claiming that extending benefits create a disincentive to find work.

Many, such as co-chairman of the Joint Finance Committee Robin Vos (R), argue there are jobs out there, but people are unwilling to take them, preferring to sit on the cushion of unemployment benefits rather than take a pay cut from what they were making before the recession. But Vos’ statements contradict multiple reports.

The San Francisco Federal Reserve, for instance, has found that workers who qualify for unemployment benefits stay unemployed just 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits. And as the Wisconsin AFL-CIO noted, these benefits are quite stingy:

“It seems to me to be crazy in a time of such high unemployment to not take this federal assistance,” said Jon Peacock, research director for the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO agreed, pointing out the $363/week in unemployment benefits is equal to a $9-an-hour full-time job – virtually impossible for a family to live on.

A National Employment Law Project report from last month found that, nationally, there are 5.6 workers for each job opening.

The Republican leadership in the state is by no means unified. Despite the staunch Republican opposition in the House, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) wrote a letter to the Republican-dominated Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council in which he urged lawmakers to accept the extension to provide temporary relief for those out-of-work. Walker’s outreach mirrors that of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), who earlier this month tried to persuade Arizona Republicans to extend benefits in her state:

Extending benefits for the unemployed is the right thing to do both for our local economy and for Arizona families. [...] For our economy, these federal dollars represent an immediate cash infusion of nearly $3.5 million a week as recipients spend on necessities like food, rent and clothing.

The extension in unemployment first must be approved by the Republican-dominated Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council, who is expected to meet Thursday. If passed, its next step is a legislative vote. Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Utah are the only other states who have turned down the federal extension of unemployment benefits.

– Jen Kalaidis

Over the last few decades, executive pay at large corporations has skyrocketed. Today, American CEOs make 263 times the average compensation for American workers, up from the 30 to 1 ratio in the 1970s. In 2010 alone, CEO pay went up 27 percent while average worker pay went up just 2 percent.

At the same time, corporate tax revenue has plunged to historic lows. During the 1960s, for instance, the United States consistently raised nearly 4 percent of GDP in corporate revenue. During the 1970s, the total was still above 2.5 percent of GDP. But the U.S. now raises less than 1.5 percent of GDP from the corporate income tax.

According to a new report called “S.& P. 500 Executive Pay: Bigger Than …Whatever You Think It Is,” put together by the independent research firm R. G. Associates, there are currently 32 companies that actually spent more on compensation for their top executives in 2010 than they paid in corporate income taxes:

Total executive pay increased by 13.9 percent in 2010 among the 483 companies where data was available for the analysis. The total pay for those companies’ 2,591 named executives, before taxes, was $14.3 billion…Warming to his subject, Mr. Ciesielski also determined that 158 companies paid more in cash compensation to their top guys and gals last year than they paid in audit fees to their accounting firms. Thirty-two companies paid their top executives more in 2010 than they paid in cash income taxes.

This isn’t really surprising when you consider that several of the largest U.S. corporations simply paid no taxes at all last year. General Electric, for instance, made more than $5 billion last year, but had a tax rate of -64 percent, meaning it received billions in tax benefits. Boeing hasn’t paid any federal income tax in three years, while CEO Jim McNerny made $19 million last year.

At the moment, a slew of multinational corporations — who already pay exceedingly low taxes — are lobbying for yet another tax boondoggle that would cost the government nearly $80 billion in revenue over the next ten years. With corporate taxes already so low, and corporations flush with cash and paying tens of millions to their CEOs, there’s little reason to grant these huge companies yet another giant tax giveaway.

An iconic photograph of the funeral of an assassinated trade unionist in Colombia.

Across the nation’s capital, business lobbyists are working furiously to hash out the details of a new trade agreement with Colombia. Tentatively known as the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the deal was approved by the Colombian Congress in 2007 and has awaited U.S. ratification since then.

While business groups have lobbied heavily in favor of the agreement, a number of human rights and labor groups have opposed it, saying that Colombia has failed to make needed progress on human and labor rights standards and that the agreement may further undermine these rules and regulations.

Over at ChamberPost, John Murphy, the Vice President of International Affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, makes the argument that violence in Colombia has subsided and that it’s actually much more unsafe to be an American citizen than a Colombian union member:

Today, homicide rates are higher in the United States (5.0 per 100,000) than among Colombia’s labor union members (3.4 per 100,000). A resident of the District of Columbia is seven times more likely to be murdered than a Colombian labor union member. The allegation that labor union members are being targeted for assassination today comes from U.S. labor unions, not Colombians.

At the Huffington Post, Gary Shapiro, the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, makes a similar argument, saying, “Colombian union leaders visiting Washington this week are in more danger here than in their home country.” Shapiro then went on to point out in the comments that Murphy wrote an additional post mocking the AFL-CIO labor union for using a 13-year-old picture of a union member’s assassination to talk about violence against labor — with the suggestion that declining violence means that such scenes are not nearly as pressing.

Shaprio and Murphy’s statistics are deceptive. Victims of homicide are largely victims who aren’t targeted specifically due to occupation, while union members are being targeted specifically for their labor activism. Furthermore, both men leave out a crucial fact: Colombia is still the most dangerous place in the world to be in a labor union.

In fact, according to data from the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights, Colombia had 49 assassinations of labor officials in 2010 — more than the entire rest of the world combined (41 deaths were recorded elsewhere in the world in 2010). ThinkProgress has assembled the following graph comparing killings of trade unionists in Colombia with several other developing countries:

As you can see, Colombia easily leads the world in killings of union members. It is simply disingenuous to factor in other forms of killings — like common homicide — to absurdly claim that Colombian trade unionists are safe. After all, if Shapiro and Murphy decided to compare the murders of trade unionists between Colombia and the United States, the numbers would look completely different, because there were no assassinations of trade unionists of the United States last year.

For months, Republicans have been refusing to talk about additional revenue being part of the solution to the country’s long-term deficit problem, relying on the refrain: “We don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.” However, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) told reporters yesterday that House Republicans are not necessarily opposed to raising revenue by cutting loopholes or subsidies in the tax code:

And while Republicans have stuck with the talking point that the government doesn’t have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem, GOP leaders have left the door open to finding more money in the tax code. “We are not opposed to revenues. We are just opposed to tax increases,” Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told reporters.

While this is a small but encouraging step, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Jared Bernstein points out, it really matters what House Republicans plan to do with any additional revenue that gets raised. As Bernstein put it, “[House Republicans] may not want that revenue to go to deficit reduction. The mantra on this aspect of tax policy is ‘broaden the base, lower the rates.’ But that latter part is dialable, meaning you can lower the rates far enough to give back all the revenue you just gained from closing the loopholes.”

That it’s considered noteworthy to have a Republican acknowledge revenue could be part of the budget solution is a sad commentary on the state of the budget debate. Over in the Senate, meanwhile, Republicans still seem unwilling to put revenue on the table at all. And, at the end of the day, taxes are still at a 60-year low, meaning that eliminating a tax subsidy here or there is not going to be enough to get the budget back into balance.

When workers petition for an election to form a union, they should actually get an election. That’s a basic tenant of democracy, and what the proposed rule announced today by the National Labor Relations Board would do.

Yet sadly, even this modest change to the current rules has already provoked an outpouring of opposition.

The same crowd that is trying to take away collective bargaining rights in the states is opposing a modest improvement to give workers a fairer, more standardized process for voting to join a union. The opposition favors the current system in which elections are frequently delayed and often never happen. Thirty-five percent of the time that workers file a petition for a union election, the election does not occur, according to research by John-Paul Ferguson of Stanford Business School.

Sadly, this kind of opposition to unions is killing our middle class — and thus our economy.
Over the past several decades, the middle class has dramatically weakened as the rich has secured the lion’s share of the economy’s gains. The share of pretax income earned by the richest 1 percent of Americans more than doubled between 1979 and 2007, climbing to 19 percent from 9 percent, according to the most recent data available from the Congressional Budget Office. And for the richest of the rich — the top 0.1 percent — the gains have been even more astronomical — quadrupling over this period.

Over this same time period, both the share of income going to the middle class has decreased sharply – as has the percentage of workers who are unionized. Between 1979 and 2007, the share of the country’s income going to the middle class — defined as the middle 60 percent of households — dropped from 48.9 percent to 40.8 percent, as the unionization rate fell from 24 percent to 12 percent.

Without a strong middle class, our economy suffers. To grow again, our economy needs a strong middle class. And to rebuild the middle class, people need to be able to join unions.

The NLRB’s proposed rule makes relatively modest changes to standardize the union election process. The rule won’t fix every barrier facing workers trying to organize, but it’s a common-sense step to help make the union election process more democratic and restore middle-class Americans’ foothold in the economy.