The corporate media is blasting out the story that the IRS “targeted conservative groups.” Some in the media say there was “IRS harassment of conservative groups.” Some of the media are going so far as claiming that conservative groups were “audited.”

This story that is being repeated and treated as “true” is just not what happened at all. It is one more right-wing victimization fable, repeated endlessly until the public has no choice except to believe it.

Conservative Groups Were Not “Targeted,” “Singled Out” Or Anything Else

You are hearing that conservative groups were “targeted.” What you are not hearing is that progressive groups were also “targeted.” So were groups that are not progressive or conservative.

All that happened here is that groups applying to the IRS for special tax status were checked to see if they were engaged in political activity. They were checked, not targeted. Only one-third of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Once again: Only one-third of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Conservative groups were not “singled out,” were not “targeted” and in the end none were denied special tax status – even though many obviously should have been.

From last week’s House hearings on this:

Rep. Peter Roskam, R-IL: “How come only conservative groups got snagged?”

Outgoing acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller: “They didn’t sir. Organizations of all walks and all persuasions were pulled in. That’s shown by the fact that only 70 of the 300 organizations were tea party organizations, of the ones that were looked at by TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration].”

Bet you didn’t see that blasted all over your TV news that night.

Click here to watch the video clip of this. It’s worth it.

And from Bloomberg reporting: IRS Sent Same Letter to Democrats That Fed Tea Party Row, (emphasis added, for emphasis)

One of those groups, Emerge America, saw its tax-exempt status denied, forcing it to disclose its donors and pay some taxes. None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected. Progress Texas … faced the same lines of questioning as the Tea Party groups from the same IRS office that issued letters to the Republican-friendly applicants. A third group, Clean Elections Texas, which supports public funding of campaigns, also received IRS inquiries.

In a statement late yesterday, the tax agency said it had pooled together the politically active nonpartisan applicants — including a “minority” that were identified because of their names. “It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views,” the IRS said in its statement.

Again, for emphasis: “It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views,” the IRS said in its statement.”

But no matter, its conventional wisdom now that “the IRS targeted conservative groups.” And it’s very useful to the right if people believe this. But it just is not true. (If you want to see conventional wisdom at work watch this clip from the most recent Saturday Night Live.)

What Did Happen?

Here’s the story. After the “Citizen’s United” decision allowed unlimited corporate money into elections there was a flood of applications to get special tax status that allowed an organization to hide its donors from the public, and in some cases even be tax-exempt. But the rules say that political groups can’t get this special tax status. The IRS has to check out applications for tax status to see if it is really a political group trying to sneak in to a special tax status.

Because they were flooded and couldn’t check out every applying organization, the IRS group looked for things in the applications that “flagged” an organization as possibly a political group. These flagged applications were then passed along to specialists to look deeper and determine if they were legit or not.

So What Was The “Wrongdoing”?

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) has issued a full report: Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review that looked into the accusation that the IRS “targeted” tea party groups that were applying for special tax status for extra scrutiny. The report is not all that long. You should read it. (Apparently most the people you are hearing from in the media haven’t read it.)

According to the report, the swamped IRS group involved in this came up with ways – “criteria” – to identify groups that really needed to be checked further because it was possible they might be engaged in the kind of political activity that would exclude them from getting the special tax status. (The rules for what constitutes political activity that would keep a group for getting special tax status are, to say the least, not clear. See the P.S. below.) Some groups were chosen to receive the required scrutiny because they had “political-sounding” names. Some of the “political-sounding names” included the words “tea party.” Others included “We the People” and “Take Back the Country.” (The inspector general’s report does not disclose if or which other “political sounding names” were also used as criteria.)

And the other problem was that the scrutiny these groups received involved some “unnecessary, burdensome questions.”

That was the extent of the wrongdoing. At a time when they couldn’t give all applying groups the necessary scrutiny they used criteria that included the names of an applying group to decide if it would get the required scrutiny. And they asked “unnecessary, burdensome questions.” That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Normally all groups applying for special tax status would and should all get looked at to see if they were really political groups. In this case no groups received any extra scrutiny as has been accused, instead many received less than usual. No group was “singled out” or “targeted” for extra scrutiny, instead they were not given the free pass others were getting because of the overload of applicants.

The IG report concluded that it was wrong to use a group’s name as a criteria to help determine if an applicant would be checked out at a time when there were so many applications that every group was not being checked out. (However, the IG report did say that most of the groups forwarded with this criteria in fact should have been forwarded.)

Again, that’s the wrongdoing that has triggered the absolute frenzy of outrage you are hearing from … everyone. They said it was silly to use a group’s name as criteria for deciding if they should be checked out thoroughly at a time when the IRS was too busy to thoroughly check all applications as they usually do. And they said groups filing for a special tax status but suspected of political activity were then asked “unnecessary, burdensome questions.”

And again, that’s it, That’s the whole “scandal.” That’s the whole “IRS harassing conservative groups.” That’s the whole “Obama the dictatorial tyrant going after his enemies” hissy-fit. (Pleasee read Digby’s The Art of the Hissy-Fit)

A Few Facts

Fact: The IRS is required to determine whether organizations applying for special tax status are “social welfare” groups or are instead engaged in political activity. Political groups cannot get the special tax status these groups were applying for.

Fact: Only one-third of the groups that were passed to specialists for a closer look were “conservative.” Lots of other organizations were also checked, including progressive organizations.

Fact: No groups were audited or harassed or “targeted” or “singled out.” This was about applications for special tax status being forwarded to specialists for a closer look to see if they were engaged in political activity that would disqualify them for the special tax status. This closer look is the kind of review all organization should get, but the IRS was swamped because of the flood of groups applying for a status that let them mask their donors, after Citizens United.

Fact: No groups were harmed. There were delays while the groups were checked to see if they should have special tax status. That’s it. But the rules are that they are allowed to operate as if they had that status while they waited for official approval.

Fact: The only groups actually denied special tax status were progressive groups, not conservative groups. In 2011, during the period that “conservative groups were targeted” the New York Times carried the story, 3 Groups Denied Break by I.R.S. Are Named . The three groups? Drum roll … “The I.R.S. denied tax exemption to the groups — Emerge Nevada, Emerge Maine and Emerge Massachusetts — because, the agency wrote in denial letters, they were set up specifically to cultivate Democratic candidates.”

Fact: The IRS commissioner in charge at the IRS at the time this happened was appointed President George W. Bush.

Fact: According to the inspector general’s report (p. 10) in the “majority of cases, we agreed that the applications submitted included indications of significant political campaign intervention.”

Other scandals?

The stage for this story to take off at this time was set by other “scandals” in the news. The scandal frenzy began when ABC News’ Jonathan Karl falsely reported that White House emails had “taken out” “all references to al Queda and all references to CIA warnings before the attack about the terror threat in Benghazi.” He said that these emails “show that many of these changes were directed by Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson …”

Click here to see the video of this report.

But a couple of days later CNN broke the news that the emails Karl used for his ABC report were edited by Republicans to make it appear they said these things. Parts of the edited emails Karl used were “inaccurate” and “invented” to make the administration and State Department look bad. (The word “fabricated” comes to mind.)

Next came a story that the Justice Department had looked at records of AP reporters to see who in the administration had leaked a story. The story was that an informer high up in al Queda in Yemen had delivered a new kind of bomb to target airliners, while the government was still analyzing how to detect it and the informer was still in Yemen. The Justice Department looked at call records – phone numbers only – to see if they could spot who had called AP. This became a “scandal” with accusations that the government was “wiretapping” reporters and “secretly monitoring” or “listening in” on their calls – with the “scandal” gaining traction with its conjunction with the “Benghazi scandal” story promoted by ABC.

Driving Right-Wing Themes Out To Wider Audiences

It is worth noting that Jonathan Karl is a graduate of a conservative-movement “media training” program, the Collegiate Network. The significance of this is explained by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), in A Right-Wing Mole at ABC News: Jonathan Karl and the success of the conservative media movement,

Conservatives don’t just complain loudly, endlessly and inaccurately about liberal media bias. They also train right-leaning journalists to make their way into the supposedly hostile terrain of Beltway media. And one of the most famous alums of a conservative media training program is now a major star at a network news outlet: ABC’s senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl.

Karl came to mainstream journalism via the Collegiate Network, an organization primarily devoted to promoting and supporting right-leaning newspapers on college campuses – such as the Rutgers paper launched by the infamous James O’Keefe. The network, founded in 1979, is one of several projects of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which seeks to strengthen conservative ideology on college campuses. William F. Buckley was the ISI’s first president, and the current board chair is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery. Several leading right-wing pundits came out of Collegiate-affiliated papers, including Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham.

ABC’s Jonathan Karl is also one of the reporters driving the “IRS scandal” story to a wider audience, with on-air reports like “Document Draft Shows IRS Targeted Conservative Groups,” “IRS IG Report: Targeting Conservatives Began In 2010,” “IRS Scandal Spreads Wider Than Cincinnati Officers” and more such stories, usually with inflammatory headlines and sensationalist scandal-hyping story lines.

The Daou Triangle

In 2005 Peter Daou wrote a widely-discussed paper describing how the right’s media machine works to drive false stories and smears out to wide audiences. In THE TRIANGLE: Limits of Blog Power Daou described how “a triangle of blogs, media, and the political establishment” worked together to “generate the critical mass necessary to alter or create conventional wisdom.” “…it’s still the Russerts and Broders and Gergens and Finemans, the WSJ, WaPo and NYT editorial pages, the cable nets, Stewart and Letterman and Leno, and senior elected officials, who play a pivotal role in shaping people’s political views.”

Describing a triangle of “netroots + media + party establishment = CW,” (netroots = “the base” and CW means “conventional wisdom”), Daou explained how they work together,

“…a well-developed echo chamber and superior top-down discipline, the right has a much easier time forming the triangle. Fox News, talk radio, Drudge, a well-trained and highly visible punditocracy, and a lily-livered press corps takes care of the media side of the triangle. Iron-clad party loyalty – with rare exceptions – and a willingness of Republican officials to jump on the Limbaugh-Hannity bandwagon du jour takes care of the party establishment side of the triangle. “

The Daou triangle described how Republican politicians work in concert with the echo chamber to turn false stories into “conventional wisdom.” One the progressive-aligned side? Not so much. Daou again,

Whereas rightwing bloggers can rely on their leadership and the rightwing noise machine to build the triangle, left-leaning bloggers face the challenge of a mass media consumed by the shop-worn narrative of Bush the popular, plain-spoken leader, and a Democratic Party incapacitated (for the most part) by the focus-grouped fear of turning off “swing voters” by attacking Bush. For the progressive netroots, the past half-decade has been a Sisyphean loop of scandal after scandal melting away as the media and party establishment remain disengaged.

Six years later Doau wrote an update, How the Democratic establishment shunned the left, spawned the Tea Party and moved America right. From Daou’s follow-up piece,

At the root of the problem is this: the GOP benefits from a superior communications mechanism with which to shape and reshape conventional wisdom. Faced with a public that holds opposing views, politicians can either change their positions to match the public’s views or change the public’s views to match their positions — Republicans almost always choose the latter, bolstered by a highly sophisticated framing and messaging infrastructure crafted and funded over decades.

… On the other side you have the Democratic establishment, political leaders, pollsters and strategists who, by and large, are poll addicts, chronically incapable of taking principled stands, obsessed with appealing to independent voters, hostile to progressive advocates, often just as captive to moneyed interests as their Republican counterparts. …

[. . .] So the brashest, loudest, most confident-sounding voices end up filling the knowledge void, voices that sound authoritative and principled. Rush Limbaugh, for instance. Or Sarah Palin. Sean Hannity. Ann Coulter. Bill O’Reilly.

Echoing these blaring ‘voices of authority’ are Republican politicians and the right’s online denizens. Conservative pundits and columnists then lend it all an air of seriousness. And the media, desperately seeking to appear “fair,” give an uncritical national platform to those voices. Not to mention Fox News, which pipes a steady stream of propaganda into millions of American homes. The triangle of establishment, media, and Internet comes together on the right and conventional wisdom is created. Pollsters then dutifully register that shift in sentiment and the media regurgitate it. A virtuous loop for the right.

There’s simply nothing comparable on the Democratic side.

If anything, in the debt debate, President Obama and leading Democrats were part of the Republican triangle, reinforcing GOP talking points and running roughshod over a country that didn’t even agree with the conservative position.

But The President “Admitted It”

Daou’s last point is key. While Republican politicians work with the conservative movement’s propaganda outlets, often Democratic politicians also echo Republican messages. In the case of the “IRS scandal” the President did just that, saying that what happened was “intolerable” and firing the acting IRS commissioner. This validated and propelled the false message that the IRS had “targeted” conservative outlets for “harassment” instead of refuting the accusations with facts. And this admission served to validate by proxy the other false right-wing scandal accusations about Benghazi and “wiretapping reporters.”

This is not the first time the Obama administration was taken in by false stories originating at right-wing propaganda outlets before the real facts were known. Van Jones had to leave the Obama administration after Glenn Beck accused him of being a “communist” and other right-wing sites accused him of being a “9/11 Truther.” Shirley Sherrod was fired from the Department of Agriculture after Breitbart (the same person who posted the doctored ACORN videos) posted doctored video that made it appear she had made racist remarks — even though the full video later showed the opposite to be true.

The great Brad Blog tells these stories, in IRS ‘Scandal’ Appears Nearly as Phony as Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones, ACORN ‘Scandals’,

… if you listened only to the corporate media, you — like the Obama Administration — also probably thought that the phony, trumped-up “scandals” that led to the inappropriate firing of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, the cowardly firing of White House green jobs adviser Van Jones and the outrageous federal defunding of ACORN were also the unhappy result of an endemic culture of corruption by the Obama Administration, the Democratic Party and its insidious political apparatchiks.

Those fake scandals, however, all three of them, were shams. They were eventually identified as such, though only after a great deal of harm to Sherrod, Jones and ACORN had already been done by the Democrats who fell for them and acted out of knee-jerk and cowardly fear to try and contain the perception of “scandal” which was, naturally, helped along by the very loud misreporting of “the nightly news”.

A Teachable Moment

This is a teachable moment — to us — to recognize how the right’s machine operates, to see how the corporate media and Washington Democrats react, and to learn not to get taken in by it. This is what they do. We shouldn’t fall for it — again and again. Remember, it was Washington Democrats who were taken in by right-wing smear operations, responding by defunding ACORN and censuring MoveOn.

These “scandals” are intended to distract us from the important stories that are unfolding around us, and obstruct the Obama administration from being able to accomplish anything more. For example, one unfolding story is how Senate Republicans are obstructing all attempts to get the government functioning and the economy recovering. By obstructing the National Labor Relations Board and Labor Department nominations, they are preventing the government from being able to enforce laws and rules that enable people to organize and bargain for better wages and benefits. By filibustering laws like last year’s Bring Jobs Home Act and The American Jobs Act, they are keeping us from growing the economy and rebuilding our infrastructure, and from preventing the offshoring of jobs. By using hostage-taking tactics with the debt ceiling they are forcing cuts in programs that help people and grow the economy.

This is where our attention should be focused.

PS – A Note About The Law vs. The Rules For Groups Applying For Special Tax Status

While researching this post I came across something interesting about the kind of special-tax-status organization that is allowed to do political work while masking its donors. This is called a 501(c)(4) organization, often just called a “C4.” According to the IRS,

The statute: IRC 501(c)(4) provides, in part, for the exemption from federal income taxation of civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.

The IRS regulation, or “interpretation” of the law: Section 1.501(c)(4)-1(a)(2)(i) of the Income Tax Regulations states that an organization will be considered to be operated exclusively for social welfare purposes if it is primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community, i.e. primarily for the purpose of bringing about civic betterments and social improvements.

Note the shift from “exclusively” to “primarily.” These words have VERY different meanings. While the law says these “social welfare” organizations cannot engage in what is called political intervention, the IRS “interprets” this to mean that up to 49 percent of their activity can.

Recently the New York Times explained some of the ambiguity this difference creates, in Uneven I.R.S. Scrutiny Seen in Political Spending by Big Tax-Exempt Groups,

The tax code states that 501(c)(4)’s must operate “exclusively” to promote social welfare, a category that excludes political spending. Some court decisions have interpreted that language to mean that a minimal amount of political spending would be permissible. But the I.R.S. has for years maintained that groups meet that rule as long as they are not “primarily engaged” in election work, a substantially different threshold.

Nowhere do the rules specify what “primarily engaged” means, though there are indications that the agency has begun to re-examine the question. In March, the I.R.S. began sending out questionnaires to roughly 1,300 tax-exempt organizations, including some 501(c)(4)s, regarding their political lobbying and other activities. The agency has said it is merely seeking a clearer picture of how tax-exempt groups operate to ensure better compliance.

So all of those smear ads you see at election time, and no one knows who is paying for them? THAT is the difference between the law and this “interpretation” of the law. This “interpretation” of a law that requires groups with special tax status to operate “exclusively” for the social welfare is used to mask the corporate and billionaire donors and enable the smear ads that are destroying our civility and democracy.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary

Tomorrow the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is scheduled to hold a hearing titled “Offshore Profit Shifting and the U.S. Tax Code – Part 2 (Apple, Inc.)” with Apple’s Tim Cook. Apple is holding more than $100 billion in tax haven countries, to evade U.S. taxes. At the hearing, Cook (2011 compensation $378 million) is expected to offer a proposal for changes to the corporate tax system.

Cook’s proposal is likely to be for a “tax repatriation holiday” and a “territorial tax system,” both of which mean giant, multinational companies like Apple will pay less in taxes, people like Cook will have even more money, and We the People will end up with higher taxes, fewer good schools and good roads and police and teachers and the other things government does to make our lives better. As a bonus, this makes giant multinationals that move jobs and profits overseas even more competitive against smaller American companies that keep jobs and profits here and do not have foreign “subsidiaries” located in tax havens.

New Report On Apple’s Tax Avoidance

Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the AFL-CIO held a conference call today to talk about a new report by CTJ, “Apple Holds Billions of Dollars in Foreign Tax Havens,” documenting Apple’s offshore tax avoidance. The report states that,

An analysis of Apple Inc.’s financial reports makes clear that Apple has paid almost no income taxes to any country on its $102 billion in offshore cash holdings. That means that this cash hoard reflects profits that were shifted, on paper, out of countries where the profits were actually earned into foreign tax havens.

How much is this costing us? First, with Washington all aflutter over deficits, the tax dollars: $35.3 billion. From the report:

Applying this same U.S. tax rate to Apple’s $102.3 billion offshore cash hoard as of March 2013 would generate $35.3 billion in U.S. income taxes, without deferral.

Worse, however, is the cost in jobs and manufacturing infrastructure. The current tax laws encourage companies to move jobs, factories and profit centers out of the country. They actually subsidize this with tax breaks!

“Back-Alley Thief”

On the call were Bob McIntyre, Executive Director of CTJ, Damon Silvers, Policy Director and Special Counsel for AFL-CIO and Frank Clemente, Campaign Manager for ATF.

ATF’s Frank Clemente said Apple is “acting like a back-alley thief trying to pick the pockets of American taxpayers.” Clemente also said the proposal for a tax holiday is “another mugging of the American taxpayer.”

CTJ’s Bob McIntyre said that Apple has more than $102 billion accumulated offshore, “virtually all in tax havens, never taxed. Often profits made in the U.S. that they pretend to earn abroad.” McIntyre said Apple is a “poster child for why we need to get rid of deferral,” and “If they are doing business in real countries and paying taxes, give them a credit, but companies like Apple, it all ends up in a situation where they pay very little in taxes. Deferral has cost the U.S. taxpayers in Apple’s case $35 billion and is growing every year.”

Hurts Smaller American-Based Businesses

AFL-CIO’s Damon Silvers described the terrible cost we pay for this, because it hurts smaller American-based businesses. Silvers spoke of the tax policies Apple seems likely to advocate in terms of the current “sequester” cuts, saying, “Today as Apple testifies we are dismantling vital government services, laying people off because we are in theory in a fiscal crisis. Head start, cancer research, national defense … there is a long list of vital functions not being carried forward because in the view of Congress we don’t have revenues to support it.”

“Apple is one of the most profitable corporations in America and perhaps the world, setting aside $102 billion, not paying tax. On a cash basis Apple only paid $3.3 billion in taxes worldwide, less than 10 percent. Walmart is paying 24 percent. But more damaging is what Apple is saying we should do with corporate taxes in general. Deferral lets companies with overseas subsidiaries avoid taxes. This is not something available to most companies, only to global corporations that can move profits and operation offshore.”

“Small business is paying the full freight as are all of us as individuals. But Apple is asking for a special rate on offshore profits of 10 percent. And now key lobbyists, led by Fix the Debt, are proposing foreign overseas earnings tax free.”

Resources

ATF has an extensive facts page at “Apple Is a Bad Apple when It Comes to Paying Its Taxes” and you can download the fact sheet by clicking here. You can tweet using the #BadApple hashtag.

CTJ has a page describing their new report, Apple Holds Billions of Dollars in Foreign Tax Havens and you can read a PDF of the full report by clicking here.

About CTJ and ATF

CTJ is a public interest research and advocacy organization focusing on federal, state and local tax policies. They push for tax fairness for middle and low-income families, requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share and closing corporate tax loopholes.

ATF is a coalition representing more than 280 groups. They are pushing for a tax system that makes the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

FYI – ATF will be live blogging and live Tweeting from the Tuesday U.S. Senate hearing.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary

Mythical Deficit Problem Solved

The “deficit problem” is man-made. When Bill Clinton was president we were paying off the debt. George W. Bush turned Clinton’s budget surpluses right around, calling deficits “extremely positive news” because they would later force cuts in government. Ronald Reagan’s “strategic deficits” began a strategy to make the borrowing appear so bad that the public would be panicked into allowing cuts in the things government does to make our lives better – so the wealthy few could have even more wealth and power. (Reagan tripled the national debt, Bush doubled it again.)

So after Bush we had a problem. When ‘W’ left office the budget deficit was $1.4 trillion. Then after Obama took office Wall Street and the right started terrifying the public about deficits and outlining their “solutions”: Cut government, cut regulation of the giant corporations, cut entitlements, cut investment in infrastructure, privatize public assets, cut the safety net, etc… Cut the things that government does to make our lives better (government spending) and cut the things government does to protect us from the immense power of the insanely wealthy and their giant corporations.

But something got in their way. The deficit started coming down before all of the “solutions” could be forced on us. The deficit is now down 60 percent as a percent of GDP from the level Bush left behind (see the chart in this post).

The 2010 “Simpson-Bowles” plan called for austerity to lower our budget deficit to 2.3 percent of GDP by 2015. But the latest CBO budget projections say the deficit will be 2.1 percent of GDP in 2015.

Ezra Klein, in “CBO says deficit problem is solved for the next 10 years,” writes, “…the debt disaster that has obsessed the political class for the last three years is pretty much solved, at least for the next 10 years or so.”

Problem solved – austerity and the sequester can go away. For those of us outside Washington and in the real world we’ve been saying all along this isn’t the problem, the problem is that there aren’t enough jobs, people’s wages are stagnant or falling and the country is losing more than a billion dollars a day from bad trade deals. We have real problems to solve, so let’s get to it. Let’s address the job gap and the wage gap and the trade gap.

The mythical budget deficit is problem gone; let’s worry about our real problems.

The Economy Can’t Recover Without An Emphasis On Fixing Jobs, Wages And Trade

The economy can’t recover until housing recovers. Housing can’t recover until people can afford to buy houses. People can’t afford to buy houses until they can get jobs, and those with jobs can’t afford to buy houses until wages go up. Wages cant go up until the trade problem is fixed. And the trade problem is killing jobs.

Explained a different way:

1. The economy can’t recover until housing recovers.
2. Housing can’t recover until people can afford to buy houses.
3. People can’t afford to buy houses until they can get jobs,
4. and those with jobs can’t afford to buy houses until wages go up.
5. Wages cant go up until the trade problem is fixed.
6. And the trade problem is killing jobs.

They say that housing is the key to recovery from recessions. Forbes: Buffett Says Housing Is Key To Recovery, USA Today: Housing holds key to full job growth rebound, Time: Can the Economy Get Healthy Without a Housing Recovery? CAP: A Strong Housing Market Is Critical to Our Economic Recovery and so on. But on NPR Monday, in Is The Housing Recovery Just A Mirage?, they made the key point: “What we really need to do is focus on jobs and unemployment to get people able to have the money to spend on a house.”

Yes, jobs are being created. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month when President Obama took office, and now we are gaining just enough jobs each month to keep up with and get a little bit ahead of growth in the labor force. But there are not enough new jobs and too many of the new jobs are low-wage jobs. So the middle class is still shrinking, and people can’t afford to buy houses to get a real housing recovery underway.

We need more jobs. We have a jobs emergency.

The Jobs Gap

The Hamilton Project explains the jobs gap as “the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month.” They say:

If the economy adds about 208,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate for the best year of job creation in the 2000s, then it will take until April 2020 to close the jobs gap. Given a more optimistic rate of 321,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate of the best year of job creation in the 1990s, the economy will reach pre-recession employment levels by December 2016.

One more thing: “As of April, our nation faces a “jobs gap” of 10.0 million jobs.”

10 million jobs still needed just to catch up to where we should be. That is huge.

Where did the jobs go?

The Trade Deficit

According to economist Dean Baker the trade deficit represents American consumers spending their money overseas rather than here. And that means those dollars are “creating jobs” there, not here. His point was driven home last year when he wrote that, “The main factor leading to job loss [in the 2000s] was the growing U.S. trade deficit.”

The trade deficit represents millions of jobs. That more than $1 billion per day we send out of the country represents how many jobs at $50,000 per year? That’s good jobs sent out of the country every day of every week of every year. That is the trade deficit.

We can start by fixing currency manipulation. A “strong dollar” is a lot of the problem because it means things made here cost more and things made elsewhere cost less. So we aren’t able to sell as much and we are buying more than we should.

A February report from the Economic Policy Institute, “Reducing U.S. trade deficit will generate a manufacturing-based recovery for the United States and Ohio,” written by Robert E. Scott, Helene Jorgensen, and Doug Hall, looked at the job-cost of the portion of the trade deficit that is caused by currency manipulation. The report concludes that fixing just this problem would reduce the trade deficit by between about $190 billion and $400 billion over the course of three years and bring us between 2.2 million and 4.7 million U.S. jobs. Doing this would lower the unemployment rate between 1 percent and 2.1 percent and increase GDP between 1.4 percent and 3.1 percent.

That is just the portion of the trade deficit caused by currency manipulation and you can see the immense cost. Imagine if we took that step as well as other steps to eliminate the trade deficit.

The Wage Gap

A trade deficit also means that our workers not only face high unemployment but are also pitted against exploited workers in countries where those workers don’t have a say in how things are done. This inevitably drives down wages as employers move jobs offshore and remaining workers compete for jobs, all the while afraid to make waves and ask for raises lest their job be shipped out of the country as well.

American workers face high unemployment and then on top of that they face competition from people who are paid a fraction of what Americans earn. The trade deficit represents a significant contributor to this problem.

Fixing the trade deficit also fixes some of the wage gap. But we also need strong unions and strong government to combat the power of the giant corporations and demand that regular working people a fair share of the proceed of our economy.

The “Sequester” And Other Budget Cuts Just Make Things Worse

On top of this, our own government is aggravating the problem, with this wealthy-donor driven focus on deficit reduction instead of job expansion.

For example, Politico: Sequestration gets real for furloughed workers,

Sequestration went from wait-and-see to here-it-is Tuesday when the number of furloughed federal workers hit an eye-popping 820,000. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told 680,000 civilian workers they’d have to stay home 11 days without pay. About 140,000 workers from other government agencies have already been given furlough notices.

The number is expected to grow …

The deficit is not a problem. The Simpson-Bowles target has been reached and passed. The austerity is harming the economy and hurting people. Congress and the President should pivot to jobs. They need to fix the jobs gap, the wage gap and the trade gap, and if they continue to ignore these real problems it is up to We, the People to apply the necessary pressure to make them do it.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary

Grateful Dead, August 1967, West Park, Ann Arbor.

Photo by Leni Sinclair

James O’Keefe is the guy who made a video supposedly showing him in a “pimp costume” getting advice from ACORN employees on ow to run a prostitution ring. Except the video was doctored, he never wore a “pimp costume” and ACORN employees never did any such thing. But the story sounded good … so it went wide and ACORN was defunded by Congress.

And here we go again. It turns out the IRS was NOT singling out “Tea Party” groups for audits. The IRS was scrutinizing ALL groups applying for c4 status by asking additional questions. No audits. And only SOME (1/3) of those groups were conservatives — OTHERS were liberal, etc. Doesn’t matter, the right put out a victimization story making it sound like only conservatives were targeted for political reasons. (And Christians are a persecuted minority, Whites are discriminated against, etc.) The “mainstream” news media picked up and spread the lie, and here we are.

Again: Only 1/3 of the organizations that received extra scrutiny were conservative. The rest are not identified, but liberal and progressive organizations are reporting that their applications received the same scrutiny as conservatives. (And by the way almost 70% of the applications that were flagged WERE engaged in campaign activity that would disqualify them from c4 status.)

See:

Bloomberg News: IRS Sent Same Letter to Democrats That Fed Tea Party Row

Daily Kos: Liberal groups received same IRS letter that ignited Tea Party outrage

Washington Monthly: Two Rather Important Details About the IRS “Scandal”

From the Inspector General’s report on what happened, page 8:

Figure 4 shows that approximately one-third of the applications identified for processing by the team of specialists included Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names, while the remainder did not. According to the Director, Rulings and Agreements, the fact that the team of specialists worked applications that did not involve the Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 groups demonstrated that the IRS was not politically biased in its identification of applications for processing by the team of specialists.

Look at how MANY of us fell for one more “pimp costume” story.

James O’Keefe never wore a “pimp costume” into an ACORN office, and conservative groups were not singled out for scrutiny by the IRS. But because of the right’s ability to spread these smears both are now firmly “true” in the public mind. Partly because the rest of us fell for it and helped amplify it.

TPP is a “trade” agreement between several Pacific-rim countries that is actually about much more than just trade. It will be sold as a trade agreement (because everyone knows that “trade” is good) but much of it appears to be (from what we know) a corporate end-run around things We the People want to do to reign in the giant corporations — like Wall Street regulation, environmental regulation and corporate taxation.

One-Sided Process

The TPP process appears to be set up to push corporate interests over other interests. The TPP is being negotiated in secret, so what we know about it comes from leaked documents. Even our Congress is being kept out of the loop. But 600 corporate representatives are in the loop while representatives of groups that protect working people, human, political and civil rights and our environment are largely not in the loop.

This one-sided participation unfortunately indicates that the interests of giant corporations are likely to override the interests of working people and those who want to protect non-corporate interests. Otherwise there would be more representation by representatives of organizations representing these concerns, and greater transparency into the process.

TPP Is A Very, Very Big Deal

The coming TPP is a very, very big deal. If it is agreed to by the Senate and signed by the President it will override American laws in many areas. We won’t be allowed to enforce laws and regulations that impede the “rights” granted to big corporations under this agreement, and it will be very hard to rescind the agreement once signed, no matter how much damage might result. Just look at how NAFTA, China’s entry into the WTO and other agreements are causing huge trade deficits and sending jobs, factories and industries out of the country while dramatically increasing income and wealth inequality.

Making the TPP work for We, the People should be up there on our “litmus test” of things we require of our elected officials — right along with pledging no cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

TPP Not Just Trade

It looks like TPP will go way beyond what most of us would consider to be in a normal “trade” agreement. TPP — negotiated by giant corporate interests — appears set to give giant corporations a veto over a country’s ability to set many laws and regulations that are designed to reign in those corporations. Quelle surprise!

Leaked documents appear to show that negotiators are writing provisions that will set rules that are binding on Congress and our state legislatures tell us what laws and regulations our own country can pass or enforce in areas like:

• intellectual property rights like patents and copyrights,
• government procurement like Buy American which would be banned,
• investment and land use,
• service-sector regulation,
• food and product safety,
• corporate competition,
• labor,
• even environmental standards.
• Leaks show that TPP even limits government regulation of financial services!

Dean Baker explains that non-trade items like patents in an agreement like TPP can have a huge effect on us by dramatically increasing prices of items like pharmaceuticals, in Political Corruption and the “Free Trade” Racket,

Tariffs and quotas might raise the price of various items by 20 or 30 percent. By contrast, patent and copyright protection is likely to raise the price of protected items 2,000 percent or even 20,000 percent above the free market price. Drugs that would sell for a few dollars per prescription in a free market would sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars when the government gives a drug company a patent monopoly.

Again: There are over 600 corporate representatives participating in the TPP process, but few if any representatives of human rights, environmental, civil rights or worker rights organizations. And the resulting agreement will be binding on governments! The corporate powers apparently granted in the TPP can override domestic laws on environmental health and safety, and labor and citizens’ rights. If this agreement becomes law multinationals can claim that those domestic laws and regulations hamper free trade and can sue for millions of dollars in “damages.”

Bad History Of Trade Agreements Harming Economy, Democracy

Our one-sided, corporate-negotiated trade agreements have dramatically enriched Wall Street and a few CEOs. But the devastation that is apparent in many regions of our country along with the hollowing out of our middle class tells the real story of what these agreements can do to an economy. For example, we all know what has happened since China was allowed to enter the WTO. In the 2000s we lost 50,000+ factories and at least 6 million jobs just to China. Because of the massive cost of building a manufacturing infrastructure it will be very difficult to restore even key industries. But the 1% who pushed this made out extremely well.

Even the just-signed Korea Free Trade agreement is already hurting our economy. It has increased the trade deficit, increased imports and decreased exports! A recently-released fact sheet from Public Citizen looks at the damage our economy is already experiencing from the Korea, Panama and Columbia agreements. The section on Korea tells the story: exports to Korea down 10%, trade deficit up 37%:

“One year into the Korea FTA, U.S. goods exports to Korea have declined by 10 percent (a $4.2billion decrease) in comparison to the year before FTA implementation. U.S. meat producers lost a combined $206 million in beef, pork and poultry exports in the first year of the Korea FTA relative to the year before FTA implementation, while the U.S. auto and auto parts industries suffered a 16 percent increase in the U.S. auto trade deficit with Korea. Overall, the U.S. trade deficit with Korea has swelled 37 percent under the FTA.”

Just one of many examples in the fact sheet:

• Imports of cars and auto parts from Korea have soared 15 percent (more than $2.5 billion) under the FTA, driving a 16 percent increase in the U.S. trade deficit with Korea in autos and auto parts relative to the year before FTA implementation.

Also from the fact sheet — loss of 12,000 jobs:

“The combined U.S. trade deficit with Korea, Colombia and Panama under the FTAs has jumped 11percent above pre-FTA levels for the same months as exports to Korea have declined and imports from Korea and Panama have risen substantially. Using the same ratio employed by the Obama administration, this $2.3 billion combined trade deficit expansion implies the net loss of more than 12,000 U.S. jobs in just the first several months of the new FTAs.”

And that’s just the recent Korea agreement, and in just a few months since it went into effect.

Trade Can Be Good Or Bad, Depending…

No question about it, a good trade deal can boost exports, boost the economy, boost employment … And of course this promise is how these trade deals are sold to us.

But the bad trade deals we have gotten ourselves into have instead boosted the trade deficit, boosted unemployment, boosted income and wealth inequality, boosted the loss of factories and industries, boosted the hollowing-out of our middle class and boosted the domination of our politics by the large corporate interests.

All trade deals have winners and losers. NAFTA and letting China into the WTO were obviously big winners for Wall Street, the 1%ers, and their giant multinational corporations. But these and similar trade deals helped break the back of the unions, the middle class and our economy — especially manufacturing and its supply chains. The result of these changes has been that all of the gains from our economy as productivity increases have increasingly gone to fewer and fewer people who are higher and higher up the food chain.

We need an open, democratic process that ensures that We, the People are the winners from our trade deals.

Needed Fixes

The TPP negotiations should not just be negotiated to serve the interests of giant multinational corporations. The process should be opened up to the public and democracy, so people and groups with a huge stake in the outcome — like labor unions, environmental organizations, human rights groups and consumer organizations — can participate. With only corporate participation, only corporate interests will be served. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

The process of democracy should not be subverted by a “fast track” rule that keeps our Congress from fully considering the implications and effects of such an agreement. “Fast track” just extends the lack of citizen involvement in negotiations into a lack of citizen involvement in the finalization!

Last June 130 members of the Congress wrote a letter to the US Trade Representative asking for transparency in the TPP negotiations and consultation with members of Congress. In addition, more than 400 organizations have asked Congress to replace the “Fast Track” system that limits Congress’ (democracy’s) ability to get involved in the process, and to call for a new direction for TPP as well as other trade agreements.

We also need strong tests and irrevocable language about withdrawing from the agreement if it is harming our economy, environment, smaller businesses, tax base and/or our working people.

TPP and all future trade deals must include clear and enforceable rules covering currency manipulation and other ways that countries game the system.

Elizabeth Warren Drives It Home

Watch Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asking about trends in trading patterns with Korea since the new “free trade” treaty went into effect, and about how TPP looks like an end run around Wall Street regulation.

Get Involved

The next round of TPP talks will be held May 15–24 in Lima, Peru. It is time to start making sure that your voice is heard in DC. Trade deals can lift people on both sides of trade borders. But only if a true open and democratic process is used to reach agreement. Otherwise these agreements will continue to be gamed to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

One of the best comprehensive sources of information on TPP is at Public Citizen and their Global Trade Watch. They have a landing page just waiting for you: TPP: Corporate Power Tool of the 1%. Go take a look.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has a TPP page, explaining their concerns about the sections involving Intellectual Property (IP) as well as the general lack of transparency and openness.

Public Knowledge has a TPP landing pageo expressing similar concerns.

The AFL-CIO has a TPP detail page and offers Trans-Pacific FTA Outline concluding:

“Although not all the news coming from APEC was good, it is too early to tell if the TPP will live up to its promise to create great opportunities for America’s working families. Now is the time to speak up. If you have concerns about some of these announcements, too, now is the time to speak up—the TPP is still being negotiated.”

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary

What Is The NLRB?

The NLRB is the agency that “safeguards employees’ rights to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative. The agency also acts to prevent and remedy unfair labor practices committed by private sector employers and unions.”

The NLRB supervises elections to form or decertify unions in the workplace. It investigates charges that employees, unions or employers violated rules over labor practices and rules on the charges. It works to get problems resolved rather than taken to court. And finally, when the NLRB has issued a ruling that is ignored it can take the parties to court.

But if the NLRB is prevented from operating there is no one to make sure that the rules for labor practices are being enforced. This hurts workers and companies.

Background Of The Nomination Battle

Individual workers have little power when up against giant corporations. They can ask for better pay, benefits and working conditions, please, and the giant companies can just say, “you’re fired” if they do — and working people know that. However, when the employees all band together it gives them collective power. It’s the old story of how a person can break a single stick, but when all the sticks are bundled together the person is not able to break them. Banding together the workers have the power to get better wages, benefits and working conditions.

The other side of this is that big companies can make a lot of money if they can keep their workers from organizing unions. So they use their money and power to try to stop workers from organizing unions.

Because the economy does better when people have better wages, benefits and working conditions, and because strikes and lawsuits can plug things up, it is the law that workers have the right to form unions and bargain collectively to balance out the immense power of the giant corporations.

This is why the NLRB battle matters. For years elected officials allied with anti-union businesses worked to block the NLRB from operating, so that workers are not able to form unions and existing unions are not able to enforce labor rules. At the same time these elected officials worked to get anti-union judges into the courts and block impartial judges from being confirmed. This enabled the giant companies to make more money — and working people less money. (Meanwhile as wages dropped nationally the economy slowed and slowed.)

A strategy unfolded, in which big companies would put up money to elect anti-union candidates. Then these anti-union elected officials blocked nominees to the NLRB and filled the courts up with anti-union judges. Senator Lindsay Graham, for example, has vowed to block all nominees to the NLRB, saying “the NLRB as inoperable could be considered progress.”

Over time this strategy meant that there were too few people confirmed to sit on the NLRB, and too many anti-union judges in the courts.

Timeline

After President Obama took office anti-union Senators rolled out a strategy of blocking confirmation of any appointees to the NLRB to keep the agency from having a quorum so it could not operate.

In 2010 the anti-union judges on the Supreme Court ruled that the NLRB could not issue rulings without at least three confirmed members.

Anti-union Senators continued to block confirmations to the NLRB.

In January, 2012 President Obama made recess appointments to the NLRB to enable it to operate again.

In January, 2013 anti-union judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were unconstitutional.

Today’s Situation

Anti-union companies are refusing to comply with NLRB rules by allowing union elections or bargaining with unionized employees, thereby making money by keeping wages low. More than 85 companies are now challenging NLRB rulings that went against them, claiming the rulings shouldn’t count — even though they were found to have violated labor practices.

The result is that the rights of American workers to organize unions and bargain for better pay, benefits and working conditions are unprotected, and the big companies are taking advantage of this. Wages are stagnant and benefits are disappearing. Obviously the economy does better when people are paid better and have better working conditions, so this is also holding the economy back.

What Next?

Next week on May 16 a Senate committee will hold a hearing on the nominees to the NLRB. Anti-union senators are expected to try to block the nominations because a lot of money for the giant corporations rides on keeping the NLRB from operating.

Then the full Senate will consider the nominees.

What is needed now is for people to contact their Senators and let them know they need to confirm all of these nominees, Democratic and Republican alike, so the NLRB can get back to work.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary

A new report from the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), Remaking American Security, Authored by Brig. Gen. Adams (US Army, Retired) looks at supply chain weaknesses and chokepoints, to see how vulnerable our security is to disruption by China and other “potentially unreliable” foreign suppliers.

Yes, we farm out critical defense supply contracts to that China, the country that has been hacking into our computers.

Take a look at AAM’s landing page for the report, Report Says U.S. Military Dangerously Dependent on Foreign Suppliers to see the Executive Summary and links into the report.

Conclusion: Our “over-reliance on foreign suppliers for critical defense materials” means that the country is dangerously dependent on “potentially unreliable” foreign suppliers for the raw materials, parts, and finished products needed to defend America.

Here is just one example from the report: “The United States is completely dependent on a single Chinese company for the chemical needed to produce the solid rocket fuel used to propel HELLFIRE missiles.”

Solutions: This is so important that I am going to list the entire summary of conclusions, details are available in the report and condensed on a separate PDF.

But first, I want to point out that following these recommendations will also increase our own job base, reduce our massive trade deficit and strengthen our economy.

• Increasing long-term federal investment in high-technology industries, particularly those involving advanced research and manufacturing capabilities;
• Properly updating, applying, and enforcing existing laws and regulations to support the U.S. defense industrial base;
• Developing domestic sources of key natural resources that our armed forces require;
• Ensuring that defense industrial base concerns are considered at the highest levels when formulating the U.S. National Military Strategy, National Security Strategy and throughout the Quadrennial Defense Review process;
• Building consensus among government, industry, the defense industrial base workforce, and the military on the best ways to strengthen the defense industrial base;
• Increasing cooperation between federal agencies and between government and industry to build a healthier defense industrial base;
• Strengthening collaboration between government, industry, and academic research institutions to educate, train, and retain people with specialized skills to work in key defense industrial base sectors;
• Crafting legislation to support a broadly representative defense industrial base strategy;
• Modernizing and securing defense supply chains through networked operations that provide ongoing communications between prime contractors and the supply chains they depend on; and
• Identifying potential defense supply chain chokepoints and planning to prevent disruptions.

Please visit AAM’s page on this report, and if you can please read the report.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary

A Million Manufacturing Jobs?

In the 2012 campaign President Obama set a goal of creating 1 million new manufacturing jobs. (This goal comes after the country lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2009.) Manufacturing jobs bring money into the economy. Manufacturing jobs also bring along with them many jobs in other sectors that support manufacturing, from the supply chain to the maintenance to the marketing and sales of the goods. This is what the President understood when he set this goal.

But with the March jobs numbers out this morning the economy has created a total of only 39,000 manufacturing jobs this year — zero in March. That leaves the country with 961,000 manufacturing jobs to go in the time remaining.

Perhaps this dearth of new manufacturing jobs has something to do with the economic stagnation we see around us?

Job Report Summary

While the jobs report was not too bad overall, it was terrible for manufacturing. Job growth for January and February was revised up by 114,000, so average job growth for the last three months was 212,000. But job gains were largely in low-wage sectors with zero gained in manufacturing. Employment services, restaurant employees and the retail sector accounted for more than half of April job growth. Health care added 19,000 jobs.

The sequester started to hit, with 8,000 jobs lost in the federal government (3,500 of those from the Postal Service.) State and local governments lost 3,000 jobs, which means 224,000 jobs lost over the last year. Construction lost 6,000 jobs, apparently from public projects.

The #AAMeter Manufacturing Jobs Tracker

The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) Jobs Tracker — the #AAMeter — tracks progress toward the President’s goal of adding 1 million manufacturing jobs. AAM uses the monthly jobs report data to keep track of how we are dowing towards reaching the 1-million-jobs goal, which would require an average monthly increase of 20,833 manufacturing jobs. The picture tells the story:

Not so great. What do we need to do to boost our manufacturing sector, bringing better-paying jobs and the jobs that support manufacturing?

First We Need A National Manufacturing Strategy

We need more jobs, higher-wage jobs, and jobs in sectors that do more for the economy. This requires a national manufacturing strategy.

Other countries have national strategies to increase the strength of their national manufacturing sector. We do not. We are wedded to an ideology that says that we as a nation should not protect our good-paying jobs and our manufacturing sector. In fact, the “free-market” and “free-trade” ideology even says it is wrong to have a strategy as a country to keep and strengthen our important economic sectors.

Alliance for American Manufacturing’s Scott Paul said, “The United States is the only major industrial nation that does not have a cohesive national manufacturing strategy. We’ve outlined steps the president should to help meet his manufacturing jobs goal. If the Administration and Congress show a genuine willingness to act on these common sense policies, we’ll see our Jobs Tracker move toward 1 million jobs gained.”

Democrats in Congress have, in fact, outlined a Make It In America legislative plan,

The Democrats’ Make it in America plan is a bold initiative to get America working again by building the products of the future here at home. Make it in America will create the conditions necessary to unleash American skill and ingenuity to power our 21st century economy. As President Obama has said, America must out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world and our initiative will help our nation do just that. When we Make it in America, American families will make it too.

Please click through to see information about the Jobs Opportunities Between our Shores (JOBS) Act, New Alternative Transportation to Give American Solutions (NAT GAS) Act, National Manufacturing Strategy Act, Build American Jobs Act, Build America Bonds to Create Jobs Now Act, National Infrastructure Development Bank Act, The Airports, Highways, High-Speed Rail, Trains and Transit: Make it in America, One Global Internet Act, Permanent R&D Tax Credit, Rare Earths and Critical Materials Revitalization Act, Energy Critical Elements Renewal Act, Resource Assessment of Rare Earths (RARE) Act, Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act, Innovative Technologies Investment Incentives Act, Small Business Start-Up Savings Accounts, Make it in America Block Grant Act, Clean Energy Technology Manufacturing and Export Assistance Act, Security in Energy and Manufacturing (SEAM) Act, American Manufacturing Efficiency & Retraining Investment Collaboration (AMERICA Works), Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success (SECTORS) Act, The Keep American Jobs from Going Down the Drain Act, Berry Amendment Extension Act, American Jobs Matter Act and the All-American Flag Act.

Democratic Whip Sten Hoyer has been a leader in promoting the Make It In America agenda, with a Make It In America web page as well.

Ideology, or Something Else?

But here is the thing: everything is being blocked by Republican obstruction in the name of “free market” and “free trade” ideology.

And here is the other thing: those who are driving and funding the ideology are making big money off of the damage this ideology is doing! The financial sector funds much of the push to “free trade” and against a national manufacturing strategy. And as a result the financial sector is soaring at the expense of manufacturing and the jobs it brings. The oil and coal industries are funding much of the fight against alternative energy, energy efficiency, green manufacturing and the jobs it brings. And as a result the oil and coal sectors are booming at teh expense of the rest of the economy.

The Koch brothers alone gained $15 billion — a 43% increase — between March 2010 and Sept 2011. Are their motives really ideological? It turns out to be a very profitable ideological agenda for them.

And we don’t even know if other countries are helping drive America’s ideological opposition to national strategies by funding the right-wing “free market” “think tanks” that push it, because the funding for these efforts is not disclosed.

Other Steps

Along with implementing a national manufacturing strategy there are many other things we can do to promote our manufacturing sector to revive our economy and create meaningful, good-paying jobs. Among these:

Tax policies: End the tax incentives that encourage American companies to move jobs, factories and profit centers out of the country. Immediately end the “deferral” of taxes on foreign income. Companies get a tax advantage on foreign profits over profits they earn here, so they more operations out of the country.

The big one in tax policy is offshore tax deferral: Companies are currently holding $1.7 trillion out of our economy and away from shareholders, just because we let them avoid taxes until the bring it back. So they move profit centers of tax havens, etc. Repeal this deferral and make them bring that money home now and stop moving profit centers out of the country from now on.

Other tax policies that would help: Section 199 Domestic Production Deduction; Accelerated Cost Recovery; Depletion Allowances; Net Operating Losses; Last-In, First-Out Accounting; Interest Cost Deductibility; Research & Development Tax Credit; Current Tax Treatment of Employee Health Care and Pension Contributions; Credit for Prior Year Minimum Tax.

Currency manipulation: Countries like China manipulate their currency to give them a price advantage in international markets. This must stop. There are steps we can take to stop this but our administration is hog-tied by foreign policy needs that conflict with our country’s trade-balance needs. For example they can’t crack down on China and then ask China’s help with North Korea. The answer is for Congress to pass a law requiring balancing tariffs on goods from countries that manipulate currency.

Buy American policies: COngress and states should improve Buy American requirements in procurement. Our tax dollars should boost our economy.

A recent example — Reps. Pete Visclosky (D-IN) and Tim Murphy (R-PA) have introduced the American Steel First Act of 2013, a bill to require the Department of Transportation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security to exclusively use American-made iron and steel in infrastructure projects.

Defense procurement especially needs Buy American requirements. Contractors should be required to increase their domestic procurement. This is about national security vulnerabilities just as much as about our tax dollars supporting our economy.

Fix and modernize our country’s infrastructure: We could have full employment right away if we just did what we need to do anyway and will have to do eventually. Maintain and modernize our infrastructure (with American-made supplies.) Our infrastructure is crumbling. We need to completely modernize our infrastrucutre so our economy is competitive, and in the process we will revitalize jobs and manufacturing.

Invest in education: to improve our high schools, colleges and universities. We need 21st-century education with a renewed focus on manufacturing in America.

Invest in energy efficiency and green manufacturing: There is a green revolution taking place in the world and we are not in the lead. The President’s 50mpg mandate is a great start, but we need renewable energy standards, tax credits for alternative energy, and policies to promote green manufacturing, especially working to capture a share of wind, solar, advanced battery, electric car and similar manufacturing.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary