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Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation

October 23, 2012
Remembering George McGovern’s Invaluable Work to End Poverty, Hunger
Guest Post
By Peter B. Edelman. Edelman is a law professor at Georgetown Law and Chair of the ACS Board. Edelman is also author of the recent book, So Rich, So Poor.

George McGovern leaves legacies of principle and courage across the board. Robert Kennedy once said McGovern was the most decent man he had ever known. I admired McGovern for many reasons, but the one that counts most for me in particular is that he picked up the mantle on American hunger after RFK was murdered and led the way to the food stamp program we have today – eradicating the near-starvation of children that we discovered in our country in the 1960s and achieving an enormous success in our public policy.

McGovern is no doubt known more for his unsuccessful run for the presidency and his steadfast opposition to the war in Vietnam, but he had a lifelong concern for food and nutrition and especially about feeding the hungry across the world. After Robert Kennedy died, McGovern got the Senate to establish a special committee on hunger and nutrition and stayed with it through the better part of the 1970s until food stamps had become a fully mature and successful national program.

I will remember George McGovern on many counts, but personally more than anything else I will hold closest to my heart his enormous contribution to bringing an end to severe malnutrition for millions of children in our nation.

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Economic inequality, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, children, George McGovern, Guest Post, malnutrition, Peter B. Edelman, poverty, Robert Kennedy
October 22, 2012
George McGovern: ‘Patriot and Truth-Teller’
posted by Jeremy Leaming

The nation lost a passionate liberal, proud populist and decorated war hero on Sunday when U.S. Senator and presidential nominee George McGovern died at 90.

As Salon’s Joan Walsh wrote, after McGovern accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, Richard Nixon and the Republican Party unleashed a notorious smear campaign that not only attempted to besmirch McGovern’s integrity, but led to a landslide victory for Nixon.

Walsh wrote:

It worked. Of course Nixon’s aggressiveness was ultimately his downfall; he resigned over the scandal around his henchmen breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building. A year after the ’72 election, polls showed Americans would choose McGovern if they had it to do over again.

Read more tributes to McGovern’s life:

Ignore McGovern’s Message at Your Peril, Stanley Kutler, Salon

George McGovern Dead at 90, David Browne, Rolling Stone

Remembering George McGovern, Gary Hart, The Huffington Post

A Prairie Liberal, Trounced but Never Silenced, David E. Rosenbaum, The New York Times

George McGovern: Touchstone of Liberalism, John Nichols, The Nation

George McGovern: American Patriot and Truth-Teller, Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

George McGovern, the man who never gave up, former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, The Washington Post

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Economic inequality, Democracy and Voting, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, 1972, George McGovern, Joan Walsh, Richard Nixon
October 12, 2012
The Clean Water Act at 40: Finishing a Task Well Begun
Guest Post
By William Andreen, Clarkson Professor of Law, University of Alabama School of Law, Member Scholar, Center for Progressive Reform

On October 18, the nation will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. This landmark piece of legislation has proven remarkably successful. Water pollution discharges from both industry and municipal sewer systems have declined sharply, the loss of wetlands has been cut decisively, and water quality has broadly improved across the country. The Clean Water Act is, in short, a real success story. It stands as a tribute to the foresight of those in Congress who passed it, as well as to the men and women in both state and federal regulatory agencies who have worked so hard, and for so long, to restore the integrity of our nation’s waters.

The Act, however, is showing its age. Twenty-five years have passed since it was last amended in comprehensive fashion, and more than a little fine-tuning is necessary to finish the task that began in 1972. The most significant problem involves nonpoint source pollution – the indirect discharge of polluted runoff from fields and roads, clear cuts, and parking lots. The Act never addressed nonpoint source pollution in a straightforward way. Instead, it was treated as something of an afterthought left primarily in the hands of state and local government, and they have primarily relied upon voluntary management practices to control polluted runoff. As a result, nonpoint source pollution has evolved into the largest single source of water quality impairment in the country. These diffuse sources of water pollution are, furthermore, much more diverse than we once thought. In addition to obvious sources such as polluted runoff from agriculture, urban areas, logging operations, and mines, nonpoint source pollution also includes cross-media transfers, including the deposition of air pollutants such as mercury and nitrogen, into our waters.

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Environmental protection, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, 40th anniversary, Center for Progressive Reform, Clean Water Act, Guest Post, Shana Jones, The Clean Water Act: A Blueprint for Reform, William Andreen
October 4, 2012
Policy Promoting the Needs of the 1 Percent, Leaving Many More Mired in Poverty
by Jeremy Leaming

It’s difficult to fathom how large swaths of the populace still embrace rightwing rhetoric proclaiming that in America almost anyone can significantly better their stations in life. It is the annoying yank yourself up by the bootstraps mentality that fogs the minds of far too many Americans, leaving them unable to appreciate just how detrimental the wealth gap is to sustaining a resilient economy.

But leading economists and think tanks, and to a lesser extent the Occupy Wall Street movement, caught on long ago and have strived to amplify the hard truth that in American if you are born into poverty your chances of experiencing the “American Dream” of upward mobility are almost nil – one is more likely to be struck by an asteroid. Yes that’s hyperbolic. But as Professor Peter Edelman details in his recent book So Rich, So Poor, our country’s safety net is so tattered that it has made it vastly more difficult to move from poverty to the middle class. The tired argument that less regulations of corporations and more tax breaks for the nation’s superrich will spur job creation and help move large numbers of people out of poverty continues to resonate with far too many people.

As noted on this blog recently, Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz dubbed the American dream a “myth.” The Columbia business school professor and author told a German publication that one’s chance of upward mobility in the country is really dependent on the income and education of your parents.”

The New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof recently offered a powerful piece about a nation that has become “unequal for all.”

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Economic inequality, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, inequality, Nicholas Kristof, Paul Krugman, Peter Edelman, redistribution, So Rich, So Poor,, wealth gap
September 21, 2012
Workers’ Rights to be Tested in Michigan
Guest Post
By J. Chris Sanders, General Counsel, United Food & Commercial Workers Union Local 227

Michigan voters will have the opportunity to defeat so-called “right-to-work”in November, and ensure that Michigan workers will have constitutional rights on the job far above current federal law.

What is "right-to-work"? In short, big trouble for working people, a law that, as Martin Luther King said, guarantees neither rights nor work.

A little background: Right-to-work is a provision in the National Labor Relations Act. The trouble comes from the NLRA's weak constitutional underpinning. The NLRA is founded upon the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause, affording the federal government the power to enact statutes and take other actions to regulate commerce. Unlike many countries, U.S. labor rights to organize and bargain collectively are not deemed fundamental. In other countries, these rights are founded upon those of freedom of speech, association, and assembly, but not in the U.S. Here, it's just about commerce, meaning business.

Right-to-work is all about business. The federal NLRA permits states to enact laws that keep unions weak and wages low. It requires labor unions, which are membership organizations, to bargain for and represent employees who choose not to be members for free, thereby weakening those unions and driving down wages.

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Labor law, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, collective bargaining, Gov. Rick Snyder, Guest Post, J. Chris Sanders, Michigan, National Labor Relations Board, NLRB, righ to work, workers' rights