and welcome back to the big picture i'm sam sacks in for tom hartman coming up in this half hour to a new report our economy has lost one third of its ability to create what are known as good jobs but that's just half the story the other half is coming up in just a moment and in the last couple of years conservatives have wage wars against women labor and even education and when you throw in their love of conspiracy theories and dog whistle politics it's clear conservatives have gone far far right so why would anyone want to call themselves a conservative today. welcome

to the new american economy were good jobs are as hard to find as mitt romney's tax returns a new report by the center for economic and policy research finds that our economy has lost one third of its ability to create what are defined as good jobs a good job is one that pays at least thirty seven thousand thirty seven thousand dollars and offers health insurance and a retirement plan and the data shows that since one nine hundred seventy nine american workers of all education levels have lost these good jobs that includes workers with less than a high school degree and workers with more than a college degree no one is being spared in the new american economy. so why is this happening while the report concludes quote the real culprit is the systematic decline in the bargaining power of workers reflected in a drop in the minimum wage a collapse in the unionization rate in the private sector the deregulation of

previously well paying industries the privatization of state and local government jobs a series of business bias trade deals a dysfunctional immigration system poor enforcement of already weak labor standards and high unemployment or i could just some all of that up in just one word reaganomics it's ruined us as a nation but the dismantling of the middle class and the good jobs that it depends on is just half the story the other half of the story is the systematic destruction of new low wage workers cutting their already meager paychecks and benefits and forcing them into the rapidly growing working poor class no where is this on better display than in houston texas where hundreds of janitors belonging to the local suu union have been on strike for more than three weeks demanding better wages so far negotiations with management have hit a wall workers are demanding

a modest pay increase taking their hourly wages up from eight thirty five to ten dollars over the next three years ten dollars an hour is still well below the living wage for a family with a child in houston which is about seventeen bucks an hour again workers are only asking for ten bucks an hour but management countered that offer with their own offer to give janitors a tiny fifty cent pay increase over the next five years and while most will consider that offer insulting management said it's their quote last best and final offer so the strike continues. josh eidelson joins me now he's a former labor organizer organizer and now a journalist think contributor to in these times and so long josh welcome thank you good to be here sam they could have you back on the show so first off give us the latest on what's happening in houston today so the negotiations are going to resume

tomorrow in the lead up to resume today in the lead up to that there have been additional statements of support from elected officials workers have continued to picket in the visible but coming out of negotiations friday the union said there was progress but there was no sign that the essential situation had changed the situation that really as you say is a great symbol of the state of the economy of workers literally cleaning the buildings for shell and j.p. morgan and and meanwhile having to struggle in order to try to get up to ten dollars an hour over the next few years yeah i guess that is the real ironic thing here is that the managers in this story are people like j.p. morgan chase or i'm sorry not people are corporations like j.p. morgan chase exxon mobil i believe too. that's right and these guys are making nine million dollars a year and don't want to pay the janitors just

a dollar thirty five more an hour over the next three years to them they can't budge on that that's right and you have these janitorial contractors the middle men claiming that what they've offered is all that's realistic and it's manifestly on to john true the question is just what can these companies get away with and in particular the larger companies behind the curtain in the banking companies and the oil companies what they can get away with and what the public will let them on the bright side here this is kind of blown up beyond houston this is gone this story is gone national right. that's right there's been sympathy strikes in other cities by janitors there have been prominent politicians speaking out they've been actions by janitors in other cities and partly what we see is what labor law has done to the strike that all of the restrictions on workers right to strike as well as other restrictions that mean that even though the banking companies and the oil companies

are the ones with the power the union is limited in its ability to strike them or picket them mean that it does become largely about this comprehensive campaign to put public pressure and consumer pressure and media or political pressure on the companies that actually make the decision at the national level what do you make of this study that i mentioned by the center for economic and policy research about how one third of good jobs in america have been lost and that's across all education. demographics is the. i think it's striking and it's an important intervention because there is this myth that all of our problems will be solved if we just get enough people to go to college and i think amazon that was a really troubling and darkly ironic example of this amazon gets in trouble for how badly workers are treated in their factories how people get little pay and they get injured and instead of solving it amazon announces well if you do it for

a few years we'll help you pay to go to college and that in some sense is the bargain that politicians from both parties have put out there that it's ok that these remain bad jobs as long as people of the chance go to college and get a better job and what this report shows is the same forces that have made low wage jobs worse are affecting higher wage jobs also and are specifically affecting jobs that people get after college as well as jobs people before college. it's been a rough thirty years for organized labor but we had a spark last year in wisconsin that led to the recall and there was kind of a you know it was a pretty bad defeat in the recall election with the general election a few months away what is the state of organized labor in america in just the last thirty seconds here what i think wisconsin really symbolized both the vulnerability of the labor movement and the vitality it symbolized that workers are able to get together and do things and build a kind of movement strength that people didn't think was possible but it also

showed that even in places where unions seem to be secure there are real existential threats that if workers unions don't become movements and don't become militant ineffective they can be wiped out yeah well we'll see how this resolves i'm not sure how the millionaires can get by with no one cleaning their offices right now but we'll see what happens josh eidelson thanks a lot for coming on. thank you sam earlier this year tom took a trip to iceland were he learned a lot about organized labor take a look. oh this is iceland last week stopped in iceland went to sweden and the u.k. and back and it was pretty insane trip but in any case one of the interesting moments you get these these little moments of insight the consequence of things that happened to you louise and i were in a taxi and i tried to tip the taxi driver and he seemed offended and i say you know you don't want to tip and he said i am very well paid thank you

very much then we went to dinner restaurant and i tried to tip the waiter the waiter brought me the check actually with a credit card as if it were right the tip of he said you know we don't we don't take tips. so you don't tip in iceland. so i asked my friend who was who was an icelander who was with me i said you know why is everybody upset when i try to offer a tip he said because it implies that you know we're poor or something it's almost an insult he said we have eighty four percent unionization in this country everybody recognizes that if you have a job you have a right to a decent salary it's not even a debate in this culture and that eighty four percent unionization has produced a culture that gets it the workers gets the fact that basically workers drive everything in an economy by virtue of the fact that they're also the consumers and if they're appropriately pager going to have an economy that works and if not like in the united states increasingly as our wages are going down and down and down and

now it takes two workers in a family to make what you know to maintain a living status that one of the ronald reagan became president you could do with lower and family. our country slides into third world status which is what's happening to the united states right now and what we need to do to some to fix frankly and probably the best way to do it is to have card check is to bring back the right of workers to have a democracy in the workplace also known as a union. and now an update on a story we covered monday about fifty four year old marvin wilson the mentally disabled man who was scheduled to be put to death by texas governor rick perry yesterday afternoon that's exactly what happened marvin wilson was executed he was sentenced you know i'm sorry he was executed despite the supreme court ruling a decade ago that executing the mentally disabled violated the eighth amendment against cruel and unusual punishment curiously the same supreme court that ruled such executions are unconstitutional denied

a last minute appeal by wilson's attorneys in one final bid to save their client's life as we talked about on monday rather than employing science and medicine to determine if in his mentally disabled the state of texas uses john steinbeck's novel of mice and men basically using lenny from the novel as a benchmark for mental retardation marvin wilson did meet the criteria and now he's dead and he's governor perry will have another applause line at the republican debate she decided to run for president again. state of texas has a. very thoughtful very clear. process in place you will face the ultimate justice in the state of texas and that is you will be executed when you make yourself. coming up conservatives have always tried their best to move america backwards

while siding with the rich and powerful and leaving everyone else in the dust so why would anyone today be willing to call themselves a conservative tom we'll explain in tonight's they leave it. there.

more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets and canada. giant corporations are today.

just. now it's time for tonight's the good the bad in the very very wreck you say it to slee ugly the good network the catholic social justice lobby group has invited romney to spend the day with nuns so he can learn about the struggles of america's poor in a statement network says it wants romney to quote spend a day with catholic sisters who are gay every day to meet the needs of struggling families in their communities the group also says that romney's attacks on social

welfare demonizes families and poverty and shows his ignorance about the challenges poor americans face network is completely right and someone needs to remind me they're not all americans have. car elevators like he does. the bad. charter school the private school in louisiana is requiring girls to take mandatory pregnancy tests and if a girl is pregnant they aren't allowed in school and are forced to either switch schools or be homeschooled so what happens if a girl at delhi doesn't want to take the pregnancy test well she is automatically treated as pregnant and kicked out of the school not surprisingly these outrageous policies have attracted the attention of the a.c.l.u. which claims are rightfully so that the policies are violations of federal law and the constitution and who still thinks charter schools are a better alternative to public education. and now the very very ugly bryan

fischer fischer the head of the conservative anti-gay american family association which has also been classified as a hate group by the southern poverty law center had this to say about gay adoption a few weeks ago. put kids into this environment it's a form of sexual abuse all its own to adopt kids into a same sex environment is a form of child abuse. writes and then in a series of tweets last night fisher continued his hateful message on gay adoption by calling for a quote underground railroad to deliver innocent children from same sex households and it's bad enough that fisher is openly endorsing kidnapping what's worse is that he thinks children in same sex households have it just as bad as slaves luckily time is on the side of those who favor you quality and sooner or later dinosaurs like bryan fischer will realize they were on the wrong side of history and they

were very very ugly. on tuesday night republican voters in missouri nominated congressman todd akin to be their senate candidate to challenge democratic incumbent senator claire mccaskill in november just like ted cruz who won in texas last week and richard murdock who won in indiana a few months back bacon is a rabid tea partier here's a profile of the guy courtesy of think progress bacon believes that liberalism which a large percentage of americans subscribe to is also synonymous with a hatred for god yes liberals are the foot soldiers for the anti-christ he believes

that the seventeenth amendment which provides for the direct election of senators by voters and not by well connected state legislatures is a bad idea and should be repealed that's a pretty unconventional way of getting votes you know telling voters they shouldn't have a say at all while he also believes that medicare the program that nearly forty eight million seniors across america depend on for health care is unconstitutional and should be repealed. he is a climate change denier but that's not too surprising considering every freshman republican in the house of representatives disagrees with ninety nine point nine percent of climate scientists and also denies man made climate change he believes the united states should withdraw from the un he's also one of the most anti-gay legislators in congress ranking in the top ten and introducing anti-gay legislation that blocks marriage equality prevents gays from serving in the military and protects ongoing discrimination against gays oh and he also believes that cutting

out subsidies to banks to administer student loans which president obama did in two thousand and ten was quote stage three cancer of socialism so let's just say if he wins don't expect him to be moving toward the center looking to compromise at all but that part is akin fits right in with today's radicalized republican party a party that is embrace the corporate elite religious extremism and anti intellectual ism at the detriment of the american people that's the subject of a new book by veteran republican mike lofgren titled the party is over our publicans went crazy democrats became useless and the middle class got shafted in it lofgren writes quote having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime i have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of

the republican party politicize religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes at least in the minds of its followers all three of the g.o.p.'s main tenets wealth worship war worship and the permanent culture war yeah i'd say that sounds about right to me. but the thing is this isn't anything new yes the republican party has a history of somewhat moderate voices people like two white guys in our group called those who wanted to get rid of social security and unemployment insurance stupid even people like richard nixon who created the e.p.a. kept tax kept taxes on the rich above seventy percent but those few blips aside conservatism whether it's under the name of the republican party or not has always been a force trying to drag our nation backwards in nearly every instance in history conservatives

have sided with the rich and powerful over the middle class with the c.e.o. over the worker with the health insurer over the sick with the oil baron over the environment in fact one has to wonder why anyone given the history of conservatism in america would proudly call themselves a conservative or republican for that matter todd akin may be the latest crazy to go on to become a republican u.s. senator but he's certainly not the first and the way things are going he won't be the last here it is tonight's daily take but i don't want to talk about conservatism the political ideology that is touted by today's republican party by corporate america and even by some democrats according to a recent poll by the pew research center conservative was the second most positively viewed political term in america right behind progressive check republicans have liked the label so much their biggest political conference of the

year is c pac the conservative political action conference but i'm trying to figure out why exactly that is i'm trying to figure out why anyone given our nation's history or any knowledge of it would want to call themselves a conservative in today's america. they say that conservative means someone who embraces traditional values limited government moderate change and fiscal restraint but those are frankly just weasel words they're the velvet glove over the brutal fist of an autocratic authoritarian and oligarchy form of governance here's the reality of what conservatives have actually done to this nation in its two hundred thirty plus year year plus history first off it was conservatives who opposed the american revolution and many of them joined the british in fighting against george washington's army then conservatives at the birth of our nation pushed to restrict voting rights at the federal level to only white men who own property although

progress was like thomas jefferson and james madison blocked those efforts so conservatives at the state level picked up that cause it was conservatives who wanted to keep the traditional american value of slavery and fought progressive abraham lincoln so fiercely it led to an incredibly bloody and horrific civil war in the aftermath of that civil war conservative supported jim crow laws to keep freed slaves as second class citizens conservatives oppose woman's women's suffrage all the way up until the nineteenth amendment was ratified in one nine hundred twenty and some still to this day oppose it when women got the right votes when it all went downhill because that that's when votes started being cast with emotion and maternal instincts that government ought to reflect. well think in service of elites opposed every advancement made by average working people from the forty hour work week to child labor laws to workplace safety laws

during the one nine hundred fifty s. conservatives embrace mccarthyism and the witch hunts that ruined the lives of thousands of americans in the one nine hundred sixty s. conservatives oppose the civil rights act which finally ended legal discrimination in america. you see every single advance our nation has made came despite conservative efforts to block it as famed conservative thinker william f. buckley said a conservative is someone who stands up for work history yelling stop at a time when no one is inclined to do so at each turning point to give more and more rights to americans to give more and more economic opportunity to more americans to make the workplace safety or for more americans you name it conservatives have tried to stop it while progressives have fought bled and died to make sure these progressive things happen and today nothing has changed today conservatives are yelling stock when it comes to marriage equality they're yelling stop when it comes

to climate change legislation they're yelling stop when it comes to equal pay for equal work for women they're yelling stop when it comes to critical lifesaving stem cell research they're yelling stop when it comes to providing health insurance at an affordable cost to all americans they're yelling stop when it comes to immigration reform they're yelling stop when it comes to ending the failed richard nixon's failed drug war and not only are they stop they're actively trying to undo most of the progressive victories over the last one hundred fifty years that they opposed from the start that includes undoing a woman's right to choose or even have access to contraceptives it includes forcing women to submit to mandatory ultrasounds like their children are wards of the state includes passing more and more right to work for less laws further eroding the rights of working people in america. and includes gutting food safety programs unemployment benefits and food stamps it even includes sabotaging our economic

recovery to achieve their all to a political goal which is kicking a black man out of the white house this is what conservatism has been all about in america. and continues to be all fear discrimination and corporate domination the conservative principles of limited government and more freedom might sound good but in practice they mean less government to protect americans from corporate abuse and more freedom for people like the koch brothers and their industries to pollute it means less government to provide social services and more freedom to die like a dog in the gutter without health insurance that's been the message of the conservative movement since the onset of this nation always wanting to take us back where we should be moving forward so i ask the question again. why the hell would anyone call themselves a conservative. and that is the big picture for tonight wednesday august eighth two

thousand and twelve if you missed any of tonight show you can now watch it in h.d. on hulu at hulu dot com slash the big picture for more information on any of the stories we've covered visit our website tom harmon dot com free speech org and r.t. dot com also check out our two you tube channels there are links at tom hartman dot com also tom foreman dot com check out all the different ways you can send us your feedback and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there and get active as tom always says tag you're it we'll see tomorrow.

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