Shared Sacrifice

While rallying with some 10,000 at the state capitol in Columbus, Ohio Tuesday against the union busting Senate Bill 5, I got another example of the myth of shared sacrifice. It was in a conversation with Republican State Sen. Karen L. Gillmor, who represents me.

Gillmor is the wife of the late U.S Rep Paul Gillmor, a Republican, who was worth at least $6 million from his family's bank holdings when he died in 2007 of an apparent heart attack. In 2006, Gillmor was ranked the 43rd richest congressman with between $15 and 25 milllion in stock holdings, according to Roll Call, the congressional newsletter.

So it was no surprise when Gillmor blanched when I suggested that instead of making it impossible for public sector union workers to negotiate decent wages and benefits, Ohio raise the income tax rate for residents who earn $250,000 or more to 70 percent, the approximate federal rate in 1945. The rate was about 47.7 percent when Ronald Reagan took office as president in 1981, according to the Tax Foundation.

Gillmor looked at me like I was nuts.

"Once you tax someone once, it's all gone," Gillmor told me. "I pay $27,000."

It was ironic that Sen. Gillmor would bring up taxes on her residence. Besides voting for lowering taxes on capital gains while raising the age rate 25 to 35 for eligibility for food stamps - despite this voting record the Gillmor's New York Times obituary described him as a "moderate Republican" - Gillmor was notorious for flouting Ohio's residency law by maintaining a sham residence in his district while primarily living in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2007/05/comedy-in-ethics-even-if-rep-paul.html

Karen Gillmor was accused of the same unethical behavior and cleared in a ruling that essentially said  legislator's primary residence is where they say they vote and where they plan to retire http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/12/16/gillmor-residency-status-upheld.html So Gillmor can continue to collect some $3,400 in taxpayer mileage reimbursments for traveling from her home in Tiffin, Ohio because she says she lives there more than the second home 50 miles away from the capitol.

It's people like Gillmor who say we need to have shared sacrifice to deal with the budget deficit created by lawmakers like her husband starving the government of revenue for essential services for citizens and passing financial deregulation that allowed Wall Street to crash the economy and rob the taxpayers blind in bailouts. Before he was elected governor, John Kasich was a nine-term congressman helping pass laws that handcuffed financial policing of Wall Street before getting rich at Lehman Brothers, a company that helped cause the recession with risky financial trading that robbed pension funds like Ohio's http://www.seiu.org/2010/09/john-kasichs-work-at-lehman-brothers-connected-to-hit-that-ohio-seniors-have-taken-in-new-tv-ad.php

Gillmor, who to her credit was gracious enough to speak with me for about 20 minutes despite me not having an appointment, told me that part of the state's economic problems was that some people don't want to work or can't pass drug tests to get hired. This is classic blame the victim Republicanism: the poor and unemployed are the deadbeats, not the fat cats getting billions in corporate welfare and taxpayer bailouts.

Besides the myth that most poor and unemployed people are deadbeats is the myth that public sector workers are overpaid. I told Gillmor that Ohio workers earn 5.9  percent less in total compensation than their private sector counterparts, according to a February study by the Economic Policy Institute http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/news_from_epi_epi_study_finds_ohio_public-sector_workers_under-compensated/ Nationally,  public sector workers earned 3.7 percent under compensated than their private sector counterparts.

I also reminded Gillmor that the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 8 percent of all wealth in 1974, but it was up to 18 percent in 2007, according to IRS statistics. The top 0.01 percent of American families earned  an average of $27,342,212 in 2008 and the top 1 percent averaged $1,137, 684, according to University of California-Berkley economist Emmanuel Saez who analyzed IRS statistics.

The top 10 percent averaged $164,647 while the bottom 90 percent averaged $31,244. Wall Street profits increased 720 percent between 2007 and 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics while unemployment rose 102 percent and American's home equity dropped 35 percent. So much for shared sacrifice.

I informed Gillmor that SB 5 is a race to the bottom neighbor against neighbor tactic. But just because I'm an unemployed journalist who doesn't enjoy decent union benefits and wages doesn't mean I want to see them taken away from others. And I'm not the only one who isn't being duped by the split and divide tactics.

For hours, thousands of us were kept out of the capitol for several hours by state police and left to chant  and wave signs in below freezing temperatures. "Stop the War on Workers. Billionaires get Tax Cuts, Peasants get Pay Cuts" read one sign. "Corporate America Hands off our Government" read another.

The message wasn't getting through to Gillmor. She said she opposed SB 5 in its current form, but planned to write her own version which would include a provision removing workers right to strike. I told her I understand why firefighters and police officers are forbidden to strike - SB 5 would remove their right to binding arbitration as an alternative to striking - but workers need the right to strike as a last resort leverage.

I know Gillmor will eventually vote for SB 5 no matter how much we protest and appeal to her sense of decency. Nearly all politicians serve special interests, not the voters.

The corporations have the money, the power and the pols. But there's a lot more of us than them. And maybe, just maybe, the union busting occurring in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey and the rest of the nation will help end the political apathy that has been such a badge of honor for most Americans now that they're wallets are threatened.

We have to keep agitating, educating and organizing. If we go down, we go down fighting.

Back to Ohio

As I got my new Ohio driver's license Tuesday I compared the photo of me to the one I had taken in November of 2004 the first time I moved to Ohio. The six-and-a-half years have not been kind to me or my country. The stolen election of 2000 was the decisive turning point for this country, but back in November 2004 there was still plenty of time to turn things around.

On that day at the Department of Motor Vehicles in 2004, I was just about to start my dream job at The Columbus Dispatch. On Tuesday I was contemplating eight months of unemployment, discontinued unemployment benefits and no job prospects.

You can see the happiness in the 2004 license photo compared to my forced grin on Tuesday. Granted the unemployment beard - more Joaquin Phoenix during his "acting retirement" on David Letterman than Ernest Hemingway just before he ate his shotgun - adds to the depressing comparison, but I'm definitely keeping pace in America's race to the bottom.

My first day at the Dispatch was Election Day and voters waited up to nine hours in the rain in Columbus to vote while voting machines were in short supply in Democratici not as fradulent as the 2000 election when the Supreme Court effectively appointed Bush president by stopping the Florida recount, I'll always wonder how the country would've been different if Ohio had gone Democrat and Kerry had defeated Bush.

I lasted less than a year at the Dispatch due to carelessness, bad luck and a touch of hubris, but at least the price I paid was my own fault. After Bush's re-election, what chance did most Americans, Afghanis and Iraqi's have?

Not that Kerry didn't run an inept campaign or that his centrist politics were radically different from Bush's, but maybe Kerry's combat experiences in Vietnam - which the right successfully smeared in Swift Boat attacks thanks to a complicit corporate media - would've made the Iraq quagmire a little less deadly, by withdrawing instead of surging.  Perhaps the John Kerry of 1972 who asked a congressional committee, "Who want to be the last man to die for a mistake?" might have briefly reappeared.

Maybe Kerry would've declared victory in the Afghanistan War quagmire and withdrawn instead of doubling down on disaster like Barack Obama. O.K., that's probably wishful thinking on my part.

However, Kerry certainly wouldn't have botched Katrina as badly as Bush - Republicans hate government too much to govern well - although I suspect the financial meltdown would've happened on Kerry's watch. At least Kerry might have attached a few strings to the bailout.

Of course despite all the hooey about shared sacrifice, there will be no bailout for the victims of the cannabalistic capitalism on Wall Street. Some of the hardest hit victims are here in Ohio, a state with a nearly 10 percent unemployment rate and a new Republican governor.

Gov. John Kasich is determined to scapegoat public workers for the lack of revenue in Ohio which is mainly due to the tax cuts for the rich he pushed for as a nine-term congressman and the Wall Street criminality that occurred while he worked as an executive at Lehman Brothers. Kasich parachuted to a gig as a Fox News anchor before the crash, but most of us in Ohio and the rest of the nation are still in a freefall.

I can't help wonder what might have been if we were out in the streets the last few years marching, fighting and striking like those brave Egyptians last week who helped topple the US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak. Of course they probably won't get the democracy they seek with the Army now in control and mass protests and strikes in America, not corporate-sponsored posturing by ignorant, whiny Tea Partiers,  are inconceivable.

Most Americans are too apathetic, ignorant or just too busy trying to make end's meet and get through the day to organize against heads they win, tails you lost capitalism and the us-against-them politics that perpetually divides us. But to go down swinging sure beats the long humiliating decline of a once great nation.

As a middle-aged reporter with black marks on my resume trying to get a job in the terminally ill newspaper industry, I confess to being a pessimist. But despite record-high corporate profits in the third quarter, does anyone seriously believe in the oxymoron of a jobless recovery? Or that Obama's toothless financial reform and continual capitulations to Republicans on cutting taxes and the social safety net won't lead to another meltdown and bailout?

Factor in the coming environmental catastrophe of climate change, endless wars against terrorism and it's hard not to be apocalyptic. We cling to hope because it gets us through the day, but false hope does not change reality or put groceries on the table. Like a driver's license, you can only renew it so often.

If there's anything left to bail with. There certainly won't be any room on the lifeboat for those of us in steerage class.