The Economic Policy Institute finds that the number of workers subject to forced arbitration agreements has risen from 2% in 1992 to 55% now. That means more than half of American workers can't take their employer to court, but must hope against hope that their employers' chosen arbitrator will rule in their favor, which, as you might imagine, hardly ever happens. And remember: if you don't sign the employment contract which includes the forced arbitration clause, you just don't get the job. Which makes this yet another hostage crisis perpetrated by corporations. Think maybe Chief Justice Roberts might one day decide that forced arbitration, as a condition of employment, violates a worker's rights? It's not totally outlandish.
Richard Moser at Counterpunch describes how "New Jersey is a One-Party State." Long story short: though Democrats have a hammerlock on the Assembly and are never out of the Governor's mansion for too long, the real power in New Jersey is the "big political machines" that of course supported the Republican Governor Christie in his attack on state worker pensions. And now former Christie donors are putting their money on the bankster running as a Democrat, Phil Murphy. "One hand washes the other and the people of New Jersey get the shaft" indeed.
Not having any legislative accomplishments to brag about, President Trump is reduced to bragging about all his Executive Orders and regulation-slashing. An OIRA hack says the President has saved America $300 million, but that's nothing to brag about in the context of a $4 trillion federal budget, and what sane, rational person would brag about having cut clean air and clean water enforcement, or injuring immigrants and transgendered folk, or having increased the flow of military-grade weapons to local police?
I find that I'm of two minds about Nate Silver's call for our "liberal" media to stop "rationalizing" the President's behavior. I'm not sure he's right to suggest that Mr. Trump runs more on instinct than calculation -- I presume he runs on intuition, in that he's calculating a bit (or has made that calculation many years ago) even when he appears to do something off-the-cuff. But Mr. Silver is generally correct to reproach the media for "com(ing) up with overly convoluted explanations for Trump’s behavior," particularly to declare his latest outburst a "clever political strategy." Our media mystify people like Mr. Trump way too much.
Finally, speaking of "clever political strategies," we all know that Mr. Trump has twittered that his own Secretary of State is "wasting his time negotiating" with North Korea, but we also know a few aspiring cynics will look down their noses at us and say he's acting crazy so he gets a better deal from North Korea! They said this about George W. Bush, too, but I don't recall Mr. Bush throwing his own Secretary of State under the bus like that. And anyway, what did "Bush acting crazy" get us? Did it solve any problems in the Middle East? No. In fact, it helped bring about ISIS, and I bet Mr. Trump's alleged crazy-like-a-fox act helps bring about something even worse than ISIS.
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