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A national monument would mean "more people could learn about this incredible woman and the power of government to be a force for good," a member of Congress said.
The Frances Perkins Center on Wednesday launched a campaign calling for its 57-acre site in Maine to be named a national monument in honor of the trailblazing woman who led former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Labor Department and ushered in some of the most important legislation in the country's history.
Frances Perkins became the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet when she was named secretary of labor in 1933. She was instrumental in establishing Social Security, unemployment benefits, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour work week.
Campaigners called for President Joe Biden to designate the site, which is already a national historic landmark, as a national monument, and media reports indicated that he's likely to do so.
Members of Congress from Maine came out in strong support of the proposal.
Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) said in a statement that the designation would mean that "more people could learn about this incredible woman and the power of government to be a force for good."
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) also supported the push to honor Perkins.
"Her commitment to ensuring hardworking families have the resources to succeed and thrive is still felt today throughout the nation," he said.
"[The designation] would not only be a tribute to her incredible legacy, but also a testament to the leadership and resolve of so many Maine women following in her footsteps," he added.
Frances Perkins’ leadership radically improved the lives of everyday workers – her story deserves a permanent home in the @NatlParkService. Join NPCA in calling on @POTUS to designate the Frances Perkins Homestead a national monument! https://t.co/8uf58hI0jZ
— National Parks Conservation Association (@NPCA) August 8, 2024
Perkins was born in Massachusetts in 1880 and lived much of her adult life in New York and Washington, D.C., but came from a Maine family and spent time there throughout her life—she owned the house that's now home to the Frances Perkins Center, in the small town of Newcastle on the Damariscotta River, from 1927 until her death in 1965.
Perkins witnessed firsthand the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village in 1911—one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history, which left 146 workers dead, and an event she made reference to for the rest of her life—and was appointed to lead a New York City safety committee. She successfully pushed for a wide range of workplace health and safety reforms in the city that became a model elsewhere.
Perkins later became a New York state official, and when Roosevelt became the state's governor in 1929 he made her the industrial commissioner, with oversight over the state labor department. Four years later, when he became president, he again tapped her to run labor affairs. Unionists initially opposed Perkins' appointment because she didn't have a union background, but they grew to support her.
One of only two Cabinet members to serve for Roosevelt's entire 12-year tenure, Perkins was a tireless advocate for workers rights who gave a huge number of speeches across the country, some of which were aimed at encouraging union organizing.
Most notably, Perkins organized the drafting of both the Social Security Act of 1935, which included unemployment compensation, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which banned child labor, established a federal minimum wage, and required overtime pay for employees working more than 44 hours a week. (Two years later, it was changed to 40 hours a week.)
"If you had a weekend, you can thank Frances Perkins," Stephanie Dray, the author of a historical fiction novel about Perkins, told the Portland Press Herald, Maine's leading newspaper. "If you or anyone you ever loved has collected Social Security benefits, you can thank her. If you're a child who got to go to school instead of to work in a factory, you can thank her. She's just everywhere around us."
Perkins' crucial place in U.S. history has been largely overlooked, like that of many women. Only about a dozen national monuments out of more than 100 in total honor women. Biden in March issued an executive order calling for more recognition of women's history, and the push for the Perkins monument is seen by many as fitting perfectly into that initiative.
Biden has so far named five new national monuments and expanded four others. The president has the authority to do so under the Antiquities Act of 1906, aimed at protecting lands and waters. National monuments are "intended to preserve at least one nationally significant resource," whereas national parks generally cover a larger area and have a wide variety of resources worth protecting, according to the National Park Service.
The Washington Postreported Thursday that Biden plans to agree to the Frances Perkins Center's proposal and make the site a national monument, citing anonymous sources, though the White House responded by saying that no such decision had been made.
Boeing, instead of building new airplanes to expand and upgrade their fleet, spent over $60 billion on stock buybacks in the years leading up to the 2019 grounding of their Max fleet.
A Boeing whistleblower is testifying before Congress today that the 787 has dangerous flaws in the way it’s put together.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s investigations subcommittee that will hear from the whistleblower, told The New York Times he has heard:
Repeated, shocking allegations about Boeing’s manufacturing failings [that] point to an appalling absence of safety culture and practices—where profit is prioritized over everything else.
Profit?
The last year that Boeing invested in creating a new jet airplane from scratch was 2004. While it costs around $7 billion to develop a new plane, Boeing chose to save that money by “upgrading” their 737 line to the infamous 737 Max, which has now killed hundreds of people.
But just between 2014 and last year, Boeing showed a profit of over $95 billion. If they didn’t spend that money on improved safety, new products, or paying their workers better, where did it go? Follow along…
It’s time to declare the 43-year Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw or heavily tax the share buybacks that are one of its most visible markers.
Just as an example, let’s say you and I owned a publicly traded corporation with 100 shares that sold for $100 each (yes, it’s a very small corporation!). You own 10 shares ($1,000 worth of stock), I own 10 shares (ditto), and the general public owns 80 shares. The notional stock value of the company is 100 shares times $100 each, or $10,000.
So, how do you and I increase the value of our stock so we can sell some or all of it (or borrow against it) for a profit?
The way businesses have traditionally increased the value of their shares—all the way back to the invention of the modern corporation when Queen Elizabeth I chartered the East India Company on December 31, 1600—has been to grow the company.
Develop new products. Build new airplanes or widgets. Open new stores. Invest in a sales-force or advertising campaign. Expand manufacturing capability or open new factories. Improve employee productivity and retention with better pay and benefits.
But what if there was a way to make our stock price go up without any real work on our parts? No need to develop new products, open new outlets, increase worker pay, or sell a single extra widget?
Turns out, there is. All we have to do is take some of the company’s profit this year into the public marketplace (the stock exchange we’re listed on) and “buy back” from the public, say, 20 shares for $100 each and “retire” or, essentially, destroy them.
Instead of 100 shares, our company now only has 80 shares, but it’s still worth $10,000. Which means each share magically went from a price of $100 to a price of $125! ($10,000 divided by 80 = $125 per share.)
The value of your and my investment in our company each went from $1,000 to $1,250 without either of us having done anything other than executing that stock buyback: if we sold our stock today we’d show an instant profit of $250 each. All our other stockholders are happy, too, because their stock also went up in price.
Back in 1934 when, in the wake of the epic stock market crash of 1929 caused by insider trading, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and put Joe Kennedy in charge of it, one of Kennedy’s first actions was to largely outlaw these kinds of stock buybacks, labeling them “stock price manipulation.”
(My late friend Gloria Swanson, who knew both Kennedy and FDR well, told me over dinner in her New York apartment in the early 1980s that FDR told her he appointed Kennedy head of the SEC because, she said, imitating FDR’s voice, “It takes a crook to catch a crook.”)
Thus, from 1934 until the Reagan Revolution, American businesses grew the value of their stock by growing the value of their companies. It made America the leader in industrial manufacturing, innovation, and R&D. Sam Walton started Walmart with the slogan, hung as giant banners over his stores and echoed as the title of his autobiography, “100% Made in the USA.”
With that innovation and business expansion, we developed lifesaving new drugs, the transistor and integrated circuit, put men on the moon, and produced more patents than every other country in the world combined.
Today, though, we’ve lost that distinction: China produces more patents than the U.S., and it takes massive government subsidies to get companies to develop new products like chips or electric cars.
Boeing, instead of building new airplanes to expand and upgrade their fleet, spent over $60 billion on stock buybacks in the years leading up to the 2019 grounding of their Max fleet. Just between 2013 and 2019 they bought back an astonishing $43.5 billion in shares.
Not one penny of that money did anything to increase the value of Boeing: instead, it simply manipulated upward the price of their stock, as the purchased and retired shares vanished from the marketplace per the example I opened this article with.
Because most of the company’s senior executives got most of their compensation in stock rather than pay (to avoid the corporate loss of tax deductibility on salaries over $1 million), the benefit went primarily to Boeing’s executives and stockholders. Regular salaried and hourly employees were left out of the equation altogether, as was much of the ability to grow the company.
In fact, to free up money to pay for stock buybacks to feather the nests of the company’s senior executives and shareholders, the company restrained pay increases for regular employees, cut back on quality control employees, and created the kludge of the jerry-rigged 737 Max 8 and 9 planes.
According to data compiled by William Lazonick and the Academic-Industry Research Network from Boeing’s 10-K SEC filings, in the 20 years from 1998 to 2018 the company bought back $61 billion worth of stock, representing 81.8% of all profits. When you add the dividends paid to shareholders during that same period, the amount was 121% of its profits.
In other words, the senior executives appear to have spent the past few decades looting the company for their own benefit.
And Boeing isn’t alone in this: Virtually every American exchange-listed company is doing the same, which is a main reason why American worker pay and innovation have both been so stagnant for so long.
Apple, for example, has bought back $467 billion in their own shares since 2012, rather than invest in manufacturing facilities and decent worker pay here in the U.S. Facebook bought back over $50 billion of their own stock just in 2021, making Mark Zuckerberg the richest millennial in America, controlling over 1/50th of all millennial wealth.
In the nine years leading up to 2021, the S&P 500’s 474 corporations spent$5.7 trillion buying back their own stock: That’s more than half their total income. Further gutting their ability to pay their employees well or develop new products, they paid another $4.2 trillion in dividends to shareholders, representing 41% of their net income.
And the problem is equally pervasive among companies listed on the Dow and the NASDAQ.
How did it come to this?
It started with Reagan’s putting John Shad—the vice chairman of the monster investment house E.F. Hutton—in charge of the SEC, which regulates monster investment houses.
Shad wasted no time in deregulating stock buybacks, instituting in 1982 what’s now known as “Rule 10b-18” that made stock buybacks explicitly legal for the first time since 1934.
Since then, share buybacks have become the most personally profitable business scam CEOs and senior executives can run against their own employees, companies, and communities.
When Reagan and Shad made this change in 1982, the average compensation of CEOs was around 30 times that of their average employee. CEO’s often lived in the same communities as their workers, or in a just slightly more upscale part of town.
Today CEO compensation is between 254 and 10,000 times the average employee, depending on the industry, and CEOs live in palatial estates with servants’ quarters, yachts, and private jets; most of that increase in their annual income is the result of their companies’ repeatedly executing stock buybacks over the past 40 years.
Corporate CEOs call this “maximizing shareholder value” and claim it’s how capitalism is supposed to work. But Adam Smith never anticipated such a thing, would have called it a scam, and he would have been right.
As more and more CEOs got in on the hustle since Reagan legalized it in the 1980s, it’s come to account for much of the 40-year explosion in the price of publicly traded stocks.
Dow Industrials are shown between 1900-2019.
Investors don’t complain because they’re making out well, too (and 84% of all stock in America is owned by the top 10%).
After all, why spend money on improving the company—or even on routine maintenance and safety—when you can personally cash in just as effectively by simply using your company’s revenues to engineer a new stock buyback scheme every year?
As William Lazonick wrote for The Hill in 2018:
Most recently, from 2007 through 2016, stock repurchases by 461 companies listed on the S&P 500 totaled $4 trillion, equal to 54% of profits... Indeed, top corporate executives are often willing to incur debt, lay off employees, cut wages, sell assets, and eat into cash reserves to “maximize shareholder value.”
It’s all done, Lazonick notes, to facilitate share buybacks.
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) have all written about this, decrying stock buybacks and offering specific proposals to tax or even outlaw them. (Biden put a 1% tax on them with the Inflation Reduction Act, a breakthrough, but it should probably be at least 40% to have any impact.)
It’s time to declare the 43-year Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw or heavily tax the share buybacks that are one of its most visible markers. Joe Kennedy knew what he was talking about when he criminalized them, even if he was a crook.
The federal government awards approximately $700 billion per year in federal contracts; what if the Biden administration added one simple clause: “No compulsory layoffs.”
President Joe Biden trails former President Donald Trump by 20 points in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin when people are asked who “is best able to handle the economy,” according to a recentWall Street Journal poll.
To many pundits this makes no sense. During the Biden administration unemployment has been near all-time lows, wages have been rising, and, after a spurt, inflation has been falling. The Wall Street Journal poll also showed that most people say they personally and their states are doing well economically.
Robert Reich, who I greatly respect, tells us not to worry. “There’s always a time lag,” he wrote recently in his newsletter, “between when the economy turns positive and when voters begin to feel more positive about an administration.” He estimates it will take another three to four months for the voter vibes to catch up with the good economy, just in time for the election.
If a corporation takes taxpayer money, it should not be laying off taxpayers.
Economist Paul Krugman blames the disconnect on partisanship: Republicans believe that when a Democrat is in the presidency, the economy must be doing poorly. He urges progressives to celebrate the Biden achievements. “The truth is,” he warns, “the U.S. economy is a remarkable success story. Don’t let anyone tell you that it isn’t.”
Well, I’m about to do just that.
I fear that Reich and Krugman may be underestimating a devastating economic problem that the Democrats have ignored for more than a generation: mass layoffs. And this is a problem that will not go away by November.
In January, 90,309 jobs were cut, according to the Challenger Report. In the high-tech sector, 260,000 workers lost their jobs in 2023, and another 57,000 so far this year. Approximately, 4 million workers have been laid off since Biden came into office.
But wait! Aren’t those job-loss numbers dwarfed by the 14.8 million new jobs created since the Biden inauguration? Won’t that jobs boom soon sink into public consciousness, just as Reich is predicting?
Not likely. That’s because there’s a big difference between finding a new job because you want to and scrambling to find a job because you’ve been laid off. If your factory shuts down in rural Pennsylvania, for example, finding a new job could feel like hell on Earth as you, and a thousand of your former co-workers, scramble for the last jobs at the Dollar Store or Walmart.
You’re not about to reward those in power for the pain and suffering caused by being laid off due to no fault of your own.
In addition to the financial loss, the damage done to laid off workers’ health is considerable. Studies show that:
The U.S. Department of Labor recognizes that “being laid off from your job is one of the most traumatic events you can experience in life.”
If Biden wants to gain more support, he should take a page from Donald Trump and intervene directly to stop mass layoffs. When Trump stepped in and prevented Carrier Air Conditioning from moving a plant to Mexico in 2017, it was widely popular. Finally, a politician stopped a layoff!
Why did Carrier give in? Because of the leverage inherent in the power of the presidency. As the CEO of United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, put it: “I was born at night, but not last night; I know that 10% of our revenue comes from the U.S. government.”
The federal government awards approximately $700 billion per year in federal contracts. What if the Biden administration added one simple clause: “No compulsory layoffs.”
If corporations with federal contracts want to lay off workers, they should have to buy them out. Layoffs would need to be voluntary. The logic is simple: If a corporation takes taxpayer money, it should not be laying off taxpayers. If that’s too much of a restriction, corporations are free to refuse federal contracts and government subsidies.
That would get the attention of working-class voters.
The blowback from corporate America, of course, would be fierce. Biden would be viciously attacked and accused of every socialist sin imaginable. It would take real nerve to let corporations know that they can’t take our tax dollars and then destroy our jobs.
Franklin D. Roosevelt knew exactly what to say in 1936 when faced with these kinds of attacks during his first term as president:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.
The country may again be ready for that fight. But are the Democrats?