Norm Blumenthal: Follow The Money

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: Nice to be back, Bert. Pleasure to have another chance to talk to you about what’s going on in this country in terms of management versus labor, and we’ve talked about this numerous times before. We live in an adversary system. Up until very recently, the Republicans have always represented management and haven’t pretended to be pro labor. Now, with the advent of Trumpism, they have managed to take under their wing the far right end of the labor force and labor group.

And so they have this majority made up of management, which is the key component of the Republican Party and the people that continue to vote against their own best interest in the labor force. And it’s really getting to be not pretty, let’s just put it that way. Most recently, you can see from the debt ceiling debate, it’s probably the most current example of what we’re facing in the debt ceiling debate.

The question is, they want to cut spending, which is a good thing. Obviously, the government can’t go on and spend and spend and spend, and they want to cut spending by doing something with the debt ceiling. In other words, it’s going to be raised because we have so much debt. We have $31 trillion in debt, and we need more money to pay our bills.

But the question is, when are we going to make the turn where we start to not incur additional debt at some point? So now it’s a question of what we’re going to incur and who’s going to be cut. And the lines are drawn. On the one hand, the Republicans. They want to cut all of the spending from what’s called discretionary spending from all of the programs for people and no cuts for the military. And the Democrats want to have it cut across the board.

So the issue is how much are you going to cut? The plan is to over the course of the next year to freeze spending, which is effectively a cut across the board, which would mean it’d be a 13% reduction across the board for all spending for the Republicans propose. And the Democrats propose, well, no, can’t cut any military spending. So it’s 26% for discretionary spending, and that’s a number of laws. All of the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid across the board, they’d lose 26% of their revenues would be decoded in the Republican budget.

What they’re talking about is cutting programs for Childcare Head Start. 1.2 million women, infants, children would go off of nutritional assistance, 200,000 head Start spots would be lost. Disqualifying 100,000 children from child care assistance, no more food stamps. Exacerbating that and cutting rental assistance for 640,000 families. So that’s what we’re up against. And Biden’s got a gun to his head and he’s going to have to do something and it’s a question of how bad it’s going to get.

Bert Martinez: The thing that always cracks me up about this is that there are literally billions of dollars that are being handed out in government subsidies to some of the wealthiest corporations, including the corn industry, the dairy industry, the beef industry, the wheat industry, the list goes on. And so billions of dollars are being handed out to some of the wealthiest corporations, but yet they’re looking at cutting programs to the poorest. It just boggles the mind.

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: Well, it’s an old problem. Money talks. I mean that’s what they have. They have the carried interest on Wall Street, which is where you don’t pay taxes like everybody else at the same rates you paid at a reduced rate. It really only is to the advantage of a very small number of people. But they have so much money that no one will. It’s not even brought up by the Democrats or Republicans because they give money to both parties.

They’re equal contributors and so they’re not going to touch them. Same thing with the oil industry. The intangible drilling cost deduction that’s been around forever. There’s no reason to have it. But nobody’s going to touch the oil industry. So you don’t touch the securities industry, you don’t touch the oil industry. What are you going to start to touch? You’re not going to touch agriculture, you’re not going to touch these other industries because all this pork has been built into the system and all these tax breaks have been built into the system.

And these are the people that contribute money. And once you allow black money with Citizens United to come in where you don’t know who’s contributing, the amount is just astronomical for both sides.

So everybody’s at their wits end as to what to do. The only thing they can do is if you cut across the board, you won’t change the tax system for the wealthy. It’ll still be whatever it is. They’re not going to raise the rates anymore and they’re not going to raise the subsidies, lower the subsidies for the industry. So this is where we’re stuck and we continue to go into debt. So the people that will suffer, of course, are the people at the low end because they’re the ones that it hits their pocketbook. It’s not going to affect everybody else. Here we are, we’re stuck with this and there’s no place to go. And now on top of this we have these child labor laws. Ten states already talk about these children.

Bert Martinez: Talk about these child labor laws because this is just crazy. Go ahead, explain what’s going on.

Norm Blumenthal: First of all, Why is it happening? Let’s just start there with the inability of the government to issue work permits to people at the border. And there’s a lot of them. You see these potential workers at the border and they say, well, why are you here? I want a better job. I want to send money home. I want to help my family. But no, we have these immigration laws and for reasons unknown, they won’t give out work permits for these industries where people don’t want to work.

How many people are running around looking for the city’s dishwashing jobs or the lumber business or cleaning up slaughterhouses at midnight or industrial waste cleanups? There’s jobs out there, agricultural jobs, backbreaking jobs that no one wants. So because they can’t give out work permits or don’t give out work permits to people at the border, and let’s be clear, a work permit is not a road to citizenship. And so people shouldn’t worry about the fact that they’re giving out work permits to people that the Caucasians are going to lose their majority. It’s not the case. They lose their job, they go home. It’s that simple. But no, they’re not going to do that.

Bert Martinez: The other benefit to a work permit is now these people are in the system. They’re trackable there’s information on who’s coming over to work. And I think that’s important.

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: It’s not only that. It’s not money off the books. It’s in the books. And they take withholding. They pay taxes, they have a paycheck. And it’s not cash and carry for these people because they have no work permit. They lose their job, they go home. It seems like it’s worked for a long time. Immigrants that have always done the tough jobs in this country, and there’s no reason to stop now except for this xenophobic insanity that these people are not going to be good citizens. Of course there’s bad apples all around. You can give examples, but these are onesies and twosies compared to the people that want to come over and work and make life better where they live for their families they left behind. But instead of this, we’re faced with these child labor laws and it’s across the country. Ten states have already enacted bills in favor of child labor law. This is not good.

Bert Martinez: Explain what these changes are, because I think this is a substantial change. This is something that on the surface, I think will hurt families.

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: Ten states have proposed or passed legislation to roll back child labor laws during the last two years. Let’s start and go down the list. Arkansas passed legislation in 2023 to eliminate age verification and parental consent to work. Iowa passed a bill to lower the minimum age of childcare staff. Iowa also passed a broader bill that enables minors to work in hazardous occupations.

These are the slaughterhouse bills where they work at night, cleaning up and extending their work hours. What are the chances of these kids going to school and getting an education? When you work from midnight to 08:00 A.m., you’re not going to be going to school the next day. So they’ve taken them out of the education system. It’s very cruel what they’ve done to these children. And unfortunately, these laws pass because the Republicans and management control these state legislatures across the country.

And so there’s this nationwide redefinition of childhood in the United States, and it’s pushing it lower and lower. You become an adult now for work purposes at 14. It’s not just the south. New Jersey and New Hampshire passed child labor laws to roll back child labor protection. Missouri recently enacted an amendment that would expand work hours for minors. And additional legislation to relax child labor laws have been introduced in Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota. So in Maine and Virginia, they want to take the age down from 17 to 14 to define what children are. So if you’re 14, you’re no longer a child. So this is what we’re up against, and this is where we’re headed, and there’s no stopping it. And so since there’s a lack of people that want to work these jobs, they turn to children.

And we will pay the price of an uneducated workforce of children out there that have no education and just have menial skills. I don’t know where we go from there, but this seems to be what I would call a race to the bottom.

Bert Martinez: Again, a situation where instead of big labor raising the minimum wage to entice adult workers, they figured out, hey, if we reduce or redefine the child labor laws, we don’t have to raise our minimum wage, and we’re going to attract people that don’t know any better. And if you’re struggling financially, you’re going to be enticed to give up education to go to work for now.

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: To help feed your family, these kids are going to go to work. And to add insult to injury, they’ve now created in some of these states what’s called a sub minimum wage for children. So if you’re 14 to 17, they have a waiver, a local waiver for minimum wage. So instead of making $15 an hour or the federal minimum wage is 7.20, they take it down. So you’ll be making $4 an hour. So you have to work twice as long to make as much as someone 18 and over. So there’s really this management aid that they’re passing to get around the fact that they can’t hire immigrants from the border because the work permits aren’t there. There’s an easy fix for it.

Give the people at the border work permits, put them to work, give them a job, and if they don’t perform and then at that point in time they need to go home. And it’s easily enforceable because you can track them in the system. They’re part of the system. There’ll be no more illegal immigration anymore. It won’t exist because people will come here and just line up for work. That’s all they want to do. You just see who’s at the border. It’s all these mostly 18 to 24 something men looking for a job and construction industry and the agricultural industry and the manufacturing industry that nobody else wants to take instead of children.

Bert Martinez: And by the way, we’re not saying that working in a slaughterhouse or working in construction or working in any of these jobs is not a good job or honest working situation. What we find offensive is that you’re targeting 14, 15, 16 year old’s, just like the tobacco industry was targeting young people. And the government stepped in and said, hey, you can’t do that. It is unconscionable that you would target young people. Now we have the labor system doing the same thing. And because these young people are so susceptible, they are going to give up going to high school. They are going to give up going to college. Most of them will. And like you mentioned, we’re going to have this very ignorant workforce that are going to have no options in life other than to have these lower paying jobs.

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: Work in the computer age, which we’re in, or in the AI age, which we’re starting to be in, you have to have more education. You have to be more proficient in computers. So there’s just going to be less and less people in that part of the workforce to begin with, because you’re going to need less people to do more jobs that would otherwise require persons.

Just picture in the past the typing poles of persons, women typing to get out paperwork, and that doesn’t exist. Or even the telephone they used to have handheld switches to hook you up. None of these things exist anymore. And we’re going to go into a new age where you can talk to AI and tell them what you want. I just heard on the way today, AI you can do with Adobe Photoshop that people do now, you can do some of it with background and things you want to do and how you want to make people look would take hours and hours of Photos shopping to work. They can do it with AI in two minutes.

Bert Martinez: I also want to interject this. Look, the other thing that’s going on besides AI is you have the robotic industry. So I think within the next five, maybe ten years, a lot of these, like, slaughterhouses will have more and more automation, more robots, because it’s the same work repeated over and over again. You got places like McDonald’s and some other burger joints that are now using robots to make hamburgers. So the way I look at it is you’re going to have this generation of people who didn’t finish high school or didn’t go on to higher education, and then in five or ten years they’re going to be let go because they’re going to be replaced by a robot. And so the job that they sacrifice for their education is no longer going to support them.

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: The only thing competing against the robot now is these lower wages because they’re taking it down to such a level that it doesn’t make sense to switch over to robotics when you can hire somebody at 50% of the minimum wage. So it’s delaying that inevitability of robotics that we will eventually see. And I agree with you on it, it’s going to be that kind of world. But you still need the people to run the robots and to manufacture robots and do the programming.

But you’re in a different world and you need different sophistication. They had AI just this morning, and had earlier showed an explosion outside the Pentagon, but it was all AI. But news organizations picked it up and for some minutes there, the stock market went down because they thought there was an attack on the Pentagon. So this is the kind of crazy stuff that AI can do and that needs regulation. They’re asking for regulation.

But that’s another point of it, is there are people out there that need these jobs, and they need to have a fair wage and health care and insurance and other protection and pay into Social Security and pay into Medicare, but they’re not getting it because there’s children competing for these jobs. 14 year olds that will work at a sub minimum wage. And so that’s what we have to protect against.

But the majority in most state houses are Republicans and pro management and in our adversary system, they’re going to vote for their constituency, unfortunately, and there’s no changing it except with a vote. And right now they have brainwashed the lower end of the labor force to believe that their best interest is with Republicans and management, too, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Bert Martinez: Again, this is something that has been around for a while. Let me clarify what I’m talking about. So back in the, what, thirty s and forty s, there are pictures, there’s a history of young children being chained to dangerous machines and expected to work all day for pennies. And so we’re not necessarily going back to that horrible situation, but this is the same thing.

And so you’re enticing the most vulnerable families, again with money for a quick fix. Bottom line is, whether it happens in five years or ten years or 15 years, sooner or later these jobs are going to change dramatically and these people are going to be out. Some of them are not even going to finish high school, and they’re going to be hurting it’s going to wipe out generations.

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: And the frightening thing is that right now the crazy radicals are with the Republicans. If it turns out that they switch over and we’ve had it before on the left, we’ve had it on the right. But when you end up with a disgruntled group of people and they start to become radicalized, I mean, it could easily be a labor force that takes over like it’s happened in the past in Russia and Germany and other countries where you have these fascists come in and take over the country because there’s so many disgruntled people out there.

So I think everybody, it’s a little scary for me, but that’s why I keep preaching the fact that we need to take care of our citizens and be careful what we do. Because when you have the power, the scariest thing to do is a group of people that are out of power and come into power and ultimately the ones that come into power do the same awful things that the ones that were out of power, that were previously in power do. So it’s not like anybody learns from others’ mistakes.

They just add to it. And that’s the scary part of it, where we’re going to end up. This is out of control when you start putting children into your workforce over immigrants who are able-bodied and can do it and let the kids go to school and get an education so they’ll be in the workforce that you need for the 21st century.

Bert Martinez: And if I’m not mistaken and I could be completely misquoting, president Ronald Reagan so I remember him saying something along the line that some of the worst things he’s ever heard is I’m from the government, I’m here to help and we have to look at what’s best for us. And you vote accordingly. You’re a big proponent of voting for your best interest, following the money. It’s amazing to me how many people don’t get that. Look, if you’re the CEO of a multibillion dollar corporation, you’re going to vote completely differently than if you’re in the working class because you have two different interests and people need to wake up to find out what’s going to best serve me.

 

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: That’s what they do and what’s going to best serve their family and their children. And everything that is happening now from the debt ceiling debate to child labor laws is happening pro management and you don’t hear a lot in the system about pro labor. We’ve passed some bills, we’re trying to get more jobs. We’re trying to bring home semiconductor manufacturing, we’re trying to bring home some manufacturing that wasn’t there before and build some EU electric car charging stations.

But this is all in process and these are good jobs and anything that when you’re building stuff is good because you can put people to work but you don’t want to be putting children to work no.

Bert Martinez: By the way, these jobs might be great during the summer, but you definitely don’t want to take their future away from them. And I believe that that’s what’s going to happen. We’ve already talked about that. It will rob their future, because, yes, they’re going to feel as though they’re making big money because they’re making, whatever, $10 an hour. And to a 15 year old, that might seem like a lot, but we all know that again, we all know that that isn’t that much money. And you cannot sacrifice your future for $400 a week.

Lawyer Norm Blumenthal: They need to go to school and have the opportunity, just like everyone else, to get a good education and get a good paying job.