Tength Congressional District Democrats

By Murray Levin

Donald Trump has gained much of his support from people who feel that their financial condition has stagnated for the last several years. They know that their incomes and social situations have not improved and may have deteriorated. They have little hope for improvement. They blame both political parties and the Obama Administration. They blame NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), which makes them angry at Hillary Clinton because her husband signed NAFTA when he was President. In fact, NAFTA was negotiated mostly by the George H. W. Bush administration, but since it was signed by Bill Clinton shortly after he became President, Clinton tends to get the blame (or credit) for this trade agreement. 

Here’s another fact.  Although some jobs probably have been lost because of NAFTA, the largest number of US manufacturing jobs lost over the last several decades were lost between 2000 and 2010— mostly during the George W. Bush administration.  Since 2010, the US economy has actually gained manufacturing jobs.

These facts bear repeating.  The majority of manufacturing jobs were lost to other countries during the George W. Bush Republican administration, and the Obama administration has increased manufacturing jobs in the U.S.  Of the five million U.S. manufacturing jobs that went overseas during the first decade of this century, over three million were lost to China and several hundred thousand more to other Asian countries.  This large number of jobs went to China and other Asian countries because U.S. businesses found it cheaper to manufacture there despite some terrible quality and safety issues. This occurred after China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization in December, 2001, during the Bush 43 administration. The Bush administration put up few if any obstacles to this shift of jobs to China and other Asian countries.

NAFTA was not the cause of this job loss.  Only 20 percent of the five million jobs lost from 2000 to 2010, about one million, went to Mexico and Canada, the two countries that were part of NAFTA. What happened in Asia from 2000 forward cannot be attributed to Bill Clinton’s having signed NAFTA, much less to his first lady, Hillary Clinton.

One answer to bringing back U.S. jobs is government-funded infrastructure improvement.  However, the Republican leadership in the Senate and House has done everything it can to block President Obama’s efforts to create construction jobs through programs to improve our infrastructure.

Of course, we know why infrastructure improvement, a program that should be noncontroversial, has been blocked over the last seven and a half years. Senator Mitch McConnell, leader of the Senate Republicans, famously called a meeting immediately after President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 and launched his plan to obstruct everything Obama wanted.  The result?  No infrastructure jobs, no new energy jobs, no government-supported jobs program.

Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have championed infrastructure job creation as a way of providing better jobs for the lower and lower-middle economic classes.

The anger of those who are justifiably unhappy with their current economic lot should be directed in the appropriate direction—at the loose attitude toward job loss to China by the Bush 41 administration and at Republicans in Congress, who have blocked President Obama’s efforts to build a better economy.

Donald Trump’s economic plans, which have been blasted by economists of all political and social leanings, would only make things worse. Investment in new jobs would be difficult, if not impossible, if Trump’s plan to decrease tax rates for the wealthy and for corporations were implemented.  In contrast, Clinton wants to make sure that the rich and the companies pay their fair share so that our country’s economy can move forward with investment in our infrastructure and education.

These are only some of the reasons why election of Democrats like Brad Schneider and Tammy Duckworth is essential to helping the next Democratic administration break the logjam in Washington and get our country moving forward again.

A Personal Reminiscence by Lonni Berkley

I am honored and profoundly humbled to have been asked to write a remembrance of Abner Mikva, so I will attempt in my own way to describe his unique contribution to the trajectory of my life, in particular.  I’ll leave to the history books the daunting task of continuing to assess the remarkable contributions of a just and moral man who so fearlessly served in all three branches of government and embraced social change as social imperative.

I have been a news and political junkie as long as I can remember. When I was probably three or four years old, I adopted the unnerving practice of leaping out of bed the moment my father returned home from work as an attorney, slipping his heavy wing-tipped shoes over my feetie pajamas and discussing world events on his lap while “helping” him eat what was likely his first meal of the day consumed hurriedly at 10:00 at night. Although I was so very young, my father explained to me and instilled in me an appreciation for the gravity of world events which gripped the attention of thinking men and women throughout America in the 1960s. He discussed with me not only the events themselves, but also the champions of movements who had the vision, foresight, and courage to see beyond the racism and ignorance of the moment and grasp the beauty and justice of a world which could be.

Among these courageous heroes whom I came to worship while sitting on my father’s knee were Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and, yes, Abner Mikva.

My father and I worked so very hard for Ab so many times, in so many different roles, because he embodied the very essence of Tikun Olum, the Jewish principle of “repair the world,” i.e., leave the world a better place than it was when you came into it.

The first time I secured a position working for Abner Mikva, it was as a 14-year-old intern. I lived in an area of Lincolnwood known as “the Towers” – as far west, and hence as distant from Evanston as one could get—but I was determined to work for my childhood hero. I rode my bike each day from Lincolnwood to Evanston and felt privileged to be part of the election process.

By that time, I had already decided that when I grew up I would become an attorney. Just like my father. Just like Abner Mikva.

When I shared my life’s dream with my high school counselor in 1974, he asked me, “Lonni, have you ever met a lady lawyer?” It seemed like a perfectly legitimate question, and of course the answer was, “No I have not.” However, if the inquiry was intended to give me pause, to make me ask myself, “Then what on God’s green Earth makes you think YOU young lady can become a lady lawyer?” this particular counselor did not know that I was both Irwin Berkley’s daughter and Abner Mikva’s summer intern. For when my hero, Abner Mikva, heard about the 14-year-old who had ridden her bicycle the nearly eight miles from Lincolnwood to Evanston to work for his campaign that summer, he decided he wanted to meet that intern himself.   And when Ab Mikva asked that young woman, “Lonni what do you want to do with your life when you grow up?” I said, “Mr. Mikva, I desperately want to become an attorney.”

Abner Mikva replied, “Lonni, I believe you will make a fine attorney when you grow up.”  So I was well inoculated against my high school counselor’s effort to infect me with self-doubt.

When less than a decade later, at 23 years old, I raised my hand to be sworn into the Illinois Supreme Court as a licensed attorney, I thought of Abner Mikva. On the day I made partner at Neal Gerber & Eisenberg, less than a decade after that, I thought of Abner Mikva. On the day I launched one of the first women-and-minority-owned law firms in the country, I thought of Abner Mikva. And, finally, on the day my then-secretary, a young man, told me he wanted to resign to join a political campaign to help our Senator, Barack Obama, become president of the United States, I thought of Abner Mikva and his wonderful words of encouragement to me and I said, “Duncan, I’ll see you at the inauguration.” Duncan continues to work directly for President Obama, yet another of countless men and women whose lives were touched and whose spirits were inspired by a man of such profound greatness, the 10^th District’s own Abner Mikva.

To paraphrase, “You change the life of one person, you change the world entire.”

God bless you and keep you, Abner Mikva.

If you’re worried about whether Social Security can remain solvent over the next several decades, you should know about the legislative proposals that would guarantee the program’s solvency without raising taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 per year.

As explained by Max Richtman, the chair of the National Committee to Protect Social Security & Medicare, under current law, payroll tax, which is how earners contribute to Social Security, is capped at $118,500.  This means that someone who earns $118,500 this year will contribute the exact same amount of money to Social Security as someone who earns $18 million.

In 2012, Barack Obama proposed to reinstate payroll tax deductions on earnings above $250,000.  According to Politifact, that campaign promise was not fulfilled.  (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/44/lift-the-payroll-tax-cap-on-earnings-above-25000/)

Now, according to Richtman, there is a bill in Congress that would do what President Obama promised in 2012, but for earnings above $400,000.  This bill would maintain the payroll tax cap—to protect the middle class—but would have payroll tax kick back in after earnings reached $400,000.  That is, an earner would start paying payroll tax again on the 401,000^th dollar of earnings and continue paying on every dollar earned after that.

Needless to say, as long as Republicans control Congress, this and similar proposals to preserve Social Security for generations without increasing the tax burden on the middle class will go nowhere.