by Tom Tomorrow
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Congress reaches agreement on budget
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced that the Democrats and Republicans in Congress have reached a deal to avert a government shutdown.
President Obama has also delivered a brief message, saying that "some of the cuts we agreed to will be painful [but] we protected the investments we need." He thanked Reid and Speaker John Boehner for their cooperation and added, "Today we acted on behalf of our children's future."
According to USA Today, "Boehner said the House will now take up a short-term bill to keep the government operating for a few more days while the budget deal is finalized. The deal would cover government spending until fiscal year 2011 ends on Sept. 30."
Reports are that the budget deal will not include any attempt to defund Planned Parenthood but will include as much as $40 billion in spending cuts.
House Republicans had previously spent an hour discussing the budget negotiations in an unusual late-night session as rumors swirled outside. The Tea Party, at least, wasn't happy about what they were hearing. At about 9:30 EST, Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation had tweeted, "Boehner is selling us out tonight. We will primary Boehner next year."
About ten minutes earlier, Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo had tweeted, "Whoops! Cat out of bag." His tweet included a link to the image of an apparently premature press release from Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE), announcing a "three-day budget agreement reached by bipartisan negotiators in the Senate and House."
According to reports gathered by The Guardian, Politico was suggesting earlier in the evening that the negotiators had "reached agreement on controversial policy riders in the stalled government funding measure, and closed in on a final compromise on cuts around $40 billion." The National Journal was also specifying a deal in which the Republican would drop their attempt to defund Planned Parenthood in return for an additional $1 billion in cuts.
Johnson & Johnson fined for bribing doctors
(Every time the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry is exposed, I am never surprised. It is THE most corrupt industry on the planet, next to the corporate military industrial complex, of which J&J is a part.--jef)
Johnson & Johnson fined for bribing doctors
By Agence France-Presse
Friday, April 8th, 2011
WASHINGTON — US authorities fined cosmetics and drugs giant Johnson & Johnson $70 million on Friday for bribing doctors in Europe and paying kickbacks for contracts under a UN relief program in Iraq.
The Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission said since 1998 the firm had paid doctors and hospital administrators in Greece, Poland and Romania for contracts and to promote its drugs and medical devices.
Johnson & Johnson also paid kickbacks between 2000-2003 for 19 contracts under the UN Oil for Food Program, which provided humanitarian supplies to Iraqis while the country, still ruled by Saddam Hussein.
The firm, the 15th largest US company by market capitalization, agreed to pay US authorities $70 million to settle the charges, including $48.6 million to the SEC and $21.4 million to the Justice Department.
US prosecutor Mythili Raman that the company had "cooperated extensively" with the investigation.
"The message ... is plain -- any competitive advantage gained through corruption is a mirage," said SEC enforcement director Robert Khuzami.
"J&J chose profit margins over compliance with the law by acquiring a private company for the purpose of paying bribes, and using sham contracts, offshore companies, and slush funds to cover its tracks."
The charges detailed that J&J subsidiaries Cilag AG International and Janssen Pharaceutica made $858,000 dollars in payoffs to Saddam Hussein's government to win $9.0 million in contracts under the deeply corrupted Oil for Food Program.
"The kickbacks were concealed from the United Nations by inflating Janssen and Cilag's contract prices by 10 percent," they said.
The SEC said J&J was under a related investigation by Britain's Serious Fraud Office and that a resolution was also expected.
States’ Shameful Trade-Off: Putting Prisons over Public Schools
Friday, April 8, 2011 by In These Times
by Michelle Chen
by Michelle Chen
The state lawmakers who are pushing hard for "austerity" aren't so much enemies of government “waste” as they are expert money launderers in the business of politics. Education is at the center of their shell game.
Across the country, conservatives are fixated on a curious formula for deficit reduction: wholesale disinvestment in schools (coupled with erosion of union rights and working conditions for teachers), plus a race to pump tax breaks for the rich and stifle health care for the poor. And in many areas, one sacred cow continues to fatten while students starve: our bloated prison system.
This week will bring more showdowns over public sector budget cuts in states like Florida and Ohio, hammering down especially hard on education. The Associated Press reports that the evaporation of federal stimulus funds is pushing schools toward a funding “cliff.” Adding insult to injury,some state governments appear to have funded certain programs by stealing stimulus funds intended for education, “thus avoiding cuts elsewhere in their budgets.”
Civil rights advocates suspect that the “elsewhere” resides in political interests hostile to children. A new report by the NAACP, “Misplaced Priorities,” describes the systematic underfunding of education alongside massive resources diverted into draconian criminal justice systems--a pattern that indirectly creates perverse incentives for incarcerating, rather than educating vulnerable youth.
A testament to structural racism and the “lock 'em up” mentality behind the War on Drugs, activists warn that another generation will be swallowed by courts and prisons that eagerly pick up where schools have failed disadvantaged youth.
Civil rights groups have called on lawmakers to shift funding priorities to promote educational equity and rehabilitation initiatives for youth. These proactive steps can help prevent violence and crime, and can generate meaningful work and advancement in communities battered by harsh law enforcement on the one hand, and unemployment and disinvestment on the other.
There's a tragic financial and political logic to the trade-off between educational and criminal institutions. The so-called “school to prison pipeline”--which pushes youth, particularly low-income youth of color, into the criminal justice system—begins in heavily police-patrolled schools, sucks “delinquents” into a racially skewed juvenile justice system, and ends up cycling young adults through courts and prisons, further uprooting them from their communities. This pipeline isn't just a rhetorical metaphor; it's a real channel for taxpayer money that tends to go ignored because the families most impacted are politically invisible.
Understanding the school-to-prison trajectory isn't rocket science. When kids grow up in impoverished neighborhoods, attend schools that can barely afford books much less high-quality teachers, even risk getting assaulted as they walk to school, society in many ways assumes and preordains their criminality before they ever break a law.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is borne out by data showing the overlap of high incarceration and poor education. In Los Angeles, according to the NAACP's analysis, “69 of the 90 (67 percent) low performing schools are in neighborhoods with the highest incarceration rates. By contrast, 59 of the city's 86 high performing schools (68 percent) are in neighborhoods with the lowest incarceration rates.”
In New York City, public schools hemorrhaged hundreds of millions of dollars while public coffers bled more than $500 million to lock up residents sentenced in 2008, who came from a handful of chronically troubled neighborhoods (and their school districts).
Overall, the NAACP finds:
Across the country, conservatives are fixated on a curious formula for deficit reduction: wholesale disinvestment in schools (coupled with erosion of union rights and working conditions for teachers), plus a race to pump tax breaks for the rich and stifle health care for the poor. And in many areas, one sacred cow continues to fatten while students starve: our bloated prison system.
This week will bring more showdowns over public sector budget cuts in states like Florida and Ohio, hammering down especially hard on education. The Associated Press reports that the evaporation of federal stimulus funds is pushing schools toward a funding “cliff.” Adding insult to injury,some state governments appear to have funded certain programs by stealing stimulus funds intended for education, “thus avoiding cuts elsewhere in their budgets.”
Civil rights advocates suspect that the “elsewhere” resides in political interests hostile to children. A new report by the NAACP, “Misplaced Priorities,” describes the systematic underfunding of education alongside massive resources diverted into draconian criminal justice systems--a pattern that indirectly creates perverse incentives for incarcerating, rather than educating vulnerable youth.
A testament to structural racism and the “lock 'em up” mentality behind the War on Drugs, activists warn that another generation will be swallowed by courts and prisons that eagerly pick up where schools have failed disadvantaged youth.
Civil rights groups have called on lawmakers to shift funding priorities to promote educational equity and rehabilitation initiatives for youth. These proactive steps can help prevent violence and crime, and can generate meaningful work and advancement in communities battered by harsh law enforcement on the one hand, and unemployment and disinvestment on the other.
There's a tragic financial and political logic to the trade-off between educational and criminal institutions. The so-called “school to prison pipeline”--which pushes youth, particularly low-income youth of color, into the criminal justice system—begins in heavily police-patrolled schools, sucks “delinquents” into a racially skewed juvenile justice system, and ends up cycling young adults through courts and prisons, further uprooting them from their communities. This pipeline isn't just a rhetorical metaphor; it's a real channel for taxpayer money that tends to go ignored because the families most impacted are politically invisible.
Understanding the school-to-prison trajectory isn't rocket science. When kids grow up in impoverished neighborhoods, attend schools that can barely afford books much less high-quality teachers, even risk getting assaulted as they walk to school, society in many ways assumes and preordains their criminality before they ever break a law.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is borne out by data showing the overlap of high incarceration and poor education. In Los Angeles, according to the NAACP's analysis, “69 of the 90 (67 percent) low performing schools are in neighborhoods with the highest incarceration rates. By contrast, 59 of the city's 86 high performing schools (68 percent) are in neighborhoods with the lowest incarceration rates.”
In New York City, public schools hemorrhaged hundreds of millions of dollars while public coffers bled more than $500 million to lock up residents sentenced in 2008, who came from a handful of chronically troubled neighborhoods (and their school districts).
Overall, the NAACP finds:
During the last two decades, as the criminal justice system came to assume a larger proportion of state discretionary dollars, state spending on prisons grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education.As this year's fiscal crises heat up, you'll hear lots of arguments about “shared sacrifice” and “tough decisions.” But those lawmakers need a lesson in how to “share” from the students whose education is sacrificed in the name of austerity. Their future is to be decided by a political elite who'll never understand just how tough these kids' lives will be.
The Mindless Mantra of Wall Street: The Corporate Tax Rate Is Too High
Friday, April 8, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
A 35% corporate tax rate means zero taxes. So go ahead, cut it to 25%.
by Paul Buchheit
In 2010 General Electric made $14 billion and received a $3 billion tax refund. The response by business? The 35% corporate tax rate is too high. Tax cuts, they continue to say, will spur economic growth and create jobs, and allow American companies to compete in a global economy.
All very emotional. But the facts can be found in U.S. Office of Management (OMB) figures, which show a gradual drop over the years in Corporate Income Tax as a Share of GDP, from 4% in the 1960s to 2% in the 1990s to 1.3% in 2010. The unweighted global average in 2005 was 3.4%.
Also coming from the OMB is the percent of Total Tax Revenue derived from corporate taxes (OMB Historical Table 2.1). The corporate share has dropped from about 20% in the 1960s to under 9% in 2010.
Finally, in a U.S. Treasury report of global competitiveness (Table 5.3), it is revealed that U.S. corporations paid 13.4% of their profits in taxes between 2000 and 2005, compared to the OECD average of 16.1%. (Although the Tax Foundation notes that tax rates of other nations have fallen while the U.S. has remained unchanged.)
The Treasury Dept. report is consistent with a PayUpNow.org analysis of the 10-K financial statements of 100 of the largest U.S. companies, which found that less than 10% of pre-tax profits in 2010 were paid in non-deferred U.S. federal income taxes.
These 100 companies, with $5.67 trillion in 2010 revenue and almost $600 billion in pre-tax earnings, paid $57 billion, or 9.7%, in federal incomes taxes. If these 100 companies had paid the 35% tax designated by U.S. tax law, an additional $150 billion would have been collected in federal taxes in just one year. This is approximately equal to the total budget deficits for all 50 states.
From 2008 to 2010, Chevron paid less than 5% a year. Merck paid 5%. Hewlett-Packard 3%. Exxon 2%. IBM 2%. Carnival 1%.
Verizon and Boeing and Dow and DuPont all made profits three years in a row, but all paid zero taxes over the three-year period.
Banking leaders Citigroup and Bank of America, with a combined $8 billion of pretax earnings in 2009 and 2010, each paid zero taxes two years in a row.
So go ahead, cut the corporate tax rate to 25%. 25% of zero is the same as 35% of zero.
But if it means anything to the corporate CEOs, the United States is where you built your companies, utilize the infrastructure and transportation systems, benefit from years of scientific research, and make most of your sales.
Your tax avoidance may be 'legal,' but it's taking down our country.
A 35% corporate tax rate means zero taxes. So go ahead, cut it to 25%.
by Paul Buchheit
In 2010 General Electric made $14 billion and received a $3 billion tax refund. The response by business? The 35% corporate tax rate is too high. Tax cuts, they continue to say, will spur economic growth and create jobs, and allow American companies to compete in a global economy.
All very emotional. But the facts can be found in U.S. Office of Management (OMB) figures, which show a gradual drop over the years in Corporate Income Tax as a Share of GDP, from 4% in the 1960s to 2% in the 1990s to 1.3% in 2010. The unweighted global average in 2005 was 3.4%.
Also coming from the OMB is the percent of Total Tax Revenue derived from corporate taxes (OMB Historical Table 2.1). The corporate share has dropped from about 20% in the 1960s to under 9% in 2010.
Finally, in a U.S. Treasury report of global competitiveness (Table 5.3), it is revealed that U.S. corporations paid 13.4% of their profits in taxes between 2000 and 2005, compared to the OECD average of 16.1%. (Although the Tax Foundation notes that tax rates of other nations have fallen while the U.S. has remained unchanged.)
The Treasury Dept. report is consistent with a PayUpNow.org analysis of the 10-K financial statements of 100 of the largest U.S. companies, which found that less than 10% of pre-tax profits in 2010 were paid in non-deferred U.S. federal income taxes.
These 100 companies, with $5.67 trillion in 2010 revenue and almost $600 billion in pre-tax earnings, paid $57 billion, or 9.7%, in federal incomes taxes. If these 100 companies had paid the 35% tax designated by U.S. tax law, an additional $150 billion would have been collected in federal taxes in just one year. This is approximately equal to the total budget deficits for all 50 states.
From 2008 to 2010, Chevron paid less than 5% a year. Merck paid 5%. Hewlett-Packard 3%. Exxon 2%. IBM 2%. Carnival 1%.
Verizon and Boeing and Dow and DuPont all made profits three years in a row, but all paid zero taxes over the three-year period.
Banking leaders Citigroup and Bank of America, with a combined $8 billion of pretax earnings in 2009 and 2010, each paid zero taxes two years in a row.
So go ahead, cut the corporate tax rate to 25%. 25% of zero is the same as 35% of zero.
But if it means anything to the corporate CEOs, the United States is where you built your companies, utilize the infrastructure and transportation systems, benefit from years of scientific research, and make most of your sales.
Your tax avoidance may be 'legal,' but it's taking down our country.
Unnecessary Austerity, Unnecessary Shutdown
Thursday, April 7, 2011 by Institute for Policy Studies
Reversing tax giveaways to the super-rich and the nation's largest corporations could raise $4 trillion within a decade and avert possible government closures.
by Chuck Collins, Alison Goldberg, Scott Klinger, Sam Pizzigati
WASHINGTON - "We're broke."
Or so claim governors and lawmakers all over the country. Our states and our nation can no longer afford, their plaint goes, the programs and services that Americans expect government to provide. We must do with less. We need "austerity."
But we're not broke. Not even close. The United States of America is awash in wealth. Our corporations are holding record trillions in cash. And overall individual wealth in the United States, the Credit Suisse Research Institute reported this past fall, has risen 23 percent since the year 2000, to $236,213 per American adult.
We have, these indicators of overall wealth suggest, survived the Great Recession quite nicely. So how can average families — and the national, state, and local governments that exist to serve them — be doing so poorly? Why do "deficits" dominate our political discourse? What explains the red-ink hurricane now pounding government budgets at every level?
This Tax Day report (pdf) identifies two prime drivers behind our current budget "squeeze."
One, we have indeed become wealthier than ever. But our wealth has become incredibly more concentrated at our economic summit. U.S. income is cascading disproportionately to the top.
Two, we are taxing the dollars that go to our ever-richer rich — and the corporations they own — at levels far below the tax rates that America levied just a few decades ago. We have, in effect, shifted our tax burden off the shoulders of those most able to bear it and away from those who disproportionately benefit from government investments the most.
These two factors — more dollars at the top, significantly lower taxes on these dollars — have unleashed a fiscal nightmare. Can we wake up in time to avoid the crippling austerity that so many of our political leaders insist we must accept?
This report offers both an analysis of our current predicament and a series of proposals that can help open our eyes to a far more equitable — and brighter — future.
Key Tax Facts
Reversing tax giveaways to the super-rich and the nation's largest corporations could raise $4 trillion within a decade and avert possible government closures.
by Chuck Collins, Alison Goldberg, Scott Klinger, Sam Pizzigati
WASHINGTON - "We're broke."
Or so claim governors and lawmakers all over the country. Our states and our nation can no longer afford, their plaint goes, the programs and services that Americans expect government to provide. We must do with less. We need "austerity."
But we're not broke. Not even close. The United States of America is awash in wealth. Our corporations are holding record trillions in cash. And overall individual wealth in the United States, the Credit Suisse Research Institute reported this past fall, has risen 23 percent since the year 2000, to $236,213 per American adult.
We have, these indicators of overall wealth suggest, survived the Great Recession quite nicely. So how can average families — and the national, state, and local governments that exist to serve them — be doing so poorly? Why do "deficits" dominate our political discourse? What explains the red-ink hurricane now pounding government budgets at every level?
This Tax Day report (pdf) identifies two prime drivers behind our current budget "squeeze."
One, we have indeed become wealthier than ever. But our wealth has become incredibly more concentrated at our economic summit. U.S. income is cascading disproportionately to the top.
Two, we are taxing the dollars that go to our ever-richer rich — and the corporations they own — at levels far below the tax rates that America levied just a few decades ago. We have, in effect, shifted our tax burden off the shoulders of those most able to bear it and away from those who disproportionately benefit from government investments the most.
These two factors — more dollars at the top, significantly lower taxes on these dollars — have unleashed a fiscal nightmare. Can we wake up in time to avoid the crippling austerity that so many of our political leaders insist we must accept?
This report offers both an analysis of our current predicament and a series of proposals that can help open our eyes to a far more equitable — and brighter — future.
Key Tax Facts
- 15,753: The number of households in 1961 with $1 million in taxable income (adjusted for inflation).
- 361,000: The number of households in 2011 estimated to have $1 million in taxable income.
- 43.1: Percent of total reported income that Americans earning $1 million paid in taxes in 1961 (adjusted for 2011 dollars)
- 23.1: Percent of total reported income that Americans earning $1 million are likely to pay in taxes in 2011, estimated from latest IRS data.
- 47.4: Percent of profits corporations paid in taxes in 1961.
- 11.1: Percent of profits corporations paid in taxes in 2011.
What, Is Behind GOP Medicare Plan? The Private Insurance Industry, of course
Pay much attention to the insurers behind the curtain
Thursday, April 7, 2011 by Center for Public Integrity
by Wendell Potter
Democrats who think Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues have foolishly wrapped their arms around the third rail of American politics by proposing to hand the Medicare program to private insurers will themselves look foolish if they take for granted that the public will always be on their side.
Rep. Ryan’s budget proposal would radically reshape both the Medicare and Medicaid programs. It would turn Medicaid into a block grant, which would give states more discretion over benefits and eligibility. And it would radically redesign Medicare, changing it from what is essentially a government-run, single-payer health plan to one in which people would choose coverage from competing private insurance firms, many of them for-profit.
Poll numbers would seem to give the Democrats the edge in what will undoubtedly will be a ferocious debate over the coming months and during the 2012 campaigns. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted February 27-28 showed that 76 percent of Americans considered cuts to Medicare unacceptable. The public is almost as resistant to cutting Medicaid, at least for now: 67 percent of Americans said they found cutting that program unacceptable as well.
According to a story in Politico this week, Democrats “with close ties to the White House” think Ryan has handed them a gift that will keep on giving. They believe the Ryan blueprint will enable them to portray Republicans as both irresponsible and heartless, hell-bent on unraveling the social safety net that has protected millions of Americans for decades. That message will be the centerpiece of the Democrats’ advertising and fundraising efforts, unnamed party strategists told Politico.
Perhaps. But know this: Ryan et al would never propose such a fundamental reshaping of those programs unless they were confident that corporate America stands ready to help them sell their ideas to the public. Like big business CEOs, Congressional Republicans wouldn’t think of rolling out Ryan’s budget plan without a carefully crafted political and communications strategy and the assurance that adequate funding would be available to carry it out.
Republicans know they can rely on health insurance companies—which would attract trillions of taxpayer dollars if Ryan’s dream comes true — to help bankroll a massive campaign to sell the privatization of Medicare to the public.
Four years ago, in a secret insurance industry meeting in Philadelphia, I saw numbers that were similar to those in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The industry’s pollster, Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, told insurance company executives, who had assembled to begin planning a campaign to shape the health care reform debate, that Americans were rapidly losing confidence in the private health insurance market.
For the first time ever, he said, more than 50 percent of Americans believed that the government should do more to solve the many problems that plagued the U.S. health care system. In fact, he said, a fast-growing percentage of Americans were embracing the idea of a government run “Medicare-for-All” type program to replace private insurers.
The executives came to realize at the meeting that the industry’s very survival was dependent upon the successful execution of a comprehensive campaign to change public attitudes toward private insurers. They needed to convince Americans they “added value” to the health care system, and that what the public should fear would be more government control.
Knowing that a campaign publicly identified with the industry would have little credibility, the executives endorsed a strategy that would use their business and political allies — and front groups — as messengers.
The main front group was Health Care America It was set up and operated out of the Washington PR firm APCO Worldwide. The first objective was to discredit Michael Moore’s documentary, SICKO, which was about to hit movie screens nationwide. Moore’s film compared the U.S. health care system to those in countries that had “Medicare-for-all” type programs run by governments. The American system, dominated by private insurers, did not fare well in Moore’s cinematic interpretation.
The front group painted Moore as a socialist but also went about the larger task of scaring the public away from “a government takeover of the health care system.” Part of that work involved persuading Americans that any reform bill expanding Medicare or including a “public option” would represent a government takeover.
The industry knew it had to enlist the support of longtime allies such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Association of Health Underwriters to repeat the term “government takeover” like a mantra. It also had to get conservative talk show hosts, pundits and politicians to play along. And play along they did. In the debate preceding one key House vote involving a public option, a parade of Republicans took to the floor to repeat the industry’s favorite term: government takeover.
To help make sure the term stuck, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the insurers’ lobbying group, funneled $86 million to the Chamber of Commerce to help finance its advertising and PR campaign against any reform legislation that included the public option. It worked like a charm. Polls showed during the course of the debate that public opinion was increasingly turning against the Democrats’ vision of reform. By the time the bill reached President Obama in March 2010, the public option had been stripped out, and public support for reform was well below 50 percent.
As a testament to the success of the industry’s campaign, PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times’ independent fact-checking website, chose “a government takeover of health care” as its “Lie of the Year” in 2010. (The 2009 Lie of the Year was the fabrication that the Democrats’ reform bill would create Medicare “death panels.”)
While they were leading the effort to torpedo the public option, the insurers were lobbying hard for a provision in the bill requiring all of us to buy coverage from them if we’re not eligible for a public program like Medicare or Medicaid. They won that round, too. That provision alone will guarantee billions of dollars in revenue the insurers would never have seen had it not been for the bill the president signed.
But even that is not enough for the insurers. For many years, they’ve lobbied quietly for privatization of Medicare, with significant success. They were behind the change in the Medicare program in the 1980s that allowed insurers to offer what are now called “Medicare Advantage” plans. The federal government not only pays private insurers to market these plans, it pays them an 11 percent bonus. That’s right: people enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans cost the taxpayers 11 percent more than people enrolled in the basic Medicare program.
During the Bush administration, the insurers persuaded lawmakers to allow them to administer the new Medicare Part D prescription drug program. That has been a major source of new income for the many big for-profit insurers that participate in the program.
Rest assured that insurers have promised Ryan and his colleagues a massive industry-financed PR and advertising campaign to support his proposed corporate takeover of Medicare. If Democratic strategists really believe that Ryan has all but guaranteed the GOP’s demise by proposing to shred the social safety net for some of our most vulnerable citizens, they will soon be rudely disabused of that notion. The insurers and their allies have demonstrated time and again that they can persuade Americans to think and act — and vote — against their own best interests.
Thursday, April 7, 2011 by Center for Public Integrity
by Wendell Potter
Democrats who think Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues have foolishly wrapped their arms around the third rail of American politics by proposing to hand the Medicare program to private insurers will themselves look foolish if they take for granted that the public will always be on their side.
Rep. Ryan’s budget proposal would radically reshape both the Medicare and Medicaid programs. It would turn Medicaid into a block grant, which would give states more discretion over benefits and eligibility. And it would radically redesign Medicare, changing it from what is essentially a government-run, single-payer health plan to one in which people would choose coverage from competing private insurance firms, many of them for-profit.
Poll numbers would seem to give the Democrats the edge in what will undoubtedly will be a ferocious debate over the coming months and during the 2012 campaigns. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted February 27-28 showed that 76 percent of Americans considered cuts to Medicare unacceptable. The public is almost as resistant to cutting Medicaid, at least for now: 67 percent of Americans said they found cutting that program unacceptable as well.
According to a story in Politico this week, Democrats “with close ties to the White House” think Ryan has handed them a gift that will keep on giving. They believe the Ryan blueprint will enable them to portray Republicans as both irresponsible and heartless, hell-bent on unraveling the social safety net that has protected millions of Americans for decades. That message will be the centerpiece of the Democrats’ advertising and fundraising efforts, unnamed party strategists told Politico.
Perhaps. But know this: Ryan et al would never propose such a fundamental reshaping of those programs unless they were confident that corporate America stands ready to help them sell their ideas to the public. Like big business CEOs, Congressional Republicans wouldn’t think of rolling out Ryan’s budget plan without a carefully crafted political and communications strategy and the assurance that adequate funding would be available to carry it out.
Republicans know they can rely on health insurance companies—which would attract trillions of taxpayer dollars if Ryan’s dream comes true — to help bankroll a massive campaign to sell the privatization of Medicare to the public.
Four years ago, in a secret insurance industry meeting in Philadelphia, I saw numbers that were similar to those in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The industry’s pollster, Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, told insurance company executives, who had assembled to begin planning a campaign to shape the health care reform debate, that Americans were rapidly losing confidence in the private health insurance market.
For the first time ever, he said, more than 50 percent of Americans believed that the government should do more to solve the many problems that plagued the U.S. health care system. In fact, he said, a fast-growing percentage of Americans were embracing the idea of a government run “Medicare-for-All” type program to replace private insurers.
The executives came to realize at the meeting that the industry’s very survival was dependent upon the successful execution of a comprehensive campaign to change public attitudes toward private insurers. They needed to convince Americans they “added value” to the health care system, and that what the public should fear would be more government control.
Knowing that a campaign publicly identified with the industry would have little credibility, the executives endorsed a strategy that would use their business and political allies — and front groups — as messengers.
The main front group was Health Care America It was set up and operated out of the Washington PR firm APCO Worldwide. The first objective was to discredit Michael Moore’s documentary, SICKO, which was about to hit movie screens nationwide. Moore’s film compared the U.S. health care system to those in countries that had “Medicare-for-all” type programs run by governments. The American system, dominated by private insurers, did not fare well in Moore’s cinematic interpretation.
The front group painted Moore as a socialist but also went about the larger task of scaring the public away from “a government takeover of the health care system.” Part of that work involved persuading Americans that any reform bill expanding Medicare or including a “public option” would represent a government takeover.
The industry knew it had to enlist the support of longtime allies such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Association of Health Underwriters to repeat the term “government takeover” like a mantra. It also had to get conservative talk show hosts, pundits and politicians to play along. And play along they did. In the debate preceding one key House vote involving a public option, a parade of Republicans took to the floor to repeat the industry’s favorite term: government takeover.
To help make sure the term stuck, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the insurers’ lobbying group, funneled $86 million to the Chamber of Commerce to help finance its advertising and PR campaign against any reform legislation that included the public option. It worked like a charm. Polls showed during the course of the debate that public opinion was increasingly turning against the Democrats’ vision of reform. By the time the bill reached President Obama in March 2010, the public option had been stripped out, and public support for reform was well below 50 percent.
As a testament to the success of the industry’s campaign, PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times’ independent fact-checking website, chose “a government takeover of health care” as its “Lie of the Year” in 2010. (The 2009 Lie of the Year was the fabrication that the Democrats’ reform bill would create Medicare “death panels.”)
While they were leading the effort to torpedo the public option, the insurers were lobbying hard for a provision in the bill requiring all of us to buy coverage from them if we’re not eligible for a public program like Medicare or Medicaid. They won that round, too. That provision alone will guarantee billions of dollars in revenue the insurers would never have seen had it not been for the bill the president signed.
But even that is not enough for the insurers. For many years, they’ve lobbied quietly for privatization of Medicare, with significant success. They were behind the change in the Medicare program in the 1980s that allowed insurers to offer what are now called “Medicare Advantage” plans. The federal government not only pays private insurers to market these plans, it pays them an 11 percent bonus. That’s right: people enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans cost the taxpayers 11 percent more than people enrolled in the basic Medicare program.
During the Bush administration, the insurers persuaded lawmakers to allow them to administer the new Medicare Part D prescription drug program. That has been a major source of new income for the many big for-profit insurers that participate in the program.
Rest assured that insurers have promised Ryan and his colleagues a massive industry-financed PR and advertising campaign to support his proposed corporate takeover of Medicare. If Democratic strategists really believe that Ryan has all but guaranteed the GOP’s demise by proposing to shred the social safety net for some of our most vulnerable citizens, they will soon be rudely disabused of that notion. The insurers and their allies have demonstrated time and again that they can persuade Americans to think and act — and vote — against their own best interests.
Losing a Party's Soul in Budget Fight
Thursday, April 7, 2011 by The Boston Globe
by Robert Kuttner
Republicans have unveiled drastic budget plans that will either crown their success as radical reformers — or prove a huge misreading of public opinion. President Obama will play no small role in determining which way this plays out.
In the jousting over whether small differences over the 2011 budget will force a government shutdown, Obama has emphasized the importance of compromise, pointedly avoiding the subject of the broad harm in the Republican grand design. In an impromptu Tuesday press conference after talks broke down, Obama said with both pride and petulance that he had already agreed to most of the Republicans’ demands.
But his pride is misplaced. Obama’s eagerness to conciliate only whets the right’s appetite. Consider their plans for next year.
The 2012 budget proposal released Tuesday by Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee, would cut projected spending over the next decade by $5.8 trillion and further cut taxes. The plan would eliminate Medicare and Medicaid as we know them — and Social Security is next.
Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare from a government insurance program into a voucher is a stunning gamble. Seniors would get a fixed sum to shop for private insurance. If the money didn’t buy decent coverage, they would have to supplement it with their own resources — or do without.
Medicare is hugely popular. Last September, a Pew/National Journal poll asked about converting Medicare to a voucher. Among respondents 65 and older, just 14 percent supported the idea, while 69 percent opposed it. For all respondents, 33 percent were in favor, while 52 percent were opposed.
Indeed, Obama lost serious political ground when Republicans (inaccurately) characterized Obama’s health reform as weakening Medicare. Now the Republicans are explicitly proposing to dismantle government-operated insurance for the elderly.
The GOP budget would also convert Medicaid, which serves the poor, to a block grant. The federal cost would be capped, leaving states freer to cut already meager benefits. Beyond the poor, about 40 percent of Medicaid outlays finance long-term nursing home care, a benefit that supports the middle-class elderly and spares their families huge expense.
Republicans would slash a wide range of other popular programs from Pell Grants to cancer research. They would drastically reduce funding for public agencies that monitor everything from safe food and drinking water to abusive practices by banks of the kind that crashed the economy.
The Tea Party Republicans seem so besotted with the animated rage of their far-right political base that they are mistaking that narrow energy for a broad shift in public opinion. Yet, in the absence of more clarity and leadership on the Democratic side, they may yet prevail.
Though key Democratic legislators like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and White House press secretary Jay Carney in a little-noticed written release, have decried the extremism of the Republican cuts, the missing figure in this deeper debate is Obama.
On Monday, as Ryan’s budget was leaked, Obama formally announced his reelection campaign in a video and email. The announcement was about strategy, fundraising, and a call for volunteers. The president declined to address this epic national debate about the future of government in protecting the beleaguered middle class.
But what is the next election about? Anything close to the Ryan budget would destroy not only Obama’s own aspirations for America, but repeal core, Democratic-sponsored social insurance anchors dating back to the Great Society and the New Deal.
This Republican-led debate has often seemed like the sound of one hand clapping. You’d think the president would be out there, pointing out that most of the deficit crisis was created by recession and Republican tax cuts, costing $4 trillion over a decade; and emphasizing who gets hurt by these new budget cuts.
Public opinion largely sides with the Democrats’ defense of popular social programs. But that support will remain latent unless a national debate is focused on something that only presidential leadership can achieve. As long as the debate is about who will cut more, the definition of responsible budgeting shifts steadily right, and the Tea Party wins.
Maybe Obama is waiting for just the right moment to draw a bright line. Yet political capital increases most when it is spent, not when it is saved for a rainy day.
The president’s reelection campaign slogan is “Are You In?’’ A better question might be: Is Obama In?
by Robert Kuttner
Republicans have unveiled drastic budget plans that will either crown their success as radical reformers — or prove a huge misreading of public opinion. President Obama will play no small role in determining which way this plays out.
In the jousting over whether small differences over the 2011 budget will force a government shutdown, Obama has emphasized the importance of compromise, pointedly avoiding the subject of the broad harm in the Republican grand design. In an impromptu Tuesday press conference after talks broke down, Obama said with both pride and petulance that he had already agreed to most of the Republicans’ demands.
But his pride is misplaced. Obama’s eagerness to conciliate only whets the right’s appetite. Consider their plans for next year.
The 2012 budget proposal released Tuesday by Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee, would cut projected spending over the next decade by $5.8 trillion and further cut taxes. The plan would eliminate Medicare and Medicaid as we know them — and Social Security is next.
Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare from a government insurance program into a voucher is a stunning gamble. Seniors would get a fixed sum to shop for private insurance. If the money didn’t buy decent coverage, they would have to supplement it with their own resources — or do without.
Medicare is hugely popular. Last September, a Pew/National Journal poll asked about converting Medicare to a voucher. Among respondents 65 and older, just 14 percent supported the idea, while 69 percent opposed it. For all respondents, 33 percent were in favor, while 52 percent were opposed.
Indeed, Obama lost serious political ground when Republicans (inaccurately) characterized Obama’s health reform as weakening Medicare. Now the Republicans are explicitly proposing to dismantle government-operated insurance for the elderly.
The GOP budget would also convert Medicaid, which serves the poor, to a block grant. The federal cost would be capped, leaving states freer to cut already meager benefits. Beyond the poor, about 40 percent of Medicaid outlays finance long-term nursing home care, a benefit that supports the middle-class elderly and spares their families huge expense.
Republicans would slash a wide range of other popular programs from Pell Grants to cancer research. They would drastically reduce funding for public agencies that monitor everything from safe food and drinking water to abusive practices by banks of the kind that crashed the economy.
The Tea Party Republicans seem so besotted with the animated rage of their far-right political base that they are mistaking that narrow energy for a broad shift in public opinion. Yet, in the absence of more clarity and leadership on the Democratic side, they may yet prevail.
Though key Democratic legislators like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and White House press secretary Jay Carney in a little-noticed written release, have decried the extremism of the Republican cuts, the missing figure in this deeper debate is Obama.
On Monday, as Ryan’s budget was leaked, Obama formally announced his reelection campaign in a video and email. The announcement was about strategy, fundraising, and a call for volunteers. The president declined to address this epic national debate about the future of government in protecting the beleaguered middle class.
But what is the next election about? Anything close to the Ryan budget would destroy not only Obama’s own aspirations for America, but repeal core, Democratic-sponsored social insurance anchors dating back to the Great Society and the New Deal.
This Republican-led debate has often seemed like the sound of one hand clapping. You’d think the president would be out there, pointing out that most of the deficit crisis was created by recession and Republican tax cuts, costing $4 trillion over a decade; and emphasizing who gets hurt by these new budget cuts.
Public opinion largely sides with the Democrats’ defense of popular social programs. But that support will remain latent unless a national debate is focused on something that only presidential leadership can achieve. As long as the debate is about who will cut more, the definition of responsible budgeting shifts steadily right, and the Tea Party wins.
Maybe Obama is waiting for just the right moment to draw a bright line. Yet political capital increases most when it is spent, not when it is saved for a rainy day.
The president’s reelection campaign slogan is “Are You In?’’ A better question might be: Is Obama In?
Friday, April 8, 2011
The Electoral Paymasters
A Billion Dollars Worth of Free Speech
By ANDREW LEVINE
It's official: Barack Obama will run for President in 2012. Now he can start raising a billion dollars for the campaign, 25% more than in 2008. This time it is looking like there won't even be the pretense of getting the lion's share from small donors hoping for "change." Not enough of them are still gullible; and, in any case, as Obama well knows, you go where the money is. In other words, you sell yourself to plutocrats and corporate "persons." Thanks to decades of bipartisan support for the status quo and flawed constitutional jurisprudence, culminating in the 2010 Citizens' United case, there is, as our politicians tell us (about almost everything), no alternative.
The most pernicious part of this profoundly anti-democratic notion is the view that buying elections is a form of free speech. This misunderstanding is easy enough to dismiss from a philosophical or public policy point of view. But to dispatch the idea from our political scene, it is also necessary to contend with the claim that the right to buy political influence is protected under the First Amendment. If only we could ask the pre-2008 Barack Obama, part-time professor of constitutional law, he would surely show on a dime how flawed that position is. Anybody to the left of the Federalist Society could.
Obama's gift for beseeching plutocrats was evident from the moment he entered national politics, and since assuming office, he has given the plutocrats their money's worth. Toadying up to Wall Street and to profiteers in the health care, energy, and warfare industries is only part of the story. Just by being there, Obama has kept at bay what would otherwise be a tide of liberal opposition to corporate predation; and, though doing nothing of consequence for their benefit – indeed, quite the contrary -- he has helped keep African Americans and other peoples of color quiescent.
In spite of everything, those constituencies are loyal to a fault, and are likely to remain so until too late for the 2012 elections. If blundering into yet another quagmire doesn't shake their faith, what will? Maybe a "bipartisan' move against "entitlements," but don't count on even that. And don't count on the working class and its allies doing for Obama and the national Democratic Party what they did for Wisconsin Democrats; not yet, anyway. Expect instead that trade union bureaucrats will channel working class rage into support for Obama and his ilk. As in the past, organized labor will do yeoman's work for the Democrats, getting in return just what they demand – nothing!
This is why the drama this time is unlikely to register within the bowels of the Lesser Evil party. Under Obama's aegis, Democrats will be too busy divvying up the free speech, and the Democratic base will let them do it.
Republicans will get their share of free speech too. How much depends on the extent to which that bizarre coalition of capitalist patroons, libertarians, "values voters," and the usual fodder of right-wing political movements hang together. The prospect is not hopeless: thanks to the deep incoherence that licenses a degree of overlap among these fundamentally incompatible categories. Think, for example, of those irksome Koch brothers straddling all the camps.
Even so, it remains a mystery how that party survives; how those for whose benefit it exists coexist with the quacks and riff raff they rally to their cause. What is clear is that it would not be possible but for the unseemly greed of the ruling class.
With some exceptions, more often Democratic than Republican, the pillars of American capitalism were never much on noblesse oblige. Their forte was bourgeois pretension. Now even that has lapsed. Our plutocrats hardly care where their free speech lands, so long as the consequence is that their greed is fed. This is a bipartisan sentiment, but it is a particular danger for the GOP inasmuch as that party's establishment is on the verge of losing control of the vehicle through which it has from time immemorial promoted the power and privilege of the titans of America's capitalist system.
Enter the Tea Party – an out of control Frankenstein striking fear in the hearts of Republicans smart enough not to believe the more disabling parts of their "limited government" ideology. If they know how to subdue the monster they created or to keep on wielding it for their purposes, there is no sign of it to date.
This is why there is still no plausible GOP alternative to Obama on the horizon. The eventual nominee will probably be someone acceptable to the party's patroons. But that only makes a full-fledged rebellion within Republican ranks more likely, and a Democratic victory more certain. It might even spark the long overdue end of the Republican Party, and the fulfillment of the Clintonian dream of the Democrats becoming the unchallenged party of the ruling class.
That might seem like a pipe dream today but, only two or three months ago, the popular revolt that suddenly broke out in the (formerly) industrial Midwest and elsewhere seemed far more unlikely. Republican efforts to repeal the twentieth century brought on that remarkable turn of events. The same overreaching could also lead their party to self-destruct.
It was the imminent prospect of Civil War that brought the GOP into being a century and a half ago. Since then, it has looked like the only prospect for becoming free from the duopoly system that ensued would be an impending catastrophe of comparable proportions. As Obama et al play Russian roulette with nuclear power, deep-sea drilling and a host of other precarious energy policies, and with the empire in decline and lashing out, there are, alas, ample prospects for impending catastrophes.
But no matter how awful the status quo is, we can only hope that we somehow stave catastrophe off. We can hope too, not unreasonably, that a non-catastrophic road to a better politics soon comes into being. This will happen if capitalist greed finally does push the Republican Party, a house divided, into a comparatively painless implosion.
That would allow Obama to complete Bill Clinton's dream of turning the party of FDR, now besotted with corporate free speech, into the party of the class whose enmity FDR embraced. It's a chilling thought. But at least it would put perceptions more in line with reality. It might even break the lesser evilist spell that has, for decades, stifled all semblance of progressive change.
But whatever happens on the Republican side, remember that it isn't just money that talks. Workers and their allies can also put free speech to use -- not the Kennedy-Scalia-Thomas-Alito-Roberts kind, which is in increasingly short supply for the bottom 98% plus of the population, but the genuine article. With or without an imploded GOP, bottom up democracy, not bought and paid for government, is our last, best and only hope – not just against Tea Party idiocy, but also against Obama's paymasters and the politicians, Obama included, whom they own.
By ANDREW LEVINE
It's official: Barack Obama will run for President in 2012. Now he can start raising a billion dollars for the campaign, 25% more than in 2008. This time it is looking like there won't even be the pretense of getting the lion's share from small donors hoping for "change." Not enough of them are still gullible; and, in any case, as Obama well knows, you go where the money is. In other words, you sell yourself to plutocrats and corporate "persons." Thanks to decades of bipartisan support for the status quo and flawed constitutional jurisprudence, culminating in the 2010 Citizens' United case, there is, as our politicians tell us (about almost everything), no alternative.
The most pernicious part of this profoundly anti-democratic notion is the view that buying elections is a form of free speech. This misunderstanding is easy enough to dismiss from a philosophical or public policy point of view. But to dispatch the idea from our political scene, it is also necessary to contend with the claim that the right to buy political influence is protected under the First Amendment. If only we could ask the pre-2008 Barack Obama, part-time professor of constitutional law, he would surely show on a dime how flawed that position is. Anybody to the left of the Federalist Society could.
Obama's gift for beseeching plutocrats was evident from the moment he entered national politics, and since assuming office, he has given the plutocrats their money's worth. Toadying up to Wall Street and to profiteers in the health care, energy, and warfare industries is only part of the story. Just by being there, Obama has kept at bay what would otherwise be a tide of liberal opposition to corporate predation; and, though doing nothing of consequence for their benefit – indeed, quite the contrary -- he has helped keep African Americans and other peoples of color quiescent.
In spite of everything, those constituencies are loyal to a fault, and are likely to remain so until too late for the 2012 elections. If blundering into yet another quagmire doesn't shake their faith, what will? Maybe a "bipartisan' move against "entitlements," but don't count on even that. And don't count on the working class and its allies doing for Obama and the national Democratic Party what they did for Wisconsin Democrats; not yet, anyway. Expect instead that trade union bureaucrats will channel working class rage into support for Obama and his ilk. As in the past, organized labor will do yeoman's work for the Democrats, getting in return just what they demand – nothing!
This is why the drama this time is unlikely to register within the bowels of the Lesser Evil party. Under Obama's aegis, Democrats will be too busy divvying up the free speech, and the Democratic base will let them do it.
Republicans will get their share of free speech too. How much depends on the extent to which that bizarre coalition of capitalist patroons, libertarians, "values voters," and the usual fodder of right-wing political movements hang together. The prospect is not hopeless: thanks to the deep incoherence that licenses a degree of overlap among these fundamentally incompatible categories. Think, for example, of those irksome Koch brothers straddling all the camps.
Even so, it remains a mystery how that party survives; how those for whose benefit it exists coexist with the quacks and riff raff they rally to their cause. What is clear is that it would not be possible but for the unseemly greed of the ruling class.
With some exceptions, more often Democratic than Republican, the pillars of American capitalism were never much on noblesse oblige. Their forte was bourgeois pretension. Now even that has lapsed. Our plutocrats hardly care where their free speech lands, so long as the consequence is that their greed is fed. This is a bipartisan sentiment, but it is a particular danger for the GOP inasmuch as that party's establishment is on the verge of losing control of the vehicle through which it has from time immemorial promoted the power and privilege of the titans of America's capitalist system.
Enter the Tea Party – an out of control Frankenstein striking fear in the hearts of Republicans smart enough not to believe the more disabling parts of their "limited government" ideology. If they know how to subdue the monster they created or to keep on wielding it for their purposes, there is no sign of it to date.
This is why there is still no plausible GOP alternative to Obama on the horizon. The eventual nominee will probably be someone acceptable to the party's patroons. But that only makes a full-fledged rebellion within Republican ranks more likely, and a Democratic victory more certain. It might even spark the long overdue end of the Republican Party, and the fulfillment of the Clintonian dream of the Democrats becoming the unchallenged party of the ruling class.
That might seem like a pipe dream today but, only two or three months ago, the popular revolt that suddenly broke out in the (formerly) industrial Midwest and elsewhere seemed far more unlikely. Republican efforts to repeal the twentieth century brought on that remarkable turn of events. The same overreaching could also lead their party to self-destruct.
It was the imminent prospect of Civil War that brought the GOP into being a century and a half ago. Since then, it has looked like the only prospect for becoming free from the duopoly system that ensued would be an impending catastrophe of comparable proportions. As Obama et al play Russian roulette with nuclear power, deep-sea drilling and a host of other precarious energy policies, and with the empire in decline and lashing out, there are, alas, ample prospects for impending catastrophes.
But no matter how awful the status quo is, we can only hope that we somehow stave catastrophe off. We can hope too, not unreasonably, that a non-catastrophic road to a better politics soon comes into being. This will happen if capitalist greed finally does push the Republican Party, a house divided, into a comparatively painless implosion.
That would allow Obama to complete Bill Clinton's dream of turning the party of FDR, now besotted with corporate free speech, into the party of the class whose enmity FDR embraced. It's a chilling thought. But at least it would put perceptions more in line with reality. It might even break the lesser evilist spell that has, for decades, stifled all semblance of progressive change.
But whatever happens on the Republican side, remember that it isn't just money that talks. Workers and their allies can also put free speech to use -- not the Kennedy-Scalia-Thomas-Alito-Roberts kind, which is in increasingly short supply for the bottom 98% plus of the population, but the genuine article. With or without an imploded GOP, bottom up democracy, not bought and paid for government, is our last, best and only hope – not just against Tea Party idiocy, but also against Obama's paymasters and the politicians, Obama included, whom they own.
Targeting the Unemployed
A Matter of Conscience?
By CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI
Michigan led the way when on March 29th Governor Rick Snyder signed a bill that says beginning January 2012 the number of weeks the unemployed will receive benefits will drop from 26 weeks to 20 weeks. It is estimated this will save the state $300 million each year. Since Michigan has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country at more than 10%, a significant number of its citizens will be given the opportunity beginning next year to participate in bringing government spending under control. They will also be benefitting those who might employ them, according to supporters of the legislation, since reducing the unemployment benefits will reduce the unemployment taxes paid by employers. It is a win-win situation although the employers will appreciate it somewhat more than the unemployed. Michigan is not the only state addressing the issue.
Florida boasts an unemployment rate of 11.5% and its House of Representative proposes to not only reduce the number of weeks for which unemployment benefits will be paid from 26 to 20 weeks but to provide that if the unemployment rate falls the number of weeks that benefits are paid also falls. If the rate drops to below 5% members of the below 5% group will only be able to collect unemployment benefits for 12 weeks. It is not clear why those who remain unemployed when the rate drops should pay a price for the good fortune of the 6.5% who are no longer a member of their club. Supporters of the House version say by reducing the number of people receiving unemployment benefits, businesses will do more hiring. The unemployed will eagerly await that outcome. (This proposal is not yet law. The Florida Senate has passed a less restrictive version of reform that neither shortens the number of weeks of payments nor penalizes recipients of unemployment as the rate of unemployment falls. Negotiations between the two chambers will determine how it will end up.) Meanwhile in the mid-West there's the "Show Me" state-Missouri.
Missouri is a conscience driven state. Missouri has an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent. Legislators in that state are more concerned about the national debt than about their unemployed. Missouri legislators have blocked a vote that would have permitted the state to accept federal funds to extend unemployment benefits from 79 weeks to 99 weeks. Jim Lembke is one of the state senators filibustering the legislation. Speaking on behalf of the opponents of taking the money as well as the unemployed who are in the district he represents he said: "This is about sending a message to the federal government from the state of Missouri that enough is enough. The federal government is sending us money they don't have." If it is money the federal government does not have then presumably it is money the unemployed could not have used anyway. (Mr. Lembke also plans to take steps to try to keep the state from accepting $190 million in federal education money, efforts that will earn him the thanks of school children throughout Missouri.) If Mr. Lembke is successful, 10,202 people will immediately lose their benefits and, by the end of this year, another 24,000 people will have lost their benefits. Mr. Lembke, on the other hand, will have helped the federal government save $105 million for which it, if not his unemployed constituents, will be grateful.
Wisconsin has not reduced benefits but has taken steps to reign in costs. The Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau discovered that in the 2009 fiscal year there were more than $9 million in overpayments of unemployment benefit payments of which $222,000 went to 37 prison inmates who though unemployed, are not the sort of unemployed that unemployment payments are designed to help. (The same study showed that there were 33 inmates who received food stamp benefits, a surprising result since one of the benefits of being in prison is that room and board are furnished by the state and food stamps would seem to be unnecessary.) The state agencies that are responsible for having made the payments say that they are taking steps to recover the money and may even pursue criminal charges. One can only wish them success in their efforts. Helping the unemployment fund stay solvent by recovering money from those who collected it fraudulently is far preferable to keeping it solvent by reducing benefits. Just ask the unemployed in Florida, Michigan and Missouri.
By CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI
"When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment results."The unemployed in many states have been given what they, at least, hope is a once in a lifetime opportunity to help the states and federal government solve their budgetary problems, an opportunity that hunger and homelessness may keep them from fully appreciating.
Attributed to Calvin Coolidge
Michigan led the way when on March 29th Governor Rick Snyder signed a bill that says beginning January 2012 the number of weeks the unemployed will receive benefits will drop from 26 weeks to 20 weeks. It is estimated this will save the state $300 million each year. Since Michigan has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country at more than 10%, a significant number of its citizens will be given the opportunity beginning next year to participate in bringing government spending under control. They will also be benefitting those who might employ them, according to supporters of the legislation, since reducing the unemployment benefits will reduce the unemployment taxes paid by employers. It is a win-win situation although the employers will appreciate it somewhat more than the unemployed. Michigan is not the only state addressing the issue.
Florida boasts an unemployment rate of 11.5% and its House of Representative proposes to not only reduce the number of weeks for which unemployment benefits will be paid from 26 to 20 weeks but to provide that if the unemployment rate falls the number of weeks that benefits are paid also falls. If the rate drops to below 5% members of the below 5% group will only be able to collect unemployment benefits for 12 weeks. It is not clear why those who remain unemployed when the rate drops should pay a price for the good fortune of the 6.5% who are no longer a member of their club. Supporters of the House version say by reducing the number of people receiving unemployment benefits, businesses will do more hiring. The unemployed will eagerly await that outcome. (This proposal is not yet law. The Florida Senate has passed a less restrictive version of reform that neither shortens the number of weeks of payments nor penalizes recipients of unemployment as the rate of unemployment falls. Negotiations between the two chambers will determine how it will end up.) Meanwhile in the mid-West there's the "Show Me" state-Missouri.
Missouri is a conscience driven state. Missouri has an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent. Legislators in that state are more concerned about the national debt than about their unemployed. Missouri legislators have blocked a vote that would have permitted the state to accept federal funds to extend unemployment benefits from 79 weeks to 99 weeks. Jim Lembke is one of the state senators filibustering the legislation. Speaking on behalf of the opponents of taking the money as well as the unemployed who are in the district he represents he said: "This is about sending a message to the federal government from the state of Missouri that enough is enough. The federal government is sending us money they don't have." If it is money the federal government does not have then presumably it is money the unemployed could not have used anyway. (Mr. Lembke also plans to take steps to try to keep the state from accepting $190 million in federal education money, efforts that will earn him the thanks of school children throughout Missouri.) If Mr. Lembke is successful, 10,202 people will immediately lose their benefits and, by the end of this year, another 24,000 people will have lost their benefits. Mr. Lembke, on the other hand, will have helped the federal government save $105 million for which it, if not his unemployed constituents, will be grateful.
Wisconsin has not reduced benefits but has taken steps to reign in costs. The Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau discovered that in the 2009 fiscal year there were more than $9 million in overpayments of unemployment benefit payments of which $222,000 went to 37 prison inmates who though unemployed, are not the sort of unemployed that unemployment payments are designed to help. (The same study showed that there were 33 inmates who received food stamp benefits, a surprising result since one of the benefits of being in prison is that room and board are furnished by the state and food stamps would seem to be unnecessary.) The state agencies that are responsible for having made the payments say that they are taking steps to recover the money and may even pursue criminal charges. One can only wish them success in their efforts. Helping the unemployment fund stay solvent by recovering money from those who collected it fraudulently is far preferable to keeping it solvent by reducing benefits. Just ask the unemployed in Florida, Michigan and Missouri.
Why We Don't Let Foxes in the Henhouse
Regulatory Capture
By DAVID MACARAY
Regulatory Capture is defined as the phenomenon where “….a regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. [It] is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce ‘negative externality.’ The agencies are called Captured Agencies.”
It’s common knowledge that tobacco companies once enlisted shady doctors to deny the link between smoking and lung cancer, that corporations hire ex-IRS employees to advise them on how to avoid paying taxes, that coal mine companies have put mining safety regulators on their payrolls to grease the skids, and that ex-congressmen drool at the prospect of becoming top-dollar lobbyists.
Therefore, it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that Wall Street investment firms continue to hire government financial regulators to help them game the system.
And it’s not simply a matter of hiring these ex-regulators to assist in circumventing federal law. As devious and sleazy as that practice has become, what’s even more alarming is the conflict-of-interest charges leveled against regulators accused of lying, falsifying data, and “looking the other way” as a condition of future employment. But again, why would that shock anyone?
The relationship between financial institutions and the agencies established to regulate them has become so ridiculously cozy, so maggoty, that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now regarded as the Oversight Fairy’s notion of an elaborate prank. The list of SEC officials who have left the Commission for highly lucrative jobs in the private sector is long and impressive (Linda Thomsen, Richard Walker, Bob Khuzami, Arthur Levitt, Gary Lynch, et al).
So what’s the remedy? How can we maintain the integrity of the agencies? It can’t simply be a matter of paying higher salaries to these agency people, because corporations will always be able to offer more—just as the drug cartels will never be outbid by the Mexican government. It’s no contest.
What needs to be done is to impose time restraints on changing teams. We need to regulate the regulators. Anyone who wishes to take a regulatory job with a Civil Service agency (which—let’s not forget—offers decent wages and benefits) must not be allowed to work for a private company within that same industry for a period of, say, seven years after leaving.
If that seems too harsh, or if it violates one’s finely tuned libertarian sensibilities, then so be it. If you can’t handle these restrictions going in, don’t work for the government. The Peace Corps had a rule where ex-volunteers couldn’t engage in military intelligence for a period of five years following our leaving the host country. It was part of the Peace Corps charter.
When you take a federal job, you are, in principle, promising to serve the citizens of the United States. These jobs should not be used as a springboard to higher paying positions within the industry you’re regulating, nor should they result in the very citizens you were empowered to serve being taken advantage of by your change of allegiance. It’s a covenant that any enlightened fourth-grader would understand.
By DAVID MACARAY
"The Commission is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for government supervision of the railroads, while, at the same time, that supervision is almost entirely nominal.” [italics added]
—Richard Olney, U.S. Attorney General, referring to the ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission), circa 1889.
"If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don't you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don't you see that they must capture the government in order not to be restrained too much by it? Must capture the government? They have already captured it.” [italics added]
—Woodrow Wilson, 1913
Regulatory Capture is defined as the phenomenon where “….a regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. [It] is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce ‘negative externality.’ The agencies are called Captured Agencies.”
It’s common knowledge that tobacco companies once enlisted shady doctors to deny the link between smoking and lung cancer, that corporations hire ex-IRS employees to advise them on how to avoid paying taxes, that coal mine companies have put mining safety regulators on their payrolls to grease the skids, and that ex-congressmen drool at the prospect of becoming top-dollar lobbyists.
Therefore, it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that Wall Street investment firms continue to hire government financial regulators to help them game the system.
And it’s not simply a matter of hiring these ex-regulators to assist in circumventing federal law. As devious and sleazy as that practice has become, what’s even more alarming is the conflict-of-interest charges leveled against regulators accused of lying, falsifying data, and “looking the other way” as a condition of future employment. But again, why would that shock anyone?
The relationship between financial institutions and the agencies established to regulate them has become so ridiculously cozy, so maggoty, that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now regarded as the Oversight Fairy’s notion of an elaborate prank. The list of SEC officials who have left the Commission for highly lucrative jobs in the private sector is long and impressive (Linda Thomsen, Richard Walker, Bob Khuzami, Arthur Levitt, Gary Lynch, et al).
So what’s the remedy? How can we maintain the integrity of the agencies? It can’t simply be a matter of paying higher salaries to these agency people, because corporations will always be able to offer more—just as the drug cartels will never be outbid by the Mexican government. It’s no contest.
What needs to be done is to impose time restraints on changing teams. We need to regulate the regulators. Anyone who wishes to take a regulatory job with a Civil Service agency (which—let’s not forget—offers decent wages and benefits) must not be allowed to work for a private company within that same industry for a period of, say, seven years after leaving.
If that seems too harsh, or if it violates one’s finely tuned libertarian sensibilities, then so be it. If you can’t handle these restrictions going in, don’t work for the government. The Peace Corps had a rule where ex-volunteers couldn’t engage in military intelligence for a period of five years following our leaving the host country. It was part of the Peace Corps charter.
When you take a federal job, you are, in principle, promising to serve the citizens of the United States. These jobs should not be used as a springboard to higher paying positions within the industry you’re regulating, nor should they result in the very citizens you were empowered to serve being taken advantage of by your change of allegiance. It’s a covenant that any enlightened fourth-grader would understand.
The Real Story on the Latest Jobs Report
Hold the Applause
By DEAN BAKER
When the Labor Department announced that the U.S. economy had created 216,000 jobs in March, it set off a round of celebrations throughout Washington policy circles. The word in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major news outlets was that the economy was back on course; we were on the right path.
Those who know arithmetic were a bit more skeptical. If the economy sustained March's rate of job it will be more than seven years before we get back to normal rates of unemployment.
Furthermore, some of this growth likely reflected a bounce back from weaker growth the prior two months. The average rate of job growth over the last three months has been just 160,000. At that pace we won't get back to normal rates of unemployment until after 2022. That's a long time to make ordinary workers suffer because the folks who run the economy are not very good at their job.
In addition to the job growth numbers, the March data also showed that the unemployment rate slipped down by another 0.1 percentage point. It now stands at 8.8 percent, almost a full percentage point below its year-ago level of 9.7 percent. This too was treated as cause for celebration.
While that may sound like progress, a more careful look at the data makes this number less impressive. The percentage of the population that is employed has actually fallen by 0.1 percentage point over the last year.
In order to be counted as unemployed you have to say that you are looking for work. The unemployment rate did not fall because the unemployed had found jobs; rather the unemployment rate fell because people have given up looking for work. Only in Washington would this be hailed as good news.
Remarkably, as the mixed basket of economic news in the March employment report was being celebrated, a major piece of unambiguously bad news was almost completely ignored. The Commerce Department released data on construction spending for February.
A decline of 1.4 percent in spending in February, coupled with sharp downward revisions to the data for the prior two months, left nominal spending in February 6.2 percent below its November level. Construction is virtually certain to be a major drag on growth in the first quarter. The big culprit this time is the non-residential sector, as a result of the bursting of the bubble in this sector, coupled with a fading out of stimulus spending on government projects.
Other recent economic news also suggests that the economy's momentum is more likely to slow than accelerate in the months ahead. Nominal Wage growth has been virtually flat the last two months. With food and gas prices rising sharply, this means that real wages are falling, leaving workers with less money to spend.
House prices are again falling rapidly, having declined at the rate of 1.0 percent a month for the last three months. If this pace of decline continues, by the end of the year homeowners will have lost more than $2 trillion in equity compared with the peak hit in the summer of 2010. This loss of housing wealth implies a reduction in annual consumption of $120 billion.
There was also a big jump in the trade deficit reported for January. While the celebrants of recent trade pacts were excited by the growth in exports, people who know economics recognize that the larger increase in imports will be another drag on economic growth. With most of the country's major trading partners experiencing weak growth, there is little prospect for an improvement in the trade deficit any time soon.
And, investment in equipment and software also appears to be weakening. New orders for capital goods (excluding volatile aircraft orders) in February were down 6.8 percent from the levels reported in December. In addition, the government cutbacks, threatened at the federal level and going into place at the state and local level, will be a further source of drag on the economy.
In short, there is little basis for last Friday's celebrations about the economy. The February jobs report would have been mediocre if the economy were already at normal rates of unemployment. It is pathetic in the context of a badly depressed economy. We should be seeing jobs growth at 2-3 times this rate. However, the real bad news is that it is more likely to get worse than better. Yet again, the economic press is missing the story.
By DEAN BAKER
When the Labor Department announced that the U.S. economy had created 216,000 jobs in March, it set off a round of celebrations throughout Washington policy circles. The word in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major news outlets was that the economy was back on course; we were on the right path.
Those who know arithmetic were a bit more skeptical. If the economy sustained March's rate of job it will be more than seven years before we get back to normal rates of unemployment.
Furthermore, some of this growth likely reflected a bounce back from weaker growth the prior two months. The average rate of job growth over the last three months has been just 160,000. At that pace we won't get back to normal rates of unemployment until after 2022. That's a long time to make ordinary workers suffer because the folks who run the economy are not very good at their job.
In addition to the job growth numbers, the March data also showed that the unemployment rate slipped down by another 0.1 percentage point. It now stands at 8.8 percent, almost a full percentage point below its year-ago level of 9.7 percent. This too was treated as cause for celebration.
While that may sound like progress, a more careful look at the data makes this number less impressive. The percentage of the population that is employed has actually fallen by 0.1 percentage point over the last year.
In order to be counted as unemployed you have to say that you are looking for work. The unemployment rate did not fall because the unemployed had found jobs; rather the unemployment rate fell because people have given up looking for work. Only in Washington would this be hailed as good news.
Remarkably, as the mixed basket of economic news in the March employment report was being celebrated, a major piece of unambiguously bad news was almost completely ignored. The Commerce Department released data on construction spending for February.
A decline of 1.4 percent in spending in February, coupled with sharp downward revisions to the data for the prior two months, left nominal spending in February 6.2 percent below its November level. Construction is virtually certain to be a major drag on growth in the first quarter. The big culprit this time is the non-residential sector, as a result of the bursting of the bubble in this sector, coupled with a fading out of stimulus spending on government projects.
Other recent economic news also suggests that the economy's momentum is more likely to slow than accelerate in the months ahead. Nominal Wage growth has been virtually flat the last two months. With food and gas prices rising sharply, this means that real wages are falling, leaving workers with less money to spend.
House prices are again falling rapidly, having declined at the rate of 1.0 percent a month for the last three months. If this pace of decline continues, by the end of the year homeowners will have lost more than $2 trillion in equity compared with the peak hit in the summer of 2010. This loss of housing wealth implies a reduction in annual consumption of $120 billion.
There was also a big jump in the trade deficit reported for January. While the celebrants of recent trade pacts were excited by the growth in exports, people who know economics recognize that the larger increase in imports will be another drag on economic growth. With most of the country's major trading partners experiencing weak growth, there is little prospect for an improvement in the trade deficit any time soon.
And, investment in equipment and software also appears to be weakening. New orders for capital goods (excluding volatile aircraft orders) in February were down 6.8 percent from the levels reported in December. In addition, the government cutbacks, threatened at the federal level and going into place at the state and local level, will be a further source of drag on the economy.
In short, there is little basis for last Friday's celebrations about the economy. The February jobs report would have been mediocre if the economy were already at normal rates of unemployment. It is pathetic in the context of a badly depressed economy. We should be seeing jobs growth at 2-3 times this rate. However, the real bad news is that it is more likely to get worse than better. Yet again, the economic press is missing the story.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
The Peasants Need Pitchforks
Wednesday, April 6, 2011 by TruthDig.com
by Robert Scheer
In an article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations:
Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.
It is a reality further obscured by the academic elite, led by economists who receive enormous payoffs from Wall Street in speaking and consulting fees, and their less privileged university colleagues who are so often dependent upon wealthy sponsors for their research funding.
Then there are the media, which are indistinguishable parts of the corporate-owned culture and which with rare exception pretend that we are all in the same lifeboat while they fawn in their coverage of those who bilk us and also dispense fat fees to top pundits. Complementing all that is the dark distraction of the faux populists, led by tea party demagogues, who blame unions and immigrants for the crimes of Wall Street hustlers.
My book on the banking meltdown--The Great American Stickup--begins with the following words:
The lobbyists are deliberately bipartisan in their bribery, and the authors of our demise are equally marked as Democrats and Republicans. Ronald Reagan first effectively sang the siren song of ending government’s role in corporate crime prevention, but it was Democrat Bill Clinton who accomplished much of that goal. It is the enduring conceit of the top Democratic leaders that they are valiantly holding back the forces of evil when they actually have continuously been complicit.
The veterans of the Clinton years, so prominent in the Obama administration, still deny their role in the disaster of the last 25 years. Yet the sad tale of income inequality that Stiglitz laments is as much a result of their policies as those of their Republican rivals. In one of the best studies of this growing gap in income, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during Clinton’s tenure in the White House the income of the top 1 percent increased by 10.1 percent per year, while that of the other 99 percent of Americans increased by only 2.4 percent a year. Thanks to President Clinton’s deregulation and the save-the-rich policies of George W. Bush, the situation deteriorated further from 2002 to 2006, a period in which the top 1 percent increased its income 11 percent annually while the rest of Americans had a truly paltry gain of 1 percent per year.
And that was before the meltdown that wiped out the jobs and home values of so many tens of millions of American families. “The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles,” Stiglitz concludes, “but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”
by Robert Scheer
"A working class hero is something to beThe delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”
John Lennon, Working Class Hero
In an article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations:
“Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret."That is the harsh reality obscured by the media’s focus on celebrity gossip, sports rivalries and lotteries, situations in which the average person can pretend that he or she is plugged into the winning side. The illusion of personal power substitutes consumer sovereignty—which smartphone to purchase—for real power over the decisions that affect our lives. Even though most Americans accept that the political game is rigged, we have long assumed that the choices we make in the economic sphere as to career and home are matters that respond to our wisdom and will. But the banking tsunami that wiped out so many jobs and so much homeownership has demonstrated that most Americans have no real control over any of that, and while they suffer, the corporate rich reward themselves in direct proportion to the amount of suffering they have caused.
Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.
It is a reality further obscured by the academic elite, led by economists who receive enormous payoffs from Wall Street in speaking and consulting fees, and their less privileged university colleagues who are so often dependent upon wealthy sponsors for their research funding.
Then there are the media, which are indistinguishable parts of the corporate-owned culture and which with rare exception pretend that we are all in the same lifeboat while they fawn in their coverage of those who bilk us and also dispense fat fees to top pundits. Complementing all that is the dark distraction of the faux populists, led by tea party demagogues, who blame unions and immigrants for the crimes of Wall Street hustlers.
My book on the banking meltdown--The Great American Stickup--begins with the following words:
“They did it. Yes, there is a ‘they’: the captains of finance, their lobbyists, and allies among leading politicians of both parties, who together destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning splendidly. …”They got to rewrite the laws to enable their massive greed over everything from the tax codes to the sale of toxic derivatives over the past quarter century, smashing the American middle class and with it the nation’s experiment in democracy.
The lobbyists are deliberately bipartisan in their bribery, and the authors of our demise are equally marked as Democrats and Republicans. Ronald Reagan first effectively sang the siren song of ending government’s role in corporate crime prevention, but it was Democrat Bill Clinton who accomplished much of that goal. It is the enduring conceit of the top Democratic leaders that they are valiantly holding back the forces of evil when they actually have continuously been complicit.
The veterans of the Clinton years, so prominent in the Obama administration, still deny their role in the disaster of the last 25 years. Yet the sad tale of income inequality that Stiglitz laments is as much a result of their policies as those of their Republican rivals. In one of the best studies of this growing gap in income, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during Clinton’s tenure in the White House the income of the top 1 percent increased by 10.1 percent per year, while that of the other 99 percent of Americans increased by only 2.4 percent a year. Thanks to President Clinton’s deregulation and the save-the-rich policies of George W. Bush, the situation deteriorated further from 2002 to 2006, a period in which the top 1 percent increased its income 11 percent annually while the rest of Americans had a truly paltry gain of 1 percent per year.
And that was before the meltdown that wiped out the jobs and home values of so many tens of millions of American families. “The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles,” Stiglitz concludes, “but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”
Greed is Not a Virtue
Wednesday, April 6, 2011 by YES! Magazine
Profit-centered market fundamentalism has become a national religion.
by David Korten
We humans are living out an epic morality play. For millennia humanity’s most celebrated spiritual teachers have taught that society works best and we all enjoy our greatest joy and fulfillment when we share, cooperate, and are honest in our dealings with one another.
But for the past few decades, this truth has been aggressively challenged by a faith called market fundamentalism—an immoral and counter-factual economic ideology that has assumed the status of a modern state religion. Its believers worship the God of money. Stock exchanges and global banks are their temples. They proclaim that everyone does best when we each seek to maximize our individual financial gain without regard to the consequences for others.
In the eyes of a market fundamentalist, to sacrifice profit for some presumed social or environmental good is immoral. The result is a public culture that proclaims greed is a virtue and sharing is a sin.
Modern faith
Having established control of the institutions of the economy, media, education, government, and even religion, market fundamentalists initiated a global social experiment to test their theory. The results are now in.
The prophets of the older faith traditions were right. Our common future depends on rediscovering their truth and redefining our public culture and governing institutions accordingly.
The following are some of the more visible elements of Wall Street’s global campaign of moral perversion.
Step back to take in the big picture, and it turns out Wall Street market fundamentalists have proclaimed the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth to be virtues. In turn they have proclaimed the seven life-serving virtues of humility, sharing, love, compassion, self-control, moderation, and passion to be sins against the market.
There is a widespread sense that with Wall Street’s apparent recovery, the window of opportunity for serious structural change has passed. Such a judgment, however, is premature. Far from closing, the window of opportunity for serious change continues to widen as public awareness of Wall Street corruption grows and true and appropriate moral outrage builds.
Most psychologically healthy adults recognize in their heart of hearts the moral perversion of the old economy, but may fear to speak up because so many experts—including even some religious leaders—continuously assure us in so many words that greed is good, even that God wants us to be financially rich and financial wealth is a mark of God’s favor.
If all who share a mature moral consciousness find the courage to speak the simple truth that greed is driving us to collective self-destruction and cooperation is essential to our common salvation, we can put the perversion behind us and secure the future of our children.
Profit-centered market fundamentalism has become a national religion.
by David Korten
We humans are living out an epic morality play. For millennia humanity’s most celebrated spiritual teachers have taught that society works best and we all enjoy our greatest joy and fulfillment when we share, cooperate, and are honest in our dealings with one another.
But for the past few decades, this truth has been aggressively challenged by a faith called market fundamentalism—an immoral and counter-factual economic ideology that has assumed the status of a modern state religion. Its believers worship the God of money. Stock exchanges and global banks are their temples. They proclaim that everyone does best when we each seek to maximize our individual financial gain without regard to the consequences for others.
In the eyes of a market fundamentalist, to sacrifice profit for some presumed social or environmental good is immoral. The result is a public culture that proclaims greed is a virtue and sharing is a sin.
Modern faith
Having established control of the institutions of the economy, media, education, government, and even religion, market fundamentalists initiated a global social experiment to test their theory. The results are now in.
The prophets of the older faith traditions were right. Our common future depends on rediscovering their truth and redefining our public culture and governing institutions accordingly.
The following are some of the more visible elements of Wall Street’s global campaign of moral perversion.
By capitalism’s perverse moral logic, if a person sells toxic assets by knowingly misrepresenting them as sound, the fault lies not with the misrepresentation of the seller, but rather with the lack of due diligence on the part of the overly trusting borrower. When the assets prove worthless and threaten both the solvency of both the seller and the borrower, the logic says the party responsible for the misrepresentation has a moral obligation to demand redress from the government, “Buy my toxic assets at face value and make me whole so that I return to my trade in toxic assets, or I will be forced to stop lending and crash the economy.”
- It uses control of media outlets, advertising, and politicians to shape and spread a global culture of individualistic greed, material self-indulgence, ruthless competition, and moral irresponsibility.
- Through the pursuit and celebration of financial gain at any cost, it provides role models for immoral behavior.
- It undermines democracy and the legitimacy of government by buying politicians to do its bidding.
- It uses student loan programs to get the best and brightest youth mired in debts they can repay only by selling themselves to jobs that serve Wall Street interests.
- It buys up and monopolizes control of the world’s land and water resources in anticipation of extracting monopoly profits by charging what the market will bear as scarcity increases.
- It uses its financial power and creative accounting skills to manipulate markets and obscure market signals, as when helping governments hide their debt or helping corporate CEOs hide their insider bets against the future of their own companies.
- It buys the deeply discounted debt obligations of hapless underwater homeowners and countries on the open market and then demands full value payment from governments or philanthropists who step in to lend a helping hand to the afflicted.
- It puts in place global rules requiring that if a government introduces regulations that prevent a foreign corporation from harming or killing people with its toxic products or discharges, the country’s government must compensate the corporation for the profits it estimates it will lose.
Step back to take in the big picture, and it turns out Wall Street market fundamentalists have proclaimed the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth to be virtues. In turn they have proclaimed the seven life-serving virtues of humility, sharing, love, compassion, self-control, moderation, and passion to be sins against the market.
There is a widespread sense that with Wall Street’s apparent recovery, the window of opportunity for serious structural change has passed. Such a judgment, however, is premature. Far from closing, the window of opportunity for serious change continues to widen as public awareness of Wall Street corruption grows and true and appropriate moral outrage builds.
Most psychologically healthy adults recognize in their heart of hearts the moral perversion of the old economy, but may fear to speak up because so many experts—including even some religious leaders—continuously assure us in so many words that greed is good, even that God wants us to be financially rich and financial wealth is a mark of God’s favor.
If all who share a mature moral consciousness find the courage to speak the simple truth that greed is driving us to collective self-destruction and cooperation is essential to our common salvation, we can put the perversion behind us and secure the future of our children.
Spiderlegs & BIG CITY GANG BANG Productions charting again
Spiderlegs has hit #2 on the Shoegazer chart, and #29 on the Indie charts on the Australian Digital Music Charts.
Likewise, BIG CITY GANG BANG Productions has hit #4 on the industrial charts, #11 on the experimental electronica charts, and #53 on the dance/electronic charts on the same site.
And with nothing new released since summer 2010...;)
Likewise, BIG CITY GANG BANG Productions has hit #4 on the industrial charts, #11 on the experimental electronica charts, and #53 on the dance/electronic charts on the same site.
And with nothing new released since summer 2010...;)
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
President Obama’s broken campaign promises
By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
President Barack Obama came to office on a tide of voters eager to see a change in more than just the White House's occupant. Two years into his presidency -- and one day after he launched his 2012 reelection campaign -- and even some of his most ardent supporters are having trouble coming to terms with the answer to Sarah Palin's 2010 question: "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out?"
Polls show that less than half the country believes President Obama deserves reelection, with disaffected liberals now a fast growing demographic.
Even though Obama clearly leads all of the likely Republican front-runners at this point, the deep dissatisfaction brewing within his core constituency could make the president, and his whole party, uniquely vulnerable in next year's elections.
Below are five of the biggest campaign pledges Obama failed to keep -- for which he'll likely have to answer before election day 2012.
Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
President Barack Obama came to office on a tide of voters eager to see a change in more than just the White House's occupant. Two years into his presidency -- and one day after he launched his 2012 reelection campaign -- and even some of his most ardent supporters are having trouble coming to terms with the answer to Sarah Palin's 2010 question: "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out?"
Polls show that less than half the country believes President Obama deserves reelection, with disaffected liberals now a fast growing demographic.
Even though Obama clearly leads all of the likely Republican front-runners at this point, the deep dissatisfaction brewing within his core constituency could make the president, and his whole party, uniquely vulnerable in next year's elections.
Below are five of the biggest campaign pledges Obama failed to keep -- for which he'll likely have to answer before election day 2012.
1. Health care for all
If you're an American making less than $30,000 a year, chances are you still have trouble seeing a doctor, despite the passage of President Obama's health care reform plan. In 2007, then-Senator Obama said he wanted to make sure no American is without access to vital medical attention and proposed using revenues from the soon-to-expire Bush tax cuts to fund it. When the campaign laid out their specific plans in 2008, they included a "public option" that would be paid for by the public at large and made available to anyone who could not obtain coverage through their employer or other public program.
Ultimately, the debate in Washington became so heated and rife with disinformation that the administration and its allies in Congress agreed to forgo the public option, using it as a bargaining chip to ensure other proposals, like ending the "pre-existing condition" exclusion in private insurance policies, were passed in the final bill. They also gave in to Republican demands and extended the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, promising to take on the issue again in 2012. In spite of the modest legislative victory of actually getting health reform passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that even after all the elements take effect in 2014, over 22 million Americans will still lack access to basic health services.
2. Close Guantanamo
As a symbol of everything that liberals thought to be wrong with the Bush-era, closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba should have been an easy target for the new and popular president and his Democratic super-majority in Congress -- and, in fact, then-candidate Obama promised to do just that. But as he soon found out, strategic and political calculations have made it almost impossible to shuck.
Today, Obama has turned away from his promise to close the facility and embraced the controversial terror war symbol, ordering the resumption of military tribunals and even moving the accused 9/11 plotters' trial from a civilian court in New York City to the secret military court at Guantanamo.
3. Defend labor rights
"Understand this," Obama said during a campaign rally in 2007. "If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I will put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America." (Watch.)
Despite efforts by state-level Republicans in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Florida and Indiana to curtail collective bargaining rights, the President has yet to offer support to a single protest or picket line.
4. Reform the Patriot Act
Contrary to popular belief, Obama has never actually argued for a repeal of the Bush administration's sweeping, post-9/11 security initiatives, which were passed with a mandatory "sunset" clause to overrule the concerns of civil libertarians at the time. Instead, Obama has consistently said he favors enhanced judicial oversight and a pullback from some warrantless searches -- like the provisions that allow the FBI to access library records without a warrant.
But every time the emergency laws have been due to expire, President Obama has pushed to extend them without any reforms. Most recently, the administration sought an extension of the Patriot Act that was even longer than the one Republicans wanted. They gave it to him and continued the sweeping spy powers through 2013, ensuring that the next extension doesn't become an election year issue.
5. End the wars
Even as a candidate, Obama maintained that Afghanistan should be "the focus" of Bush's terror war, and he pledged to make it so. But the president was also swept into power on a wave of anti-war fervor behind his calls to end the occupation of Iraq. Iraq has calmed down quite a bit as U.S. troops steadily stream out of the country, but Afghanistan is more violent than ever amid Obama's own "surge."
Even though the president promised his Afghan occupation would conclude in July 2011, military officials have admitted that sometime in 2014 is more likely. Elsewhere, American forces are dropping more bombs on more countries today than at any point during the Bush administration, with continued occupation forces in two massive countries even as they stage aerial bombardments of Pakistan, Libya and Yemen.
EPA Plan to Raise Radiation Exposure Limits Sparks Internal Debate
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by Facing South
by Sue Sturgis
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering dramatically increasing the allowable level of radioactive contamination in water, food and soil after radiological incidents such as spills or "dirty bomb" attacks.
The radioactive Iodine-131 detected in milk samples in California and Washington state were 5,000 times below levels of concern. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering dramatically increasing the allowable level of radioactive contamination in water, food and soil after radiological incidents such as spills or "dirty bomb" attacks. (AP) The move preceded the nuclear disaster now unfolding in Japan in the wake of last month's devastating earthquake and tsunami. Documents released today by the whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility show the plan has sparked concerns within EPA.
The agency's Office of Radiation and Indoor Air (ORIA) has prepared an update of the 1992 "Protective Action Guides" for radiation exposure. Other EPA divisions have raised concerns about how much the new guidelines would raise allowable exposures.
As Charles Openchowski of EPA's Office of General Counsel wrote in a January 2009 e-mail to ORIA:
"This critical debate is taking place entirely behind closed doors because this plan is 'guidance' and does not require public notice as a regulation would," said PEER Counsel Christine Erickson.
PEER sent EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson a letter today calling for a more open and broader examination of the proposed radiation guidance.
A comprehensive 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences found there is no safe dose of low-level radiation, with no threshold of exposure below which radiation can be shown to be harmless.
"The health risks -- particularly the development of solid cancers in organs -- rise proportionally with exposure," said epidemiologist Richard R. Monson, chair of the NAS committee that issued the report and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "At low doses of radiation, the risk of inducing solid cancers is very small. As the overall lifetime exposure increases, so does the risk."
by Sue Sturgis
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering dramatically increasing the allowable level of radioactive contamination in water, food and soil after radiological incidents such as spills or "dirty bomb" attacks.
The radioactive Iodine-131 detected in milk samples in California and Washington state were 5,000 times below levels of concern. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering dramatically increasing the allowable level of radioactive contamination in water, food and soil after radiological incidents such as spills or "dirty bomb" attacks. (AP) The move preceded the nuclear disaster now unfolding in Japan in the wake of last month's devastating earthquake and tsunami. Documents released today by the whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility show the plan has sparked concerns within EPA.
The agency's Office of Radiation and Indoor Air (ORIA) has prepared an update of the 1992 "Protective Action Guides" for radiation exposure. Other EPA divisions have raised concerns about how much the new guidelines would raise allowable exposures.
As Charles Openchowski of EPA's Office of General Counsel wrote in a January 2009 e-mail to ORIA:
"[T]his guidance would allow cleanup levels that exceed MCLs [Maximum Contamination Limits under the Safe Drinking Water Act] by a factor of 100, 1000, and in two instances 7 million and there is nothing to prevent those levels from being the final cleanup achieved (i.e., it's not confined to immediate response of emergency phase)."Other EPA officials have raised concerns that drinking water containing radioactive contamination at the proposed limits would result in acute health effects such as vomiting and fever. PEER obtained the internal EPA e-mails after filing a lawsuit last fall under the Freedom of Information Act. It is still waiting for the agency to turn over thousands more communications.
"This critical debate is taking place entirely behind closed doors because this plan is 'guidance' and does not require public notice as a regulation would," said PEER Counsel Christine Erickson.
PEER sent EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson a letter today calling for a more open and broader examination of the proposed radiation guidance.
A comprehensive 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences found there is no safe dose of low-level radiation, with no threshold of exposure below which radiation can be shown to be harmless.
"The health risks -- particularly the development of solid cancers in organs -- rise proportionally with exposure," said epidemiologist Richard R. Monson, chair of the NAS committee that issued the report and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "At low doses of radiation, the risk of inducing solid cancers is very small. As the overall lifetime exposure increases, so does the risk."
The Sad Defeat of Our Constitution
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by The Huffington Post
by Kristen Breitweiser
Today I was given two hours of "advance notice" regarding DOJ's decision to not prosecute the remaining alleged 9/11 conspirators in an open court of law. According to DOJ's statement, the remaining individuals will be sent to military tribunals.
I recognize that there are many, many other things for Americans to be upset with today, but I hope everyone can take a second to contemplate this decision and recognize what it says about President Obama, the Department of Justice, and the United States.
As for the Department of Justice, it shows their inability to prosecute individuals who are responsible for the death of 3,000 people on the morning of 9/11. Apparently our Constitution and judicial system -- two of the very cornerstones that make America so great and used to set such a shining example to the rest of the world -- are not adequately set up to respond to or deal with the aftermath of terrorism. To me, this is a startling and dismal acknowledgment that perhaps Osama Bin Laden did, in fact, win on the morning of 9/11. And chillingly, I wonder whether it wasn't just the steel towers that were brought down and incinerated on 9/11, but the yellowed pages of our U.S. Constitution, as well.
And what does it say about the solemn capabilities of our Department of Justice if it is left to "subcontract out" its duties and responsibilities to the Department of Defense? We should all think about that scary notion for a bit. But, perhaps more disturbingly recognize that it is not occurring under the tutelage of Bush and Cheney, rather it is coming at the hands of Obama.
At least when President Bush was in office, he was candid about his feelings regarding the alleged 9/11 conspirators in our custody. He didn't care about them. He allowed them to be tortured. He was fine letting them rot in the heat of Guantanamo for all of eternity. They were less than human to him and he certainly was never going to afford them the benefits of our U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions. That was President Bush. Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, you, at least, knew where he stood. And you could, like it or not, rely on his word.
For the past two years, it's been President Obama in the Oval Office. Quite early on in his presidency, Obama invited the 9/11 families to the White House to discuss 9/11-related issues. During this meeting in Feb '09 the topic of closing Guantanamo and the use of Article 3 courts to prosecute the remaining alleged 9/11 conspirators was discussed. Many of us were incredibly relieved to learn that as a matter of course President Obama was going to shut down Guantanamo and support the open prosecution of the alleged 9/11 conspirators. He gave us -- the various widows and children at the meeting -- his golden word. He shook our hands. He smiled broadly. He posed for pictures. (In fact, several weeks later many of the widows even received hand signed courtesy copies of these photos from Obama -- a nice touch. I did not receive such a photo.)
It's been almost ten years now since my husband was killed. My daughter has gone from a 2-year-old to a 12-year-old. Our country has started two -- and now maybe three -- pointless, misguided, costly wars. And if it wasn't already difficult enough to accept that Osama Bin Laden will probably never be caught or held accountable, now I have to swallow the fact that I will never see constitutional justice for the handful of individuals we actually hold in custody. In short, justice in a court of law for the murder of my husband and 3,000 others will never come.
I suppose in life timing is everything. To me, as a lawyer and a 9/11 widow, DOJ's announcement today acknowledges the sad defeat of our U.S. Constitution when it comes to 9/11. How truly tragic in my eyes. And you would think that a man who was once a constitutional law professor might feel the same way. Yet, not so much for President Barack Obama who has chosen this great day to announce his billion-dollar campaign for re-election. His slogan asking us to "join in" by writing him a check.
First, I've never been much of an "in"-sider. Second, I truly wonder how you can trust a leader who carries no compunction to keep his promises or his word -- whether those words and promises were made in support of gay rights, to not start or perpetuate illegal/useless/costly military campaigns (or wars), in support of environmental causes even to the detriment of big business, to put an immediate end to torture and unlawful detainment, to rein in the bloat and greed of Wall Street, to oppose gun control, or to correct the broad overreach of a previous administration.
But perhaps most pointedly, if you can't trust what a man says to a group of widows and children, then what words and promises of his can you trust?
So President Obama, am I IN? Will you be receiving my check?
Hell no.
by Kristen Breitweiser
Today I was given two hours of "advance notice" regarding DOJ's decision to not prosecute the remaining alleged 9/11 conspirators in an open court of law. According to DOJ's statement, the remaining individuals will be sent to military tribunals.
I recognize that there are many, many other things for Americans to be upset with today, but I hope everyone can take a second to contemplate this decision and recognize what it says about President Obama, the Department of Justice, and the United States.
As for the Department of Justice, it shows their inability to prosecute individuals who are responsible for the death of 3,000 people on the morning of 9/11. Apparently our Constitution and judicial system -- two of the very cornerstones that make America so great and used to set such a shining example to the rest of the world -- are not adequately set up to respond to or deal with the aftermath of terrorism. To me, this is a startling and dismal acknowledgment that perhaps Osama Bin Laden did, in fact, win on the morning of 9/11. And chillingly, I wonder whether it wasn't just the steel towers that were brought down and incinerated on 9/11, but the yellowed pages of our U.S. Constitution, as well.
And what does it say about the solemn capabilities of our Department of Justice if it is left to "subcontract out" its duties and responsibilities to the Department of Defense? We should all think about that scary notion for a bit. But, perhaps more disturbingly recognize that it is not occurring under the tutelage of Bush and Cheney, rather it is coming at the hands of Obama.
At least when President Bush was in office, he was candid about his feelings regarding the alleged 9/11 conspirators in our custody. He didn't care about them. He allowed them to be tortured. He was fine letting them rot in the heat of Guantanamo for all of eternity. They were less than human to him and he certainly was never going to afford them the benefits of our U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions. That was President Bush. Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, you, at least, knew where he stood. And you could, like it or not, rely on his word.
For the past two years, it's been President Obama in the Oval Office. Quite early on in his presidency, Obama invited the 9/11 families to the White House to discuss 9/11-related issues. During this meeting in Feb '09 the topic of closing Guantanamo and the use of Article 3 courts to prosecute the remaining alleged 9/11 conspirators was discussed. Many of us were incredibly relieved to learn that as a matter of course President Obama was going to shut down Guantanamo and support the open prosecution of the alleged 9/11 conspirators. He gave us -- the various widows and children at the meeting -- his golden word. He shook our hands. He smiled broadly. He posed for pictures. (In fact, several weeks later many of the widows even received hand signed courtesy copies of these photos from Obama -- a nice touch. I did not receive such a photo.)
It's been almost ten years now since my husband was killed. My daughter has gone from a 2-year-old to a 12-year-old. Our country has started two -- and now maybe three -- pointless, misguided, costly wars. And if it wasn't already difficult enough to accept that Osama Bin Laden will probably never be caught or held accountable, now I have to swallow the fact that I will never see constitutional justice for the handful of individuals we actually hold in custody. In short, justice in a court of law for the murder of my husband and 3,000 others will never come.
I suppose in life timing is everything. To me, as a lawyer and a 9/11 widow, DOJ's announcement today acknowledges the sad defeat of our U.S. Constitution when it comes to 9/11. How truly tragic in my eyes. And you would think that a man who was once a constitutional law professor might feel the same way. Yet, not so much for President Barack Obama who has chosen this great day to announce his billion-dollar campaign for re-election. His slogan asking us to "join in" by writing him a check.
First, I've never been much of an "in"-sider. Second, I truly wonder how you can trust a leader who carries no compunction to keep his promises or his word -- whether those words and promises were made in support of gay rights, to not start or perpetuate illegal/useless/costly military campaigns (or wars), in support of environmental causes even to the detriment of big business, to put an immediate end to torture and unlawful detainment, to rein in the bloat and greed of Wall Street, to oppose gun control, or to correct the broad overreach of a previous administration.
But perhaps most pointedly, if you can't trust what a man says to a group of widows and children, then what words and promises of his can you trust?
So President Obama, am I IN? Will you be receiving my check?
Hell no.
Paul Ryan’s Plan, the Coming Shutdown, and What’s Really at Stake
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by RobertReich.org
by Robert Reich
I was in Washington in 1995 when the government closed because of a budget stalemate. I had to tell most of the Labor Department’s 15,600 employees to go home and not return the next day. I also had to tell them I didn’t know when they’d next get a paycheck.
There were two shutdowns, actually, rolling across the government in close succession, like thunder storms.
It’s not the way to do the public’s business.
Newt Gingrich got blamed largely because his ego was (and is) so big he couldn’t stop blabbing that Clinton should be blamed. (Gingrich’s complaint of a bad seat on Air Force One didn’t help.)
But the larger loss was to the dignity and credibility of the United States government. When average Americans saw the Speaker of the House and the President of the United States behaving like nursery school children unable to get along, it only added to the prevailing cynicism.
Cynicism about government works to the Republicans’ continued advantage.
Case in point. House Budget Chair Paul Ryan unveiled a plan today that should make every American cringe. It would turn Medicare into vouchers whose benefits are funneled into the pockets of private insurers. It would make Medicaid and Food Stamps into block grants that allow states to ignore poor people altogether. It would drastically cut funding for schools, roads, and much else Americans need. And many of the plan’s savings would go to wealthy Americans who’d pay even lower taxes than they do today.
Ryan’s plan has no chance of passage – as long as Democrats are still in control of the Senate (even Democratic deficit hawks like Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson are appalled by it) and the White House.
But this so-called “blueprint” could be a blueprint for America’s future when and if right-wing Republicans take charge.
Which is where the cynicism comes in – and the shutdowns. Republicans may get blamed now. But if the shutdowns contribute to the belief among Americans that government doesn’t work, Republicans win over the long term. As with the rise of the Tea Partiers, the initiative shifts to those who essentially want to close it down for good.
That’s why it’s so important that the President have something more to say to the American people than “I want to cut spending, too, but the Republican cuts go too far.” The “going too far” argument is no match for a worldview that says government is the central problem to begin with.
Obama must show America that the basic choice is between two fundamental views of this nation. Either we’re all in this together, or we’re a bunch of individuals who happen to live within these borders and are mainly on their own.
This has been the basic choice all along — when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, in the Civil War, when we went through World War I and World War II and the Great Depression in between, during the Civil Rights movement and beyond.
The President needs to remind us that as members of the same society we have obligations to one another — that the wealthiest among us must pay their fair share of taxes, that any of us who loses our jobs or homes or gets terribly sick can count on the rest of us, and that we have collective obligations to our elderly, our children, and the rest of the planet.
This is why we have government. And anyone who wants to shut it down or cut it down because they say we can’t afford it any longer is plain wrong. We are the richest nation in the world, richer than we’ve ever been. We can afford to remain a society whose members are in it together.
by Robert Reich
I was in Washington in 1995 when the government closed because of a budget stalemate. I had to tell most of the Labor Department’s 15,600 employees to go home and not return the next day. I also had to tell them I didn’t know when they’d next get a paycheck.
There were two shutdowns, actually, rolling across the government in close succession, like thunder storms.
It’s not the way to do the public’s business.
Newt Gingrich got blamed largely because his ego was (and is) so big he couldn’t stop blabbing that Clinton should be blamed. (Gingrich’s complaint of a bad seat on Air Force One didn’t help.)
But the larger loss was to the dignity and credibility of the United States government. When average Americans saw the Speaker of the House and the President of the United States behaving like nursery school children unable to get along, it only added to the prevailing cynicism.
Cynicism about government works to the Republicans’ continued advantage.
Case in point. House Budget Chair Paul Ryan unveiled a plan today that should make every American cringe. It would turn Medicare into vouchers whose benefits are funneled into the pockets of private insurers. It would make Medicaid and Food Stamps into block grants that allow states to ignore poor people altogether. It would drastically cut funding for schools, roads, and much else Americans need. And many of the plan’s savings would go to wealthy Americans who’d pay even lower taxes than they do today.
Ryan’s plan has no chance of passage – as long as Democrats are still in control of the Senate (even Democratic deficit hawks like Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson are appalled by it) and the White House.
But this so-called “blueprint” could be a blueprint for America’s future when and if right-wing Republicans take charge.
Which is where the cynicism comes in – and the shutdowns. Republicans may get blamed now. But if the shutdowns contribute to the belief among Americans that government doesn’t work, Republicans win over the long term. As with the rise of the Tea Partiers, the initiative shifts to those who essentially want to close it down for good.
That’s why it’s so important that the President have something more to say to the American people than “I want to cut spending, too, but the Republican cuts go too far.” The “going too far” argument is no match for a worldview that says government is the central problem to begin with.
Obama must show America that the basic choice is between two fundamental views of this nation. Either we’re all in this together, or we’re a bunch of individuals who happen to live within these borders and are mainly on their own.
This has been the basic choice all along — when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, in the Civil War, when we went through World War I and World War II and the Great Depression in between, during the Civil Rights movement and beyond.
The President needs to remind us that as members of the same society we have obligations to one another — that the wealthiest among us must pay their fair share of taxes, that any of us who loses our jobs or homes or gets terribly sick can count on the rest of us, and that we have collective obligations to our elderly, our children, and the rest of the planet.
This is why we have government. And anyone who wants to shut it down or cut it down because they say we can’t afford it any longer is plain wrong. We are the richest nation in the world, richer than we’ve ever been. We can afford to remain a society whose members are in it together.
'Dual System': Minorities Lose Financial Ground, Critics Say
(Leaving behind whole sectors of the population based on race and income disparity will be what destroys this country, inevitably. You cannot expect to advance as a society when you leave whole chunks of the population behind.--jef)
++++++++
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by USA Today
by Christine Dugas
After making big financial gains in recent decades, African Americans and Hispanics are again losing ground, critics say.
Rather than blaming the lingering effects of the recession, a growing number of reports point to financial discrimination as a major cause.
"Communities of color have received the worst treatment at a very high cost," says Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). "We estimate 20% of African-American and Hispanic homeowners will lose their homes in this housing crisis," more than twice as high as white households.
Homeownership is the primary engine of wealth, but the housing slump only partly explains the growing gap affecting minority families, says John Taylor, CEO of National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC).
"It's about a dual system of finance," he says. "People of color do not have the same access that most American citizens enjoy."
While most consumers are able to go to a full-service bank branch that offers an array of competitively priced products and services, minorities are disproportionately forced to go to payday lenders, pawnshops and high-cost mortgage lenders, Taylor says.
Those who live in minority neighborhoods — even middle-income families whose high credit scores could qualify them for a prime loan — are likely to be steered into a subprime loan, says Hilary Shelton, NAACP's senior vice president for advocacy and policy.
Josephine Wiles-Warner didn't think that she would become a subprime casualty statistic when she bought a home in Herndon, Va., in 2000 as she sought to provide security and good schools for her family.
"That is what this nation is about," says Warner, 57, a single working mother who is raising five adopted children while she pursued dual graduate degrees in project management and information systems.
She had needed to refinance her mortgage when she took time off from work in 2006 to go to Liberia for her mother's funeral. Countrywide Financial offered her a subprime loan that Warner later found out she couldn't afford.
When Countrywide was close to filing for bankruptcy protection, another lender took over her loan, and her payments continued to spiral out of control until she got a foreclosure notice.
Getting pushed back
"She had faith in the process, but she was qualified for a loan that she could not afford," says Mani Fierro, a real estate and bankruptcy attorney in Herndon who assisted Warner but does not represent her. Many minorities have become victims of mortgage lenders who are interested only in getting the biggest commission, he says.
Fierro suggested Warner find a buyer for a short sale, where the home is sold for less than the mortgage balance and prevents a foreclosure. He put her in touch with Robert Chavez, a Realtor, who purchased the home and now rents it to Warner and her family.
"They were my guardian angels," says Warner, who hopes to eventually buy back the home.
Cases like that show how minority communities are being pushed back to where they were 25 or 30 years ago, Calhoun says.
It is a reminder of redlining, a practice that grabbed much attention in the 1990s, where whole minority neighborhoods were excluded from banking and insurance services, as though the financial community had drawn a red line around areas where it didn't want to do business.
Regulators tried to stamp out redlining by using the Community Reinvestment Act and public access of mortgage data through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to help more minorities become homeowners.
Those "were major and effective tools in helping to open the doors of opportunities," says Shelton, but over time, regulatory oversight has loosened.
Now, minorities face what is sometimes called reverse redlining, Taylor says. Instead of financial services companies avoiding minority neighborhoods, the industry targets them with more-expensive and more-abusive products.
Other signs that minorities are losing financial ground:
- In December, the NCRC said that too many of the largest lenders in the FHA loan program refused to provide conventional loans to consumers with credit scores between 580 and 640, even though that violated FHA policy. It said that has had a disparate impact on communities of color.
Last May, a study compiled by seven non-profit groups including the Chicago-based Woodstock Institute, also found that from 2006 to 2008, the overall share of conventional prime mortgage lending in communities of color fell 35%, while the share of loans to predominantly white neighborhoods increased 11%.
- Minorities are much more likely to be unbanked and underbanked, which are households that have a checking or savings account but rely on alternative financial services, such as payday loans. In January 2009, 54% of black households and 43.3% of Hispanics were either unbanked or underbanked, compared with 25.6% of U.S. households, according to a survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
- Only 16% of people who overdraw their accounts paid 71% of all overdraft fees, but they were more likely to be minorities and low-income consumers, according to a 2006 and 2008 study by the CRL.
Excessive overdraft fees are a major reason why consumers close bank accounts and leave the banking system, according to a 2008 Harvard study.
- People of color are more likely to be payday borrowers, and a typical borrower pays back $800 for a $300 loan, says the CRL. In California, minorities represent 56% of payday borrowers but make up just 35% of the population, a 2008 CRL report said.
Marginal profitabilty
Many financial experts say that African Americans and Hispanics tend to get subprime loans or rely on check-cashing businesses, payday lenders and pawnshops because of job loss and low income.
They also say that banks do not ignore minority neighborhoods.
"The penetration of banks throughout the communities has continued to grow," says Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president at the American Bankers Association. "Many bank branches are very marginal in terms of profitability, but we maintain them anyway to reach out to populations."
Meanwhile, regulators are taking steps:
- The FDIC tried to address payday lending by creating a two-year, small-dollar loan pilot program with 28 volunteer banks. When it ended last summer, the banks had made more than 34,400 loans with a principal balance of $40.2 million, the FDIC said.
- The Department of Justice created a fair lending unit in January 2010. In March 2010, it reached a $6.1 million settlement with two AIG subsidiaries after a lawsuit alleged AIG charged African-American borrowers higher fees.
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau opens its doors in July.
The agency's Elizabeth Warren has said it will target one type of fee that has hit minorities so hard.
"Warren has indicated that overdraft fees are a major problem … that she wants to address," says the CRL's Calhoun.
Tax the Rich: Fair Taxation Requires More Brackets at the Top (2 articles)
Monday, April 4, 2011 by Robert Reich's Blog
Why We Must Raise Taxes on the Rich
by Robert Reich
It’s tax time. It’s also a time when right-wing Republicans are setting the agenda for massive spending cuts that will hurt most Americans.
Here’s the truth: The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.
Even if we got rid of corporate welfare subsidies for big oil, big agriculture, and big Pharma – even if we cut back on our bloated defense budget – it wouldn’t be nearly enough.
Tax the Rich!
The vast majority of Americans can’t afford to pay more. Despite an economy that’s twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the bottom 90 percent are still stuck in the mud. If they’re employed they’re earning on average only about $280 more a year than thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. (Families are doing somewhat better but that’s only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.)
Yet even as their share of the nation’s total income has withered, the tax burden on the middle has grown. Today’s working and middle-class taxpayers are shelling out a bigger chunk of income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than thirty years ago.
It’s just the opposite for super rich.
The top 1 percent’s share of national income has doubled over the past three decades (from 10 percent in 1981 to well over 20 percent now). The richest one-tenth of 1 percent’s share has tripled. And they’re doing better than ever. According to a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal, total compensation and benefits at publicly-traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record in 2010 — $135 billion. That’s up 5.7 percent from 2009.
Yet, remarkably, taxes on the top have plummeted. From the 1940s until 1980, the top tax income tax rate on the highest earners in America was at least 70 percent. In the 1950s, it was 91 percent. Now it’s 35 percent. Even if you include deductions and credits, the rich are now paying a far lower share of their incomes in taxes than at any time since World War II.
The estate tax (which only hits the top 2 percent) has also been slashed. In 2000 it was 55 percent and kicked in after $1 million. Today it’s 35 percent and kicks in at $5 million. Capital gains – comprising most of the income of the super-rich – were taxed at 35 percent in the late 1980s. They’re now taxed at 15 percent.
If the rich were taxed at the same rates they were half a century ago, they’d be paying in over $350 billion more this year alone, which translates into trillions over the next decade. That’s enough to accomplish everything the nation needs while also reducing future deficits.
If we also cut what we don’t need (corporate welfare and bloated defense), taxes could be reduced for everyone earning under $80,000, too. And with a single payer health-care system – Medicare for all – instead of a gaggle of for-profit providers, the nation could save billions more.
Yes, the rich will find ways to avoid paying more taxes courtesy of clever accountants and tax attorneys. But this has always been the case regardless of where the tax rate is set. That’s why the government should aim high. (During the 1950s, when the top rate was 91 percent, the rich exploited loopholes and deductions that as a practical matter reduced the effective top rate 50 to 60 percent – still substantial by today’s standards.)
And yes, some of the super rich will move their money to the Cayman Islands and other tax shelters. But paying taxes is a central obligation of citizenship, and those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.
But don’t the super-rich have enough political power to kill any attempt to get them to pay their fair share? Only if we let them. Here’s the issue around which Progressives, populists on the right and left, unionized workers, and all other working people who are just plain fed up ought to be able to unite.
Besides, the reason we have a Democrat in the White House – indeed, the reason we have a Democratic Party at all – is to try to rebalance the economy exactly this way.
All the President has to do is connect the dots – the explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of vital public services for the middle class and the poor.
This shouldn’t be difficult. Most Americans are on the receiving end. By now they know trickle-down economics is a lie. And they sense the dice are loaded in favor of the multi-millionaires and billionaires, and their corporations, now paying a relative pittance in taxes.
Besides, the President has the bully pulpit. But will he use it?
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by OtherWords
Some of the most affluent Americans actually pay lower effective tax rates than many middle class Americans.
by Mazher Ali
So many governors are hammering their budgets with a “we’re broke” message these days that it’s amazing our country hasn’t shattered into a thousand separate islands. More and more, however, rational voices are correctly asserting that we’re not broke.
The problem isn’t that the United States is out of money. It’s that a tiny sliver of households are under-taxed. The richest 10 percent of Americans own almost three-fourths of the country’s total wealth. Astoundingly, the most affluent 1 percent of Americans own more than one-third of our total wealth.
Thankfully, the message that our country isn't broke is making its way closer to the center of the tax and deficit debates. It can’t get there soon enough.
Many Republican lawmakers, along with governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich, bizarrely think that they can erase deficits with tens of billions of dollars in budget cuts and tax breaks for corporations and wealthy people who don’t need them. They’re ignoring the greatest economic returns available, which are provided by public investments, federal aid to states, and even unemployment benefits. Instead of helping save the middle class, they're propelling us toward a busted, plutocratic disaster.
The GOP's deficit obsession isn't just misguided. It turns a blind eye on the struggles of low- and middle-income Americans. In contrast, Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s sensible Fairness in Taxation Act would raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, which better serves the American majority.
Currently, families earning $374,000 pay the exact same federal income tax rates as families with multi-million-dollar incomes, or even the handful who earn a billion bucks every year, such as the heirs of Walmart's founder. The lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy wouldn’t change in the least if they had to pay moderately higher income taxes. And it would boost our national economy.
The Fairness in Taxation Act calls for establishing five new tax brackets for incomes between $1 million and $1 billion, with rates ranging from 45 percent to 49 percent.
The Illinois Democrat's bill would also address an absurd aspect of our tax system, which wrongly favors wealth over work. Today, money earned through working nine-to-five or the graveyard shift is taxed at a higher rate than money obtained through windfalls. Capital gains, dividends, and other investment income derived from pre-existing wealth shouldn't be taxed at rates lower than income earned through work.
Three-quarters of all stocks and mutual funds owned by U.S. taxpayers belong to the richest 10 percent of American households. Therefore, some of the most affluent Americans actually pay lower effective tax rates than many middle-class Americans.
Take, for example, a weasel like Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. He raked in just over $13 million in 2010 (excluding his bonus of some $12 million worth of shares in his company). Of that $13 million, only his base salary of $600,000 will be taxed according to the federal income tax rates. The remaining $12.4 million will be taxed at a top rate of 15 percent. Unfortunately, Blankfein is just one example of the kind of gross inequity that exists in the current tax system.
A century ago, tax policies adopted during President Teddy Roosevelt's administration were guided by sound principles that stand in direct contrast to those of today’s Republicans.
“No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned,” explained Roosevelt in a 1910 speech. “Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered--not gambling in stocks…I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes."
The Fairness in Taxation Act takes aim at the same inequities Teddy Roosevelt--a Republican--identified long ago. If it were enacted this year, it would generate $78 billion that could fund jobs and social programs that Americans need now more than ever.
Repeat after me: we're not broke. It’s time to mandate that the wealthiest members of our communities share in the sacrifice of the economic recovery and pay their fair share. The Fairness in Taxation Act offers a clear path in that direction.
Why We Must Raise Taxes on the Rich
by Robert Reich
It’s tax time. It’s also a time when right-wing Republicans are setting the agenda for massive spending cuts that will hurt most Americans.
Here’s the truth: The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.
Even if we got rid of corporate welfare subsidies for big oil, big agriculture, and big Pharma – even if we cut back on our bloated defense budget – it wouldn’t be nearly enough.
Tax the Rich!
The vast majority of Americans can’t afford to pay more. Despite an economy that’s twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the bottom 90 percent are still stuck in the mud. If they’re employed they’re earning on average only about $280 more a year than thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. (Families are doing somewhat better but that’s only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.)
Yet even as their share of the nation’s total income has withered, the tax burden on the middle has grown. Today’s working and middle-class taxpayers are shelling out a bigger chunk of income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than thirty years ago.
It’s just the opposite for super rich.
The top 1 percent’s share of national income has doubled over the past three decades (from 10 percent in 1981 to well over 20 percent now). The richest one-tenth of 1 percent’s share has tripled. And they’re doing better than ever. According to a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal, total compensation and benefits at publicly-traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record in 2010 — $135 billion. That’s up 5.7 percent from 2009.
Yet, remarkably, taxes on the top have plummeted. From the 1940s until 1980, the top tax income tax rate on the highest earners in America was at least 70 percent. In the 1950s, it was 91 percent. Now it’s 35 percent. Even if you include deductions and credits, the rich are now paying a far lower share of their incomes in taxes than at any time since World War II.
The estate tax (which only hits the top 2 percent) has also been slashed. In 2000 it was 55 percent and kicked in after $1 million. Today it’s 35 percent and kicks in at $5 million. Capital gains – comprising most of the income of the super-rich – were taxed at 35 percent in the late 1980s. They’re now taxed at 15 percent.
If the rich were taxed at the same rates they were half a century ago, they’d be paying in over $350 billion more this year alone, which translates into trillions over the next decade. That’s enough to accomplish everything the nation needs while also reducing future deficits.
If we also cut what we don’t need (corporate welfare and bloated defense), taxes could be reduced for everyone earning under $80,000, too. And with a single payer health-care system – Medicare for all – instead of a gaggle of for-profit providers, the nation could save billions more.
Yes, the rich will find ways to avoid paying more taxes courtesy of clever accountants and tax attorneys. But this has always been the case regardless of where the tax rate is set. That’s why the government should aim high. (During the 1950s, when the top rate was 91 percent, the rich exploited loopholes and deductions that as a practical matter reduced the effective top rate 50 to 60 percent – still substantial by today’s standards.)
And yes, some of the super rich will move their money to the Cayman Islands and other tax shelters. But paying taxes is a central obligation of citizenship, and those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.
But don’t the super-rich have enough political power to kill any attempt to get them to pay their fair share? Only if we let them. Here’s the issue around which Progressives, populists on the right and left, unionized workers, and all other working people who are just plain fed up ought to be able to unite.
Besides, the reason we have a Democrat in the White House – indeed, the reason we have a Democratic Party at all – is to try to rebalance the economy exactly this way.
All the President has to do is connect the dots – the explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of vital public services for the middle class and the poor.
This shouldn’t be difficult. Most Americans are on the receiving end. By now they know trickle-down economics is a lie. And they sense the dice are loaded in favor of the multi-millionaires and billionaires, and their corporations, now paying a relative pittance in taxes.
Besides, the President has the bully pulpit. But will he use it?
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Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by OtherWords
Some of the most affluent Americans actually pay lower effective tax rates than many middle class Americans.
by Mazher Ali
So many governors are hammering their budgets with a “we’re broke” message these days that it’s amazing our country hasn’t shattered into a thousand separate islands. More and more, however, rational voices are correctly asserting that we’re not broke.
The problem isn’t that the United States is out of money. It’s that a tiny sliver of households are under-taxed. The richest 10 percent of Americans own almost three-fourths of the country’s total wealth. Astoundingly, the most affluent 1 percent of Americans own more than one-third of our total wealth.
Thankfully, the message that our country isn't broke is making its way closer to the center of the tax and deficit debates. It can’t get there soon enough.
Many Republican lawmakers, along with governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich, bizarrely think that they can erase deficits with tens of billions of dollars in budget cuts and tax breaks for corporations and wealthy people who don’t need them. They’re ignoring the greatest economic returns available, which are provided by public investments, federal aid to states, and even unemployment benefits. Instead of helping save the middle class, they're propelling us toward a busted, plutocratic disaster.
The GOP's deficit obsession isn't just misguided. It turns a blind eye on the struggles of low- and middle-income Americans. In contrast, Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s sensible Fairness in Taxation Act would raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, which better serves the American majority.
Currently, families earning $374,000 pay the exact same federal income tax rates as families with multi-million-dollar incomes, or even the handful who earn a billion bucks every year, such as the heirs of Walmart's founder. The lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy wouldn’t change in the least if they had to pay moderately higher income taxes. And it would boost our national economy.
The Fairness in Taxation Act calls for establishing five new tax brackets for incomes between $1 million and $1 billion, with rates ranging from 45 percent to 49 percent.
The Illinois Democrat's bill would also address an absurd aspect of our tax system, which wrongly favors wealth over work. Today, money earned through working nine-to-five or the graveyard shift is taxed at a higher rate than money obtained through windfalls. Capital gains, dividends, and other investment income derived from pre-existing wealth shouldn't be taxed at rates lower than income earned through work.
Three-quarters of all stocks and mutual funds owned by U.S. taxpayers belong to the richest 10 percent of American households. Therefore, some of the most affluent Americans actually pay lower effective tax rates than many middle-class Americans.
Take, for example, a weasel like Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. He raked in just over $13 million in 2010 (excluding his bonus of some $12 million worth of shares in his company). Of that $13 million, only his base salary of $600,000 will be taxed according to the federal income tax rates. The remaining $12.4 million will be taxed at a top rate of 15 percent. Unfortunately, Blankfein is just one example of the kind of gross inequity that exists in the current tax system.
A century ago, tax policies adopted during President Teddy Roosevelt's administration were guided by sound principles that stand in direct contrast to those of today’s Republicans.
“No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned,” explained Roosevelt in a 1910 speech. “Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered--not gambling in stocks…I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes."
The Fairness in Taxation Act takes aim at the same inequities Teddy Roosevelt--a Republican--identified long ago. If it were enacted this year, it would generate $78 billion that could fund jobs and social programs that Americans need now more than ever.
Repeat after me: we're not broke. It’s time to mandate that the wealthiest members of our communities share in the sacrifice of the economic recovery and pay their fair share. The Fairness in Taxation Act offers a clear path in that direction.
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