4 Numbers That Prove America Is a Deeply Messed Up Place

And no matter which party is in control, they sell their fuzzy bullshit numbers like they are real, meanwhile in this "resurgent" economy, more and more people are suffering while the wealthy increase their wealth in obscene amounts.

The mainstream media rarely publishes facts like this.

By Paul Buchheit / AlterNet

March 15, 2015

There's something perversely wrong with a society that creates $30 trillion in new wealth while putting six million more children on food stamps.
The mainstream media rarely publishes facts like this. The super-rich keep building up their own numbers, as quietly as possible. And our leading members of Congress have little need for numbers, except for budget cuts and the strings of zeros at the end of their campaign contributions.

But numbers have the power to reveal the dramatic fall of the middle class over the past 35 years.


1. 138,000 Kids Were Homeless while 115,000 Households Were Each Making $10 Million Per Year

Recent data has shown that the richest .1% (115,000 households) have each increased their wealth by an astonishing $10 million per year. As they counted their money on a frigid night in January, 138,000 children, according to the U.S. Department of Housing, were without a place to call home.


2. The Average U.S. Household Pays $400 to Feed and Clothe Walmart, McDonalds, and Other Low-Wage Workers

The Economic Policy Institute reports that $45 billion per year in federal, state, and other safety net support is paid to workers earning less than $10.10 an hour. Thus the average U.S. household is paying about $400 to employees in low-wage industries such as food service, retail, and personal care.

Walmart's well-advertised $1 raise will cost the company about $1 billion a year. Its profits last year were about $25 billion.

The sordid tale gets even worse, as told by a PBS report: Walmart has spent about $6.5 billion per year on stock buybacks to enrich investors, approximately the same total annual amount billed to taxpayers for food stamps, Medicaid, housing, and other safety net programs for the company's underpaid employees.


3. As $30 Trillion in New Wealth was being Created, the Number of Kids on Food Stamps Increased 70%

Before the recession, 12 out of every 100 American children got food stamps. After the recession, 20 out of every 100 American children got food stamps.
That's nearly a 70 percent increase, from 9.5 million kids in 2007 to 16 million kids in 2014, at the same time that U.S. wealth was growing by over $30 trillion. Even with that incomprehensible increase in wealth our nation was not able to ensure food security for millions of its most vulnerable citizens.


4. Despite the Decline in Food Security, the Food Stamp Program was Cut by $8.6 Billion and the Money Paid to Corporate Agriculture

As more and more children go hungry, the largest agricultural firms continue to take taxpayer money to supplement their billions in profits. The 2014 farm bill cut $8.6 billion (over the next ten years) from the food stamp program, of which nearly half of all participants are children. Meanwhile, $14 billion is annually paid out to the largest 10 percent of farm operators.


Beaten Up, Broken Down

The mainstream media highlights the "resurgent economy," the booming stock market, and the drop in unemployment. But the stock market has enriched only about ten percent of America, handing them millions of dollars since the recession, while the newly available jobs are well below the skill levels of college-trained adults and often without health care and retirement benefits.

Too many once-prosperous Americans are beaten up and broken down, waiting in vain for our elected leaders to stop the redistribution of our national wealth.

What We Are Not Being Told About Suicide And Depression

Shouldn’t researchers examine societal and cultural variables that are making us depressed and suicidal?

By Bruce E. Levine / AlterNet

February 15, 2015

For nearly two decades, Big Pharma commercials have falsely told Americans that mental illness is associated with a chemical brain imbalance, but the truth is that mental illness and suicidality are associated with poverty, unemployment, and mass incarceration. And the truth is that American society has now become so especially oppressive for young people that an embarrassingly large number of American teenagers and young adults are suicidal and depressed.

In November of 2014, the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) issued a press release titled “Nearly One in Five Adult Americans Experienced Mental Illness in 2013.” This brief press release provides a snapshot of the number of Americans who are suicidal, depressed, and mentally ill, and it bemoans how many Americans are not in treatment. However, excluded from SAMHSA’s press release—yet included in the lengthy results of SAMHSA’s national survey—are economic, age, gender, and other demographic correlates of serious mental illness, depression, and suicidality (serious suicidal thoughts, plans, or attempts). It is these demographic correlates that have political implications.

These lengthy results, for example, include extensive evidence that involvement in the criminal justice system (such as being on parole or probation) is highly correlated with suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness. Yet Americans are not told that preventing unnecessary involvement with the criminal justice system—for example, marijuana legalization and drug use decriminalization—could well prove to be a more powerful antidote to suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness than medical treatment.

Also, the survey results provide extensive evidence that unemployment and poverty are highly associated with suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness. While correlation is not the equivalent of causation, it makes more sense to be further examining variables that actually are associated with suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness rather than focusing on variables such as chemical imbalances which are not even correlates (see AlterNet January 2015). These results beg questions such as: Does unemployment and poverty cause depression, or does depression make it more likely for unemployment and poverty, or are both true?

And the survey results also provide extensive evidence that younger Americans are more depressed than older Americans, that women are more likely to be depressed than men, and that Native Americans and biracial Americans are more likely to be depressed than other ethnic/racial groups. Again, while correlation is not the equivalent of causation, depression obviously cannot cause one to become young, female, or Native American. More rationally, researchers should be asking what is it about American society that is so depressing, especially for young people, women, and Native Americans?

These recent SAMHSA survey results provide a golden opportunity for a scientific and societal shift to reconsider what about American society and culture is resulting in emotional suffering and self-destructive behaviors, especially for certain groups. Below is a summary of some of the key statistics in these buried SAMHSA survey results.

Summary of Buried SAMHSA Survey Results
Involvement with the Criminal Justice System: In 2013, the percentage of American adults with serious suicidal thoughts: 10.7 percent for those on parole or a supervised release from jail in the past 12 months, 9.2 percent among those who were on probation, and 3.9 percent for those not involved in the criminal justice system. The percentage for adults with any mental illness: if on probation was 32.3 percent, if on parole or supervised release, 36.5 percent, double the percentage of adults not involved in the criminal justice system (18.3 percent). The percentage of adults with serious mental illness: if on probation was 9.4 percent, if on parole or supervised release was 13.9 percent, more than triple for those not involved in the criminal justice system (4.1 percent).

Unemployment: Among American adults in 2013, the unemployed were more likely than those who were employed full time: to have serious thoughts of suicide (7.0 vs. 3.0 percent), make suicide plans (2.3 vs. 0.7 percent), or attempt suicide (1.4 vs. 0.3 percent). The percentage of adults with any mental illness: for the unemployed was 22.8 percent, for part-time employed was 20.3 percent, and for full-time employed was 15.4 percent. Among adults with serious mental illness: the percentage for the unemployed was 6.6 percent, for part-time employed was 4.8 percent, and for those full-time employed was 2.7 percent. Among those adults having a major depression episode: the percentage for the unemployed was 9.5 percent, for part-time employed was 7.8 percent, and for full-time employed was 5.3 percent.

Family Income: Among American adults in 2013, serious suicidal thoughts occurred in: 6.6 percent of those from family incomes below the Federal poverty level, 4.7 percent of those with family incomes between 100 and 199 percent of the Federal poverty level, and 3.1 percent of those with annual family incomes at 200 percent or more of the Federal poverty level. Among American adults, the percentage with serious mental illness: for those with a family income that was below the Federal poverty level was 7.7 percent, for those with a family income at 100 to 199 percent of the Federal poverty level was 5.1 percent, and for those with a family income at 200 percent or more of the Federal poverty level was 3.2 percent.

Age: No suicidality results were reported for Americans under 18, however, among American adults having serious suicidal thoughts, the percentage: for those aged 18 to 25 was 7.4 percent, for those aged 26 to 49 was 4.0 percent, and for those aged 50 or older was 2.7 percent. And among adults who made suicide plans in the past year: the percentage for those aged 18 to 25 was 2.5 percent, for those aged 26 to 49 was 1.3 percent, and for those aged 50 or older was 0.6 percent. The percentage of Americans having a major depressive episode in 2013: for those aged 12 to 17 was 10.7 percent, for those aged 18 to 25 was 8.7 percent, for those aged 26 to 49 was 7.6 percent, and for those aged 50 or older was 5.1 percent.

Gender: In 2013, adult women were more likely than adult men to have: any mental illness (22.3 vs. 14.4 percent), a serious mental illness (4.9 vs. 3.5 percent), a major depressive episode (8.1 vs. 5.1 percent), and suicidal thoughts (4.0 vs. 3.8 percent). Among American ages 12 to 17, females were more likely than males to have a major depressive episode (16.2 vs. 5.3 percent) and a major depressive episode with severe impairment (12.0 vs. 3.5 percent).

Ethnicity/Race: In 2013, the percentages of adults aged 18 or older having serious thoughts of suicide in the past year were: 2.9 percent among blacks, 3.3 percent among Asians, 3.6 percent among Hispanics, 4.1 percent among whites, 4.6 percent among Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, 4.8 percent among American Indians or Alaska Natives, and 7.9 percent among adults reporting two or more races. The percentages of adults with a major depressive episode: were 1.6 percent among Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, 4.0 percent among Asians, 4.6 percent among blacks, 5.8 percent among Hispanics, 7.3 percent among whites, 8.9 percent among American Indians or Alaska Natives, and 11.4 percent among adults reporting two or more races.

Conclusions
The SAMHSA press release states that among American adults in 2013: 10 million American adults (4.2 percent) experienced a serious mental illness, 15.7 million adults (6.7 percent) experienced a major depressive episode, and states that “major depressive episodes affected approximately one in ten (2.6 million) youth between the ages of 12 to 17.” The press release then laments how many Americans with mental illnesses are not receiving treatment.

While these statistics in the SAMHSA press release are troubling, the devil is in the details of the actual lengthy SAMHSA survey results. These results make clear that suicidality, depression, and mental illness are highly correlated with involvement in the criminal justice system, unemployment, and poverty, and occur in greater frequency among young people, women, and Native Americans.

Shouldn’t researchers be examining American societal and cultural variables that are making so many of us depressed and suicidal? At the very least, don’t we as a society want to know what exactly is making physically healthier teenagers and young adults more depressed than senior citizens?

5 Facts That Show Half of America Is Seriously Struggling

The media celebrates "economic growth," while new data shows most Americans are barely surviving.

By Paul Buchheit / AlterNet

February 8, 2015

Happy Monday! S&P 500 now up 10% for year --CNN Money
Third-quarter U.S. economic growth strongest in 11 years --Reuters
The U.S. economy is on a tear --Wall Street Journal 

Half of our nation, by all reasonable estimates of human need, is in poverty. The jubilant headlines above speak for people whose view is distorted by growing financial wealth. The argument for a barely surviving half of America has been made before, but important new data is available to strengthen the case.

1. No Money for Unexpected Bills 

A recent Bankrate poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans didn't have savings available to cover a $500 repair bill or a $1,000 emergency room visit.

A related Pew survey concluded that over half of U.S. households have less than one month's income in readily available savings, and that ALL their savings -- including retirement funds -- amounted to only about four months of income.

And young adults? A negative savings rate, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Before the recession their savings rate was a reasonably healthy 5 percent.

2. 40 Percent Collapse in Household Wealth 

Over half of Americans have good reason to feel poor. Between 2007 and 2013 median wealth dropped a shocking 40 percent, leaving the poorest half with negative wealth (because of debt), and a full 60% of households owning, in total, about as much as the nation's 94 richest individuals.

People of color fare the worst, with half of black households owning less than $11,000 in total wealth, and Hispanic households less than $14,000. The median net worth for white households is about $142,000.

3. Cost of Living Surges as Income Falls 

Official poverty measures are based largely on the food costs of the 1950s. But food costs have doubledsince 1978, housing has more than tripled, and college tuition is eleven times higher. The cost of raising a child increased by 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. And despite the gains from Obamacare, health care expenses continue to grow.

As all these essential costs have been going up, median household income has been going down since 2000, with the greatest drop occurring since 2009, as 95 percent of the post-recession income gains have gone to the richest 1%.

4. Lots of New Jobs (Below Living Wage) 

'Amazing' jobs report, apart from wages --Marketwatch 

Amazing at the top and at the bottom. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, there have been job gains at the highest paid level -- engineering, finance, computer analysis; and there have been job gains at thelowest paid level -- personal health care, retail, and food preparation.

But the jobs that kept the middle class out of poverty -- education, construction, social services, transportation, administration -- have seen a decline since the recession, especially in the northeast. At a national level jobs gained are paying 23 percent less than jobs lost.

Worse yet, the lowest paid workers, those in housekeeping and home health care and food service, haveseen their wages drop 6 to 8 percent (although wages overall rose about 2 percent in 2014).

5. Our Greatest Shame: Half of the Children Feeling Poverty 

Over half of public school students are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies. There's been a stunning70 percent increase since the recession in the number of children on food stamps. State of Working America reported that almost half of black children under the age of six are living in poverty.

The celebratory quotes about a booming economy seem so far away.

How Govt. Hides the Poor:--Formula for Measuring Poverty Dates to When a Loaf of Bread Cost 22 Cents

Depressing stats.
By Steven Rosenfeld
February 24, 2014 |

Why is Congress still measuring poverty based on a 1963 trip to the grocery store?

To determine who is officially poor in America, the federal government compares a family’s annual cash income to a figure produced by an arcane formula that's based on the price of food [3] in 1963, when a loaf of bread was 22 cents and a burger less than a quarter. Starting under President Lyndon Johnson, the government's official way of defining who is poor comes from calculating [4] a minimum food budget for a family of four, tripling that figure to cover other living costs, and then indexing it annually for inflation.

The result is the federal poverty level. For 2014, that threshold was $23,850 for a family of four. Smaller families can subtract $4,060 per person. Individuals making $11,670 or less in 2014 were officially poor. Many government programs, from School Lunch to the Earned Income Tax Credit to Obamacare's subsidies, decide eligibility by comparing one’s annual cash income to the official poverty level—or to a multiple of it, say 150 percent.

Cities, states, advocates and academics have known for years that this measure of who is poor undercounts millions of Americans. They know that the 1960s-based formula ignores modern living costs, such as today's cheaper food but higher housing and other expenses. And they have developed [5] alternative ways to track living costs that confirm poverty and economic insecurity of households just above the poverty line is far more widespread than Congress wants to admit.

But the 1960s poverty formula persists, and not without other pernicious effects. This heads-in-the-sand approach works against Congress spending more on current programs because lawmakers aren't using numbers that honestly depict the extent of economic insecurities. And an outdated methodology pre-empts a contemporary discussion of what a basic, dignified living standard costs, based on variables such as family size, one’s age and stage in life, and location.

“In the 1960s, the poverty measure was a focal point for the nation’s growing concern about poverty,” an April 2013 report [5] by New York City’s Center for Economic Opportunity said, recounting this history and shortcomings. “Over the decades, society evolved and policies have shifted, but the official poverty measure remains frozen in time. As a result it has lost its credibility and usefulness.”

“In 2011, our poverty line for the two-adult, two-child family comes to $30,945,” the NYC agency said [5], after using a more sophisticated modern formula. “The 2011 official [federal] poverty threshold for the corresponding family was $22,811.”

Looking back to 2005, New York City found that its poverty rate consistently was 2 percent higher than the official federal rate. The federal formula did not just ignore changes in real life expenses, but also decades of government programs that didn’t pay out cash but kept more money in poorer people’s pockets.

“In recent years an increasing share of what government programs do to support low-income families takes the form of tax credits and in-kind benefits," the Center for Economic Opportunity said. "If policymakers or the public want to know how these programs affect poverty, the official measure cannot provide an answer.”

There have been notable efforts in recent decades by government institutions, including Congress, to update, expand and replace the 1963 formula. But those efforts, while drawing a more realistic picture of who is poor in America, still aren’t framing federal policy. That’s because when it comes to Congress, better metrics aren’t used to create policy and law. One result is that anti-poverty advocates continually urge Congress to look at real living costs, and use more up-to-date numbers.

“Policymakers considering changes to social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare must consider the economic realities confronting older Americans,” a 2013 report [6] by the Economic Policy Institute said, in one such example. EPI based its analysis on a more comprehensive but unofficial measure used by the Census Bureau—the same one used by New York City. Not surprisingly, EPI found that poverty and near-poverty were more widespread among the elderly than the government admitted.

“Many of America’s 41 million seniors are just one bad economic shock away from significant material hardship,” it reported [6]. “Most seniors live on modest retirement incomes, which are often barely adequate—and sometimes inadequate—to cover the costs of basic necessities and support a simple, yet dignified, quality of life.”

But official Washington holds firm, using its arcane 1960s formula instead of adopting a more honest measure of tracking poverty and economically insecure Americans.

A Better Baseline

Social scientists have known for decades that the 1963-based poverty line didn’t include necessities such as shelter, utilities, healthcare, childcare, clothes, commuting and other out-of-pocket costs. In 1995, Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to create a formula including those factors. It did, but for years that sat on the shelf. It was used for academic research but not to recalibrate government policy and actions.

However, a decade after it was created, the NAS formula was adopted [5] by several cities and states. Starting in 2005, New York, Philadelphia, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Masachusetts, Minnesota and Wisconsin used the NAS formula and soon found out there were many more households living just above and below the poverty line.

Starting in March 2010, the Census Bureau started applying [7] the 1995 formula, which it called the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), and started issuing reports comparing the official and unofficial measures. For 2012, the “official measure” of poverty level income for “two-adult, two-child” households was $23,283, while the SPM was $31,060. For seniors, the Census Bureau said [7], “Note that poverty rates for those 65 years of age and over were higher under the SPM measure compared with the official measure.”

This Obama administration initiative, which was not embraced by the Congress, was noticed and praised by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who encouraged his city’s Center for Economic Opportunity to do a better job measuring poverty even if it meant acknowledging that New York had more poor people than previously thought.

“If we are going to successfully fight poverty, we need data that captures the challenges that poor households face as well as the benefits conveyed by our most significant government supports,” he said in 2011, when the Census released its first report using the NAS formula. “The decision to adopt this measure is not one that was made lightly; we know that a greater proportion of the American people are poor under this Supplemental Measure, and this is, if course an attention-grabbing finding. But it is important to have a measure that can accurately tell us what is going on.”

What’s going on, as Bloomberg puts it, is that Congress is in the dark about the extent of economic insecurity and the role of government programs to offset it. Perhaps the best example is Social Security, which is not just an anti-poverty program paying the elderly a monthly benefit, but also helps millions [8] of people with disabilities as well as children in families who lose a parent.

A recent Boston College study [9] found that the country’s latest generation of retirees lack $6.6 trillion to maintain current lifestyles as they age, underscoring just how important Social Security will be for their quality of life. For millions of baby boomers, especially people of color and women, it will make up 90 percent or more of retirement income, according to experts like the non-partisan National Academy of Social Insurance.

In June 2013, the Social Security Administration said [8] that there were 37 million retirees receiving benefits. Of those recipients, 23 percent of married couples and 46 percent of unmarried individuals relied on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income. Those percentages are expected to grow in coming years, advocates say.

Washington’s current budget debate highlights this omission. President Obama is pushing to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 a hour, or $21,000 a year—saying that's a living wage. But absent from public debate is what it costs to keep vulnerable Americans, young and old, from falling into poverty or hovering above it by paying for household necessities.

How Much Is Needed?

When EPI experts Elise Gould and David Cooper looked [6] at replacing the official poverty line with the more modern Supplemental Poverty Measure, they found that seniors with a household income (via any mix of social insurance benefits or savings) that was less than double the SPM could be thrown into poverty by a “single economic shock.”

“There is a large share of elderly Americans who are economicaly vulnerable; a single shock could push them precariously close to or into outright material deprivation,” they wrote [6]. “With nearly half of all seniors in the United States falling below the threshold of economic vulnerability, policymakers must be especially careful when considering changes to social insurance programs—predominantly Social Security and Medicare—that protect this group.”

EPI’s conclusion that elderly Americans needed a monthly income twice that of the SPM is backed up ny an even more detailed poverty-line tool developed by the Washington-based advocacy group, Wider Opportunities for Women [10]. It has an online index [11] where anyone, from families with children to seniors, can plug in information on family type, income, location, savings and other expenses to calculate basic living costs below which [12] one becomes impoverished—not being able to pay for necessities.

All of these tools and indices—the Supplemental Poverty Measure, EPI’s finding that elderly Americans need to earn double the SPM to weather inevitable crises, WOW’s economic security index—are a far cry from the official federal poverty threshold. They suggest that Congress and the White House should be looking at a different big picture: what it costs to live today and how far social insurance programs fall short of that line.

There's no need to measure poverty and economic insecurity by indexing family food budgets based on large eggs costing 45 cents a dozen and macaroni-and-cheese dinners 39 cents, as they did in Wisconsin in 1963.

The Triumph of the Right

by robert reich

Conservative Republicans have lost their fight over the shutdown and debt ceiling, and they probably won’t get major spending cuts in upcoming negotiations over the budget.

But they’re winning the big one: How the nation understands our biggest domestic problem.

They say the biggest problem is the size of government and the budget deficit.

In fact our biggest problem is the decline of the middle class and increasing ranks of the poor, while almost all the economic gains go to the top.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that only 148,000 jobs were created in September — way down from the average of 207,000 new jobs a month in the first quarter of the year.

Many Americans have stopped looking for work. The official unemployment rate of 7.2 percent reflects only those who are still looking. If the same percentage of Americans were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, today’s unemployment rate would be 10.8 percent.

Meanwhile, 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. The real median household income continues to drop, and the number of Americans in poverty continues to rise.
So what’s Washington doing about this? Nothing. Instead, it’s back to debating how to cut the federal budget deficit.

The deficit shouldn’t even be an issue because it’s now almost down to the same share of the economy as it’s averaged over the last thirty years.

The triumph of right-wing Republicanism extends further. Failure to reach a budget agreement will restart the so-called “sequester” — automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that were passed in 2011 as a result of Congress’s last failure to agree on a budget.
These automatic cuts get tighter and tighter, year by year — squeezing almost everything the federal government does except for Social Security and Medicare. While about half the cuts come out of the defense budget, much of the rest come out of programs designed to help Americans in need: extended unemployment benefits; supplemental nutrition for women, infants and children; educational funding for schools in poor communities; Head Start; special education for students with learning disabilities; child-care subsidies for working families; heating assistance for poor families. The list goes on.

The biggest debate in Washington over the next few months will be whether to whack the federal budget deficit by cutting future entitlement spending and closing some tax loopholes, or go back to the sequester. Some choice.

The real triumph of the right has come in shaping the national conversation around the size of government and the budget deficit – thereby diverting attention from what’s really going on: the increasing concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top, while most Americans fall further and further behind.

Continuing cuts in the budget deficit – through the sequester or a deficit agreement — will only worsen this by reducing total demand for goods and services and by eliminating programs that hard-pressed Americans depend on.

The President and Democrats should re-frame the national conversation around widening inequality. They could start by demanding an increase in the minimum wage and a larger Earned Income Tax Credit. (The President doesn’t’ even have to wait for Congress to act. He can raise the minimum wage for government contractors through an executive order.)

Framing the central issue around jobs and inequality would make clear why it’s necessary to raise taxes on the wealthy and close tax loopholes (such as “carried interest,” which enables hedge-fund and private-equity managers to treat their taxable income as capital gains).

It would explain why we need to invest more in education – including early-childhood as well as affordable higher education.

This framework would even make the Affordable Care Act more understandable – as a means for helping working families whose jobs are paying less or disappearing altogether, and therefore in constant danger of losing health insurance.

The central issue of our time is the reality of widening inequality of income and wealth. Everything else — the government shutdown, the fight over the debt ceiling, the continuing negotiations over the budget deficit — is a dangerous distraction. The Right’s success in generating this distraction is its greatest, and most insidious, triumph.

Manufactured Poverty: a reality but not a necessity

An Elegant Feast - JULY 21, 2013 

The history of poverty in the United States is depressing. So we repress it. Instead our history books talk about industrial revolutions, wars, economic prosperity, global trade, and so on. The consequences that such events have on the poor and oppressed are either whitewashed or legitimized. Our history books serve as an example of a larger ideological mission to naturalize poverty and to give us reasons to ignore it. In other words, there has been a direct and systematic attempt to make poverty appear to be innate, unchanging, irreversible, and everlasting. If people can be convinced to accept poverty, then the incentive to alleviate it is removed.

Even well meaning progressives will, unsuspectingly, get caught up in a regressive language. They will say, “Poverty is complex.” But the perception of poverty’s complexity has been conditioned in us in order to overwhelm our motivation. What if we accepted the uncontroversial fact that a small fraction of US military spending could feed, house, and educate everyone on the planet, 10 times over. If we wanted to eliminate poverty in the United States, it could be done within a week.

What is our impediment? There is a concerted effort, by those with economic and political power, to manufacture and to maintain poverty. Currently, an effort is underway to eliminate the minimum wage. On the surface, advocates will unabashedly argue that the goal is to create the cheapest possible labor force. But it should be lost on no one that the ability to push the working class into economic desperation is, in itself, a political end. People who are merely trying to survive do not have the time, the energy, or the resources for political advocacy. Economic exploitation always accompanies marginalization.

The desire to eliminate the minimum wage is only the most recent and flagrant part of an organized effort to barricade the halls of wealth and power. The series of so-called free trade agreements in the 1990s consistently lowered human rights standards abroad while, simultaneously, forcing US workers to compete with third world labor. The intent is clear: to drive down real wages and to decrease the quality of life of the working class. The tax cuts of Bush the Second’s presidency redistributed wealth from the bottom to the top in an explicit effort to further consolidate economic and political power. These efforts coincided with a national push for ‘right to work laws’ (or really, right to work for nothing laws) so that workers were politically disenfranchised while also being economically exploited. No politician worthy of the name would be foolish enough to discuss these practices in public, but the strategy is unmistakable. There is a political motivation to fossilize poverty.

Unfortunately, the Obama years have made the problem worse. The bailouts of the banks assured the financial sector that they will always be protected. In order to guarantee poverty, the powerful maintain this simple equation: privatize profits, socialize losses. After the downturn of 2008, everyone has become poorer except the people who caused the crash. To call this an accident ignores the facts and ignores the history. Still, there are people, many people, who genuinely want to combat poverty. But this needs to be done with eyes wide open. To face poverty is not to fight laziness or circumstance or ability; these are mirages. To combat poverty is to take the fight directly against those who have consciously made poverty one of the most shameful institutions of the United States.

Debtors Prisons Are Punishing the Poor Across America

A 19th century tool for instilling fear in the public to pay off debt
May 1, 2013 | AlterNet/By Bill Berkowitz

"In the 1990s, Jack [Dawley's] drug and alcohol addictions led to convictions for domestic violence and driving under the influence, resulting in nearly $1,500 in fines and costs in the Norwalk Municipal Court. Jack was also behind on his child support, which led to an out-of-state jail sentence." After serving three and a half years in Wisconsin, Dawley, now sober for 14 years, is still trying to catch up with the fines he owes, and it has "continue[d] to wreak havoc on his life."

Tricia Metcalf is a mother with sole custody of two teenagers. In 2006, Metcalf "was convicted of passing multiple bad checks. The fines mounted into the thousands. Unable to pay the total amount owed, Tricia entered into a payment plan of $50 per month." Although she's worked temporary jobs, a long-term job has been hard to find. "Whenever Tricia missed a payment, a warrant was issued and she was taken to jail."

The stories of Jack Dawley and Tricia Metcalf are only two of several compelling accounts in the ACLU's new report, The Outskirts of Hope: How Ohio's Debtors' Prisons Are Ruining Lives and Costing Communities .

The jailing of people unable to pay fines and court costs is no longer a relic of the 19th century American judicial system. Debtors' prisons are alive and well in one-third of the states in this country.

In 2011, Think Progress' Marie Diamond wrote: "Federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the U.S. since 1833. It's a practice people associate more with the age of Dickens than modern-day America. But as more Americans struggle to pay their bills in the wake of the recession, collection agencies are using harsher methods to get their money, ushering in the return of debtor's prisons."

In 2010, the ACLU did a study titled In for a Penny: The Rise of America's New Debtors' Prisons, which revealed the use of debtors prison practices in five states, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia and Washington.

In his 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson said:

"Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope - some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity."

Nearly 50 years after Johnson's address, which launched the "War on Poverty," "poverty in America has not dissipated," the ACLU's report states that "the number of people living in poverty in Ohio grew by 57.7% from 1999 to 2011, with the largest increase coming from suburban counties."

This year's ACLU report - which takes its name from a phrase in Johnson's speech - points out that many poor "Ohioans ... convicted of a criminal or traffic offense and sentenced to pay a fine an affluent defendant may simply pay ... and go on with his or her life [find the fine] unaffordable [launching] the beginning of a protracted process that may involve contempt charges, mounting fees, arrest warrants, and even jail time. The stark reality is that, in 2013, Ohioans are being repeatedly jailed simply for being too poor to pay fines."

According to the report, Ohio courts in Huron, Cuyahoga, and Erie counties "are among the worst offenders. In the second half of 2012, over 20% of all bookings in the Huron County Jail were related to failure to pay fines. In Cuyahoga County, the Parma Municipal Court jailed at least 45 people for failure to pay fines and costs between July 15 and August 31, 2012. During the same period in Erie County, the Sandusky Municipal Court jailed at least 75 people for similar charges."

Debtors' prisons are unconstitutional

If you are thinking that debtors' prisons must be unconstitutional, you are right. The ACLU report points out that the U.S. Constitution, the Ohio Constitution, and Ohio Revised Code "all prohibit debtors' prisons."

"The law requires that, before jailing anyone for unpaid fines, courts must determine whether an individual is too poor to pay. Jailing a person who is unable to pay violates the law, and yet municipal courts and mayors' courts across the state continue this draconian practice."

The phenomenon of jailing people because they are unable to pay their fines and/or court costs isn't limited to Ohio. CBS Money Watch's Alain Sherter recently reported that "Roughly a third of U.S. states today jail people for not paying off their debts, from court-related fines and fees to credit card and car loans, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Such practices contravene a 1983 United States Supreme Court ruling that they violate the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause."
Wreaking havoc on ordinary peoples' lives

Jack Dawley: "You'd go do your ten days, and they'd set you up a court date and give you another 90 days to pay or go back to jail... It was hard for me to obtain work, so I fell back into the cycle of going to jail every three months."

"I tried to pay my fines several times in multiple ways," Tricia Metcalf said. "I had even gone to churches and asked if there was any way they could help. There was nothing I could do. I asked the judge about community service." She even sold personal possessions, including her only mode of transportation to keep up with paying the fines. "Since 2006, Tricia has been incarcerated five times for failure to pay fines," causing major disruptions for her family.

There are several other compelling personal stories in the report.

Perhaps the most irrational aspect of the growing use of debtors' prisons during tough economic times when counties are stretched beyond their financial capabilities, is that they "actually waste taxpayer dollars by arresting and incarcerating people who will simply never be able to pay their fines, which are in any event usually smaller than the amount it costs to arrest and jail them."

The ACLU is calling on the Ohio Supreme Court "to institute administrative rules to ensure that all courts properly determine whether a person can afford to pay her criminal fines, in order to ensure that those who are unable to pay are not incarcerated for these debts."

"....Until the state Supreme Court takes action, thousands of Ohioans will continue to be relegated to the outskirts of hope, where the crime of poverty sentences them to a vicious cycle of incarceration, burdensome fees, and diminishing optimism for a better life. Our constitution - and our conscience - demand that Ohio courts do better."

The Growing Wealth Gap Is Unsustainable

The ever-increasing many who are struggling cannot support a structure that favours a tiny number of the very rich 
Sunday, February 3, 2013 by The Observer/UK
Observer Editorial

Antony Jenkins, chief executive of Barclays, who appears before MPs and peers on the banking standards commission this week, has removed one issue from the agenda, namely his right to a bonus of more £1m. The bank has been fined £290m for rigging the benchmark Libor rate, has set aside £2bn to pay claims for mis-selling payment protection insurance and faces an official investigation by the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Services Authority into its dealings with Qatar at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. So this is the least Jenkins could do. The announcement of his monetary self-denial on Friday signals a belated sensitivity on the part of those who have benefited most from one of the least attractive sides of capitalism.

Jenkins acknowledges that Barclays has "…multiple issues of our own making". And, he added: "I think it only right that I bear an appropriate degree of accountability and I have concluded that it would be wrong for me to receive a bonus for 2012 given those circumstances." His references to "right", "wrong and "accountability" are presumably what David Cameron was seeking when he said four years ago: "We must shape capitalism to suit the needs of society; not shape society to suit the needs of capitalism." Then in opposition, he advocated "capitalism with a conscience". More recently, Ed Miliband has – so far hazily – tried to define "responsible capitalism".

What's missing is how both concepts translate into practical governance, for instance in regulation, taxation and the allocation of sparse resources. As a result, many bankers, among the notorious "1%" of the richest and most powerful, continue to rule very much OK – for now. But an awareness is growing across the political spectrum, and on both sides of the Atlantic, that a radical recalibration of capitalism is essential, not least because the wealthiest and least productive are in danger of allowing their own avarice to sabotage the very system on which they have become so hideously bloated.

Last month, Barack Obama, on his re-election to a country with 42 million living in poverty, warned: "America cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it." At the World Economic Forum in Davos, its founder, Klaus Schwab, said: "Capitalism in its current form no longer fits the world around us." How badly it "fits" is powerfully demonstrated in Inequality for All, a documentary made by Jacob Kornbluth, that recently won the special jury prize at the Sundance festival. As discussed in today's New Review, the film "stars" Robert Reich, professor of public policy at Harvard, prolific author, campaigner, former labour secretary under Bill Clinton, a charismatic man whose lectures are renowned for the way he surgically dismembers the mutant capitalism that has taken hold in the US over the past 40 years.

While the debate in the UK is mostly focused on growth and how best to engender it, Reich explains in chilling detail why growth alone may not be enough. For too many, he explains, social mobility has begun to slide backwards. A small but growing band of global pirates – billionaires all, without allegiance to community or country, devoid of civic responsibility – accrue wealth from the continued immiseration of the squeezed majority. These hugely rich are fawned over and subsidised by governments even as inequality widens to a chasm that may yet produce social unrest.

Reich's analysis is similar to that of the UK thinktank, the Resolution Foundation. It launches its definitive study of low- to middle-income families, Squeezed Britain, this week. Britain has more than 10 million adults living on between £12,000 and £30,000 gross, the majority in work. However, this squeezed middle is fast becoming the squeezed majority, with even those on £50,000 seeing their children's prospects decline. The cause, Reich points out, is that while wages have flattened for years, the cost of living has spiralled and the richest have accelerated away. In the US, in 2008, 400 billionaires were "worth" more than 150 million of the US population. British housing statistics published last week indicated a similar contemptible polarisation under way here. The 10 most expensive boroughs in London, packed with Russian oligarchs, have a combined property "value" of £552bn, identical to that of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined.

Over the past few decades, average families have coped by more women going into employment, by working longer hours and by credit. But since 70% of the US economy is based on consumer spending, a lack of surplus cash means the engine is running out of fuel. The rich are small in number and don't spend nearly as much as the majority. "Free" markets with the rules written by the richest result in a shrinking public sector, deregulation, unemployment, low taxes for the most affluent and the threat of globalisation, depressing wages still further. The sum impact isn't "bad" capitalism, it is modern-day capitalism. How it changes, and how rapidly, is a challenge to its own survival. Once, the advancement of the employee was a part of the social contract. Under Thatcher, the aspiration of the average citizen was central via shareholding and home ownership. Now, a more brutal set of priorities pushes the requirements of "the little man" aside, while those who have money buy the influence that unjustly shapes the world in which we live. So how do we forge again the link between morality and the markets?

Iceland, post 2008, forced the resignation of the government, refused to bail out the banks and placed 200 "banksters' under investigation. In 2011, its economy grew by 2.9%. Would a similarly tough approach persuade some of today's pirates that the much mocked habits of the bourgeoisie do have a value that also matters: moderation; giving something back; a sense of civic duty. In that context, Apple would desist from legitimately funnelling more than a billion dollars' worth of iTunes sales through the tax haven of Luxembourg, while the British Virgin Islands would no longer be home to 30,000 people but a staggering 457,000 companies legally siphoning money that could build sustainable communities.

Reich's agenda for positive change includes more jobs; greater investment in skills and higher education; a just taxation regime; strong unions; investment in public infrastructure; a living wage and a narrowing of the earnings gap. Reich ends with a warning: "We are losing the moral foundation stones on which our democracy is built," he says. How much more evidence do we need?

Numbers, Analysis Show 30 Years of Failed US Economic Policy

Wednesday, September 12, 2012 by Common Dreams
Census numbers show persistent poverty, falling wages, and rising inequality

The latest US Census Bureau numbers on poverty, income inequality, and healthcare, coupled with newly released economic analysis of US public policy reveals the reality and the reasons behind the persistent rut of the poverty-stricken, the working-poor, and the middle class in America.

More than three years after the collapse of the housing bubble, the federal government's bailout of Wall Street, and the start of the Great Recession, the US poverty rate remains persistently high with nearly 1 in 5 Americans living at or below the poverty line, according to new figures released on Wednesday by the US Census Bureau.

In addition, the numbers show rampant joblessness, stagnant or falling wages among workers, household incomes that continue to fall, and an inequality gap that continues to grow.

Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute released their annual review of US economic policy which includes a wide variety of data on family incomes, wages, jobs, unemployment, wealth, and poverty that allow for a clear, unbiased understanding of the economy’s effect on the living standards of working Americans.

As the Census reports, "the nation's official poverty rate in 2011 was 15.0 percent, with 46.2 million people in poverty. After three consecutive years of increases, neither the poverty rate nor the number of people in poverty were statistically different from the 2010 estimates."

New data on the continued rise in inequality—where income inequality increased by 1.6 percent between 2010 and 2011—prompted Robert Greenstein, President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, to underscore that the nation's wealthiest should begin to share in the sacrifices that will be needed to correct the economy in the coming years.

"Given the need for substantial sacrifice and the skewing of income gains to those at the top," he said in a statement, "it is difficult to justify extending the rather lavish tax cuts for high-income individuals that policymakers enacted in 2001 and 2003, which average $129,000 a year for people who make over $1 million a year, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center."

The Economic Policy Institute, which on Tuesday released its 12th annual "State of Working America" report, listed the key numbers from the Census report:

Poverty

• 15.0%: The share of the population in poverty in 2011
• 21.9%: The percent of children under 18 in poverty
• 46.2 million: The number of people in poverty in 2011
• $22,811: The poverty threshold for a family of four with two children
• 44.0%: The share of the poor population in “deep poverty,” or below half the poverty line
• 2.3 million: The number of people unemployment insurance kept out of poverty in 2011
• 21.4 million: The number of people Social Security kept out of poverty in 2011
• 5.7 million: How many fewer people would be in poverty if the Federal Earned Income Tax Credit was included in the Census definition of money income
• 3.9 million: How many fewer people would be in poverty if food stamps (SNAP) were added to money income

Income

• -1.7%, +5.1%: The change in average household income between 2010 and 2011 for the middle 20 percent, and the top 5 percent, respectively. The disparity means income inequality increased in 2011. 

• $7,887, -12.4%: The decline in median working-age household income from 2000 to 2011 in level terms and percentage terms, respectively 

• $6,518, -16.8%: The decline in median African-American household income from 2000 to 2011 in level terms and percentage terms, respectively 

• $4,695, -10.8%: The decline in median Hispanic household income from 2000 to 2011 in level terms and percentage terms, respectively 

• $50,622, $48,202:  Median earnings for a man working fulltime, full year in 1973 and 2011, respectively 

• $28,699, $37,118:  Median earnings for a female working fulltime, full year in 1973 and 2011, respectively

Putting the Census numbers in the context of public policy in their new report, EPI explains how economic policies, including policymakers’ actions and failures to act, have continuously undercut the ability of workers to benefit from economic growth in the United States. Its primary findings include:

• America’s vast middle class has suffered a “lost decade” and faces the threat of another. The wages of typical Americans, including college graduates, are lower today than they have been in over a decade. Because hourly wages and compensation failed to grow after the 2001 recession, household incomes had declined even before the Great Recession. Furthermore, forecasts of high unemployment for many years ahead suggest that another lost decade for typical American workers and their families, as measured by wages and income, has already begun.

• Income and wage inequality have risen sharply over the last 30 years. Income inequality has grown sharply since 1979, a fact that is universally recognized by researchers. The trends that have driven this growing inequality in overall incomes are growing concentration of both capital income (the returns to financial assets) and labor income (wages and benefits), as well as a shift from labor income toward capital income.

• Rising inequality is the major cause of wage stagnation for workers and of the failure of low- and middle-income families to appropriately benefit from growth. The typical worker has not benefited from productivity growth since 1979, though there has been sufficient economic growth to provide a substantial across-the-board increase in living standards. Instead, higher earners have reaped a disproportionate share of wage income, and the top one percent of households have received a disproportionate share of all income growth. Aside from the period of strong growth in the late-1990s, wages for low-and middle-wage workers were stagnant from 1979 to 2007, and incomes for lower- and middle-class households grew slowly.

• Economic policies caused increased inequality of wages and incomes. Inequality between the very top wage earners and all others grew from 1979 to 2011 except during stock declines, driven by growing executive compensation and an expanded and increasingly highly-paid financial sector. Inequality between the top wage earners and middle-wage earners also grew from 1979 to 2011. A number of policies played a role in this growth, including those that: (1) targeted rates of unemployment too high to provide reliably tight labor markets for low- and middle-wage workers; (2) hastened global integration of the U.S. economy without protecting U.S. workers; (3) failed to manage destructive international trade imbalances; (4) allowed employer practices hostile to unions to flourish; (5) privatized and deregulated industry, including the financial sector; and (6) eroded labor standards. Inequality between middle-wage earners and the lowest wage earners grew only in the 1980s, fueled by the erosion of the purchasing power of the minimum wage and, again, the targeting of rates of unemployment that were too high. Tax and budget policies have compounded the inequalities that have been generated in market-based, pre-tax incomes.

• Claims that growing inequality has not hurt middle-income families are flawed. Some recent studies have suggested that measures of comprehensive income since 1979 show that middle-income families have seen adequate income growth. Rather, incomes for the middle class have not grown as fast as average incomes, and middle-income growth was much slower between 1979 and 2007 than it was between 1947 and 1979. Furthermore, more than half of the income growth between 1979 and 2007 was made up of government transfers, which reflects the strength of programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not the strength of the labor market. In fact, higher household labor earnings can be traced to increasing work hours, not higher wages. Finally, the data on comprehensive incomes are technically flawed because they count rapidly rising health expenditures made on behalf of households by employers and the government as income, without taking excessive health care inflation into account.

• Growing income inequality has not been offset by increased mobility. There is no evidence that mobility—changes in economic status from one generation to the next—has increased to offset rising inequality, and some research shows a decline.

• Inequalities persist by race and gender. Key economic measures, including unemployment, wealth, and poverty (particularly child poverty), continue to show staggering disparities by race and ethnicity. Gender disparities also persist, and while gaps in labor market outcomes have closed in recent decades, a number have done so because men lost ground, not because women gained it.

“The State of Working America, 12^th Edition” includes new and compelling data on:

Income

• the components of the Congressional Budget Office’s “comprehensive income” growth for the middle class (health care insurance, wages, pensions, work hours, government benefits)
• the growth of capital income by income group and the growing concentration of capital incomes

Mobility

• the stagnation of economic mobility
• the poor performance of the U.S. economy in international rankings of mobility

Wages

• flat or falling wages for college graduates in almost every occupation over the past 10 years
• wage trends by education, decile, gender, and race/ethnicity
• the growth of wage inequality for the three key wage gaps: between the top one percent and others, between the top and middle (95/50 wage gap), and between the middle and bottom (50/10 wage gap)
• the impact of rising health care costs on wage growth and wage inequality
• the factors driving the gap between productivity and median hourly compensation growth
• the role of the financial sector and CEO compensation in fueling the top one percent’s income growth

Jobs

• the extent to which changes in the labor force participation rate are due to the weak economy or are structural/demographic
• why current unemployment is cyclical and not structural

Wealth

• the decline of median wealth between 1983 and 2010 (while wealth at the top grew strongly)
• the collapse of wealth in African American and Hispanic households
• the role of housing equity’s collapse on middle class wealth
• the increasing concentration of stock ownership

Poverty

• the factors driving high poverty and low-end wages
• the large role income inequality plays in growing poverty (as opposed to demographic factors like family formation)
• the contribution of longer work hours to low-income families’ income
• the relatively small role tax and transfer policy plays in reducing poverty in the U.S. in comparison to peer countries
• high child poverty rates in comparison to peer countries

America’s Descent Into Poverty

The Mega-Rich and the "Useless Eaters"

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

The United States has collapsed economically, socially, politically, legally, constitutionally, environmentally, and morally. The country that exists today is not even a shell of the country into which I was born.  In this article I will deal with America’s economic collapse. In subsequent articles, i will deal with other aspects of American collapse.

Economically, America has descended into poverty. As Peter Edelman says, “Low-wage work is pandemic.” Today in “freedom and democracy” America, “the world’s only superpower,” one fourth of the work force is employed in jobs that pay less than $22,000, the poverty line for a family of four.  Some of these lowly-paid persons are young college graduates, burdened by education loans, who share housing with three or four others in the same desperate situation.  Other of these persons are single parents only one medical problem or lost job away from homelessness.

Others might be Ph.D.s teaching at universities as adjunct professors for $10,000 per year or less. Education is still touted as the way out of poverty, but increasingly is a path into poverty or into enlistments into the military services.

Edelman, who studies these issues, reports that 20.5 million Americans have incomes less than $9,500 per year, which is half of the poverty definition for a family of three.

There are six million Americans whose only income is food stamps. That means that there are six million Americans who live on the streets or under bridges or in the homes of relatives or friends. Hard-hearted Republicans continue to rail at welfare, but Edelman says,  “basically welfare is gone.”

In my opinion as an economist, the official poverty line is long out of date. The prospect of three people living on $19,000 per year is farfetched. Considering the prices of rent, electricity, water, bread and fast food, one person cannot live in the US on  $6,333.33 per year. In Thailand, perhaps, until the dollar collapses, it might be done, but not in the US.

As Dan Ariely (Duke University) and Mike Norton (Harvard University) have shown empirically, 40% of the US population, the 40% less well off, own 0.3%, that is, three-tenths of one percent, of America’s personal wealth. Who owns the other 99.7%?

The top 20% have 84% of the country’s wealth. Those Americans in the third and fourth quintiles–essentially America’s middle class–have only 15.7% of the nation’s wealth.   Such an unequal distribution of income is unprecedented in the economically developed world.

In my day, confronted with such disparity in the distribution of income and wealth, a disparity that obviously poses a dramatic problem for economic policy, political stability, and the macro management of the economy, Democrats would have demanded corrections, and Republicans would have reluctantly agreed.

But not today. Both political parties whore for money.

The Republicans believe that the suffering of poor Americans is not helping the rich enough. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are committed to abolishing every program that addresses needs of what Republicans deride as “useless eaters.”

The “useless eaters” are the working poor and the former middle class whose jobs were offshored  so that corporate executives could receive multi-millions of dollars in performance pay compensation and their shareholders could make millions of dollars on capital gains. While a handful of executives enjoy yachts and Playboy playmates, tens of millions of Americans barely get by.

In political propaganda, the “useless eaters” are not merely a burden on society and the rich. They are leeches who force honest taxpayers to pay for their many hours of comfortable leisure enjoying life, watching sports events, and fishing in trout streams, while they push around their belongings in grocery baskets or sell their bodies for the next MacDonald burger.

The concentration of wealth and power in the US today is far beyond anything my graduate economic professors could image in the 1960s. At four of the world’s best universities that I attended, the opinion was that competition in the free market would prevent great disparities in the distribution of income and wealth.  As I was to learn, this belief was based on an ideology, not on reality.

Congress, acting on this erroneous belief in free market perfection, deregulated the US economy in order to create a free market. The immediate consequence was resort to every previous illegal action to monopolize, to commit financial and other fraud, to destroy the productive basis of American consumer incomes, and to redirect income and wealth to the one percent.

The “democratic” Clinton administration, like the Bush and Obama administrations, was suborned by free market ideology. The Clinton sell-outs to Big Money essentially abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But this sell-out of struggling Americans was not enough to satisfy the Republican Party. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to cut or abolish every program that cushions poverty-stricken Americans from starvation and homelessness.

Republicans claim that the only reason Americans are in need is because the government uses taxpayers’ money to subsidize Americans who are unwilling to work. As Republicans see it, while we hard-workers sacrifice our leisure and time with our families, the welfare rabble enjoy the leisure that our tax dollars provide them.

This cock-eyed belief, on top of corporate CEOs maximizing their incomes by offshoring the middle class jobs of millions of Americans, has left Americans in poverty and cities, counties, states, and the federal government without a tax base, resulting in bankruptcies at the state and local level and massive budget deficits at the federal level that threaten the value of the dollar and its role as reserve currency.

The economic destruction of America benefitted the mega-rich with multi-billions of dollars with which to enjoy life and its high-priced accompaniments wherever the mega-rich wish.

Meanwhile, away from the French Rivera, Homeland Security is collecting sufficient ammunition to keep dispossessed Americans under control.

Chagas: Is tropical disease really the new AIDS? Overblown Hype? Somewhere in Between?

By Dylan Stableford | The Lookout – Thu, May 31, 2012

Chagas, a tropical disease spread by insects, is causing some fresh concern following an editorial—published earlier this week in a medical journal—that called it "the new AIDS of the Americas."

More than 8 million people have been infected by Chagas, most of them in Latin and Central America. But more than 300,000 live in the United States.

The editorial, published by the Public Library of Science's Neglected Tropical Diseases, said the spread of the disease is reminiscent of the early years of HIV.

"There are a number of striking similarities between people living with Chagas disease and people living with HIV/AIDS," the authors wrote, "particularly for those with HIV/AIDS who contracted the disease in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic."
 

Both diseases disproportionately affect people living in poverty, both are chronic conditions requiring prolonged, expensive treatment, and as with patients in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, "most patients with Chagas disease do not have access to health care facilities."

Unlike HIV, Chagas is not a sexually-transmitted disease: it's "caused by parasites transmitted to humans by blood-sucking insects," as the New York Times put it.

"It likes to bite you on the face," CNN reported. "It's called Triatominae, the kissing bug, conenose bugs, assassin bugs or triatomines. When it ingests your blood, it excretes the parasite at the same time. When you wake up and scratch the itch, the parasite moves into the wound and you're infected."

"Gaaah," Cassie Murdoch wrote on Jezebel.com, summing up the sentiment of everyone who read the journal's report.

 

Chagas, also known as American trypanosomiasis, kills about 20,000 people per year, the journal said.

And while just 20 percent of those infected with Chagas develop a life-threatening form of the disease, Chagas is "hard or impossible to cure," the Times reports:

The disease can be transmitted from mother to child or by blood transfusion. About a quarter of its victims eventually will develop enlarged hearts or intestines, which can fail or burst, causing sudden death. Treatment involves harsh drugs taken for up to three months and works only if the disease is caught early.

"The problem is once the heart symptoms start, which is the most dreaded complication—the Chagas cardiomyopathy—the medicines no longer work very well," Dr. Peter Hotez, a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine and one of the editorial's authors, told CNN. "Problem No. 2: the medicines are extremely toxic."

And 11 percent of pregnant women in Latin America are infected with Chagas, the journal said.

The True Costs of Bank Crises

The Suicide Machine

by ROB URIE

 

In March 2010 Andrew Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, estimated that the financial crisis that began in 2008 will ultimately cost the world economy between $60 trillion and $200 trillion in lost production (link). The methods he used to reach his conclusions require a number of assumptions, but so would any effort at assessing the broader damage. And to his point, counting the cost of bank crises in terms of costs to the banks alone substantially misrepresents the economic harm that recurrent crises cause.

When J.P. Morgan announced last week that it had lost $2 billion from derivatives transactions gone awry, later revised to $3 billion and rising, the mainstream press reiterated the framing that this is a cost to be borne by the bank and that it indicates what the rest of us might be expected to contribute if another banking crisis erupts. The implication is that future crises are possible, ignoring that we are collectively still paying for the last crisis. And again, to Mr. Haldane’s point, the costs to Wall Street are nearly irrelevant when considering the total costs of banking crises.

This all proceeds from the premise that the broader economic order, of which the banks are a part, is a viable form of economic organization. Given that the current order is radically environmentally unsustainable, it is tempting to imagine that the lost production that Mr. Haldane is counting as a cost of the financial crisis has a silver lining in slowed environmental degradation. Additionally, any careful look at the business of banking finds degrees of predation inversely related to social power—even when they aren’t blowing themselves up, most of the world would be better off without predator banks.

This establishes a paradox—the existing economic (and political) order isn’t working. But, as political leaders on the right and what passes for the left these days claim, failing to sustain it would entail massive human costs in terms of unemployment, bankruptcy, poverty, divorce, suicide and the dissolution of our public institutions. Ironically, add increasing environmental destruction to this list and it well describes current conditions under the existing order.

Apparently the best that defenders can offer is that things could be a lot worse.

To point to the obvious, even Mr. Haldane’s lower cost estimate of $60 trillion isn’t being borne by the banks. The banks couldn’t pay this if they were forced to—it is more money than they will collectively earn in profits over coming decades. And it isn’t being borne by the large corporations that are earning the highest rate of profits in history. It is in fact a negative, an unmet promise made to the rest of us by the proponents of capitalism over recent decades. Through the prism of social struggle it appears as an absence, not as a more straightforwardly actionable misappropriation. But then, what is the ultimate difference?

Jamie Dimon, J.P. Morgan’s CEO, offered that the bank’s loss reflected a failure of risk models. But the bank’s risk models are necessarily narrowly delineated—what model could propose that transactions that could cost the broader economy $60 trillion if they go wrong balance out in favor of the transactions? Such risk models carry the implicit premise of heads, the banks win; tails, the rest of us lose. Practically speaking, these trades, when they work, are simply a method of converting a rigged game into cash. The assets being traded, reportedly a basket of credit default swaps, are un-funded insurance policies; accounting fictions that when aggregated guarantee bailouts—every bank requires that every other bank meet its obligations or the whole system collapses.

For all of the money that the banks have been allowed to create and pay out to the purported rocket scientists who build their risk models, the particular model under discussion in J.P. Morgan’s case (VAR, value-at-risk) is a work of rare idiocy. The question that it attempts to answer is: how badly can things go for one day, week, month etc. assuming (1) no other banks run into similar problems and (2) everything goes back to normal in the next period. What makes use of this model so questionable is that both of these assumptions are behind every spectacular financial collapse in modern history that didn’t involve outright theft (e.g. Ponzi schemes).

Ultimately the particulars of J.P. Morgan’s losses are so much noise.
What they point to is an economic system designed to self-destruct. Add increasing environmental degradation in the face of global warming to structural financial fragility and what capitalism appears to have created is a full-blown suicide machine. And to invert Mr. Haldane’s premise—the $60 trillion in lost production (minimum) was never going to go to us anyway. The trajectory since the 1970s had it going to corporate executives, bankers and machines (automation).

The challenge for reformers and re-regulators is that the system is the problem.

Companies pollute because they individually prosper while we collectively pay the costs. Banks take risks that are internally rational while they are systemically catastrophic. Environmental and financial crises cannot be solved with capitalism intact. In fact, when global warming and bank crises are considered, there is little evidence that capitalism ever produced any profits net of externalized costs. And the consolidation of wealth that capitalism produces undermines all attempts at remediation. Capitalism itself is a suicide machine.

What made J.P. Morgan’s loss news is the recognition that the financial crisis hasn’t been resolved. And again, this crisis isn’t from without. It is endemic to the system we are being told we must save. As Mr. Haldane has it, even if the crisis had been resolved, we would still collectively be out more than $60 trillion anyway. And the only way toward those trillions is through increasing environmental catastrophe. By appearances, the current order is in the process of imploding of its own weight. And while dislocations create fear, they also create openings for other possible futures.

Criminalizing the poor: from welfare to cellfare

RT | Christopher Petrella
24 February, 2012


On August 22, 1996 President Bill Clinton signed into law his now infamous Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act thereby “end[ing] welfare as we have come to know it.” The Act replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). TANF establishes a lifetime limit of 60 months (5 years) for federal assistance, mandates that single parents participate in work activities for an average of 30 hours per week, and caps federal block grant contributions to states at $16.6 billion per year. (As a result of inflation the real value of the TANF block grant has already fallen by 28%.)

And despite few fluctuations in the poverty rate since TANF supplanted AFCD, the participation rate among eligible families has plummeted by 52% since1995. http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=11053

Over the same time period—and despite flat to declining crime rates— the U.S. prison and jail population has increased by 44%. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1278

Perhaps a quickly expanding prison population is precisely the unspoken foundation upon which “welfare to workfare” rests. We haven’t “ended welfare;” instead we’ve invisiblized it by shifting its beneficiaries from the public square to the prison yard.

The atrophy of the social welfare state and the growth of the penal state represent a double criminalization of poverty. Considering TANF/AFDC data alongside trends in incarceration is necessary for rethinking the role of the state in provisioning basic social services. The transition from welfare to workfare and the proliferation of bodies behind bars taken together “work to marginalize populations—by forcing them off the public aid rolls, on the one side, and holding them under lock, on the other—and eventually pushing them into the peripheral [and deeply precarious] sectors of the labor market.” http://loicwacquant.net/assets/Papers/WEDDINGWORKFAREPRISONFARE-FINAL.pdf

The shared historical roots and political convergences of the assistantial and penitential functions of the state are further validated by the fact that the “social profile” of their respective beneficiaries is uncannily similar. For instance, 50% of former AFDC recipients throughout the early 1990s lived at or below half of the poverty line. Today, 65% of inmates in the United States inhabit the same category.
http://loicwacquant.net/assets/Papers/CRAFTINGNEOLIBERALSTATE-pub.pdf

Both populations, as well, are disproportionately composed of people of color. In1995, 37.2% and 20.7% of AFDC recipients were Black or Latin@, respectively, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/character/FY95/t10.htm

and in 2010 40% and 20% of state and federal inmates were Black and Latin@, respectively.
http://www.cjcj.org/files/racial_disproportionality.pdf .

Finally, 44% of AFDC recipients in 1994 had not finished high school compared to 41% of those incarcerated in 2003, the most recent year for which data is available. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/ecp.pdf

The relationship between the sudden but substantial growth in containment justified through the rhetoric of social dishonor and emergence of workfare as a condition of federal subsidy represents an intra-State struggle over its basic social function.

Simply asked, what is the role of the State? And further, what ought to be the role of the State? (Should the role of the State, as neoliberals contend, be limited to safeguarding the so-called “free market” and protecting contracts???)

The double criminalization of poverty marked by ...

1. reducing public aid to low income people of color (disproportionately) and  
2. locking them up (disproportionately) for being poor...

is evidence that the State is trying to re-architecting itself on our watch.

Further, the double criminalization of poverty serves an important ideological function in that it allows the corporate class to attribute widespread unemployment and poverty to personal moral depravity instead of material deprivation. The poor are not depraved; they’re deprived of the basic social resources to secure a dignified standard of living. In the end, the survival of any “criminal State” hinges on its ability to individualize criminality so as to divert attention from its complicitous role in its production.