This Is What Resistance Looks Like

Monday, April 4, 2011 by TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges
The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,” which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in” in your neighborhood.

Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.

“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,” Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.”

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.

The Real Story Behind Job Creation & The Servant Problem (2 articles)

Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

March's job numbers were greeted rapturously by the business press. Scratch the surface of the data and things are not so rosy

by Dean Baker

When the labour department announced that the US 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 sceptical. If the economy sustained March's rate of job growth, it will be more than seven years before we get back to normal rates of unemployment. Furthermore, some of this growth likely reflected a bounceback 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%, almost a full percentage point below its year ago level of 9.7%. 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 (pdf).

A decline of 1.4 % in spending in February, coupled with sharp downward revisions to the data for the prior two months, left nominal spending in February 6.2% below its November level. The slump in 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% 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 $2tn in equity compared with peak hit in the summer of 2010. This loss of housing wealth implies a reduction in annual consumption of $120bn.

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 recognise 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% 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. In the context of a badly depressed economy, it is pathetic. We should be seeing jobs growth at two or three times this rate.

But the real bad news is that it is more likely to get worse than better. Yet again, the business press is missing the story.

+++++++++

Monday, April 4, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

The Servant Problem: In Search of the Lost Battalion of America’s Unemployed

by Lewis H. Lapham

"Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man." -- Henry George

The news media these days look to outperform one another in their showings of concern for the lost battalion of America’s unemployed. Consult any newspaper, wander the Internet or the television talk-show circuit, and at the top of the column or the hour the headline is jobs. Jobs, the bedrock of America’s world-beating prosperity, the cornerstones of its future comfort and well-being -- gone to Mexico or China, deleted from payrolls in Michigan and Ohio, mothballed in the Arizona desert.

The nation’s unemployment rate, officially pegged at 9.4% but probably nearer to 17%, in any event no fewer than 25 million Americans, a number more than equal to the entire population of North Korea, out of work or on the run. The metrics, so say President Obama, the Wall Street Journal, and A Prairie Home Companion, are not good. The stock markets may have weathered the storm of the recession, as have the country’s corporate profit margins, but unless jobs can be found, we wave goodbye to America the Beautiful.

Not being an economist and never having been at ease in the company of flow charts, I don’t question the expert testimony, but I notice that it doesn’t have much to do with human beings, much less with the understanding of a man’s work as the meaning of his life or the freedom of his mind. Purse-lipped and solemn, the commentators for the Financial Times and MSNBC mention the harm done to the country’s credit rating, deplore the trade and budget deficits, discuss the cutting back of pensions and public services. From the tone of the conversation, I can imagine myself at a lawn party somewhere in Fairfield County, Connecticut, listening to the lady in the flowered hat talk about the difficulty of finding decent help.

Speaking Tools Versus Busy Bees

The framing of the country’s unemployment trouble as an unfortunate metastasis of the servant problem should come as no surprise. The country is in the hands of an affluent oligarchy content with Voltaire’s observation that “the comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” During Ronald Reagan’s terms as president, the income that individual American families received from rents, dividends, and interest surpassed the income earned in wages. Over the last 30 years, the wealth of the emergent rentier class has been sustained by an increasingly unequal sharing of the gross domestic product; the percentage of GDP accounted for by manufacturing fell from 21% to 14%, and the percentage accounted for by finance rose from 14% to 21%.

Eugene V Debs Speaks

The imbalances become greater over time; as between compensations awarded to the high-end baskers in the sunshine and those provided to the low-end squatters in the shade, the differential at last count in 2009 stood at 263 to 1. With wealth comes power in Washington, so it’s also no surprise that the government, whether graspingly Republican or scavengingly Democratic, adopts the attitudes and prejudices of the monied sultanate. So do most of the nation’s news media, their showings of concern expressed in the lawn-party voices of the caterers distributing the strawberries.

The lines of work are as numberless as the hooks in the sea, but they divide broadly into employments bent to one’s own purpose and those bound to a purpose other than one’s own. It is the former that reflects the founding idea of America. The Puritan settlers of the seventeenth-century New England wilderness arrived from an old world in which the civilizations both east and west of Suez fetched their food and shelter from the work of variously denominated slaves.

The ruling classes of antiquity, like those in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, regarded the necessity of having to earn a living as a mortification of the body and a degradation of the mind. Aristotle had classified slaves as “speaking tools,” available for every purpose except their own, and for the next 2,000 years, in Asia as in Europe, it was generally understood that the terms of a man’s employment were settled at birth. The newfound land of North America afforded an escape from the burdens of the past imposed by the divine right of inherited privilege as well as those enforced by Barbary pirates and British naval officers, the architects of the New Jerusalem bringing with them the Protestant belief that it was by a man’s work that he was known, not only to himself, but also to God and to his fellow men.

On no less an authority than that of John Calvin, they had been given to understand that there was “no employment so mean and sordid (provided we follow our own vocation) as not to appear truly respectable and be deemed highly important in the sight of God.” The thought embraced St. Benedict’s Catholic certainty that “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” as well as the meditation of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who likens the work for which men are by their nature born to that of “craftsmen who love their trade,” equivalent in turn to that of the “sparrows, ants, spiders, bees, all busy at their own tasks, each doing his own part toward a coherent world order.”

Further searches for a coherent world order on the western shores of the Atlantic encouraged the authors of the Constitution to conceive the document as a tool turned to the making of things, of laws as well as of ships and cider mills and songs. As with the plow and the surveyor’s plumb line, the instruments of government were meant to support the liberties of the people, not the ambitions of the state. In answer to questions being asked in Europe about what sort of persons were likely to be well received in the new republic, Benjamin Franklin in 1782 published a pamphlet, Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, in which he observed that in America people “do not inquire concerning a stranger, What is he? but, What can he do? If he has a useful art, he is welcome… But a mere man of quality, who on that account wants to live upon the public by some office or salary will be despised and disregarded.”

The love of country followed from the love of its freedoms of thought and action, not from a pride in its armies, its monuments, its manners, or its debts. Thomas Jefferson, writing his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, envisioned a republic of free-standing husbandmen who till the earth, “the chosen people of God… whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” The newfound land and its newfound independence both were to be cultivated by employments bent to purposes of the individual, their joint venture resting on a democratic holding of one’s fellow citizens in thoughtful regard not because they were rich or beautiful or famous but because they were fellow citizens.

The Elephant on the Table of American Politics

So at least was the spirit and intent if not always the practice or the case. In return for the Constitution’s ratification by the Southern slave-holding states, the politicians in Philadelphia in 1789 had compromised the principle that all men are created free and equal. They assumed that slavery was soon to become extinct, certain to be swept away on the rising tide of freedom, and so they allowed the Southern planters to temporarily retain their prize collections of speaking tools.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 remanded the case for liberty to the higher court of money. Between 1800 and 1860 the demand for cotton on the part of Britain’s satanic textile mills furnished the newly minted United States with its richest flow of capital, serving the purpose that the Saudi Arabians now extract from oil. The opulence of the trade (60% of America’s export in 1860), in large part conducted, to their immense profit, by New York banks and New England ship owners, financed the country’s westward expansion and the early development of its commerce. Without cotton, there would have been no industry, and without slavery, no cotton.

The “darkies” said by Stephen Foster to be singing sweetly in the fields subsidized the music that Walt Whitman heard elsewhere in the country in the singing of “the carpenter,” “the deckhand,” “the mason,” “the shoemaker,” “the hatter,” “the woodcutter,” and “the plowboy” -- the voices of America’s leaves of grass, the fellow citizens in the 1830s and 1840s plying trades in Massachusetts and Ohio, felling trees and building roads in Illinois, piloting Missouri and Mississippi River steamboats, tinkering with farm equipment and firing pins, going west to Texas and California.

Victory in the war with Mexico added another 529,017 square miles to the inventory of spacious skies and purple mountain majesties acquired in the Louisiana Purchase; the population went forth and multiplied (9,638,453 in 1820; 31,443,321 in 1860), its restless collective energies geared to vocations apt to prove to be their own reward. Frontier people holding fast to what Mark Twain later claimed as “a maxim of mine that whenever a man preferred being fed by any other man to starving in independence, he ought to be shot.”

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the shooting would have needed to become extensive. The Civil War had rousted slavery from the plantations of the South, but the industrial revolution in the North required an even greater supply of hired hands bound to purposes other than their own. The employments on offer in the Kentucky coal mines and the Pennsylvania steel mills matched Karl Marx’s job description of alienated labor -- a “diabolical activity,” entailing the loss of self. “What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”

How then to accommodate both man and beast under the same beach umbrella of the American dream, make the freedom-loving argument that Franklin’s craftsmen and Jefferson’s husbandmen differ only in their angles to the sun from the hostess in the bunny costume checking coats in a Playboy club? By the turn of the twentieth century, the question of what constitutes the meaning of labor as well as a fair return on its performance was the elephant on the table of American politics.

An alienated proletariat had been imported from China to build America’s western railroads, from Ireland and Eastern Europe to service its eastern factories, and between 1870 and 1914, the bitter, often violent division between the differently purposed lines of work was made manifest in the financial markets and the streets. The great railroad strike in 1877 moved Thomas Alexander Scott, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, to suggest that the strikers be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.” State militia and federal troops complied with the suggestion, killing more than 100 strikers in Maryland and Pennsylvania. The putting down of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, and the breaking of the Homestead Strike in Andrew Carnegie’s steel works in 1892, reinforced the rule of money; the bank panics of 1893 and 1907, preceded by heedless speculation in the stock markets, led to widespread unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and depression.

The disputes varied in their particulars (the protective tariff, the prices paid for gold and silver, the legitimacy of the labor unions), but in every instance what was at issue were the terms of service as defined on the one hand by President Teddy Roosevelt in a Labor Day speech at Syracuse, New York, in 1903: “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing”; on the other hand by Woodrow Wilson, still president of Princeton University in 1909, speaking to the New York City High School Teachers Association: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

Wilson’s way of looking at things aligns itself with what was to become America’s chrome-plated future, Roosevelt’s with its homespun past. The Rough Rider was trading in nostalgia, looking back to his days as a young man, a young man who also happened to be rich, shooting buffaloes in the Dakota Territory. The sentiment shows up in Norman Maclean’s remembrance of the way it was out among the tall trees in the summer of 1927, “As to the big thing, sawing, it is something beautiful when you are working together -- at times, you forget what you are doing and get lost in abstractions of motion and power. But when sawing isn’t rhythmical, even for a short time, it becomes a kind of mental illness -- maybe even something more deeply disturbing than that. It is as if your heart isn’t working right.”

It is here that one finds the dignity of labor and the expression of man’s humanity to man. One can illuminate the feeling on which Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union, mounted his candidacy for U.S. president in the election of 1912, attracting over 900,000 votes on the strength of his belief that “the workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.”

Wilson didn’t think so, and Wilson won the election, defeating Roosevelt as well as Debs. The establishment in 1913 of the Federal Reserve Bank overruled the prolonged objection by the instruments of labor to their uses in the hands of capital, shifting control of the nation’s currency from the public to the private sector.

The Labor of Consumption

It is man’s nature to be doing something, or at least to fancy that he’s doing something, but to what purpose, and for whom? Satisfactory answers to the questions lately have been hard to find, not only for the unemployed poor but also for the underemployed remnant of what was once a diligently aspiring middle class. It isn’t simply that the consumer markets don’t value work worth doing; it’s that the society’s ruling and possessing classes regard working for a living as the mark of inferior or damaged goods.

The attitude made its first appearance on the American scene during the Gilded Age, dancing with the newly crowned kings of finance under the ballroom chandeliers in Newport and New York. Thorstein Veblen took note of the arrival in 1899, his Theory of the Leisure Class suggesting that it is the conspicuous consumption of the product of other people’s time and effort that makes up the sum of one’s own worth and meaning. Not the doing of the work, the digesting of it. “Leisure, considered as an employment,” said Veblen, “is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit, and the achievements which characterize a life of leisure and which remain as its decorous criteria, have much in common with the trophies of exploit.”

During the years prior to the Second World War, the attitude was safely confined to a small number of people preserved in the aspic of what was then big money. The victories over Germany and Japan fostered extensions of the franchise. Rescued by force of arms from the Great Depression, America seemed blessed with the enchantments of both Croesus and Colossus, the indisputable proofs of its wealth and military power giving rise to the notion that all its children were the inheritors of a vast fortune and therefore deserving of the best of all possible worlds that money could buy. No reason not to have it all -- a new frontier, a great society, guns for a splendid little war in Asia, butter for the old folks at home, a house in the country, a boat on the lake, the face and fortune in the ad for one of Ralph Lauren’s tennis dresses.

Much of the world in 1945 was either bankrupt or in ruins, and the refurnishing of it supplied the American economy over the next 30 years with an abundance of jobs that afforded the means of independence and a measure of self-worth, while at the same time bringing forth the trophies of exploit to a consumer market more wonderful than the wonderful world of Oz, seeding ever broader acres of the nation’s human topsoil with the presumptions of entitlement favored by Veblen’s Newport heiresses. Don’t worry, be happy; go forth and shop. Leisure considered as employment.

Which was all well and good until it turned out, somewhere in the middle of the 1980s on the yellow brick road with Toto and the Gipper, that the Wizard was easy access to conspicuous credit. For how else could the American leaves of grass join their top-dressed companions on a golf course unless they borrowed money? The country’s working and middle classes discovered that it wasn’t the value of the work itself, or its manufacture of a decent living (as architect, bus driver, sales clerk, actress, lathe operator, automobile mechanic) that made up the sum of the country’s wealth and well-being.

Their great collective enterprise was the labor of consumption, and with it the derivative of debt, a byproduct, like the methane exuded by factory-farmed pigs, that funded the patriotic service owing to God, country, and the American Express card. The work was maybe mindless, a substitution of what is animal for what is human, but it fattened the gross domestic product, enriched the insurance companies and the banks, welcomed the second coming of an American Gilded Age, and now accounts for the increasingly grotesque disparity between the income earned as wages and the revenue collected as rent, interest, dividend, stock option, and year-end bonus.

Americans with jobs imagine they now work longer and harder hours than did their forebears on Mark Twain’s Missouri frontier; if so, their labor serves a purpose other than the one in hand. Finance accounted for 47% of total U.S. corporate profits in 2007; 58% of Harvard University’s male graduates in that same year (the heirs and assigns of Woodrow Wilson’s small class of persons deserving of a liberal education) took up careers as high-end traffickers in the drug of debt. It’s a lucrative trade, up to the standard of the cotton export from the dear old antebellum South. That it doesn’t add to the sum of human happiness or meaning is probably why the gentry on the lawns of Connecticut, together with their upper servants in Washington and the news media, talk about the lost battalion of America’s unemployed as a set of conveniently invisible numbers rather than as a body of fellow citizens.

[A longer version of this essay appears in "Lines of Work," the Spring 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]

Incarceration Nation

America Behind Bars
By LINN WASHINGTON, Jr.

Herman Garner doesn't dispute the drug charge that slammed him in prison for nine years.

Garner does dispute the damning circumstance that doing the time for his crime still leaves him penalized despite his having ended his sentence in the penal system.

Garner carries the "former felon" stain.

That status slams employment doors shut in his face despite his having a MBA Degree and two years of law school.

"I've applied for jobs at thousands of places in person and on the internet, but I'm unable to get a job," said Garner, a Cleveland, Ohio resident who recently published a book about his prison/life experiences titled Wavering Between Extremes.

Recently Garner joined hundreds of people attending a day-long conference at Princeton University entitled "Imprisonment Of A Race," that featured presentations by scholars and experts on the devastating, multi-faceted impact of mass incarceration across America.

The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country on earth, accounting for 25 percent of the world's prisoners, despite having just five percent of the world's population.

America currently holds over two million in prisoners with double that number under supervision of parole and probation, according to federal government figures.

Mass incarceration consumes over $50-billion annually across America – money far better spent on creating jobs and improving education.

Under federal law persons with drug convictions like Garner are permanently barred from receiving financial aid for education, food stamps, welfare and publicly funded housing.

But only drug convictions trigger these exclusions under federal law. Violent bank robbers, white-collar criminals like Wall Street scam artists who steal billions, and even murderers who've done their time do not face the post-release deprivations slapped on those with drug convictions on their records, including those imprisoned for simple possession, and not major drug sales.

"Academics see this topic of mass incarceration as numbers, but for millions it is their daily lives," said Princeton conference panelist Dr. Khalilah Brown-Dean of Yale University.

Exclusions mandated by federal laws compound the legal deprivations of rights found in the laws of most states, such as barring ex-felons from jobs and even stripping ex-felons of their right to vote.

"Mass incarceration raises questions of protecting and preserving democracy," Dr. Brown-Dean said, citing the estimated five-million-plus Americans barred from voting by such felony disenfranchisement laws.

Many of those felony disenfranchisement laws date from measures enacted in the late 1800s which were devised specifically to bar blacks from voting, as a way to preserve America's apartheid.

During the 2000 presidential election Republican officials in Florida fraudulently manipulated that state's anti-felon voting law to bar tens of thousands of blacks from voting. For example, many people with common names like John Smith who shared their name with a felon were also barred from voting, despite having clear records.

Yet George W. Bush won by Florida – the state where his brother Jeb served as Governor – by 537 votes. That victory in the state where George W.'s brother Jeb served as governor sent him to the White House.

Policies creating barriers to things like education and employment make it "increasingly difficult" for persons recently released from prison to "remain crime-free" according to a report released earlier this year by the Smart on Crime Coalition.

More than 60 percent of the two-million-plus people in American prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.

"The U.S. imprisons more than South Africa did under apartheid. A nation that promotes democracy has a racial caste in its prisons. We must break that caste system," said the special guest speaker at the "Imprisonment" conference, Pennsylvania Death Row Journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who telephoned from prison.

Racism is written all over the economically/socially debilitating practices embedded in mass incarceration.

A recent University of Wisconsin study found that 17 percent of white ex-con job seekers received interviews, compared to only five percent of black ex-con job seekers – a race-based disparity that is additionally devastating for people of color like Garner.

Ohio State University Law Professor Michelle Alexander, the featured speaker at that Princeton conference streamed live on the internet, said a major reason why imprisonment rates soared during the past four decades despite decreases in crime rates is anti-crime policies craftily manipulated by conservative Republican officials for political purposes.

Harsh anti-crimes policies of the 1970s and 1980s were largely a "punitive backlash" to advances of the Civil Rights Movement, said Alexander, author of the hugely popular 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Pennsylvania's prison population, for example, soared from 8,243 in 1980 to 51,487 in 2010, while the California prison population leapt during the same period from 23,264 to over 170,000.

Incarceration costs are particularly obscene when compared to college costs.

A report released in January 2011 by Pennsylvania's auditor general that noted the Keystone State now spends $32,059 annually to imprison one person…a cost that exceeds the annual $20,074 tuition for the MBA degree program at Penn State University.

A report released in January 2010 by a UCLA professor noted that the Golden State spends over $48,000 annually to imprison one person, more than four times the tuition cost of UCLA for a California resident. Back in 1980, California spent more of its state budget on higher education than on prisons, but that had reversed by 2010, with more of that state's budget going for prisons than for higher education.

America's corrosive War on Drugs – a "war" that basically ignores drug kingpins – has devastated black families, author/professor Alexander said.

"A black child today is less likely to be raised in a two-parent household than during slavery," she said. "In major urban areas almost one-half of black men have criminal records. Thus they face a lifetime of legalized discrimination," encompassing exclusions from employment and access to financial assistance required to secure a viable quality of life.

African-Americans are 13 percent of America's population and 14 percent of the nation's drug users but are 37 percent of persons arrested for drugs and 56 percent of the inmates in state prisons for drug offenses, noted the 2009 congressional testimony of Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project and a conference panelist.

Both ex-felon Herman Garner and Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of Princeton's Center for African American Studies, which hosted the conference, expressed similar views on the impacts of mass incarceration.

Dr. Glaude said mass incarceration is a "moral crisis with political and social consequences for America's future," during his remarks opening the conference.

Garner, in an interview, described the US prison system as the "biggest problem" in the American black community.

While politicians pushing punitive policies help drive mass incarceration, its budget- busting persistence implicates the blind-eye of society, said one conference panelist, history professor Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the new director of the fabled Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

"Middle-class whites and blacks in the U.S. are a new kind of 'Silent Majority' regarding mass incarceration," Dr. Muhammad charged. "This 'Silent Majority' supports unjust policies of increased law enforcement and incarceration as the only way to address crime," ignoring proven alternative approaches like "jobs, education and ending societal inequities."

Famed Princeton Professor Dr. Cornell West criticized both the black middle class and black leadership for inaction on mass incarceration.

"The new black middle class and black leadership are not attuned to the suffering in poor black communities," West said during the conference's Keynote Conversation between him and Professor Alexander.

"We need more middle-class people with genuine respect for the poor. This is more than serving as role model mentors," he said.

Author Alexander said ending the "mind-boggling scale" of mass incarceration requires "a major social movement."

One attendee at the Princeton conference, Daryl Brooks, an activist in Trenton, NJ who operates the popular "Today's News N.J." blog, backs Alexander's suggestion.

"To fix this problem we need mass boycotts. America only understands money and violence. We need to shutdown businesses like during the 60s," said Brooks, who spent three-years in prison for a conviction he says was false and aimed at crushing his activism.

"Blacks leaders allowed this incarceration to happen by doing too little to challenge this repression," he said.

The Obama Administration is doing too little to address mass incarceration and its impacts, many of the Princeton panelists and conference attendees agreed.

These critics blast the Obama Administration for what they called its tepid approaches to the torturous scourge of 240 sexual assaults daily in state and federal prisons, charging it with foot-dragging on the Prison Rape Elimination Act which was approved by Congress during the administration of George W. Bush.

While Obama fulfilled a campaign pledge to address the sentencing disparity penalizing powder cocaine more harshly than crack cocaine (a drug derived from powder cocaine), Obama's proclivity for bipartisan consensus has resulted in legislation that lower but did not eliminate the disparity.

That legislation did not apply retroactively, thus failing to mitigate stiff ten-year-plus crack cocaine sentences that have already left many blacks and Hispanics languishing in federal prisons.

"Obama and [US Attorney General Eric] Holder have no courage when it comes to the prison-industrial complex," said Dr. Cornell West.

Class Warfare Scorecard

Guess Who's Winning?
By MIKE WHITNEY

According to a new report by the BEA, personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased by $69 billion (7 percent), while personal income rose by only $38 billion (3 percent) in February.

So consumers are back to their old ways again, spending more than they earn?

Well, not exactly. The truth is, consumer spending is slowing down because food and energy are taking a bigger chunk out of the old paycheck. After factoring in inflation, personal consumption is up just 3 percent while real income fell to 1 percent. In other words, the numbers look a lot different once you factor in inflation.

The reason all this matters, is because consumption is 70 percent of GDP, so if the consumer is on the ropes and getting pummeled by stagnant wages and inflation at the same time, then you can bet the economy is headed for the dumpster. Of course, a good portion of the blame for this mess goes to Ben Bernanke whose miracle QE2 elixir has kept the stock market bubbly while commodities and food prices have skyrocketed. That's the real source of the problem, an uneven policy that rewards the investment class while leaving the workerbees (you and me) fending off soaring prices.

Bernanke says we shouldn't worry about the higher prices because core inflation is still low. (roughly 1%) That's easy to say for guy who's never filled his gas tank in his life, but for everyone else inflation is a killer that forces them to cut their spending or shed more debt, neither of which is easy to do.

So, yes, personal consumption has gone up, but only by a hair. The truth is, people are running harder just to stay in the same place. They're not making any headway at all. In fact, this whole myth about credit-addled shoppers going crazy at Macy's so they can load up on designer jeans and Italian leather boots, is pure bunkum. For most people, it's a hand-to-mouth existence 24-7. Most of their time is spent figuring out how they can stretch the budget or feed a family of four on pinto beans and Velveeta. They don't have the cash for luxuries, unless you consider Spam a luxury.

Of course, the reason for this is that all the gains from worker productivity in the last 30 years have gone to management. The front office rakes in the golden ducats while the workers get a pat-on-the-head and a "see ya later, Charlie". It's the same everywhere. Take a look at this in the WSJ:

"Consider that back in 1970, wages, salaries and employee benefits accounted for about three-quarters of total U.S. personal income as measured by Commerce. Dividend, interest and rental income contributed about 14%, while government-backed benefits, including disability, unemployment and welfare, were less than 8% of the total.

That changed in the ensuing decades as government programs expanded, the population aged and wealth disparities increased. By 2005, salaries, wages and benefits were about 67% of the total. In 2010, they dropped to 64%. Meanwhile, the shares of total income from dividend, interest and rental income and, especially, government benefit payments increased....

Unfortunately, the dwindling share of wage income fits with the broader erosion of the U.S. middle class. Roughly 40% of consumer spending these days is generated by the upper fifth of households. UniCredit economist Harm Bandholz notes that the share of U.S. consumption financed by labor income has steadily declined to about 61% today from 85% in 1970." ("Income Gains Not Lifting All Boats", Kelly Evans, Wall Street Journal)

Funny how that works, eh? Funny how American-style capitalism is like a big conveyor-belt trundling all the wealth to those on the top floor. And, it's getting worse too. The gross inequality now exceeds the period before the '29 Crash and rivals the robber barons era. Hey, we're back in the Gilded Age.

And what are all these fatcats doing with their mountains of money...planning for the future, building a stronger economy, reinvesting in America?

Hell, no. They're swapping paper assets with each other to goose the market so they can leave their bratty kids another billion or two before they meet their maker. Don't believe me? This is from Bloomberg:

"U.S. executives are starting to spend the record $940 billion in cash they built up after the credit crisis, just in time for annual shareholder meetings. Takeovers topped $256 billion this quarter... Standard & Poor's 500 Index companies authorized 38 percent more buybacks in 2011 than a year earlier and dividends may increase to a record $31.07 a share in 2013...

Chief executive officers are looking for ways to increase investor returns after posting THE BIGGEST GAIN IN PROFITS SINCE 1988 by relying on near-zero Federal Reserve interest rates and cost cuts that have kept the unemployment rate near a 26-year high....Companies in the S&P 500 have been piling up money for two years as per-share profit jumped 36 percent in 2010, the most in more than two decades...

Companies including Limited Brands Inc., owner of the Victoria's Secret chain, are relying on debt to reward shareholders. The drop in borrowing costs to a three-year low has given executives the incentive to sell bonds and use the proceeds to repurchase stock and pay dividends...

S&P 500 companies have approved $149.8 billion in share repurchases in the past three months...

"Having this much cash on the balance sheet earning essentially nothing is hurting companies' numbers, it's hurting their return on equity, it's hurting their ability to provide income in the long run for investors," said David Kelly, who helps oversee about $445 billion as chief market strategist for JPMorgan Funds in New York. "If they can't find something better to do with it than leave it as cash, the best thing is to return it to shareholders." ("CEOs Tap Record Cash for Dividends as M&A Picks Up", Bloomberg)

Right. Having all that cash lying around is a big problem. Can you believe the arrogance?

Anyway, you get the idea. Corporate USA and big finance have joined together to drive up stocks by buying up their own shares, mergers and acquisitions, debt-pyramiding, and even borrowing money to issue dividends; whatever it takes to pluck the goose one more time before the economy takes another nosedive. And, notice that none of these strategies involve increasing demand, hiring workers, or cobbling together a vision for the future. Oh no; it's all slash and burn capitalism; grab what you can, then fight-like-hell to hide it from the taxman.

And these same people have the audacity to talk about "profligate consumers"?

Give me a break. Big business is nothing more than legalized fleecing disguised as legitimate enterprise. You'd have to be a fool to buy their PR-hype. Here's more from Anne Lowrey on Slate:

"According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, real corporate profits neared an all-time high in the last three months of 2010, with companies raking in an annualized $1.68 trillion in pre-tax operating profits.... The Federal Reserve estimates that companies are sitting on about $1.9 trillion....

How can the corporate economy be so profitable while the jobs economy remains so weak? Part of the answer lies in improved productivity. When the recession hit, businesses fired millions of workers then asked the rest to make up the difference—and, in many cases, they did. Productivity increased 3.9 percent in 2010, while labor costs fell....

...in the last quarter of 2010, the story was all about Wall Street. Profits actually decreased a bit at nonfinancial firms. But companies like investment banks and insurers saw profits climb to an annualized $426.5 billion. The financial sector now accounts for about 30 percent of the economy's overall operating profits....

Still, record-high profits do not necessarily translate into improvements in the economy—as the country's 14 million jobless workers would be (not so) happy to tell you. For the past year, companies have hesitated to spend all of that cash, worried about a lack of good investment opportunities and fearful about demand. The upside is that it seems they are beginning to spend down their $1.9 trillion pile. The downside is that it does not seem that it will be to the immediate benefit of American workers." ("More Profits, Fewer Jobs", Annie Lowrey, Slate)

So the corporate mukky-muks and financial alchemists have figured out how to fatten the bottom line without hiring workers. Great. So, you and I can spend our days watching soaps and panhandling at the freeway on-ramp, while moneybags speculators catch 9-holes at the Club. What a racket.

This two-tiered system only serves the interests of the privileged few and their spoiled kids. The only way to level the playing field is by ripping it up and starting over.

The Onslaught on Organized Labor

When Workers Blame Unions ...
By DAVID MACARAY

A regular CounterPunch reader who’s written me several times—an African American ex-Steelworker from Pittsburgh, now an aspiring playwright—laments that the younger workers he meets not only believe that Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest presidents America ever had, they blame labor unions for our troubles. They blame them for ruining the U.S. economy by driving out so many of the good jobs.

Mind you, this isn’t Wall Street or the Chamber of Commerce talking. These are regular working people. But instead of viewing organized labor as the one institution capable of propping up the middle-class by offering decent wages and benefits, they’ve reached the startling conclusion that America’s unions are a detriment, not an asset. Sadly, this ex-Steelworker said he can’t recall a time in his life when unions were less respected.

How badly have things deteriorated? Just consider the well-publicized event that recently occurred in Maine. Paul LePage, the state’s Republican governor, was so opposed to the contributions of the American labor movement being made public, he insisted on removing an 11-panel, 36-foot long mural that depicted the history of Maine’s working people, arguing that it didn’t give equal time to the state’s corporations and business interests.

According to Adrienne Bennett, a spokeswoman for LePage’s office, the governor believed the mural (painted by noted artist Judy Taylor and installed in the state’s Department of Labor building) was “too one-sided,” too sympathetic to labor interests—at the expense of business interests—particularly at a time when LePage was pushing a singularly pro-business agenda.

If the move weren’t so bloody depressing, it would be comical; indeed, it would be hilarious, the basis for a zany Saturday Night Live skit. It would be tantamount to the History Channel yanking a program that glorified the life of Harriet Tubman or Fredrick Douglass, arguing that the show was too “pro-Negro,” and didn’t give the slave-holders or white supremacists equal time.

Another indication of how bad things have gotten is the condition of the auto industry. Bob King, president of the once illustrious United Auto Workers (UAW), recently announced that his union was going to undertake an historical, massive organizing drive in the American South, and that this campaign was going to amount to a “do or die” effort on the part of the union.

Why would King portray the effort as “do or die”? Because the UAW is effectively fighting for its life. The non-unionized South already accounts for almost half of all the vehicles built in the U.S., and that figure continues to grow as more auto companies relocate to Dixie. Since 2007, the number of auto industry employees who belong to a union has dropped 46-percent. In 2007 there were 345,407 unionized car makers in the U.S.; today there are only 185,522.

As Detroit continues to sink, the South continues to rise. Astonishingly, prior to its opening, in 2009, the Kia plant in West Point, Georgia, had more than 100,000 applications for 2,100 jobs. But in order to keep the union from gaining a foothold (and counter to the law of supply-and-demand), Kia wisely offered high wages and generous benefits. To the folks of West Point, the Kia plant was a godsend, the best manufacturing job anyone had ever seen.

Of course, what organized labor—and, apparently, few others—realizes is that once the American union movement is more or less neutralized, the economy will not only turn into an extravagant and lopsided sellers’ market, the clamps will come down harder and more brutally than anyone could have imagined.

Without having the unions to use as leverage, the South’s oblivious “free riders” (non-union workers whose wages and benefits are artificially propped up by the existence and threat of the unions) are going to find out exactly what a true “free market” labor pool looks like, up-close and personal….and it ain’t going to be pretty.

Consider: With more than 100,000 applicants fighting and thrashing over 2,100 jobs—and with no worries or fears about having to compete with union wages and bennies—why on earth would a company pay more than it was required to pay? Why would a company, any company, part with one nickel more than it absolutely had to?


Without the resistance of organized labor, the law of supply-and-demand will spur an inexorable race to the bottom. And instead of Alabama becoming the New Detroit (as the glossy brochures advertise), it will, in time, resemble the New Bangladesh.

Rigging the Tax Code to Profit From Disasters

GO-Zones and Rep. Jim McCrery
By DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM

Piles of words have been written about disaster capitalism. This brand of capitalism involves two kinds of assaults on communities: severe budget cuts and extensive privatization, both imposed during periods of psycho-social shock resulting from an economic crash, war, or a "natural disaster." In 2005 Hurricane Katrina became a case study to trace these twin prongs of disaster capitalism as one of the world's great cities and a stretch of the Gulf Coast were decimated by a post-hurricane flurry of budget cuts and privatization.

However, there's a third leg of the violent imposition of neoliberalism in the wake of disaster that has been subject to much less scrutiny. This aspect has been as effective as privatization in opportunistically transferring huge sums of wealth into the hands of a few corporations and the rich. It has also laid much of the groundwork for further budget cutting in the wake of catastrophe. What is it?

Two words: tax policy. Disaster tax policy.

In December of 2005 Congress responded to Hurricane Katrina by passing an unprecedented economic recovery package in the form of a tellingly named bill, the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005 (or "GO-Zone"). For those familiar with corporate globalization-speak, an "opportunity zone" is a synonym for "enterprise zone," and also closely related to the various other "zones" of special exploitation carved out by states for the benefit of capital. In these sorts of zones the normal rules of state regulation (to protect the environment, workers, etc.) are suspended, creating a laissez faire atmosphere. The GO-Zone essentially amended sections of the Internal Revenue Code, sections that normally apply to corporations and financial entities operating in a region of opportunity that included the southern counties of Mississippi and Alabama, and southern parishes of Louisiana.

The GO-Zone, the central economic policy response to Hurricane Katrina, was quite simply a massive tax break for corporations and the wealthy. It has resulted in the transfer of billions of dollars from the federal government and public sector to mostly large transnational corporations and investment banks, but also to the top 5 per cent of wealth holders in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Because this raid on the federal budget was designed to occur through somewhat arcane tax expenditures its effect of upwardly redistributing wealth and reducing federal revenues have been subtle and difficult to discern. Its absence of positive economic impacts for the hardest hit communities are conspicuous, however.

As a policy the GO-Zone has its origins in another recent disaster, 9-11. A virtually identical package of tax breaks for corporate wealth was written into a section of the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002 shortly after blocks of New York City were reduced to rubble on September 11, 2001. Buried not too deeply in this bill was the provision for creating a "New York Liberty Zone."

This uber-patriotic idea (conveniently designed to aid already fabulously wealthy real estate and financial companies owning real estate and operating in lower Manhattan) was thought up right in between the two most important Bush-era tax laws, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, and Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. All three of these bills reduced corporate taxes and taxes on personal wealth to nearly record levels, and set the federal government on its path to where it is today - massive deficit spending and a budget crisis due to shrinking revenues.

One of the Republican Party's key players in drafting all of this pro-corporate tax legislation was a relatively unassuming and little known House member from Louisiana's 4th District, Jim McCrery.

McCrery's Congressional career began in 1988 and lasted just over two decades. In that time he became one of the Congress's most knowledgeable members with respect to tax issues, and therefore a key contributor to the Bush administration's rollback of progressive taxes. McCrery co-sponsored the Bush tax cut bills and helped work out some of their finer points as a powerful member of the Ways and Means Committee.

In December of 2005 McCrery introduced the GO-Zone act to Congress and shepherded it through the House, Senate, and to the President's desk in a swift sixteen days with strong bi-partisan support. On the floor of the House McCrery implored, "I cannot overemphasize the importance of putting into law as quickly as possible incentives to give businesses, individuals, people with capital to invest, the urge to go to these devastated areas and invest that capital." His colleagues on both sides of the isle concurred that government's role should be to lavish the wealthy and powerful with lucrative tax incentives. During the perfunctory floor debate no Democrat or Republican asked why similarly targeted economic assistance was not being proposed for workers, small businesses, and others who lacked "capital to invest."

At the center of the GO-Zone are two key provisions that require a corporation or individual already be wealthy and powerful to take advantage of. The first is a $14.9 billion in bonding authority given to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. These "GO-Zone bonds" allow private financial institutions to lend billions to private companies to build all manner of private, for-profit industrial and commercial projects, with profits on these bonds subject to zero federal tax. The Congressional Research Service notes that this provision alone will reduce federal revenues by at least $1 billion over the eleven-year span of the program.

The second key provision was establishment of a bonus depreciation allowance which let businesses drastically reduce their tax burdens by claiming a deduction related to the expected wear-and-tear and therefore decline in the value of property and capital invested in after the storm. Depreciation is a standard tax deduction used by businesses, but the "bonus" aspect allowed for larger immediate deductions. The GO-Zone included billions more in other tax credits, tax exemptions, tax write offs, and tax loopholes to be claimed by corporations and other owners of large real estate and capital holdings, all predicated on the notion that the best disaster recovery policy is aimed at helping those who already have the most.

After more than five years the GO-Zone has proven a resounding failure with respect to economic recovery along the Gulf Coast. Although local chamber of commerce boosters have pointed to a lower unemployment rate than the national average, the reality is that the region's economy has shrunk, especially in locales like New Orleans and coastal parishes where the GO-Zone's promised benefits never materialized and never will. New Orleans and many of the hardest hit Louisiana parishes and counties in Mississippi and Alabama have seen little to no benefit from the promised infusions of cash via corporate investments in their backyards. This has meant relatively poor levels of job creation, few if any local construction contracts or subcontracts, few new sources of local tax revenues, actual reductions in housing stocks, and closures of unfunded public schools, public housing, public libraries, and other public goods. Because disaster tax policies are expressly written to benefit large wealth holders, these policies have no positive impact for working families. The majority who possess no vast real estate holdings and who own none of the corporate capital are at the mercy of the wealthy few to make decisions about the future. Democratic control over economic development is made impossible.

The hard truth is that most communities inside the GO-Zone's boundaries were never meant to reap benefits from these tax incentives. The intended benefactors from the very beginning were large corporations, the big financial companies that loan to them, and the elite law firms that serve both.

The Gulf Opportunity Zone Act was written by and for corporate capital. Representative McCrery sponsored the bill to respond to his most important constituents: major corporations and financial institutions with stakes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. These parties were not interested in rebuilding the region's economy to benefit disaster stricken communities. They were keen on obtaining huge tax breaks and cheap bond money to expand the already harmful economy of extraction: refineries, pipelines, and chemical plants.

This opportunistic imposition of disaster tax policy was a fitting capstone to McCrery's Congressional career which was characterized by a nearly perfect record of supporting regressive taxation and budget cutting. McCrery began his professional life as a lawyer in the small city of Leesville, Louisiana. After a stint as an assistant attorney for the city of Shreveport, in 1981 he joined the staff of Rep. Charles Roemer, III. McCrery's boss would eventually become a tax-hating, budget slashing Governor of Louisiana, one who also ushered in gambling via floating casinos and the now ubiquitous video poker machines placed in seemingly every bayou bar and truck stop. McCrery inherited Roemer's Congressional seat in 1988.

In the interim, however, McCrery spent four years working as a lawyer for the Georgia Pacific Corporation, one of the largest timber, pulp, and chemicals companies in the world with operations in Louisiana and nearby Arkansas. Perhaps it was during his four years at Georgia Pacific that McCrery's pro-corporate ideology was finally and fully cemented, or maybe it was earlier. Whenever it was, freshman McCrery entered the Congress ready to rewrite the tax code in favor of further concentrating wealth to the benefit of companies like G-P.

Candidate McCrery's elections were bankrolled by the usual powerhouse corporations that spend heavily on Republicans and Democrats alike, many of them big insurance, healthcare, and financial concerns. Oil and chemical companies with operations in Louisiana were also among the Congressman's biggest sources of campaign cash. He received virtually nothing from unions, environmental funds, women's organizations, and African American owned businesses.

McCrery's former employer Georgia Pacific was one of his top donors throughout his career. Between 1998 and 2004 Georgia Pacific gave McCrery more than $21,000. After Georgia Pacific was bought out by Koch Industries in 2005 (just around the same time Hurricane Katrina struck) Koch continued to donate to McCrery, giving him $10,000 in 2006. Another major funder of McCrery was Harrah's Entertainment. The Casino giant with two hotels, two casinos, and a horse-racing track in his district, gave McCrery $17,500 between 2002 and 2006. These corporations were largely investing in McCrery for his deft knowledge of tax policy, and his effectiveness in crafting tax legislation redistribute wealth from the public sector to private. These were shrewd investments.

To build support for this neoliberal economic agenda, Rep. McCrery created a very successful political action committee in 1996, the Committee for the Preservation of Capitalism (CPC). In addition to spending tens of thousands of dollars on ritzy fund raising events at various California wine country attractions like the Lodge at Sonoma, and Benziger Winery, McCrery's CPC doled out $5000 and $10,000 contributions to Republican candidates who would help pass extremely corporate friendly laws. A list of the CPC's biggest cash cows correlates almost perfectly with high scorers on the Americans for Tax Reform scorecard (Grover Norquist's austerity-obsessed organization). McCrery himself routinely scored above the 95th percentile. Some of the CPC's favored candidates have become stars of the Tea Party.

Having helped stack the House with Republican allies, when Hurricane Katrina hit it was almost a foregone conclusion that the economic policy response would center on tax cuts. Democrats voted with equal enthusiasm for the GO-Zone Act though, their own party's leadership having been been infected by the same neoliberal policy doctrines during the Clinton years.

Most aspects of the GO-Zone Act were set to expire at the end of 2010, but late last year the Congress extended many provisions, including the tax-exempt bond program which had failed to dole out its entire lending cap. Nevertheless, after a half-decade of implementation the GO-Zone's record speaks loud and clear. The primary beneficiaries of GO-Zone bonds have been the large oil and chemical companies. Areas that have seen the largest GO-Zone bond investments are uniformly outside of the hardest hit parishes and counties. Any economic stimulus and jobs created therefore have been at a distance from the most crippled areas. A mere ten mega-projects financed with GO-Zone bonds involving expansion of oil refineries, chemical plants, pipelines, and petroleum tanks have consumed more than half of all the program's funds in Louisiana. (In the upcoming May/June issue of Dollars and Sense magazine, http://www.dollarsandsense.org/, I will present a more complete picture of the GO-Zone's failure as a disaster reconstruction policy in Louisiana.)

One of the biggest GO-Zone bond recipients in Louisiana will be McCrery's former employer and major campaign donor, Koch subsidiary Georgia Pacific. The Atlanta based company is expected to receive $250 million to expand a pulp and paper plant in East Baton Rouge Parish. It's an exemplary disaster tax policy-enabled project; the plant will be built in a Parish that experienced relatively little damage from Katrina; it reinforces and further enriches the heavily polluting industries that already dominate Louisiana's chemical corridor; it will generate huge profits for Koch Industries; and it's all being done in the name of disaster reconstruction.

When McCrery retired from the House in 2008 he wasted no time stepping through the revolving door and into a job with the lobbying firm Capitol Counsel. It was a perfect fit for the ex-Congressman. Started in 2007 Capitol Counsel was described by The Hill's Alexander Bolton as a lobbying firm focused on helping shape tax policy for its clients. According to Bolton:

"Two of the most experienced Democratic tax lobbyists in Washington have joined forces with a team of Democratic fundraisers and operatives to form what likely will emerge as one of Washington’s premier boutique lobbying shops. The firm, Capitol Counsel LLC, will focus almost exclusively on two of the most powerful committees in Congress: the House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance panels."

When McCrery joined Capitol Counsel he was leaving the Congress as the highly influential ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee. Reaching back into this Committee, and the Senate's tax policy panel, McCrery has worked to reduce taxes for companies like General Electric, provide tax breaks for oil firms like Bass Enterprises Production, and tax credits for manufacturers like Parsons& Whittemore.

For example, in 2010 McCrery lobbied his former House colleagues and the Senate for passage of a bill that would have amended the Internal Revenue Code to allow a credit against income tax for corporations using energy derived from biomass to power domestic paper, pulp and paperboard factories. Parsons& Whittemore, McCrery's client, would have profited nicely if the bill had passed, but it did not. Coincidentally, earlier in 2010 McCrery's former employer Georgia Pacific reached an agreement to purchase several Alabama pulp and paper mills from Parsons & Whittemore.

Another example of McCrery's continuing influence over tax policy involves Harrah's Casino. Having been one of his biggest fundraisers while a Congressman, Harrah's is now a client. McCrery spent the Summer of 2010 lobbying on Harrah's behalf to amend portions of the tax code to allow the company to expand into Internet gaming and reduce the company's tax burden. While the GO-Zone specifically barred casinos from utilizing its tax provisions, Harrah's nevertheless profited from Hurricane Katrina in its own way by successfully pressuring Mississippi politicians to finally allow casinos such as its Grand Casino Biloxi to be built on dry land.

Before McCrery exited the House for his substantially more lucrative lobbying gig the Congress attempted to implement disaster tax policies after several other storms. Most notable was the introduction of the Midwestern Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2008 by Senator Charles Grassley (with Senator Barack Obama co-sponsoring). This bill would have duplicated the GO-Zone's two key provisions with tax-exempt bond financing and bonus depreciation deductions made available to businesses within the geographic region flooded by the storms of that year.

The bill never became law. The Heartland Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2008 was passed instead. The "Heartland" bill included many tax benefits for individuals and some for businesses, but these two key disaster tax policies were nixed. Nevertheless, the concept of using tax deductions as the central policy tool to rebuild after disasters remains popular in Congress, due in part to the continuing influence of corporations and large wealth holders through lobby shops like Capitol Counsel.

Ironically a senior lawyer at the elite New Orleans law firm of Adams & Reese who helped write portions of the GO-Zone Act, and whose clients have included big companies that have utilized tax-free GO-Zone bonds, sums up the harmful corporate bias inherent in disaster tax policy:

"the single greatest deficiency in the [GO-Zone] Act is the lack of sufficient assistance for small businesses. Smaller businesses typically do not need bonus depreciation because it is only beneficial if you have or expect substantial federal tax liability.”

In other words, bonus depreciation was explicitly designed to help only very large corporations, particularly those like oil and chemical companies —think Exxon or Georgia Pacific— who routinely reinvest in machinery and their physical plants. This lawyer continued:

"Without allowing the GO Zone bonds to be bank qualified, banks cannot generally justify the purchase of tax-exempt bonds for small borrowers."

Bank qualification was only one of the many reasons why tax-exempt GO-Zone bonds went un-utilized by 99 per cent of businesses, mostly medium and small firms, in the disaster-stricken region. Again, it was an opportunistic policy that only large corporations and large financial companies could possibly gain from.

Thus, more than five years after Katrina, the Gulf Opportunity Zone has become a zone of spotty recovery, with some communities still suffering from economic damages that will never be repaired by policies that were never designed to do so, and other areas seeing huge investments by polluting industries, wealth all the while being concentrated in the hands of a few. Ultimately this episode is about much more than one member of Congress, or one set of industries that gamed the tax code after a natural disaster; it's about the ascendancy of an ideology among government leadership, on both side of the aisle. The problem is that those who adhere to disaster tax policy not only believe the best response to calamity is to further enrich and empower the wealthy few: they also lack the ability to imagine that government could respond any differently, that it could directly empower and enrich the people, from the bottom up.

The FDA is Asleep at the Switch

Radiation and Everyday LifeBy ROBERT ALVAREZ

Recently, a senior scientist with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made this comment to the news media about radioactive fallout being detected in milk in the United States from the nuclear catastrophe in Japan:

"Radiation is all around us in our daily lives, and these findings are a miniscule amount compared Fukushima-Daiichi to what people experience every day. For example, a person would be exposed to low levels of radiation on a round trip cross country flight, watching television, and even from construction materials."

No matter how small the dose might be, it is disingenuous to compare an exposure to a specific radioisotope that is released by a major nuclear accident, with radiation exposures in every-day life. The FDA spokesperson should have informed the public that radioactive iodine provides a unique form of exposure in that it concentrates rapidly in dairy products and in the human thyroid. The dose received, based on official measurements, may be quite small, and pose an equally small risk. However, making a conclusion on the basis of one measurement is fragmentary at best and unscientific at worst. As the accident in Fukushima continues to unfold, the public should be provided with all measurements made of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima reactors to allow for independent analyses.

Moreover, the FDA has been asleep at the switch when it comes to protecting public health from medical radiation exposures. According to the National Council on Radiation Protection, radiation exposures to the American public from medical devices, which the FDA regulates, have soared by nearly 600 percent since 1982. In 2002, the NCRP estimated that the public received an extra 53 millirem (0.53 mSv) per person per year from medical radiation sources. In 2006, the NCRP estimates that this dose has jumped to 300 millirem (3mSv)--nearly three times the annual dose allowed by the U.S. EPA from nuclear facilities.

The single largest contributor responsible for half of this dose to the American public is from Computed Tomography or CT Scans, whose use has skyrocketed over the past several years. According to a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, as many as 29,000 future cancers could be related to CT scans performed in 2007 alone.

According to several articles in the New York Times, an alarming number of people have been severely overexposed to CT scans. FDA has yet to comment on how this may be affecting the health of the Americans in every-day life.

Victory Lapse - Obama Transparency Award

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Victory Lapse - Obama Transparency Award

Take Back the Land- Rochester Eviction Defense March 28, 2011

(Look what happens when you don't leave your next of kin a will designating to whom you leave your shit.--jef)

How Milton Friedman and Chicago Economics Undermined America

Saturday, April 2, 2011 by Corporate Crime Reporter
by Russell Mokhiber

Here’s the thing about the Chicago School of Economics – it wasn’t always this way.

Chicago School now means – market good, government bad.

But that was Chicago School hijacked by Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, and Richard Posner.

There was a Chicago School before Friedman, Bork and Posner.

“The Chicago School began with the view that in order to have a properly functioning free market, the government must drastically curtail the ability of businesses to build and maintain concentrated economic power,” writes Kenneth Davidson in his new book Reality Ignored: How Milton Friedman and Chicago Economics Undermined American Institutions and Endangered the Global Economy (2011). “Early incarnations advocated forbidding corporations to retain their earnings or to purchase other businesses. The explicit fear was that the disproportionate power of big businesses would distort commercial markets and corrupt political freedoms.”

That sounds more like Ralph Nader than the Chicago School.

“It was Henry Simons and Aaron Director,” Davidson told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last night.

“Aaron Director was very close to Milton Friedman. Henry Simons was one of his teachers during the 1930s.”

“Both Director and George Stigler were students of Simons. Simons wrote an essay called A Positive Program for Laissez Faire.”

“It was in the middle of the depression. At that time, people thought that many of the problems affecting the economy in the United States and the rest of the world were due to the growth of the then relatively new giant corporation.”

“They had this ideal that the market would work and would perfectly, but only if you could take out of the market the giant firms that dominated through their economic power.”

“And they saw that economic power as a great threat to the nation and national freedom.

That was essentially a Jeffersonian notion of the market. The market would regulate itself if everybody was a farmer, a yeoman farmer, a small businessman.”

“They thought it would be automatic.”

“By the time Friedman wrote his book – Capitalism and Freedom – in 1962, they had totally changed their minds.”

“The problem was not big business. The problem was government.”

Henry Simons thought the market had to be pretty rigidly controlled. It was bad to allow companies to keep their profits. The profits should be given back to the shareholders every year. And the businesses should have to sell the market every year on whatever their development plans are and raise new capital.”

“Friedman just swept that away. The government could not make a decision that would be correct. He and Stigler were adamant on the fact that the government was not only incompetent to make these decisions, but that whatever regulatory organizations were created would inevitably be dominated by big businesses.”

“So, it was better to let the businesses fight it out themselves in a survival of the fittest mode.”

One hundred years ago, antitrust policy was a populist policy. It was seen as a way not just to break up cartels, but to challenge concentrated economic and political power. Now, antitrust seems weak in comparison. The Chicago School has eviscerated its powers. Antitrust today seems to challenge power only at the edges.

“It’s true,” Davidson said. “The objectives of antitrust when passed were directed at political and social corporate power.”

“People feared the power of the large businesses. Some of those fears went away with the countervailing power of unions.”

“And some went away with the increased income and economic growth of the United States.”

“But we are now seeing much of the same kinds of fears re-emerging out of the deregulation, not only of antitrust as a social and political force, but also the deregulation of the financial sector.”

“The Supreme Court in the Credit Suisse decision two years ago said that antitrust can’t go after misbehavior in the stock markets.”

“Robert Bork, in his book The Antitrust Paradox, denies the history of the antitrust laws – he denies the social and political foundations.”

“To the extent that he would admit the legislative history, he says – that’s just words, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“And he invents or applies a Chicago theory about how the economy works and redefines antitrust.”

“And he says – if its not about this and only this, we should get rid of the antitrust laws.”

“Richard Posner comes along and writes the same thing – it’s about prices, it’s not about power.”

“They are simply making up this history, which then becomes the foundation for saying – when we look at mergers, we don’t look at the consolidation of corporate power, or the enhancement of corporate power. Instead, we look at the question of whether the price of individual products is going to go up or not. And that’s the only thing we look at.”

Do you see any chance for a new trust busting politician like Teddy Roosevelt coming down the pike?

“No,” Davidson said. “I don’t see the President taking the kind of leadership that Roosevelt took in the early 1900s that created antitrust as a political force in the United States.”

“President Obama is much more cautious in the way he goes about these things.”

“What inevitably causes the shift in the political winds is overreaching.”

“And we are seeing overreaching by these large corporations. I very much fear that the temporary resolution on Wall Street of our economic crisis, which ended up in the merger of even larger banks, which are going to be even more susceptible to disastrous failure, is eventually going to cause another crash, and this time the governments will have to break them up.”

“They will have to see that the original Chicago School theory that smaller is better is in fact better.”

“The idea that we let commercial private institutions get bigger and bigger is a recipe for disaster to the economy.”

The FDA and Fukushima Fallout

Saturday, April 2, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Robert Alvarez

Recently, a senior scientist with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made this comment to the news media about radioactive fallout being detected in milk in the United States from the nuclear catastrophe in Japan:

"Radiation is all around us in our daily lives, and these findings are a miniscule amount compared Fukushima-Daiichi to what people experience every day. For example, a person would be exposed to low levels of radiation on a round trip cross country flight, watching television, and even from construction materials.”

No matter how small the dose might be, it is disingenuous to compare an exposure to a specific radioisotope that is released by a major nuclear accident, with radiation exposures in everyday life. The FDA spokesperson should have informed the public that radioiodine provides a unique form of exposure in that it concentrates rapidly in dairy products and in the human thyroid. The dose received, based on official measurements, may be quite small, and pose an equally small risk. However, making a conclusion on the basis of one measurement is fragmentary at best and unscientific at worst. As the accident in Fukushima continues to unfold, the public should be provided with all measurements made of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima reactors to allow for independent analyses.

Moreover, the FDA has been asleep at the switch when it comes to protecting public health from medical radiation exposures. According to the National Council on Radiation Protection, radiation exposures to the American public from medical devices and source, which FDA regulates, have soared by nearly 600 percent since 1982. In 2002, the NCRP estimated that the public received an extra 53 millirem (0.53 mSv) per person per year from medical radiation sources. In 2006, the NCRP estimates that this dose has jumped to 300 millirem (3mSv) -- nearly three times the annual dose allowed by the U.S. EPA from nuclear facilities.

The single largest contributor responsible for half of this dose to the American public is from Computed Tomography or CT Scans, whose use has skyrocketed over the past several years. According to a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, as many as 29,000 future cancers could be related to CT scans performed in 2007 alone. According to several recent articles in the New York Times, an alarming number of people have been severely overexposed to CT scans. FDA has yet to comment on how this may be affecting the health of the Americans in everyday life.

Tax Day in America: A People Without a Vision Will Perish

Friday, April 1, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Joseph Gerson

How does it feel to know that nearly 60% of your tax dollars this year will pay for our present and future wars, not for your family’s or communities’ needs?

Our nation is in trouble, and the diagnosis is as old as the Bible, which warns that “A people without a vision will perish”. Our nation has lost its way, and its people are in trouble. People continue to lose their jobs, services, and economic security, while we spend ever greater sums in the disastrous pursuit of global military supremacy.

Consider: the combined debt of our fifty states is $140 billion. That’s a lot of money, about what we spend annually for the self-defeating “wars of choice” in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya. They will likely have cost $3 trillion by the time our grandchildren finish paying for them.

Our nation spends roughly as much for war and war preparations as the rest of the world combined. Does that buy real security? Our people suffer the highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized developed nation, and infant morality is a key indicator of a nation’s societal and future economic health. We’ve suffered a tsunami of housing foreclosures, and we have yet to find our way out of the “jobless recovery” from the country’s greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

What about the cost health care and human services? That’s just 7% of the Federal government’s discretionary spending. Education: what our children need to find jobs and a critical foundation of any democracy? That’s just 6%, and unlike other “developed” nations, most of our graduates begin adulthood with staggering debt from their college loans.

Between tax cuts for the rich and continuing increases in military spending, our communities have been set on the path of de-development, with catastrophic consequences. With the national cuts in block cuts and other spending reductions mean that in the world’s richest nation, we must suffer cuts in health care and programs for the elderly and disabled. Education is increasingly essential, but head start is being reduced, teachers are being laid off by the thousands, class sizes growing, and Pell Grant loans that working and middle class students need for college are withering. Police and fire fighters are losing their jobs, while job training programs are cut.

The budget surplus that President Bush the Lesser inherited from President Clinton didn’t evaporate magically. It was mugged in the back alleys and dark corners of the White House, Congress the Pentagon and K Street. Bush’s tax write off for the super rich, extended by the last lame duck Congressional session, took $2.5 trillion from our communities. $2.5 trillion! That’s quite enough to ensure decent housing and health care for all, to educate our children, to build the infrastructure fueled by sustainable energy that our nation needs to be competitive in the 21st century, and to be paying down the national debt.

The Pentagon’s budget, far and away the world’s largest a decade ago, has doubled since 9-11. Meanwhile our people enjoy less real security. Despite President Obama’s pledge to work for a nuclear weapons free world, $185 billion has been committed to modernize the country’s preparations for nuclear war. Plans are afoot to replace our fleets of Trident nuclear submarines and nuclear bombers. Two decades after the Cold War, we still spend more than $100 billion a year to deploy hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops around the world on an estimated 1,000 foreign military bases, including more than 100 across Japan and more than twice that number in Europe.

When your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail. Instead of seeking diplomatic or nonviolent solutions to the Libyan crisis, for example urging our Turkish allies to mediate the crisis or urging the Pope, the heads of the Councils of Churches and other renowned religious leaders to serve as human shields, we launched hundreds of cruise missiles and B-2 bomber attacks in yet another unnecessary and very uncertain “war of choice.”

Fifty years ago, outgoing Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned that the “subversive tentacles” of the “military industrial complex” created to fight two world wars were undermining U.S. democracy. A half century later they are undermining our real security as well.

As anyone who has traveled or lived in Western Europe knows, by cutting our military spending we can enjoy a higher and more secure standard of living. It’s time to refocus our vision and to reorder our priorities.