Original Link: http://www.alternet.org/story/149324/america_in_decline%3A_why_germans_think_we're_insane
By Democrats Ramshield
A look at our empire in decline through the eyes of the European media.
The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.
The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.
Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties:
Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred."
The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work.
Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)
Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out
Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families.
In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust.
In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story:
American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx.
It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media.
For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.
Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite.
Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac
A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized.
This appears to be a picture of two mothers collecting food boxes from the charity Feed the Children.
Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare?
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Reformers' crystal ball fails again with Crossroads GPS
Original Link: http://www.campaignfreedom.org/blog/detail/reformers-crystal-ball-fails-again-with-crossroads-gps
By Sean Parnell
In early October, the self-styled reform community was up in arms over the activities of Crossroads Grassroots Political Strategies (Crossroads GPS), a 501(c)(4) organization linked to the 527 group American Crossroads, even demanding an IRS investigation into the group's spending.
As a 501(c)(4) organization, Crossroads GPS is not required to disclose its donors, but it also cannot have the "primary activity" of engaging in political activities. After apparently plastering and examining newspaper advertisements on their office walls in order to decode secret messages concerning the funding and spending details of Crossroads GPS, the speech scolds at Democracy 21 and Campaign Legal Center, among others, decided that Crossroads GPS had a primary purpose of political activity. They penned a letter to the IRS demanding an investigation.
As we discussed back in October, there were ample reasons to believe the "reformers" were oblivious to basic principles concerning 501(c) tax law:
Crossroads GPS formed in July of this year... CLC/D21 could not possibly know whether or not Crossroads GPS will meet the "primary purpose" standard for this calendar year [later in the letter, CLC/D21 says that the IRS should apply the primary purpose test to Crossroads GPS according to its activity in this calendar year, based on an unrelated standard for the lobbying expenditures of 501(c)(3) groups]. But to apply a calendar year test to a nascent group that formed in the latter half of an election year doesn't make much sense.
Tax experts consulted by CCP note that the IRS has never spelled out this standard, but many tax professionals use the fiscal year standard. Contrary to what CLC/D21 claim, the fiscal year test is the test used by 501(c)(3) organizations choosing Section (h) status, which allows them to engage in some level of lobbying. Section 501(h) repeatedly notes that it is based on a "taxable year," not the "calendar year" as CLC/D21 claim...
Even if it is the case that, so far, Crossroads GPS has spent a majority of its expenditures on political activity, it does not follow that the group is violating tax law. Crossroads could presumably spend a significant amount of resources lobbying Congress during the lame duck session and the next legislative session. Indeed, it has indicated that it plans a significant legislative advocacy effort over the next few months and recently ran a policy-focused ad (on S. 3773, the Tax Hike Prevention Act) in Capitol Hill newspapers.
Considering this evidence, the allegation by CLC/D21 that the group is "engaged primarily, if not exclusively, in activities to promote and support Republican candidates and to oppose and attack Democratic candidates in the 2010 congressional elections" [emphasis added] seems demonstrably false—or at the very least premature...
Well, the pile of evidence that the "reformers" were chasing conspiracy theories untethered to the real world continues to add up. Last week I posted here regarding the overblown fears peddled by "reformers" about corporate funds overwhelming the 2010 election cycle, relying in good part on a report published by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) on OpenSecrets.org. Tucked at the end of the CRP post was the following:
Jonathan Collegio, the spokesman for American Crossroads, told the Washington Post on Thursday that Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies—a sister organization of American Crossroads that is not required to disclose information about its donors—raised an additional $43 million this year.
Crossroads GPS, legally defined as a 501(c)4 nonprofit designed to promote "social welfare," spent $17 million on political messages and advertisements this election cycle...
It doesn't take a degree in math, or for that matter more than a 6th grade education, to realize that the $17 million spent by Crossroads GPS on political activity is well less than half of their funds raised. Even given the uncertainty over whether Crossroads GPS will be filing their IRS reports based on calendar or fiscal year, the group has plenty of funds for activities other than election-related purposes.
I guess we can chalk this up as yet another example of "reformers" issuing dire warnings and making hysterical predictions that ultimately are seen to be little more than bluster, paranoia, and a cracked crystal ball.
By Sean Parnell
In early October, the self-styled reform community was up in arms over the activities of Crossroads Grassroots Political Strategies (Crossroads GPS), a 501(c)(4) organization linked to the 527 group American Crossroads, even demanding an IRS investigation into the group's spending.
As a 501(c)(4) organization, Crossroads GPS is not required to disclose its donors, but it also cannot have the "primary activity" of engaging in political activities. After apparently plastering and examining newspaper advertisements on their office walls in order to decode secret messages concerning the funding and spending details of Crossroads GPS, the speech scolds at Democracy 21 and Campaign Legal Center, among others, decided that Crossroads GPS had a primary purpose of political activity. They penned a letter to the IRS demanding an investigation.
As we discussed back in October, there were ample reasons to believe the "reformers" were oblivious to basic principles concerning 501(c) tax law:
Crossroads GPS formed in July of this year... CLC/D21 could not possibly know whether or not Crossroads GPS will meet the "primary purpose" standard for this calendar year [later in the letter, CLC/D21 says that the IRS should apply the primary purpose test to Crossroads GPS according to its activity in this calendar year, based on an unrelated standard for the lobbying expenditures of 501(c)(3) groups]. But to apply a calendar year test to a nascent group that formed in the latter half of an election year doesn't make much sense.
Tax experts consulted by CCP note that the IRS has never spelled out this standard, but many tax professionals use the fiscal year standard. Contrary to what CLC/D21 claim, the fiscal year test is the test used by 501(c)(3) organizations choosing Section (h) status, which allows them to engage in some level of lobbying. Section 501(h) repeatedly notes that it is based on a "taxable year," not the "calendar year" as CLC/D21 claim...
Even if it is the case that, so far, Crossroads GPS has spent a majority of its expenditures on political activity, it does not follow that the group is violating tax law. Crossroads could presumably spend a significant amount of resources lobbying Congress during the lame duck session and the next legislative session. Indeed, it has indicated that it plans a significant legislative advocacy effort over the next few months and recently ran a policy-focused ad (on S. 3773, the Tax Hike Prevention Act) in Capitol Hill newspapers.
Considering this evidence, the allegation by CLC/D21 that the group is "engaged primarily, if not exclusively, in activities to promote and support Republican candidates and to oppose and attack Democratic candidates in the 2010 congressional elections" [emphasis added] seems demonstrably false—or at the very least premature...
Well, the pile of evidence that the "reformers" were chasing conspiracy theories untethered to the real world continues to add up. Last week I posted here regarding the overblown fears peddled by "reformers" about corporate funds overwhelming the 2010 election cycle, relying in good part on a report published by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) on OpenSecrets.org. Tucked at the end of the CRP post was the following:
Jonathan Collegio, the spokesman for American Crossroads, told the Washington Post on Thursday that Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies—a sister organization of American Crossroads that is not required to disclose information about its donors—raised an additional $43 million this year.
Crossroads GPS, legally defined as a 501(c)4 nonprofit designed to promote "social welfare," spent $17 million on political messages and advertisements this election cycle...
It doesn't take a degree in math, or for that matter more than a 6th grade education, to realize that the $17 million spent by Crossroads GPS on political activity is well less than half of their funds raised. Even given the uncertainty over whether Crossroads GPS will be filing their IRS reports based on calendar or fiscal year, the group has plenty of funds for activities other than election-related purposes.
I guess we can chalk this up as yet another example of "reformers" issuing dire warnings and making hysterical predictions that ultimately are seen to be little more than bluster, paranoia, and a cracked crystal ball.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Corporate America's Plan to Loot Our Pensions Is the Latest Battle in Decades-Long Assault on the Middle Class
Original Link: http://www.alternet.org/economy/149226/corporate_america's_plan_to_loot_our_pensions_is_the_latest_battle_in_decades-long_assault_on_the_middle_class_/
By Arun Gupta
While the safety net is being withered by attrition, record corporate profits are deemed off-limits for discussion about closing the budget gap.
The severe economic crisis, now in its fourth year, is being used to batter the remnants of the social welfare state. Having decimated aid to the poor over the last 30 years, especially in the United States, the economic and political elite are now intent on strangling middle-class benefits, namely state-provided pensions, health care and education.
The initial neoliberal assault under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reorganized the capitalist economy and hammered private-sector unions into submission. This was accomplished by putting labor back into competition with itself by off-shoring industrial production, through deregulation and with frontal assaults on labor rights, organizing and solidarity.
Similarly, the current attack is a two-pronged effort to reorganize state social services, either by eliminating or privatizing them, and decimate public-sector unions whose workers provide those services. While the safety net is being withered by attrition, police and spying agencies are getting more powers and funding, and the wealth of the super-rich and record corporate profits are deemed off-limits to taxation to close any government budget gap.
Simply put, the elderly are superfluous to capitalism. With high rates of joblessness the “new norm,” more and more people are being made disposable. This leads to an efficient if brutal logic: cutting old-age income and health care will make it easier to scrap old, useless workers. In fact, this reality is already coming to pass. One study published in 2008 found that over a 16-year period life expectancy had declined for many poor American women — precisely those who are disproportionately represented among the elderly heavily dependent on Social Security and Medicare.
Slashing social services affects everyone by increasing the pool of workers desperate for any sort of paying job, pushing down wages and benefits. This will all be pushed under the rubric of “personal responsibility,” and it will probably be successful as long as opposition is weak and divided. The main beneficiaries will be the super-wealthy who gain both from tax cuts as the social sector is chopped up and higher corporate profits as wages and benefits are slashed more deeply.
The attack on pensions is mainly occurring in the West and those countries close to its orbit. So while the United States, Greece, Ireland, Japan, France, Turkey, Spain, Poland and Latvia have been cutting or trying to squeeze state-run pensions, others such as Bolivia, China and Venezuela have been increasing funding of old-age pensions in recent years (though within these countries the picture is more complicated because social spending may be declining overall and inflation increasing).
The Right has stridently opposed Social Security since it was enacted in 1935, but the modern attack on pensions originated during the Reagan-Thatcher era. While he proposed making Social Security voluntary during the 1964 Goldwater campaign, when he reached office Reagan temporarily froze cost-of-living adjustments, raised the future retirement age to 67, taxed benefits of higher-income earners, made it more difficult for the disabled to claim benefits and forced the self-employed to pay 100 percent of payroll taxes. Then under Clinton, according to some economists, inflation was understated to suppress cost-of-living adjustments, resulting in benefits that should be 50 percent higher than the current average of $1,072 a month. Thatcher and Tony Blair formed the same one-two punch as Reagan and Clinton, but they went further by partially privatizing much of the state-run pension system.
The second historical component is the current crisis, which is severely widening the economic chasm. According to the New York Times, corporate profits “have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history,” hitting a record of $1.66 trillion on an annual basis. Taking advantage of Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury monies, Wall Street has notched record profits over the last two years. And the top one percent actually increased their share of the wealth through the end of 2009.
As for the overall economic picture, industrial production is back to where it was in 2000 and the all-important capacity utilization rate – which measures how much of existing manufacturing plants are actually operating – is below 75 percent, compared to a level above 80 percent before the crash. This is like saying more than one-fourth of factories are idle. The trade deficit is at 3.7 percent of the gross domestic product. Only 874,000 jobs were created during the first 10 months of 2010, well short of the 1.2 million needed to keep up with population growth, and some 260,000 state workers lost their jobs during this period, leaving 7.5 million fewer jobs than when the recession began.
The household picture is even grimmer: family income shrank more than 4 percent in 2008 and 2009; the official poverty rate of 14.3 is the highest since 1994; 13.5 percent of home mortgages are in delinquency or foreclosure; the percentage of people receiving health insurance through their employer has dropped by 13 percent over the last decade and the real unemployment rate -- the “U6 rate” which includes those who have given up looking for work -- is at 17 percent. Household debt stands at 118 percent of after-tax income.
Most economists say there are really only four sources of potential growth in our economy: consumer spending, business investment, trade and government. As the data above indicates, the first three are on life support, while the Obama White House bungled the stimulus plan, helping the right in discrediting government intervention, which is still the only remaining option. These economic conditions prevail throughout the West, which is the backdrop for the global assault on pension plans. Thus the conclusion is stark: there is no functioning engine to drive economic growth.
With so much idle productive capacity, the bromide of giving tax breaks to spur business investment is little more than throwing away money. With American families drowning in debt, getting smacked with rising healthcare costs, having lost $15.8 trillion in wealth and fearing joining the armies of unemployed, they are incapable of pulling the economy out of its funk with increased consumption. Increased trade is one possibility, which would require a weaker dollar to make U.S. exports more competitive. But, as Paul Krugman points out, this is opposed by Republicans who believe continued economic decline will enhance their electoral chances in 2012. Despite investment money pouring into the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – agricultural commodities and precious metals, these markets are too narrow and shallow to form a new asset bubble, such as the ones in tech and housing that fueled economic growth for nearly two decades. And in any case, we know how well those bubbles worked out.
When business investment, consumption, trade, debt and speculation all falter, that leaves government as the only sector that can revive a capitalist economy. But, as I first pointed out in December 2008, the Obama administration knew the stimulus was almost certain to fail because the downturn was sapping a staggering $1 trillion a year from the economy at that point, while the plan offered a relatively meager $787 billion. Of that, only $600 billion of stimulus money was spent in the last two years and, according to Paul Krugman, more than 40 percent of that was in tax breaks that tend to offer the least bang for the buck. So in early 2009, faced with an economy leaking 7 percent of the GDP a year, Obama offers a plan that plugs 1 to 2 percent a year.
In the final equation, the Obama stimulus only covered some of the shortfall in state and local budgets. But that money is drying up, and that, to a large degree, is the reason state services and workers are now under attack.
But now we are in for more bloodletting of social services and government workers because the failed stimulus has legitimized the establishment hysteria over the federal debt. Debt matters but the simplest way to reduce it is by a combination of economic growth and inflation. This is what happened to U.S. debt after WW2, which peaked at about 120 percent of GDP, far more than today even with the economic depression and bailouts. Instead, the right is pushing policies that may result in a worst-case scenario. Cutting spending and taxes –which Obama has endorsed – could lead to further economic contraction and deflation. This will make federal debt payments doubly onerous because tax revenues will shrink as the dollar strengthens.
There is another solution to reviving the economy without piling on debt: tax the wealth of the elite. According to economist Rick Wolff, “high-net-worth” Americans have around $12 trillion in investable assets, which excludes the value of their homes. A 13 percent wealth tax would wipe out the entire 2010 federal budget deficit of $1.56 trillion while doing little to crimp the economy because this money is literally lying around.
Yet Obama never seriously considered even the Keynesian policy of debt-driven financing for national re-industrialization because he was the darling of Wall Street – and number one recipient of its dollars – for his unwavering support of the Bush bailout in September 2008 and by taking counsel from Larry Summers and Tim Geithner during the campaign. Once in the White House Obama shunned jobs programs on a massive enough scale to revive the economy because the indirect method of debt-driven financing would shore up benefits, wages and labor bargaining power, thus cutting into corporate profits, while the direct financing method, taxing the rich, would mean they would have to pay for programs that would eventually cut into their profits.
The Obama administration has consistently fought for policies that involve weakening labor -- such as its attacks on auto workers and teachers and the cynical gesture of calling for a freeze on the pay of federal workers– driving down wages, letting unemployment rise, and squeezing social services and benefits, all to transfer more wealth upward.
The wealthy have profited three times off the crisis: from the bubble itself, during the bailouts and from government bonds sold to them to pay for the bailouts. Putting pensions on the chopping block would give them a fourth opportunity to profit off the same crisis.
If debt is a problem, then bondholders should take a haircut because they took the risk. Of course, that’s not how capitalism works. So, in the case of Social Security, which has nearly $2.6 trillion in its trust fund and can meet ALL obligations through 2037 even assuming no changes are made, the plan is to raid it to pay off bondholders.
That’s why a crisis is being manufactured. Obama’s deal to reduce payroll tax by two percentage points will pilfer an estimated $120 billion from the trust fund that will supposedly be paid back by revenues from the general treasury. This means the deficit will increase, feeding into the fabricated panic over Social Security and debt.
For any country, cutting pensions is disastrous to long-term economic health. In the United States, Social Security accounts for 40 percent of the income of the population over 65 and nearly 50 percent for women in this group. It would also leave more people in the workforce as older workers delay retirement. Because the elderly tend to spend their benefits right away, on housing, food, transportation and medical services this means less demand and lower economic activity. And combining all this with trying to crush public workers also means more unemployed, less tax revenue and a shrinking economy.
It all adds up to a recipe for a depression. Two conclusions are inescapable: Obama is far more Herbert Hoover than FDR, and change will only come from creative independent movements instead of marching into the tomb of the Democratic Party.
By Arun Gupta
While the safety net is being withered by attrition, record corporate profits are deemed off-limits for discussion about closing the budget gap.
The severe economic crisis, now in its fourth year, is being used to batter the remnants of the social welfare state. Having decimated aid to the poor over the last 30 years, especially in the United States, the economic and political elite are now intent on strangling middle-class benefits, namely state-provided pensions, health care and education.
The initial neoliberal assault under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reorganized the capitalist economy and hammered private-sector unions into submission. This was accomplished by putting labor back into competition with itself by off-shoring industrial production, through deregulation and with frontal assaults on labor rights, organizing and solidarity.
Similarly, the current attack is a two-pronged effort to reorganize state social services, either by eliminating or privatizing them, and decimate public-sector unions whose workers provide those services. While the safety net is being withered by attrition, police and spying agencies are getting more powers and funding, and the wealth of the super-rich and record corporate profits are deemed off-limits to taxation to close any government budget gap.
Simply put, the elderly are superfluous to capitalism. With high rates of joblessness the “new norm,” more and more people are being made disposable. This leads to an efficient if brutal logic: cutting old-age income and health care will make it easier to scrap old, useless workers. In fact, this reality is already coming to pass. One study published in 2008 found that over a 16-year period life expectancy had declined for many poor American women — precisely those who are disproportionately represented among the elderly heavily dependent on Social Security and Medicare.
Slashing social services affects everyone by increasing the pool of workers desperate for any sort of paying job, pushing down wages and benefits. This will all be pushed under the rubric of “personal responsibility,” and it will probably be successful as long as opposition is weak and divided. The main beneficiaries will be the super-wealthy who gain both from tax cuts as the social sector is chopped up and higher corporate profits as wages and benefits are slashed more deeply.
The attack on pensions is mainly occurring in the West and those countries close to its orbit. So while the United States, Greece, Ireland, Japan, France, Turkey, Spain, Poland and Latvia have been cutting or trying to squeeze state-run pensions, others such as Bolivia, China and Venezuela have been increasing funding of old-age pensions in recent years (though within these countries the picture is more complicated because social spending may be declining overall and inflation increasing).
The Right has stridently opposed Social Security since it was enacted in 1935, but the modern attack on pensions originated during the Reagan-Thatcher era. While he proposed making Social Security voluntary during the 1964 Goldwater campaign, when he reached office Reagan temporarily froze cost-of-living adjustments, raised the future retirement age to 67, taxed benefits of higher-income earners, made it more difficult for the disabled to claim benefits and forced the self-employed to pay 100 percent of payroll taxes. Then under Clinton, according to some economists, inflation was understated to suppress cost-of-living adjustments, resulting in benefits that should be 50 percent higher than the current average of $1,072 a month. Thatcher and Tony Blair formed the same one-two punch as Reagan and Clinton, but they went further by partially privatizing much of the state-run pension system.
The second historical component is the current crisis, which is severely widening the economic chasm. According to the New York Times, corporate profits “have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history,” hitting a record of $1.66 trillion on an annual basis. Taking advantage of Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury monies, Wall Street has notched record profits over the last two years. And the top one percent actually increased their share of the wealth through the end of 2009.
As for the overall economic picture, industrial production is back to where it was in 2000 and the all-important capacity utilization rate – which measures how much of existing manufacturing plants are actually operating – is below 75 percent, compared to a level above 80 percent before the crash. This is like saying more than one-fourth of factories are idle. The trade deficit is at 3.7 percent of the gross domestic product. Only 874,000 jobs were created during the first 10 months of 2010, well short of the 1.2 million needed to keep up with population growth, and some 260,000 state workers lost their jobs during this period, leaving 7.5 million fewer jobs than when the recession began.
The household picture is even grimmer: family income shrank more than 4 percent in 2008 and 2009; the official poverty rate of 14.3 is the highest since 1994; 13.5 percent of home mortgages are in delinquency or foreclosure; the percentage of people receiving health insurance through their employer has dropped by 13 percent over the last decade and the real unemployment rate -- the “U6 rate” which includes those who have given up looking for work -- is at 17 percent. Household debt stands at 118 percent of after-tax income.
Most economists say there are really only four sources of potential growth in our economy: consumer spending, business investment, trade and government. As the data above indicates, the first three are on life support, while the Obama White House bungled the stimulus plan, helping the right in discrediting government intervention, which is still the only remaining option. These economic conditions prevail throughout the West, which is the backdrop for the global assault on pension plans. Thus the conclusion is stark: there is no functioning engine to drive economic growth.
With so much idle productive capacity, the bromide of giving tax breaks to spur business investment is little more than throwing away money. With American families drowning in debt, getting smacked with rising healthcare costs, having lost $15.8 trillion in wealth and fearing joining the armies of unemployed, they are incapable of pulling the economy out of its funk with increased consumption. Increased trade is one possibility, which would require a weaker dollar to make U.S. exports more competitive. But, as Paul Krugman points out, this is opposed by Republicans who believe continued economic decline will enhance their electoral chances in 2012. Despite investment money pouring into the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – agricultural commodities and precious metals, these markets are too narrow and shallow to form a new asset bubble, such as the ones in tech and housing that fueled economic growth for nearly two decades. And in any case, we know how well those bubbles worked out.
When business investment, consumption, trade, debt and speculation all falter, that leaves government as the only sector that can revive a capitalist economy. But, as I first pointed out in December 2008, the Obama administration knew the stimulus was almost certain to fail because the downturn was sapping a staggering $1 trillion a year from the economy at that point, while the plan offered a relatively meager $787 billion. Of that, only $600 billion of stimulus money was spent in the last two years and, according to Paul Krugman, more than 40 percent of that was in tax breaks that tend to offer the least bang for the buck. So in early 2009, faced with an economy leaking 7 percent of the GDP a year, Obama offers a plan that plugs 1 to 2 percent a year.
In the final equation, the Obama stimulus only covered some of the shortfall in state and local budgets. But that money is drying up, and that, to a large degree, is the reason state services and workers are now under attack.
But now we are in for more bloodletting of social services and government workers because the failed stimulus has legitimized the establishment hysteria over the federal debt. Debt matters but the simplest way to reduce it is by a combination of economic growth and inflation. This is what happened to U.S. debt after WW2, which peaked at about 120 percent of GDP, far more than today even with the economic depression and bailouts. Instead, the right is pushing policies that may result in a worst-case scenario. Cutting spending and taxes –which Obama has endorsed – could lead to further economic contraction and deflation. This will make federal debt payments doubly onerous because tax revenues will shrink as the dollar strengthens.
There is another solution to reviving the economy without piling on debt: tax the wealth of the elite. According to economist Rick Wolff, “high-net-worth” Americans have around $12 trillion in investable assets, which excludes the value of their homes. A 13 percent wealth tax would wipe out the entire 2010 federal budget deficit of $1.56 trillion while doing little to crimp the economy because this money is literally lying around.
Yet Obama never seriously considered even the Keynesian policy of debt-driven financing for national re-industrialization because he was the darling of Wall Street – and number one recipient of its dollars – for his unwavering support of the Bush bailout in September 2008 and by taking counsel from Larry Summers and Tim Geithner during the campaign. Once in the White House Obama shunned jobs programs on a massive enough scale to revive the economy because the indirect method of debt-driven financing would shore up benefits, wages and labor bargaining power, thus cutting into corporate profits, while the direct financing method, taxing the rich, would mean they would have to pay for programs that would eventually cut into their profits.
The Obama administration has consistently fought for policies that involve weakening labor -- such as its attacks on auto workers and teachers and the cynical gesture of calling for a freeze on the pay of federal workers– driving down wages, letting unemployment rise, and squeezing social services and benefits, all to transfer more wealth upward.
The wealthy have profited three times off the crisis: from the bubble itself, during the bailouts and from government bonds sold to them to pay for the bailouts. Putting pensions on the chopping block would give them a fourth opportunity to profit off the same crisis.
If debt is a problem, then bondholders should take a haircut because they took the risk. Of course, that’s not how capitalism works. So, in the case of Social Security, which has nearly $2.6 trillion in its trust fund and can meet ALL obligations through 2037 even assuming no changes are made, the plan is to raid it to pay off bondholders.
That’s why a crisis is being manufactured. Obama’s deal to reduce payroll tax by two percentage points will pilfer an estimated $120 billion from the trust fund that will supposedly be paid back by revenues from the general treasury. This means the deficit will increase, feeding into the fabricated panic over Social Security and debt.
For any country, cutting pensions is disastrous to long-term economic health. In the United States, Social Security accounts for 40 percent of the income of the population over 65 and nearly 50 percent for women in this group. It would also leave more people in the workforce as older workers delay retirement. Because the elderly tend to spend their benefits right away, on housing, food, transportation and medical services this means less demand and lower economic activity. And combining all this with trying to crush public workers also means more unemployed, less tax revenue and a shrinking economy.
It all adds up to a recipe for a depression. Two conclusions are inescapable: Obama is far more Herbert Hoover than FDR, and change will only come from creative independent movements instead of marching into the tomb of the Democratic Party.
How Do We Shift Power to the People and Away from Concentrated Corporate Power?
Original Link: http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/12/how-do-we-shift-power-to-the-people-and-away-from-concentrated-corporate-power/
By Kevin Zeese
Education, Organization and a Culture of Resistance Will Build an Independent Movement for Real Change
The power of concentrated corporate capital was on display in Washington last week, as it has been all year. The incoming Chair of the Congressional committee responsible for banking regulation, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) says “my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” And President Obama sat down with the CEOs of 20 large corporations to talk about how he could help Big Business increase their already record profits. And, in the Supreme Court, 13 of 16 business cases were ruled in favor of business interests.
These actions echo a year where Sen. Durbin complained the banks “own” the Congress and where President Obama worked with the health insurance industry to keep them in control of health care while claiming it was “reform,” and where the Supreme Court in Citizens United vastly increased corporate power in elections by allowing unlimited spending.
Corporate capital dominates the government and prevents the changes urgently needed in so many crisis issues for the nation and the world.
In the last year, through Prosperity Agenda I worked on many of these critical issues including the impact of corporate power on elections, providing health care to all Americans, restructuring finance regulation to prevent another economic collapse and reigning in spending on weapons and war. In all of these areas we had some impact, but in 2011 and beyond, much more will be needed.
Shifting power from concentrated corporate interests to the people is no easy task. It has taken years of work by those interests to gain the power that they have. It will take years of work to weaken the corporate stranglehold. The growing crises remind us of the urgency of our work and the need for a commitment to sustain and increase our efforts.
In preparing this article I looked back at a memo written by Lewis Powell two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. The memo was written in 1971 at a time when the business community felt it was rapidly losing power and that the capitalist system was under severe attack. Powell, a lawyer for the Richmond Chamber of Commerce, described as “the fundamental premise” of his paper that “business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.” They saw attacks coming in the colleges, in the media, on the streets, in bookstores and from politicians. Everywhere they looked they were under attack and on the verge of total defeat – the end of free markets and crony capitalism.
The purpose of the Powell memo, written to the head of the Chamber of Commerce, was to lay out a plan to restore and build corporate power. Powell laid out a plan that is instructive for those of us who want to shift power from concentrated capital to the people, who want to see a democratized economy in which people have greater control of their economic lives and are more represented in both the economy and government.
Powell’s plan was a long-term one built primarily on education and organization. In response to a “broadly based and consistently pursued” attack on corporate power, Powell wrote “independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.” He urged action in universities, with speaker’s bureaus, in publishing, influencing the media and working in the courts, as well as in electoral politics.
We also have a long term plan to educate, organize and unite our efforts:
■We’ve used education in writing, media and video. We strive for but do not rely on the corporate media, which is also part of the problem, to cover our work. We also recognize that too often they are part of the problem. We make our own media and work with the independent media.
■We’ve reached out to allied organizations and allied movements in order to help develop consistent and coordinated actions. And we’ve asked our thousands of members to take actions in unison so our voices are multiplied.
■We’ve used the courts and instruments of government to challenge the illegal actions of the Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads seeking investigation and prosecution of their abuses in the 2010 elections. See more here, and here. We’ve done the same when we seek corporate responsibility for companies like Massey Energy and their CEO Don Blankenship when 29 miners were killed in West Virginia (more here) and were pleased when he resigned.
While education and organization are critical ingredients to bringing change, this is a slow process and many of the issues the nation faces are urgent. This is why we also pursue acts of protest and resistance. We did this in the health care debate and most recently in the anti-war movement. Resistance has always been an ingredient for bringing change whether it was people sitting in at segregated lunch counters, or blacks sitting in the white section of the bus, or Cindy Sheehan camping outside of George Bush’s ranch. In the next year we will see a growing culture of resistance in the United States.
Other acts of resistance are seen around the release of documents by WikiLeaks. The reaction demonstrated corporations and the government working together to block the American people from knowing what is being done in our name. VISA, Mastercard, Bank of America, PayPal, Amazon and various financial institutions stopped processing funds for WikiLeaks at the request of the government. But the truth is getting out and we now know what the government is doing in our name and must take action to stop it. Knowing the truth and not acting is complicity. More and more Americans are acting. We see resistance in the more than 1,000 mirror sites of WikiLeaks, in the more than 100,000 people who downloaded the WikiLeaks “insurance policy” and were prepared to release documents if Julian Assange were harmed. It is seen in Americans organizing for their right to know, and to reaffirm Freedom of the Press. We are organizing under the banner WikiLeaksIsDemocracy.org, with a petition signed by notables and now by thousands. Join us and urge others to as well.
It is going to take education, organization and resistance as part of a persistent independent movement for political change. Those who want real change achieve it by voting for parties dominated by the donations of corporate executives. Voting for corporate parties re-enforces corporate power. We need independent electoral activity along with an independent movement and independent media to shift the power to the people.
There is a growing movement for real paradigm shifting change. It is a slow process that is accelerating and 2011 promises to be a milestone year. Please join us in our efforts at www.ProsperityAgenda.US. We need all Americans who want a democratized economy where power is shifted to the people joining us.
By Kevin Zeese
Education, Organization and a Culture of Resistance Will Build an Independent Movement for Real Change
The power of concentrated corporate capital was on display in Washington last week, as it has been all year. The incoming Chair of the Congressional committee responsible for banking regulation, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) says “my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” And President Obama sat down with the CEOs of 20 large corporations to talk about how he could help Big Business increase their already record profits. And, in the Supreme Court, 13 of 16 business cases were ruled in favor of business interests.
These actions echo a year where Sen. Durbin complained the banks “own” the Congress and where President Obama worked with the health insurance industry to keep them in control of health care while claiming it was “reform,” and where the Supreme Court in Citizens United vastly increased corporate power in elections by allowing unlimited spending.
Corporate capital dominates the government and prevents the changes urgently needed in so many crisis issues for the nation and the world.
In the last year, through Prosperity Agenda I worked on many of these critical issues including the impact of corporate power on elections, providing health care to all Americans, restructuring finance regulation to prevent another economic collapse and reigning in spending on weapons and war. In all of these areas we had some impact, but in 2011 and beyond, much more will be needed.
Shifting power from concentrated corporate interests to the people is no easy task. It has taken years of work by those interests to gain the power that they have. It will take years of work to weaken the corporate stranglehold. The growing crises remind us of the urgency of our work and the need for a commitment to sustain and increase our efforts.
In preparing this article I looked back at a memo written by Lewis Powell two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. The memo was written in 1971 at a time when the business community felt it was rapidly losing power and that the capitalist system was under severe attack. Powell, a lawyer for the Richmond Chamber of Commerce, described as “the fundamental premise” of his paper that “business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.” They saw attacks coming in the colleges, in the media, on the streets, in bookstores and from politicians. Everywhere they looked they were under attack and on the verge of total defeat – the end of free markets and crony capitalism.
The purpose of the Powell memo, written to the head of the Chamber of Commerce, was to lay out a plan to restore and build corporate power. Powell laid out a plan that is instructive for those of us who want to shift power from concentrated capital to the people, who want to see a democratized economy in which people have greater control of their economic lives and are more represented in both the economy and government.
Powell’s plan was a long-term one built primarily on education and organization. In response to a “broadly based and consistently pursued” attack on corporate power, Powell wrote “independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.” He urged action in universities, with speaker’s bureaus, in publishing, influencing the media and working in the courts, as well as in electoral politics.
We also have a long term plan to educate, organize and unite our efforts:
■We’ve used education in writing, media and video. We strive for but do not rely on the corporate media, which is also part of the problem, to cover our work. We also recognize that too often they are part of the problem. We make our own media and work with the independent media.
■We’ve reached out to allied organizations and allied movements in order to help develop consistent and coordinated actions. And we’ve asked our thousands of members to take actions in unison so our voices are multiplied.
■We’ve used the courts and instruments of government to challenge the illegal actions of the Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads seeking investigation and prosecution of their abuses in the 2010 elections. See more here, and here. We’ve done the same when we seek corporate responsibility for companies like Massey Energy and their CEO Don Blankenship when 29 miners were killed in West Virginia (more here) and were pleased when he resigned.
While education and organization are critical ingredients to bringing change, this is a slow process and many of the issues the nation faces are urgent. This is why we also pursue acts of protest and resistance. We did this in the health care debate and most recently in the anti-war movement. Resistance has always been an ingredient for bringing change whether it was people sitting in at segregated lunch counters, or blacks sitting in the white section of the bus, or Cindy Sheehan camping outside of George Bush’s ranch. In the next year we will see a growing culture of resistance in the United States.
Other acts of resistance are seen around the release of documents by WikiLeaks. The reaction demonstrated corporations and the government working together to block the American people from knowing what is being done in our name. VISA, Mastercard, Bank of America, PayPal, Amazon and various financial institutions stopped processing funds for WikiLeaks at the request of the government. But the truth is getting out and we now know what the government is doing in our name and must take action to stop it. Knowing the truth and not acting is complicity. More and more Americans are acting. We see resistance in the more than 1,000 mirror sites of WikiLeaks, in the more than 100,000 people who downloaded the WikiLeaks “insurance policy” and were prepared to release documents if Julian Assange were harmed. It is seen in Americans organizing for their right to know, and to reaffirm Freedom of the Press. We are organizing under the banner WikiLeaksIsDemocracy.org, with a petition signed by notables and now by thousands. Join us and urge others to as well.
It is going to take education, organization and resistance as part of a persistent independent movement for political change. Those who want real change achieve it by voting for parties dominated by the donations of corporate executives. Voting for corporate parties re-enforces corporate power. We need independent electoral activity along with an independent movement and independent media to shift the power to the people.
There is a growing movement for real paradigm shifting change. It is a slow process that is accelerating and 2011 promises to be a milestone year. Please join us in our efforts at www.ProsperityAgenda.US. We need all Americans who want a democratized economy where power is shifted to the people joining us.
Monday, December 27, 2010
22 Statistics That Prove That The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America
Original Link: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-middle-class-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america-2010-7
The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough. The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.
What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are "less attractive" than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.
So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.
What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about 6 unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.
Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.
But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.
The truth is that the middle class in America is dying - and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.
The following are 22 statistics that prove that the rich are getting much richer and the poor are getting much poorer in America....
#1) According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
#2) The number of Americans with incomes below the official poverty line rose by about 15% between 2000 and 2006, and by 2008 over 30 million U.S. workers were earning less than $10 per hour.
#3) According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
#4) According to that same poll, 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
#5) A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
#6) According to one new survey, 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
#7) Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
#8) Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
#9) For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
#10) In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
#11) One study found that as of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
#12) The bottom 40 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
#13) Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
#14) In the United States, the average federal worker now earns about twice as much as the average worker in the private sector.
#15) An analysis of income tax data by the Congressional Budget Office found that the top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
#16) In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
#17) More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
#18) For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
#19) This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
#20) Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
#21) According to one new study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
#22) According to Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, the gap between what the top 10 percent of Americans earn per year and what the rest of us earn has been widening sharply for the last 30 years. His measurements show that the top 10% percent of Americans now take in approximately 50% of the income.
The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough. The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.
What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are "less attractive" than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.
So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.
What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about 6 unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.
Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.
But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.
The truth is that the middle class in America is dying - and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.
The following are 22 statistics that prove that the rich are getting much richer and the poor are getting much poorer in America....
#1) According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
#2) The number of Americans with incomes below the official poverty line rose by about 15% between 2000 and 2006, and by 2008 over 30 million U.S. workers were earning less than $10 per hour.
#3) According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
#4) According to that same poll, 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
#5) A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
#6) According to one new survey, 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
#7) Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
#8) Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
#9) For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
#10) In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
#11) One study found that as of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
#12) The bottom 40 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
#13) Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
#14) In the United States, the average federal worker now earns about twice as much as the average worker in the private sector.
#15) An analysis of income tax data by the Congressional Budget Office found that the top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
#16) In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
#17) More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
#18) For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
#19) This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
#20) Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
#21) According to one new study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
#22) According to Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, the gap between what the top 10 percent of Americans earn per year and what the rest of us earn has been widening sharply for the last 30 years. His measurements show that the top 10% percent of Americans now take in approximately 50% of the income.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Republicans: Bought And Delivered
Original Link: http://www.blackstarnews.com/news/135/ARTICLE/6904/2010-11-08.html
By Colin Benjamin
Today, Republicans, like Karl Rove, are feeling good about themselves after riding a wave of anti-incumbency into control of the House of Representatives, although Democrats retained the Senate.
Unfortunately, this disastrous election result will further paralyze any notion of advancing a progressive agenda for American workers. Two years of legislative limbo and, possible, investigative witch-hunts by Republicans await us.
The question now is: are we ready to stop this insurgence of political ignorance and retrograde White supremacy at the heart of the ugliness exhibited by Tea Party crackpots and right-wing Republicans? Republicans have made it clear the prize they really covet: the White House in 2012.
As sick as it is, Republicans aren't interested in pulling this country out of its economic malaise. They're too busy trying to discredit President Obama, for political gain.
For example, Mike Duncan Chairman of American Crossroads, a political propaganda group of right-wingers run by Karl Rove, said "It's a bigger prize in 2012 and that's changing the White House. We planted a flag for permanence and we believe we'll play a major role for 2012."
Moreover, they've made it clear this election was a dry-run for 2012. Karl Rove and his minions have promised to continue running ads from now until 2012. From the beginning, Republicans never intended to govern in any cooperative way with President Obama and the Democrats. Yet, voters have just rewarded these obstinate obstructionists by giving them control of the House of Representatives. How could anybody, who voted for change in 2008, put back into office these corporately-owned Republicans?
If these voters wanted to send a "message"to Democrats why didn't they elect some third-party candidates? Wouldn't that have made more political sense? Why couldn't New York's Freedom Party garner more than 20,000 votes, especially, when Carl Palladino had no chance of beating Andrew Cuomo? Are voters that politically unsophisticated?
President Obama's hands will now be effectively tied for the next two years. With a Republican stranglehold on the House all progressive ideas to push this country forward, for regular Americans, will be effectively crushed. Worst of all, Republicans have pledged to repeal the major gains of the last two years, especially, healthcare reform.
Under the healthcare reform bill, 32 million Americans would receive healthcare, while cutting the deficit by $138 billion from 2010-2019. Over the first decade it would cost $940 billion. Republicans say we don't have the money to pay for healthcare. However, these supposedly fiscally-responsible people are committed to giving $750 billion in tax-breaks to the richest 2 percent in the country over a 10-year period.
President Obama, rightly, conceded that the Democrats had a messaging problem. Republicans fought against the stimulus bill, which included significant tax breaks for average Americans.
Republicans claim to be fighting for the "American people." I guess they mean superrich American people. The obscene amount of money --nearly $4 billion-- spent on this mid-term should make it crystal clear who Republicans really work for: billionaires and multi-millionaires.
For example, American Crossroads gets over 95 percent of its funding from four billionaires: Bob Perry, Bradley Hughes, Trevor Rees-Jones and Robert Rowling. Robert Rowling is the co-founder, along with his father Reese Rowling, of the Texas Company TRT Holdings; which owns the oil and gas exploration entity Tana Exploration. It also owns Gold's Gym and the Omni Hotel chains. Rowling has given American Crossroads, through his companies and as a private donor, more than $ 6 million.
Trevor Rees-Jones is the owner and Chairman of Chief Oil and Gas, a Texas company involved in oil drilling, including the controversial hydraulic fracturing process.
Jones has given American Crossroads at least $1 million this year. Bradley Wayne Hughes is the founder of Public Storage, America's largest self-storage company based in Glendale , California. Hughes has also given Karl Rove and American Crossroads over $1 million.
And then there is Texas construction magnate Bob Perry owner of Perry Homes. Perry was a big contributor to George W. Bush and other Republicans like: Tom DeLay, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. Perry gave the Swift Boats Vets for Truth over $4 million. Remember how these fabricators tarnished the reputation of Senator John Kerry, during the 2004 Presidential Election? Reportedly, between this September and October, Perry gave American Crossroads $7 million. Along with the Koch brothers, the bankrollers of the Tea Party phonies, these are the people pulling the strings of Republicans.
Given the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling, manipulated by activist Republican judges on the John Roberts Court, the wealthy have been given the green light to spend any amount of money to thwart true democracy. The will of regular Americans is again being dictated by money and the flawed political party system which promotes divided loyalty, leading to the "broken Washington" everyone complains about.
The fight for 2012 has begun. The time to get organized, to denounce greed and bigotry is now. As poet Ella Wilcox, in her
poem "Protest," said: "To sit in silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men. Therefore do I protest."
By Colin Benjamin
Today, Republicans, like Karl Rove, are feeling good about themselves after riding a wave of anti-incumbency into control of the House of Representatives, although Democrats retained the Senate.
Unfortunately, this disastrous election result will further paralyze any notion of advancing a progressive agenda for American workers. Two years of legislative limbo and, possible, investigative witch-hunts by Republicans await us.
The question now is: are we ready to stop this insurgence of political ignorance and retrograde White supremacy at the heart of the ugliness exhibited by Tea Party crackpots and right-wing Republicans? Republicans have made it clear the prize they really covet: the White House in 2012.
As sick as it is, Republicans aren't interested in pulling this country out of its economic malaise. They're too busy trying to discredit President Obama, for political gain.
For example, Mike Duncan Chairman of American Crossroads, a political propaganda group of right-wingers run by Karl Rove, said "It's a bigger prize in 2012 and that's changing the White House. We planted a flag for permanence and we believe we'll play a major role for 2012."
Moreover, they've made it clear this election was a dry-run for 2012. Karl Rove and his minions have promised to continue running ads from now until 2012. From the beginning, Republicans never intended to govern in any cooperative way with President Obama and the Democrats. Yet, voters have just rewarded these obstinate obstructionists by giving them control of the House of Representatives. How could anybody, who voted for change in 2008, put back into office these corporately-owned Republicans?
If these voters wanted to send a "message"to Democrats why didn't they elect some third-party candidates? Wouldn't that have made more political sense? Why couldn't New York's Freedom Party garner more than 20,000 votes, especially, when Carl Palladino had no chance of beating Andrew Cuomo? Are voters that politically unsophisticated?
President Obama's hands will now be effectively tied for the next two years. With a Republican stranglehold on the House all progressive ideas to push this country forward, for regular Americans, will be effectively crushed. Worst of all, Republicans have pledged to repeal the major gains of the last two years, especially, healthcare reform.
Under the healthcare reform bill, 32 million Americans would receive healthcare, while cutting the deficit by $138 billion from 2010-2019. Over the first decade it would cost $940 billion. Republicans say we don't have the money to pay for healthcare. However, these supposedly fiscally-responsible people are committed to giving $750 billion in tax-breaks to the richest 2 percent in the country over a 10-year period.
President Obama, rightly, conceded that the Democrats had a messaging problem. Republicans fought against the stimulus bill, which included significant tax breaks for average Americans.
Republicans claim to be fighting for the "American people." I guess they mean superrich American people. The obscene amount of money --nearly $4 billion-- spent on this mid-term should make it crystal clear who Republicans really work for: billionaires and multi-millionaires.
For example, American Crossroads gets over 95 percent of its funding from four billionaires: Bob Perry, Bradley Hughes, Trevor Rees-Jones and Robert Rowling. Robert Rowling is the co-founder, along with his father Reese Rowling, of the Texas Company TRT Holdings; which owns the oil and gas exploration entity Tana Exploration. It also owns Gold's Gym and the Omni Hotel chains. Rowling has given American Crossroads, through his companies and as a private donor, more than $ 6 million.
Trevor Rees-Jones is the owner and Chairman of Chief Oil and Gas, a Texas company involved in oil drilling, including the controversial hydraulic fracturing process.
Jones has given American Crossroads at least $1 million this year. Bradley Wayne Hughes is the founder of Public Storage, America's largest self-storage company based in Glendale , California. Hughes has also given Karl Rove and American Crossroads over $1 million.
And then there is Texas construction magnate Bob Perry owner of Perry Homes. Perry was a big contributor to George W. Bush and other Republicans like: Tom DeLay, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. Perry gave the Swift Boats Vets for Truth over $4 million. Remember how these fabricators tarnished the reputation of Senator John Kerry, during the 2004 Presidential Election? Reportedly, between this September and October, Perry gave American Crossroads $7 million. Along with the Koch brothers, the bankrollers of the Tea Party phonies, these are the people pulling the strings of Republicans.
Given the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling, manipulated by activist Republican judges on the John Roberts Court, the wealthy have been given the green light to spend any amount of money to thwart true democracy. The will of regular Americans is again being dictated by money and the flawed political party system which promotes divided loyalty, leading to the "broken Washington" everyone complains about.
The fight for 2012 has begun. The time to get organized, to denounce greed and bigotry is now. As poet Ella Wilcox, in her
poem "Protest," said: "To sit in silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men. Therefore do I protest."
Spending blitz by outside groups helped secure big GOP wins
Original Link: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/39995283/ns/politics-decision_2010/
By Michael Isikoff and Rich Gardella
Hedge fund moguls helped bankroll groups' attack ads, sources tell NBC News
A tightly coordinated effort by outside Republican groups, spearheaded by Karl Rove and fueled by tens of millions of dollars in contributions from Wall Street hedge fund moguls and other wealthy donors, helped secure big GOP midterm victories Tuesday, according to campaign spending figures and Republican fundraising insiders.
Leading the GOP spending pack was a pair of groups — American Crossroads and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS — both of which were co-founded by two former aides in the George W. Bush White House: Rove, and Ed Gillespie.
Together, the groups — which are not formally part of the Republican Party — spent more than $38 million on attack ads and campaign mailings against Democrats, according to figures compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign spending in congressional races.
A substantial portion of Crossroads GPS’ money came from a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls, according to GOP fundraising sources who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity. These donors have been bitterly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats — and endorsed by the Obama administration — to increase the tax rates on compensation that hedge funds pay their partners, the sources said.
A scorecard compiled by NBC News shows the ad barrage appeared to mostly pay off: Republican candidates won nine of the 12 Senate races and 14 of 22 House races where American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS spent money.
That had the groups’ leaders gloating Wednesday about what they described as their pivotal role in the election results.
‘A decisive blow for freedom’
“Thank you, America!” read the banner headline on a blog posting by Steve Law, president of American Crossroads, on the group’s website. The posting proclaimed that the organizations’ team had “struck a decisive blow for freedom” with the election results. “Together we not only retired House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, we also achieved the largest House seat switch since 1938!” Law wrote.
While it is hard to calculate exactly how much of an impact the Crossroads groups had in an election that was tilting Republican for a variety of reasons, their efforts helped fuel an substantial overall spending advantage by outside GOP groups. Overall, outside Republican groups outspent outside Democratic groups, $245 million to $191 million — a $54 million edge.
The Crossroads affiliates and similar groups were formed after a controversial Supreme Court ruling in January that permitted outside political groups to collect unlimited contributions from corporations, labor unions and other wealthy donors and use them directly on campaign ads. In addition, groups that were organized as nonprofit “advocacy” organizations (such as Crossroads GPS) did not have to disclose the identity of their donors.
Advertisement | ad info
As a result, the airwaves this campaign season were flooded with millions of dollars in attack ads, paid for by secret donors. Out of nearly $300 million spent on congressional campaigns ads by both parties, 42 percent were funded by undisclosed donors, according to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Just behind the Crossroads groups in outside spending on the GOP-side were the Chamber of Commerce ($31 million) and the American Action Network ($14 million), according to Sunlight Foundation figures. Neither disclosed the identity of its donors.
While outside Democratic groups belatedly tried to mimic the GOP efforts, they fell short. America’s Families First Action Fund, a group founded by a number of former Democratic strategists that operated much like American Crossroads, wasn’t organized until last summer and spent just $5.5 million — $1 million of which came from a non-disclosing nonprofit affiliate, according to the Sunlight Foundation. The big outside spenders on the Democratic side were labor unions such as AFSME ($10.7 million) and the SEIU ($10 million.)
Groups coordinated spending, insiders say
In addition to the spending advantage, outside GOP groups like the Crossroads groups, Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth coordinated their efforts, divvying up which groups would spend in which races at which times. The groups’ leaders would meet and talk regularly in sessions often led by Rove or one of his associates, according to the two GOP fundraising sources familiar with how the organizations worked.
The coordination could be seen in spending patterns in key Senate races.
In Illinois, for example, GOP winner Mark Kirk benefited from $5.5 million in attack ads from the Crossroads groups targeting his Democratic opponent, Alexi Giannoulias.
In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the Crossroads groups didn’t spend any money, but the Chamber of Commerce spent $748,000 on attack ads that helped defeat Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold. (Feingold, ironically, was co-author of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law whose restrictions on advertisements by outside groups was overturned by the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, paving the way for the creation of groups such as American Crossroads.)
The long term impact of the spending by the outside groups during this election will be to lay the groundwork for an even bigger effort during the presidential campaign two years from now. That will substantially diminish the role of the two political parties, according to campaign finance experts.
Other than running primaries, “who needs (political parties)?” asked Brett Kappel, a Washington lawyer who specializes in campaign finance laws. Contributions to the parties remain “heavily regulated,” under strict limits and must be publicly disclosed, he noted.
“After this election,” Kappel said, “all of that can be outsourced to unregulated entities that don’t have to disclose their donors.”
By Michael Isikoff and Rich Gardella
Hedge fund moguls helped bankroll groups' attack ads, sources tell NBC News
A tightly coordinated effort by outside Republican groups, spearheaded by Karl Rove and fueled by tens of millions of dollars in contributions from Wall Street hedge fund moguls and other wealthy donors, helped secure big GOP midterm victories Tuesday, according to campaign spending figures and Republican fundraising insiders.
Leading the GOP spending pack was a pair of groups — American Crossroads and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS — both of which were co-founded by two former aides in the George W. Bush White House: Rove, and Ed Gillespie.
Together, the groups — which are not formally part of the Republican Party — spent more than $38 million on attack ads and campaign mailings against Democrats, according to figures compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign spending in congressional races.
A substantial portion of Crossroads GPS’ money came from a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls, according to GOP fundraising sources who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity. These donors have been bitterly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats — and endorsed by the Obama administration — to increase the tax rates on compensation that hedge funds pay their partners, the sources said.
A scorecard compiled by NBC News shows the ad barrage appeared to mostly pay off: Republican candidates won nine of the 12 Senate races and 14 of 22 House races where American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS spent money.
That had the groups’ leaders gloating Wednesday about what they described as their pivotal role in the election results.
‘A decisive blow for freedom’
“Thank you, America!” read the banner headline on a blog posting by Steve Law, president of American Crossroads, on the group’s website. The posting proclaimed that the organizations’ team had “struck a decisive blow for freedom” with the election results. “Together we not only retired House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, we also achieved the largest House seat switch since 1938!” Law wrote.
While it is hard to calculate exactly how much of an impact the Crossroads groups had in an election that was tilting Republican for a variety of reasons, their efforts helped fuel an substantial overall spending advantage by outside GOP groups. Overall, outside Republican groups outspent outside Democratic groups, $245 million to $191 million — a $54 million edge.
The Crossroads affiliates and similar groups were formed after a controversial Supreme Court ruling in January that permitted outside political groups to collect unlimited contributions from corporations, labor unions and other wealthy donors and use them directly on campaign ads. In addition, groups that were organized as nonprofit “advocacy” organizations (such as Crossroads GPS) did not have to disclose the identity of their donors.
Advertisement | ad info
As a result, the airwaves this campaign season were flooded with millions of dollars in attack ads, paid for by secret donors. Out of nearly $300 million spent on congressional campaigns ads by both parties, 42 percent were funded by undisclosed donors, according to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Just behind the Crossroads groups in outside spending on the GOP-side were the Chamber of Commerce ($31 million) and the American Action Network ($14 million), according to Sunlight Foundation figures. Neither disclosed the identity of its donors.
While outside Democratic groups belatedly tried to mimic the GOP efforts, they fell short. America’s Families First Action Fund, a group founded by a number of former Democratic strategists that operated much like American Crossroads, wasn’t organized until last summer and spent just $5.5 million — $1 million of which came from a non-disclosing nonprofit affiliate, according to the Sunlight Foundation. The big outside spenders on the Democratic side were labor unions such as AFSME ($10.7 million) and the SEIU ($10 million.)
Groups coordinated spending, insiders say
In addition to the spending advantage, outside GOP groups like the Crossroads groups, Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth coordinated their efforts, divvying up which groups would spend in which races at which times. The groups’ leaders would meet and talk regularly in sessions often led by Rove or one of his associates, according to the two GOP fundraising sources familiar with how the organizations worked.
The coordination could be seen in spending patterns in key Senate races.
In Illinois, for example, GOP winner Mark Kirk benefited from $5.5 million in attack ads from the Crossroads groups targeting his Democratic opponent, Alexi Giannoulias.
In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the Crossroads groups didn’t spend any money, but the Chamber of Commerce spent $748,000 on attack ads that helped defeat Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold. (Feingold, ironically, was co-author of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law whose restrictions on advertisements by outside groups was overturned by the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, paving the way for the creation of groups such as American Crossroads.)
The long term impact of the spending by the outside groups during this election will be to lay the groundwork for an even bigger effort during the presidential campaign two years from now. That will substantially diminish the role of the two political parties, according to campaign finance experts.
Other than running primaries, “who needs (political parties)?” asked Brett Kappel, a Washington lawyer who specializes in campaign finance laws. Contributions to the parties remain “heavily regulated,” under strict limits and must be publicly disclosed, he noted.
“After this election,” Kappel said, “all of that can be outsourced to unregulated entities that don’t have to disclose their donors.”
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