Taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich

here's that ted video that ted deemed "too controversial" to post on their website...

and here's some of the transcript...

I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

[...]

Anyone who's ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist's course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn't just inaccurate, it's disingenuous.

That's why our current policies are so upside down. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

[...]

If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs. And yet unemployment and under-employment is at record highs.

Another reason this idea is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the median American, but we don't buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, we go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally.

I can't buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can't buy any new clothes or cars or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the vast majority of American families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.

[...]

We've had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don't create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an eco-systemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That's why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.

So here's an idea worth spreading.

In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich.

about time a wealthy capitalist stood up and told the truth...

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Why bail out the banks? As my grandma used to say, it's like bringing coals to Newcastle*.

why not bail out the people who, through no fault of their own, have gotten screwed and are in the most pain...

Cenk Uygur: Iceland Shows Bailing out Middle Class Works, Not Bailing Out Banks

On The Young Turks yesterday, Cenk Uygur spoke about two different approaches to the economic bailout.

There's the US m.o., where we gave "everything to the banks, and nothing to the homeowners" and are, predictably, still struggling. Then there's the divergent example of Iceland, where initial efforts at complete deregulation failed and the government switched course by indicting those who had "caused the mess" and bailing out the middle class instead.

Take a look at what they did, and how it worked.

*Coals to Newcastle - Something brought or sent to a place where it is already plentiful; it is a reference to the English town of Newcastle upon Tyne, historically a major coal exporter.

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Paul Buchheit: Five Facts That Put America to Shame

from common dreams...

1. We're near the bottom of the developed world in children's health and safety

According to a 2007 UNICEF report, the U.S. ranked last among 21 OECD nations in an assessment of child health and safety. The assessment measured infant mortality, immunization, and death from accidents and injuries.

[...]

2. We've betrayed the young people who were advised to stay in school

Over 40% of recent college graduates are living with their parents, dealing with government loans that average $27,200. The unemployment rate for young people is about 50%. More than 350,000 Americans with advanced degrees applied for food stamps in 2010.

[...]

3. The main source of middle-class wealth has been largely wiped out

American homeowners owe almost as much as the students, with $700 billion of debt over and above the value of their homes.

[...]

4. We give prison sentences for smoking marijuana, but not for billion-dollar fraud

About half of our world-leading prison population is in jail for non-violent drug offenses. Americans have also been arrested for handing out free food in a park. Mothers in Ohio and Connecticut were jailed for enrolling their kids in out-of-district schools. As of 2003 in California there were 344 individuals serving sentences of 25 years or more for shoplifting as a third offense, in many cases after two non-violent offenses.

[...]

5. You can have health care, if you pay for it

A recent Commonwealth Fund study compared U.S. health care spending to 12 other OECD countries. The data shows that reducing our costs to the median level of spending among the OECD countries would save us $1.5 trillion a year, more than our entire deficit.

so very, very sad...

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An open letter from the peasants to the MOTU

author unknown...

You control our world. You’ve poisoned the air we breathe, contaminated the water we drink, and copyrighted the food we eat. We fight in your wars, die for your causes, and sacrifice our freedoms to protect you. You’ve liquidated our savings, destroyed our middle class, and used our tax dollars to bailout your unending greed. We are slaves to your corporations, zombies to your airwaves, servants to your decadence. You’ve stolen our elections, assassinated our leaders, and abolished our basic rights as human beings. You own our property, shipped away our jobs, and shredded our unions. You’ve profited off of disaster, destabilized our currencies, and raised our cost of living. You’ve monopolized our freedom, stripped away our education, and have almost extinguished our flame. We are hit… we are bleeding… but we ain’t got time to bleed. We will bring the giants to their knees and you will witness our revolution!

Sincerely,

The Serfs

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The richest 1% of the US population controls 40% of the wealth

from the al jazeera fault lines news magazine that aired august 2, 2011...

The richest 1% of US Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country's income and control an astonishing 40% of its wealth. Inequality in the US is more extreme than it's been in almost a century — and the gap between the super rich and the poor and middle class people has widened drastically over the last 30 years.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a bitter partisan debate over how to cut deficit spending and reduce the US' 14.3 trillion dollar debt is underway. As low and middle class wages stagnate and unemployment remains above 9%, Republicans and Democrats are tussling over whether to slash funding for the medical and retirement programs that are the backbone of the US's social safety net, and whether to raise taxes — or to cut them further.

The budget debate and the economy are the battleground on which the 2012 presidential election race will be fought. And the United States has never seemed so divided — both politically and economically.

How did the gap grow so wide, and so quickly? And how are the convictions, campaign contributions and charitable donations of the top 1% impacting the other 99% of Americans?

pretty pathetic, eh...?

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A defective system of money, banking, and finance puts money in the wrong places

there's a lot of good common sense here... unfortunately, our super-rich elites don't give much of a shit for either common sense or the common good... they would fight recommendations like these tooth and nail...

How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule

How is it that our nation is awash in money, but too broke to provide jobs and services?

[...]

In the 1970’s Wall Street interests began pushing a deregulation agenda that led to a transfer of financial power from Main Street to Wall Street. Wall Street’s mega-banks lost interest in real investment and developed a new business model. They now specialize in charging excessive fees and usurious interest rates, providing leverage to speculators, speculating for their own accounts, luring the unwary into mortgages they cannot afford, bundling junk mortgages to sell them as triple-A securities, betting against the clients to whom they sell the overrated securities, extracting subsidies and bailouts from government, laundering money from drug and arms traders, and offshoring their profits to avoid taxes.

The consequences include the erosion of the middle class, an extreme concentration of wealth and power, a costly financial collapse, persistent high unemployment, housing foreclosures, collapsing environmental systems, the hollowing out of U.S. industrial, technological, and research capacity, huge public and international trade deficits, and the corruption of our political institutions.

Wall Street profited at every step and declared its experiment with deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy a great success. It now argues for extending the same measures even further.

How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule spells out details of a six-part policy agenda to rebuild a sensible system of community-based and accountable financial services institutions.

1. Break up the mega-banks and implement tax and regulatory policies that favor community financial institutions, with a preference for those organized as cooperatives or as for-profits owned by nonprofit foundations.
2. Establish state-owned partnership banks in each of the 50 states, patterned after the Bank of North Dakota. These would serve as depositories for state financial assets to use in partnership with community financial institutions to fund local farms and businesses.
3. Restructure the Federal Reserve to function under strict standards of transparency and public scrutiny, with General Accounting Office audits and Congressional oversight.
4. Direct all new money created by the Federal Reserve to a Federal Recovery and Reconstruction Bank rather than the current practice of directing it as a subsidy to Wall Street banks. The FRRB would have a mandate to fund essential green infrastructure projects as designated by Congress.
5. Rewrite international trade and investment rules to support national ownership, economic self-reliance, and economic self-determination.
6. Implement appropriate regulatory and fiscal measures to secure the integrity of financial markets and the money/banking system.

the only way things like this will ever see the light of day is if the american people band together to make it happen... this would involve tossing the super-rich elites, the banksters and their bought-and-paid-for elected officials out on the street or, better yet, herding them onto u.s. navy ships and holding them in indefinite detention in the lagoon at diego garcia in the indian ocean...

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A truly frightening unemployment chart

from business insider via kevin at cryptogon...



and, when none of us can afford to feed and clothe ourselves and our families and find ourselves out on the street, dumpster-diving and pushing our worldly belongings around in shopping carts, what next...?

p.s. commenter, mettle, has the answer to that question...

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Now, HERE'S a speech...!

california congressional representative george miller offers a damning indictment of those who seek to destroy the u.s. middle class along with most of the values our country stands for...



from the transcript (thanks to daily kos)...

How do you build a strong middle class community on the back of lower-wage workers? You can't do it. Many years ago in America we wanted to add a strong, vibrant middle class and we did that by forming the union and giving people the right to have a say at work. Study after study where workers have a say in the workplace, they work harder, more productive, more open to new ideas.

But what do we say to workers with the governors of Wisconsin and Ohio and Indiana? Do what we tell you to do, do it for less pay, do it for less benefit, and do it because we told you so. That doesn't sound like America to me. It doesn't sound like a powerful country that has the best and most productive workers in the history of the world. That sounds like something that we are not familiar with in this country.

That sounds like an autocratic system that just demands and takes but never gives.

wow...! an elected official who actually takes his duty to defend and represent the common good of his nation seriously...! who woulda thunk it...?

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A call for a direct focus on our super-rich elites, the ones who are calling the shots

one of the real benefits of the "global awakening," particularly as it's being played out currently in the u.s. (in places like madison, wisconsin), is that it's drawing back the curtain on those behind those they have installed as their puppets... case in point: it's not scott walker, the wisconsin governor, we should be focusing on, it's charles and david koch, the super-rich elite money-men who finance and enable people like walker...

george goehl writing in the nation...

We need to get to the root of the issue of budgets—we’re facing a revenue crisis. There is simply not enough money in our cities and states to support the investments needed to rebuild the American middle class. The good news is this: we know where the money is. And though politicians might tell you differently, it’s not in Grandma’s pension. It’s not in the homes of families fighting off foreclosure. And it’s not in the pockets of American schoolchildren or schoolteachers. It’s on Wall Street.

Jacob Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told the New York Times that the “easy cuts” are behind us. “Easy cuts” are those that impact the poor and less powerful. The hard cuts—the ones that are so hard that few in statehouses or Washington are talking about them—would mean ending tax breaks and free rides for Wall Street and the corporations they finance. These cuts are hard not because they hurt everyday people but because they would force elected officials to go toe-to-toe with the economic elites who finance their campaigns. And because too few politicians have the stomach for this fight, it’s clear we’ll have to lead it ourselves.

To do this, we need to hold elected officials accountable and directly challenge the moral abuses of major corporate powers. We get in trouble when we're doing only one or the other and missing half the fight. Right now the mix is uneven. That’s why we need to move from directing most of our energy toward the pawns of the corporate class to going directly to those calling the shots. Imagine if every time we organized a protest at a statehouse or on Capitol Hill we also marched on a bank or the headquarters of a corporation that is impeding an economic recovery for American families. It’s critical that we make this shift, because if this battle simply pits people against politicians, it allows those with the most power to be absent from the story and therefore absent from any real accountability. [emphases added]

david korten describes the unholy alliances that have been manipulated by those elites to bring us to the ugliness of today...

In the 1970s, an alliance of elite interests began preparing to roll back the measures that created the American middle class and launched a full-scale class war during the 1980s under the banner of the Reagan revolution.Corporate interests provided the money and controlled the real agenda. Religious fundamentalists provided votes in return for lip service to a conservative social agenda opposing abortion, family planning, and gay marriage. Libertarians provided an ideological framework removing constraints to the unlimited concentration of wealth in the name of market freedom. Neo-conservatives provided justification for wars and outsized military expenditures to swell the profits of the defense industry and secure corporate access to the world’s resources and markets.

you've gotta admit, those wealthy elites have done one hell of a job...

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America is happy in the sense they know happiness as an undisturbed regimen of toil, stress and commodity consumption

joe bageant's got a new essay up...

Shy of open insurrection, a nationwide refusal to pay income taxes would certainly shake things up. But broader America is happy in the sense they know happiness as an undisturbed regimen of toil, stress and commodity consumption. Despite the way it looks in the news, most Americans remain untouched by foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment. So risking loss of their work-buy-sleep cycle in an insurrection looks to be sheer lunacy to them. Like cows, they are kept comfortable in the pure animal sense to be milked for profit. Animal comfort kills all thoughts of revolution. Hell, half of mankind would be thrilled with the average American's present material situation.

tonight, i fly out of buenos aires for what may be the last time... tomorrow, i will land back in the thick of it, my country, as it's ramping up to the biggest consumer orgy of the year... two parts of that experience will drive me to retching nausea... one is the in-your-face "buy, buy, buy" displays on view everywhere i turn, and the second is that it will all be accompanied by non-stop, treacly christmas music... i can hardly wait...

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They don't need it, they don't deserve it and they won't spend it

robert reich...

The President met with Republican leaders at the White House this morning to talk about whether the Bush tax cuts should be extended to top taxpayers, at Republicans want.

No decision has been reached, but this is the first test of the President's resolve with the new Congress - and he should be tough as nails. The economics and politics both dictate it.

Taxpayers in the top 1 percent don't need it (they are now getting almost a quarter of all national income, the highest percent since 1928).

They don't deserve it (they got the lion's share of the benefits of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, and have had no reason to expect a continuation of their windfall).

They won't spend it to stimulate the economy (top earners save a much higher proportion of their income than the middle class).

And giving it to them blows a giant hole in the budget (the Joint Tax Committee estimates the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the top 1 percent to be $61 billion in 2011 alone.)

In political terms, a strong stand enables the President to clearly demonstrate who's side he's on (the working and middle class that's still bearing the brunt of this lousy economy) and who's side the Republicans are on (the powerful and privileged who brought much of this on, and who are now doing just fine).

The only compromise he should be prepared to make is to extend the Bush tax cuts to the bottom 99 percent (rather than the bottom 98 percent), and for two years rather than ten.

"he should be tough as nails"... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...! trust me, i ain't holding my breath...

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We all have to be willing to make sacrifices, as long as "we" doesn't include the rich

but we already know this, don't we...?

krugman...

[W]hen the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say: we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

joe bageant has some thoughts on the plight of those "little people" and how callously they're/we're being manipulated...

Economic, political, and social culture in America is staggering under the sheer weight of its white underclass, which now numbers some sixty million. Generally unable to read at a functional level, they are easily manipulated by corporate-political interests to vote against advances in health and education, and even more easily mustered in support of any proposed military conflict, aggressive or otherwise. One-third of their children are born out of wedlock, and are unemployable by any contemporary industrialized-world standard. Even if we were to bring back their jobs from China and elsewhere -- a damned unlikely scenario -- they would be competing at a wage scale that would not meet even their basic needs. Low skilled, and with little understanding of the world beyond either what is presented to them by kitschy and simplistic television, movie, and other media entertainments, or their experience as armed grunts in foreign combat, the future of the white underclass not only looks grim, but permanent.

Meanwhile, the underclass, 'America's flexible labor force' ... are nevertheless politically potent, if sufficiently taunted and fed enough bullshit. Just look at the way we showed up in force during the 2000 elections, hyped up on inchoate anger and ready to be deployed as liberal-ripping pit bulls by America's ultra-conservative political machinery. Snug middle-class liberals were stunned. Could that many people actually be supporting Anne Coulter's call for the jailing of liberals, or Rush Limbaugh's demand for the massive, forced psychiatric detention of Democrats? Or, more recently, could they honestly believe President Obama's proposed public healthcare plan would employ 'death panels' to decide who lives and who dies? Conservatives cackled with glee, and dubbed them the only real Americans.

joe's clear eye for why so many poor saps have been hoodwinked into supporting the very folks who have made our situation so dire is among the better explanations i've read...

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Joe Bageant: "Americans are screwed, blued and tattooed" and it's Anderson Cooper's fault

the more i read joe bageant, the more i like him...

via alternet...

Class solidarity was such a good idea. It really was. Obviously, most of the people who need solidarity are in the world's laboring classes. After all, the rich have more than enough solidarity already, as was recently demonstrated by their successful execution of the greatest global financial heist in history. Oh sure, we'll see some state sponsored mock show trials of a few of them -- they always throw a few of their own out of the sleigh to the wolves during their escapes. The big heist was big news. Working Americans will be applying Preparation H to their keisters for a long time to come.

[...]

And for that I blame Anderson Cooper. That's right, CNN's boyishly good looking, sincere faced, Emmy Award winning Anderson Cooper. Let me explain.

Between the corporate and financial elites and the slobbering masses stands the American Information Class -- the reporters, talking heads, news anchors and pundits. In short, the entire gaggle of meat puppets and journalism hacks who have been cultivated and bred to be clueless by the university industry and others serving our corporate empire. In other words, serving global capitalism, and the national fictions it maintains, including that sizable piece of corporate feudal turf known as America. And that fiction is maintained through la danse des marionnettes de viande.

[...]

There is no way out of our culture manufacturing machinery. We're not in charge. It would be bigger than any one of us because it consists of all of us. It tells us all we are individuals supremely worthy of our silliest notions and desires, thereby making us soft and lazy, infantilized an incapable of truly effective solidarity as a people. Instead, we are fed Tea Party drivel. Even if CNN decided to send Coop to Guiyu to cover the blood poisoned worker women with the deformed children, the result would be the same. The guy in Cedar Rapids would see further proof that "Me live in best place in world. Got Cheetos." Or perhaps a nice Cotes du Rhône if you are a member of the commodity drugged educated faux middle class.

And I wanna say to them: "Not for much longer, buddy. Not much longer. And you can thank Anderson Cooper and a helluva lot of other people like him who do not have a clue, but nevertheless inhabit your very mind, for that."

enjoy it while it lasts...

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Owning is being - we have become what we own

joe bageant...

There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other "developed" capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy.

It comes down to owning stuff, and that the stuff we own also owns us (as anyone paying rent for a storage locker can attest). Transmogrified by industrial materialism, we have become what we own. More specifically, what we are observed by the rest of our society as owning. In the commodified society of industrial materialism, owning is being. So much so, that politicians bandy the term "ownership society" about, not only without causing the public to gag, but to cheers. Even liberals who claim to dislike the term don't want to be in a "We don't own shit society."

[...]

Loathe as Americans are to believe it, the Mexican people and the American people are in the same situation of being mugged. However, they are robbed at a different rate and from different positions in the global pecking order. We rob the Mexicans and global capitalism robs us. Fortunately we can still afford to buy our national food staple from Dominoes. Which makes us a superior people.

[...]

Americans are hope fiends. We always see hope somewhere down every road, chiefly because honestly looking at the present situation would destroy just about everything we hold as reality. Personally, as I often state and catch readership hell for, I do not like hope. When Obama ran it up the flagpole for us to salute, and so many saluted, my blood chilled. Made me feel that we were all in deeper shit than I had supposed (Nevertheless, I reluctantly voted for Obama. At the time it seemed It was either Obama, or continuing war, debt, and diminishing civil liberties. Ha!) Hope is magic thinking, believing that somehow, some larger unknown force is in motion to set things right.

The world is what it is, and its injustices are set right by peoples and nations morally intact enough to challenge its malevolent forces.

Hope is political pabulum for an infantilized nation.

and, at the conclusion of an almost unbearably cynical rant - a rant with which i profoundly and gloomily agree - joe abruptly and unexpectedly captures my own present mood...

In all honesty, I am sick of thinking about it, tired of burning up unrecoverable hours at the end of my 63-year old candle writing about it. So are many of my colleagues in cybernetic left-space.

Distance and solitude seem the only refuge. Which is why I am "aging Mexican," and almost monastically absorbed in the small daily rituals of sustenance these days. I do not kid myself that it is permanent or a real solution to the unbearable ugliness of the American condition.

But at the moment, four AM, a cricket chirps in the orange tree by my window, and my tortillas are perfectly lovely.

while i'm not one to be found cooking tortillas at 4 a.m., i do find myself increasingly engaged in mundane, mindless ritual, often in the quiet of solitude... there is something deeply comforting about lying on my sofa in the afternoon in my leafy little corner of buenos aires watching the sunlight sparkle and dance off the deep green leaves as they rustle softly in the breeze or, in the evening, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood as it putters about before settling down into the late night quiet... it tends to make all the sucking up of internet news headlines that i seem helpless to stop doing just a bit more tolerable...

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Who benefits from the "recovery"...? Hint: It ain't "We, the people"... 2.7M will lose unemployment in April...

in typical u.s. news media fashion, this nyt article, while it at least does call some attention to the sufferings being endured in this latest rape and pillage of the middle class, neglects to focus on the super-rich elites who are still raking it in...

Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs

Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.

Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.

Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.

maybe i was too hasty... here's what the article actually does say about who is reaping the benefits of the recovery...

Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

ay, and therein lies the rub... that lovely euphemism, "maximizing shareholder value," is really code for keeping the rivers of cash flowing to the already obscenely wealthy and to hell with anybody else... what i wonder is what are the rich going to do when there's nobody left to buy their shit...?

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The super-rich elites are intent on making serfs out of all of us

i suppose at one time, back many years ago before i wised-up, i fantasized about being a member of the elite community of the super-rich... it took me a while to "get it," that the more money i have, the more possessions i have, the more i'm "owned"...

i think it's the sad delusion of our times to believe that wealth brings either freedom or happiness... what i think it brings is a slavish devotion to the system that provides such riches... after all, why in the world would you ever want to bite the hand that feeds you...? and so, in order to keep your riches intact, in order to keep the pump pumping, you have to - metaphorically - close the door behind you, keep out the riffraff, make sure you never have to risk losing anything... the mindset this produces is, in many ways, limited, constrained, selfish, inwardly focused and willfully ignorant...

i find a great deal of freedom in being "asset-free" and, needless to say, even more so by being debt-free... do i need income...? of course... do i need to pay bills...? of course... do i want to maintain some level of comfort in my living conditions...? of course... do i want some resources to help me enjoy myself...? certainly... but i know that if anybody were to carefully scrutinize my income, bank accounts and expenses, they would be amazed i am able to live like i do on so little... speaking for myself, i find it very fulfilling to be able to do so...

however, with all that said, it would be a serious mistake not to understand that all of us who are the bedrock of the economic system that supports the super-rich elites are under attack... the greed of those people is boundless and if it means robbing us at gunpoint, they won't hesitate to do it... they not only won't hesitate, they are already doing it...

david degraw...

The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on US workers over the past few years, however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970 - 2000. With the lion's share of increased profits going to the CEO's, this pay ratio dramatically rose to $90 for CEOs to $1 for the average worker.

As ridiculous as that seems, an in-depth study in 2004 on the explosion of CEO pay revealed that, including stock options and other benefits, CEO pay is more accurately $500 to $1.

Paul Buchheit, from DePaul University, revealed, "From 1980 to 2006 the richest 1% of America tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation's total income, while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop over 20%." Robert Freeman added, "Between 2002 and 2006, it was even worse: an astounding three-quarters of all the economy's growth was captured by the top 1%."

Due to this, the United States already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the average worker much harder than CEO's, the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99% of the US population has grown to a record high. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all time record.

my point is this... even for someone like me, someone who gets by on very little, it's time to accept the hard truth... we are being pushed ever harder to crawl into a little box and stay there... our handlers don't want us to be free, they don't want us to be told the truth, they don't want us to be able to make informed decisions, they don't want us to be able to travel freely, they don't want us to do anything but line up dutifully to be their good little consumers... the best thing we can do is act free, learn the truth, make informed decisions, travel freely and stop lining up to toss our money at them 24/7...

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Domestic spending freeze...? Obama's jumped the shark...

when i first read the story about obama maybe, possibly, declaring a spending freeze, i thought it might be just a rumor... this morning's headlines made it official...

Obama to Seek Freeze on Some Spending to Trim Deficits

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

i'm no fan of the ballooning deficit and i'm certainly no fan of an increasingly worthless fiat currency that's leaping off the printing presses so fast it's breathtaking... but, in the midst of a super-rich, elite-created economic storm in which businesses, states, and millions of citizens are suffering through furloughs, layoffs, foreclosures, unemployment and the complete wastage of the middle class, to put a freeze on domestic spending while still allowing free rein to our totally out-of-control defense and war spending is perhaps the most unconscionable thing done yet among the many disturbingly unconscionable things done by this president...

i'm glad to see krugman shares some of my utter dismay...

Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

this is one of the reasons i've slowed way down on blogging... my psyche is evidently too fragile at the moment to be able to regurgitate abominations of this magnitude...

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Spitzer: "Where is the public's fair payback for playing banker to the bankers?"

eliot spitzer seems to be taking a much more public profile in the last week... it's good stuff and i hope he keeps it up... i'd like to hear a lot more from joseph stiglitz as well...

from the 28 july slate...

Presenting income data is fraught with risks, as there are so many ways to look at any arrangement of numbers. So I will use three sets of data to shed light on the road we have traveled. The single most frequently used measure to gauge income distribution is the Gini coefficient, which ranges from zero to one, with zero representing perfect equality (that is, everyone has the same level of income) and one representing perfect inequality (that is, one person has all the income).

U.S. Gini Coefficient
1967	0.397
1977	0.402
1987	0.426
1997	0.459
2007	0.463

As a point of reference, the Gini coefficient for Canada is 0.326, for the United Kingdom it is 0.36, for Norway it is 0.258, and for Germany it is 0.283. In fact, the U.S. Gini coefficient is significantly higher than that for any Western European nation.

More textured are the data showing the percentage of total income garnered by each quintile of the population over a particular time frame.

Percentage of Total Income by Population Quintile
	Lowest Quintile	Middle Quintile	Highest Quintile
1967	4.0	17.3	43.6
1977	4.2	16.9	44.0
1987	3.8	16.1	46.2
1997	3.6	15.0	49.4
2007	3.4	14.8	49.7

The top 1 percent of all income earners garnered 21.8 percent of all income in 2005, up from 8.9 percent in 1976.

Of course, it can be argued that these pure distributional percentages are less meaningful if everybody's absolute income grew substantially over the period of time measured. But that is not the case. In fact, the gap here is quite remarkable:

Mean Household Income
	Lowest Quintile	Middle Quintile	Highest Quintile
1967	$8,683	$38,415	$96,725
1977	$10,394	$45,323	$110,579
1987	$10,706	$45,492	$130,768
1997	$11,385	$47,886	$158,128
2007	$11,551	$49,968	$167,971

Before 1987, it might have been reasonable to argue that overall income growth was softening the effects of rising inequality. But since then, the rate of overall growth for all but the top quintile has slowed dramatically, with the lowest quintile seeing its income grow by only 7.8 percent in the last two decades, while income for the top quintile grew by 28 percent. And looking at after-tax income, which factors in the impact of favorable tax policy for the rich, the numbers are even starker: Between 1979 and 2004, the top 1 percent of all earners saw their income grow by an astounding 176 percent.

Pretty much no matter how you examine the numbers, they are not encouraging for those in the middle class—and they are even worse for those at the bottom of the income totem pole. Once upon a time, America's income was distributed across the economy like a bell curve, with an increasing share of both population and income converging in the middle. Now a slow but continuous redistribution to the top, with the middle being squeezed, makes the graph look more like a barbell, with a bigger bump at either end—income at one end, population at the other.

[...]

The outcry over Wall Street salaries and bonuses is more understandable when you realize that, over the last 40 years, there has been an inexorable shift of wealth and income toward the upper end of the income spectrum. With the return to profitability of many of the institutions that needed bailouts, taxpayers are wondering why we have socialized the risk of failure but allowed the rewards of success to remain private. Where is the public's fair payback for playing banker to the bankers?

indeed...

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The Bush administration was a hell of a lot worse than a bunch of bungling ideologues who governed like Keystone Kops

yes, this is a lot to read, but it's well worth it... it sets forth what i have been preaching about for seemingly forever - bush administration incompetency is a sad, pathetic characterization for the evil intent behind its actions...

So, How'd You Like Your Beer?
by David Michael Green | January 16, 2009 - 1:31pm

Go on. Admit it. You never thought this would end, did you? You never thought they'd actually leave, huh? With only days remaining, you still have nagging doubts, don't you?

Finally. Mercifully. Astonishingly. Incredibly. The insane adventure in national suicide known as the Bush administration is at last coming to an end.

This was a ride that beggars belief. Even after McCarthy and Nixon and Reagan and Gingrich, nothing prepared us for the last eight years, and I for one have difficulty finding the words that could begin to do justice to describing this historical folly of epic proportions.

The list of self-inflicted wounds is endless, running from the fiscal irresponsibility, to the lies about war, to the incompetent execution of every policy, to the extreme recklessness of environmental catastrophe, to economic meltdown, and to turning one of the most admired countries in the world into one of the most reviled.

It is a breathtaking record. It really is. Indeed, one might argue in complete seriousness that it would be far easier to list the one or two exceptions to a blanket rule of disaster than to catalogue the endless list of travesties themselves. It would certainly take a lot less time to specify any successes than to climb the mountain of wholesale failures. In short, it literally involves almost no exaggeration to describe this adventure in catastrophic governance by means of a simple covering adage: If there was a way the Bush administration could have diminished America, it did.

Given this endless chronicle of national implosion, I won't try - for the umpteenth time - to catalogue the crimes and catastrophes here, despite the fact that this week offers a good opportunity for summing up our world of hurt. There are too many, and they are too well known. Except for those that are not, of course, of which I expect there is a huge quantity. Not for nothing did the administration - in one of its very first acts in government - rewrite the rules concerning the release of presidential documents, so that it could control them completely, despite the fact that they belong to you and me, not Alberto Gonzales. Not for nothing has Mr. Cheney's shredder needed sharpening every morning for the last six months.

As tempted as I am to once more list what has been lost by an America that has lost so very much, I will instead confine myself here to two simple, albeit not simply answered, questions: What happened? And, Why?

The first one is easier than the second, though I contend that most Americans still don't know the correct answer. My guess is that most people think the Bush administration has been highly ideological and partisan, and indeed it has. I think they believe the Bush people were largely incompetent at governing, and they were. Many Americans might have a sense of the corruption attendant to Bush's team, and they rightly should. Lots of them probably see the president as simultaneously arrogant and over his head, and they're quite right to do so.

But I'm convinced what most Americans fail to perceive, even to this day, is the true depth of the evil here. What they don't understand is that the incompetence and the partisanship and even the garden-variety corruption are the least of what just happened. What they don't get is that the major reason the Bush catastrophe was so catastrophic is that these people never came to Washington to do good, in the first place. They came instead to do well, and boy did they.

If this child in the body of a man were named Putin or Castro or Kim, Americans would get it. If they were observing the country from the perspective of Zimbabwe, instead of the other way around, then they would get it. They can understand the notion of some foreign thug who means to do harm to our country. They get the idea, in other places, of a domestic thug who seeks to plunder his own country. They just can't imagine it happening here. And, therefore, they don't see that it just has.

Most people have completely failed to perceive the magnitude of the Bush crime, because they see it as limited to 'merely' dumb policies, poorly implemented, by incompetent stewards of government. Would that that were so. We'd be so much better off as a country and as a world had it been only that.

Instead, this was an American Stalin, seeking to use military power for purposes of overrunning and raping other countries. Instead, this was an American Mugabe, seeking to steal power by any means, in order to plunder the wealth of his own country per the interests of a narrow band of cronies.

This president - and indeed the entire movement of regressive politics these last three decades (which I refer to as Reaganism-Bushism) - can only be properly understood as class warfare. Its purpose was never to make America a better place. Indeed, if we define America as a country belonging to its 300 million inhabitants, then the purpose was actually precisely the opposite. The mission of this ideology was in fact to diminish if not impoverish the vast bulk of these citizens, so that the already massively wealthy among them could instead become obscenely wealthy.

Where you or I might have looked at the middle of the twentieth century and seen the moment when America finally did justice to its national promise by introducing a measure of serious economic equality for the first time, and thus vastly expanding the middle class, the plutocrats behind Reaganism-Bushism saw a filthy aberration to the natural order of master and slave that had long existed in human history. They therefore set about to overturn that aberration and return to 'better times' through a process of class warfare. That meant that labor unions had to go, along with workplace protections, good wages, decent benefits, government protections, and a far-too-moderate average CEO to lowest-paid worker salary ratio on the order of fifty-to-one, replaced instead by something closer to five-hundred- to-one.

And, where Washington was concerned, that meant that government was to become a vehicle to serve not the 300 million, but rather the 300 families at the top, who already owned the most but craved ever, ever more. It was a cash cow that could provide enormous riches to buccaneers who make the Somali pirates look like Campfire Girls in comparison. Social Security is not, from this perspective, a program to serve seniors and keep a roof over their heads during their final decades of life, but rather a pool of money which the government had been kind enough to already collect and centralize, just waiting for barons to come along and robber it. Deregulation is another important purpose of the federal government. Protecting the long-term integrity of the economic system from the exploitation of short-term Ponzi schemers with their derivatives and their garbage loans was so mid-twentieth- century, you know? And then, chief among all purposes of government under Reaganism-Bushism, are the tax cuts for the wealthy, even if - especially if - they can be made more massive by borrowing from suckers' - I mean, citizens' - children in future generations.

In short, if you merely hate the Bush administration for driving the country into penury, making us hated around the world, bringing on a global economic crisis, ignoring when not exacerbating a looming environmental catastrophe of planetary proportions, killing a million Iraqis on the basis of a host of lies, letting New Orleans drown, trying to wreck Social Security, sleeping through (at best) the worst terrorist attack on our shores, allowing when not assisting the Middle East in going up in flames, or dividing our country internally - if that's 'all' you've got against these guys, then you have no idea how bad it really is.

Because how bad it really is can be found in the same place where one sees the difference between first-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. The latter is a crime of ineptitude, the former one of intent. If you are fooled into thinking - as I suspect that most Americans have been - that the Bush administration was just a bunch of bungling ideologues who governed like Keystone Kops, then you will have been duped by the crime of the century. For at bottom these were kleptocrats, pure and simple. They came to steal, not to serve, and - with the chief exception of their foiled Social Security raid - they accomplished their mission rather handily. This was class warfare, and we lost badly. The rich in America are now far richer than they've been since 1929, while we and our government are infinitely more impoverished than we've been since the New Deal.

Of course, a movement representing one-half of one percent of the American public is never going to win elections as such, even as imperfect as is America's democracy, and so the kleptocrats had to do three things. First, they had to lie about their agenda. Second, they had to enlist others as unwitting agents in their crime. And, third, they had to steal elections. The three are, of course, heavily related. By pretending to be hyper-patriots, and by dressing up tax code changes, privatization and deregulation in the vernacular of freedom and the unleashing of economic dynamism, they could give their agenda a plausibility sufficient to fool those not looking too closely. Recruiting a few jive economists from academia to flak for not-so-funny- after-all Laffer Curves and the like gave the thing an additional patina of legitimacy.

Then, by pretending to give two shits about religious piety or national security threats, the kleptocratic junta could enlist the shock troops of the religious right and enough lazy and selfish voters necessary to seize power through elections (albeit with an occasional assist from regressive Supreme Court justices or swing-state secretaries of state) and fulfill their mission. As if they ever cared a whit about either of these grand diversions of religion or national security. These predators would have happily sold Saddam Hussein the very nails to put Jesus himself up on the cross if there was money to be made in it.

This has been, indeed, the crime of the century, and my only hope at this point is that it will ultimately be recognized as such. Right now, we are far from that. Most Americans abhor the Bush administration, to the point where quite a large percentage would probably be willing to call it the worst in American history. But that fails completely to do it justice, because it still misses the crucial question of intention. The difference between the perception of the Bush administration and the true reality of its mission accomplished is the difference between a well-intentioned bungler and a vicious though friendly predator.

There is so much that is amazing (in the same sense that witnessing a tsunami or a hydrogen bomb test is amazing) about these last eight years and the two decades preceding them, but if you're looking for something to top the list, consider the fact that the regressive right in America has now been reduced to using wholesale incompetence, gross negligence and catastrophic outcomes as its alibi. Think of how ugly and deep the real crime you're hiding must be if those are your diversionary tactics.

What's more, it's crucial to note that the danger of historical misinterpretation is far from the only one lurking here. In that respect, we would be well advised to remind ourselves that - even after eight years of devastation, even with homes being repossessed in droves, with jobs being lost, with medical conditions untreated because of insufficient funds, and even with an anodyne and centrist Democratic presidential candidate running a near-perfect campaign against a buffoonish McCain-Palin ticket - even after all that, we should remember that Barack Obama won in 2008 by a mere six percent of the vote.

And the resulting possibility that we could experience yet more Reaganism-Bushism brings us to the question of how this could have happened in the first place. What drives people to embrace stupidity, aggression, recklessness, destruction and contemptuousness as national policy, especially when they have other choices? Even worse yet (though that is hard to imagine), what impels them away from perceiving the even deeper crimes lurking below the death and destruction on the surface?

This second of our two questions is less easy to understand, but I believe the short answer is fear. Which is fairly astonishing, when one considers that we have long been the richest and most powerful country on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And yet this is a country whose populace strikes me as riddled with all manner of fears, in myriad aspects, whose ugliest political operatives understand this as well as they do the very concept of breathing, and who have become so used to preying on those fears that they engage in both practices both with about equal forethought.

It's been long said of George W. Bush that he wins elections because he seems like the kind of guy voters would be most comfortable having a beer with. That says a lot - an unfortunate, awful lot - about us fearful Americans. How frightened and insecure do you have to be, after all, to deliberately choose mediocrity for your government - with all the perils affecting you and your children such a choice entails - just so you won't be reminded every night as you watch the news that you're not as accomplished as the guy in the White House? Would we want our heart surgeons and airplane pilots to be equal exemplars of mediocrity? Would we enjoy the beer we'd be sipping with them in the afterlife, once they'd managed to get us killed? Nor is this just clever and fun, but specious, analogy. Just ask the thousands of Americans dead in Iraq, or because of absent health insurance, or a government that was partying instead of protecting them when the bad guys hijacked airplanes, or when the hurricanes came onshore. A certain American vice president likes to say that "elections have consequences" . Well, indeed they do, Dick, and some of them can be quite lethal as a matter of fact.

The simple fact of George W. Bush as two-term president of the United States and leader of the Free World - as opposed instead to, say, the could-never- grow-up, could-never- stay-sober, sixty-year-old- frat-boy- cheerleader, Midland-Texas- Elks-Club- Secretary- Treasurer- who-couldn' t-actually- keep-the- minutes-or- balance-the- checkbook, local-car-crasher- extraordinaire - will not exactly acquit us all very well in the history books. At least the Romans had the excuse of monarchy to explain Nero and Caligula. We don't. Nor can we plead ignorance. Our friendly neighbors in Europe dropped their collective jaws and looked on in astonishment from Day One. "You guys chose what? Out of 300 million of you? You put a dude in charge of a planeticide- capable arsenal who can't even properly pronounce the word 'nuclear'? Are you freakin' kidding?"

Maybe the one thing I got out of the horror of the last eight years was a lesson in political culture. I learned that he who goes looking for rational thought or dialogue among the ranks of the regressives will come home a confused, addled and empty-handed fellow. That's what I was half a decade ago when that revelation whacked me across the forehead. I couldn't believe what I was witnessing. I couldn't believe that most of my fellow citizens could believe what we were witnessing.

But my mistake was to conceive of an America characterized by rational thought and some rough approximation of deliberative democracy. It's so long ago now, and no doubt my memory is foggy, but it seems to me that's what we had in my younger days. Yep, even with Vietnam and Watergate, even with Nixon and McCarthy, we seemed so much closer then to the Enlightenment ideal of the country's Founders. But something went desperately wrong - beginning in the late 1970s or early 1980s and culminating with this reign of the American Caligula - and it strikes me that there has been a paradigm shift in this country's cognitive architecture. Which is just a fancy way of saying we got ourselves real stupid, real fast. And real willfully, too.

I don't know what explains that, but I like to take the long anthropological perspective on these questions, and one can't help noticing that this is the exact moment that the wind went out of the sails of the American standard of living. Ever since then - following an economic rocket ride in the post-war period - it's been static, if not a real-value decline, for the American middle class (and we don't even bother talking about those in poverty any more). I think what happened is that we hit a wall and began having to get very creative in stealing from ourselves and from others and from our children in order to maintain a semblance of the old mass-consumption lifestyle. And I think we went looking for a politics that could justify and personify that expression of wholesale greed, which the regressive movement and the Republican Party were more than happy to provide. Thus did the most gluttonous faction of the most gluttonous tribe of the most gluttonous species come to rule the planet. And thus have we wrecked everything in sight.

I think we lived in some kind of deep fear that someone would take our toys away from us. And, worse, since we had so foolishly come to also imbue those toys with a sense of meaning, we thus added the existential fear that their loss would also mean taking away our very purpose for living as well. I think a political movement arose which understood that it could get additional subsequent money and power (and entertainment) out of stoking such fears by means of prior thefts of money and power from a frightened people. Give them employment insecurity and financial woes by siphoning their wages into the coffers of the already super-rich, and they'll just turn around and choose politicians who will then do far more of the same. It was the ultimate racket, and it lasted an astonishingly long time.

Nor is it even at all clear that people are the wiser, still at this late date. It's curious enough to ask how it is that Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter got ridden out on a rail, while this Thing continues blissfully on in office. How is it that he is not hated and despised? How is it that he dares show his face in public? How does he continue doing inane farewell interviews and presidential speeches without being confronted with even a sliver of reality?

Perhaps it is that the same fear which led us in this direction originally now also prevents us from reckoning with our wreckage. Perhaps our cowardice has now morphed from solitary failing to enduring habit.

But, of course, what isn't paid for now is only paid for later, at a much higher cost. I will be amazed if the coming decade or two isn't a period characterized by multiple and profound self-made catastrophes raging home in an amphetamine- stoked frenzy, each of them furiously seeking Mama, looking for a hug. That's an embrace we surely won't desire, but just as surely neither will we be able to avoid it.

We've been on a bender of exquisite proportions for thirty years now. We've done everything there is to do, to everyone there is to do it to, and more or less gotten away with it all. But now our creditors - literal and figurative - are lined up around the block, knives in their teeth, and they don't look happy.

All I can say, America, is that I hope it was worth it.
I hope you enjoyed the free ride you took by offloading your woes on the rest of the world, including your own children.

I hope you feel good about yourself.

And I hope you liked your beer.

thank god the worst of it ends tomorrow... at least i hope so... we'll see, won't we...

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'Scuse me, but I have a VERY strong suspicion about WHY there's opposition to an automaker bailout

yes, i'm cynical, but you already knew that...

i was watching cnn last evening where paulson and bernanke were testifying before congress on the bailout... this was interspersed with stories about the big three automakers also scheduled to appear with hat in hand... now, i don't know about you, but i've been watching our - taxpayers' - money being handed out by the billions to banks, insurance companies, investment brokers and damn near everybody else that passes by, and i was sitting there trying to make sense out of why, fercryinoutloud, our super-rich elites, personified by paulson and bernanke, people who've been so free with our money up to now, were suddenly so hard over against helping detroit... then it dawned on me...

what sets detroit's situation apart from the banks, insurance companies, etc...? hmmmmmm...?? think about it... yep, that's right... unions AND a very large, blue-collar labor force... what is it that our elite, corporatist, super-rich overlords hate beyond almost everything else...? hmmmmmmm...? that's right... unions... who works for banks, insurance companies and investment brokers...? hmmmmmm...?? the super-rich power brokers, that's who... why would these people who are so busy feeding at the taxpayer trough pass up the chance to completely destroy the unions AND take out a large swath of the u.s. middle class in one fell swoop...? what a golden opportunity...!

don't get me wrong... i'm not favoring a detroit bailout... i'm just trying to understand an apparent contradiction... why is aig "too big to fail," but detroit, with almost three million jobs at stake, can be flushed down the toilet without a backward glance...?

just sayin'...

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