The Progressive Mind

VICE: The Weird Utopia of Wall Street

LIBertea — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 06:02:16 GMT

Wall Street is said to be fueled by the twin passions of greed and fear. That’s true enough, but not the whole story. There’s also a credo, a conviction, that all the deals and emotions add up to a surge of general bounty. In a metamorphic miracle, greed and fear conjure up growth and prosperity. The hordes of lower Manhattan partake of that conviction in fevers of exhilaration and panic. Their utopian aroma fills the nostrils of the famous bronze bull that charges triumphantly just south of Wall Street.

Wall Street’s utopia traffics in dreams. It’s a golden promise that, when everyone acts as a rational actor who buys and sells on the basis of information, the market knows best. Willy-nilly, it allocates capital to investments that seem to offer the best outcome. It’s a universal brain with an invisible heart. The zillions of private transactions are magically transformed into a dynamo of unfathomable proportions. Wall Street generates thrills—Maserati thrills, cocaine thrills, private-plane thrills, six-figure-vacation thrills, the thrill of seeing your name engraved in a university building or a hospital waiting room. These thrills celebrate a vision of Icarus not just flying close to the sun but landing on his feet, too.

Wall Street’s utopia is not only Wall Street’s, of course. It spills out everywhere. It’s unbounded and global. Globalization is a pale name for the promised uniting of humankind, where everyone speaks the common language of cost-benefit numbers. This utopia erases national boundaries. Race, gender, sexuality, and religion don’t matter. A buck is a buck. Everywhere, therefore, Wall Street converts reason into prosperity, which is, after all, a proof of moral excellence. The winners do well, but also good. Harnessing information, they deliver the common bounty. They are Investors Without Borders, one-worlders with a universal passion.

And there’s more. Since everyone’s dollar is equal to everyone else’s, this utopia is, in the end, egalitarian…

Well, there’s the snag, isn’t it? Some people have vastly more dollars than others. It takes some to get more. It takes a lot to get a lot more. The plutocrats move their dollars around in order to buy their way into privilege and pyramid their privilege from generation to generation. One thing they do with their bounty is arrange the laws to maintain their advantages. They buy preferences—exclusive safety nets. So the wealth that piles up is, to put it mildly, grotesquely unequal. Thus the parable of the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent, of which we heard so much three years ago.

For all its deficiencies of method and theory, Occupy Wall Street understood that you need a counter-utopia to resist a spurious utopia. Occupy, while it lasted, wanted to be, or was, that counter-utopia—for those who had the time, the youth, the unemployment, or the passion to hang out on the granite half acre of Zuccotti Park. For a couple of months, the occupation offered those with sufficient inclination, chutzpah, articulateness, and/or willingness to suffer discomfort a more or less self-governing, horizontal community—one without leaders, without grotesque discrepancies in property, acting according to no rules other than those the encampment devised. To some, it felt like paradise. To others, it felt like a cult.

But one way or another, however grand Occupy’s ambition, the denizens of Zuccotti Park could not come close to matching the reach of Wall Street in the collective imagination. They demanded too much of too few. Class, race, and gender resentments brewed. The absence of collective demands meant the presence of chaos. Drummers despised being told what to do and pissed off sympathetic neighbors. Occupy worked until too many separate styles and clamors offended too many fellow Occupiers and the police crushed the First Amendment.

Still, it’s too simple to argue that the dispersal of Occupy Wall Street proved there was a police state in action. There was brutality aplenty, but it was equally problematic that, though the Occupiers said they were working for the universal good (or 99 percent of it, anyway), they were actually exclusive—a community gated away not only by police barricades but by a spirit of We Precious Few.

The tragedy of the present political moment lies not only in the existence of Wall Street’s alluring and delusional utopia but also in the nonexistence of a shared counter-vision. Or shall we say the not-yet-existence? Everywhere, after all, there are struggles against abusive power. Optimists look at the sum total of all the local fights against despoilers of the land and arrogances of wealth, and they see fragments of the counter-vision. Some—I’m inclined to be one—see a counter-vision waiting in the wings of the growing climate movement.

What Occupy Wall Street taught us is that you don’t bring splinters to fight a grand vision. You need a spirit just as plausible and, at the same time, equally ambitious. Because the collective imagination has failed to produce an ideal nearly as stirring as Wall Street’s utopia, the bull—with all its charm and menace—charges on.

Ozone hole remains size of North America, NASA data shows

LIBertea — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 01:46:17 GMT

The Antarctic ozone hole, which was expected to reduce in size swiftly when manmade chlorine emissions were outlawed 27 years ago, is stubbornly remaining the size of North America, new data from Nasa suggests.

The hole in the thin layer of gas, which helps shield life on Earth from potentially harmful ultraviolet solar radiation that can cause skin cancers, grows and contracts throughout the year but reached its maximum extent on 9 September when monitors at the south pole showed it to cover 24.1m square km (9.3m sq miles). This is about 9% below the record maximum in 2000 but almost the same as in 2010, 2012 and 2013.

But scientists remain unsure why the hole has not reduced more since the Montreal Protocol agreement was signed by countries in 1987.

This global treaty is considered one of the world’s most successful, having been pushed through in record time. It bans the use of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), substances that were widely-used in household and industrial products such as refrigerators, spray cans, insulation foam and fire suppressants.

“The ozone hole area is smaller than what we saw in the late-1990s and early 2000s, and we know that chlorine levels are decreasing. However, we are still uncertain about whether a long-term Antarctic stratospheric temperature warming might be reducing this ozone depletion,” said Paul A Newman, chief scientist for atmospheres at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“It’s broadly on track [to reduce in size],” said Dr Jonathan Shanklin, emeritus professor at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, one of the three scientists who discovered the hole in the 1980s. “We knew it was always going to take a long time to recover because the CFCs were long-lived.”

He said the reason why it was not healing more quickly was because the interaction between climate change and the ozone hole was complex. “The ozone hole itself is affecting the climate of Antarctica and Australia, and is being affected by it. It is changing the wind systems.

“As the ozone hole [gradually]fills in, so we can expect, over the next 50 or so years, the effects of climate change to increase. We will see different patterns of climate change”.

Last month the UN Environment Programme (Unep) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said there were “positive indications” that the ozone layer was on track to recovery, but warned it might take a further 35 years or more to recover to 1980 levels. They said that without the Montreal Protocol atmospheric levels of ozone depleting substances could have increased tenfold by 2050.

According to Unep, by 2030 the treaty will have prevented two million cases of skin cancer annually, averted damage to human eyes and immune systems, and protected wildlife and agriculture.

Dark Money Makes Our Politics Nastier

LIBertea — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 15:06:51 GMT

We’re less than two weeks away from a midterm election that could decide which party controls the Senate, and ultimately shape the final two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

It’s the first complete midterm cycle since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United — it came down just nine months before the 2010 election — and the first since another key campaign finance case, McCutcheon v. FEC. Mountains of money are flooding key races in the most expensive non-presidential campaign in history.

To keep you up to date with the latest, we’ve rounded up some key campaign finance stories from the past week.

$4 Billion

According to the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets blog, “almost $4 billion will be spent for this year’s midterm election,” making it “by far the most expensive midterm ever.”

(Credit: OpenSecrets.org)

When all the dollars are tallied, The Center for Responsive Politics expects Republicans and conservative-leaning outside groups to outspend Democrats and their “independent” backers by $160 million. Here’s the breakdown of how much will be spent by parties versus super PACs and other outside groups:

The candidates and parties alone will combine to spend about $2.7 billion, while outside groups will likely spend close to $900 million on their own — a figure that veers close to the $1.3 billion spent by outside groups in 2012, when the hyper-expensive presidential race was fueling the fire.

Outside Spending Makes Politics Meaner

Jessica Meyers reports for The Boston Globe that “in one of the most negative midterm elections, an unprecedented amount of funding comes from secret donors.”

While vitriolic ads are hardly new, voters this year have witnessed an inundation. Nearly three quarters of Senate ads in a two-week period between August and September showed a candidate in a negative light. This outpaced the last two cycles at that time, according to Wesleyan Media Project, a nonpartisan group that researches advertising in elections…
“The increased presence of outside spending is one of the reasons why the elections in the last two cycles have been so negative,” said Michael Franz, co-director of the Wesleyan project. “Outside groups don’t do positive advertising.”

This chart shows an increasing share of negative advertising over the past few cycles:

Donors’ Interests Can Trump Parties’ Priorities

National Journal correspondent Scott Bland reports that a major Democratic super PAC, the House Majority PAC, mystified observers this week by pulling nearly a quarter-million dollars of ad spending out of a close race in New Jersey’s 3rd District and moving it into the 1st District, which is a very safe, deep-blue seat. Bland writes:

Why move the money? A look at House Majority PAC’s fundraising from last month appears to hold the answer. The numbers suggest the group is now running ads in the 1st District because allies of well-connected Democratic candidate Donald Norcross gave them money specifically to do that.
House Majority PAC operates as the unofficial super PAC version of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, looking after Democratic candidates in tough races. This move doesn’t fit into their typical strategy, but it does match up with some of their newest donors’ local aims.
In September, House Majority PAC took in six donations, totaling $270,000, from labor unions and businesses tied in various ways to Donald Norcross, a New Jersey state senator.

State Senator Donald Norcross’s 5th State Senate District overlaps with the 1st Congressional District; the money appears to be for promoting Norcross rather than fighting for a competitive seat in the US House of Representatives.

A Novel Argument Against Our Wild West Campaign Finance System

The Supreme Court has based a long series of decisions undermining campaign finance limits on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. In a landmark 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, the court established that giving money to candidates was a form of political speech, but allowed it to be limited. More recently, the court has struck down most of those limits.

But at The Brennan Center for Justice’s blog, constitutional attorney John Bonifaz, president of Free Speech for People, argues that “there is another part of the US Constitution which ought to be applied in any scrutiny of the campaign finance question: the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Through that lens, we can see that an exclusionary system which is open only to the wealthy few and which plays an integral role in our elections violates the equal protection rights of those locked of the process. Two lines of Supreme Court rulings, taken together, make this case.
First, the Supreme Court has made clear that wealth discrimination in the political process is prohibited under the Equal Protection Clause…

The second line of rulings held that parties’ exclusionary, whites-only primary processes violated the Equal Protection Clause even though they were conducted by private organizations rather than the government. Bonifaz offers much more detail in his essay.

Judicial Races Raise Conflict-of-Interest Questions

James Oliphant writes in National Journal that “39 states elect some portion of their Appellate Court or high-level trial judges,” and warns: “as judicial candidates increasingly resemble their office-seeking cousins, critics are gravely concerned that the judiciary is being cheapened, that public trust is eroding the same way it has with other branches of government.”

The FEC Is Overwhelmed With Disclosure Reports

The Federal Election Commission compiles candidates’ disclosure data and makes it available to the public on its website, FEC.gov. But this year’s battle for the Senate has generated so many reports that the system has been overwhelmed. Here’s the message posted on the site’s “Candidate and Committee Viewer” Friday afternoon:

Bipartisan Opposition to Dark Money in Arizona

Anastasia Reynolds reports for the Tucson Sun-Sentinel that both candidates for secretary of state in Arizona want to crack down on dark money.

With shadowy nonprofit groups expected to spend millions this year to influence Arizona voters without disclosing the sources of their money, both candidates for the state office overseeing elections are offering plans to address the practice.
Democrat Terry Goddard and Republican Michele Reagan say they want laws taking a harder line with so-called dark money groups and requiring them to register with the Secretary of State’s Office.

Dark Money Floods Colorado Senate Race

Michael de Yoanna reports for Colorado Public Radio that “tens of millions of dollars” are flowing into the state’s hotly contested race between incumbent Democrat Mark Udall and his Republican challenger, Rep. Corey Gardner. De Yoanna also looks at Colorado’s complex campaign finance disclosure laws, and speaks to incoming FEC Chair Ann Ravel about how partisan gridlock is preventing the agency from enacting much-needed new disclosure rules.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at hollandj [at]moyersmedia [dot]com.

How to Revive the Labor Movement

LIBertea — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 18:17:51 GMT

After the Brooklyn College administration temporarily suspended Stanley Aronowitz from school in 1950 for taking part in a protest, he dropped out to follow a much more unorthodox route to an academic career. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Aronowitz — a lifetime New Yorker in spirit even when temporarily absent — was a factory worker, union organizer, civil rights advocate, influential contributor to New Left organizations and a vivid, often flamboyant debater in a tumultuous political period.

Since 1983, however, he has been a prolific sociology professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, writing or editing 25 books. His latest, The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement, out from Verso this fall, expands his decades-long argument that unions need bigger goals and more direct action to succeed, or even survive. Aronowitz spoke with In These Times Senior Editor David Moberg about his strategies for reviving the labor movement.

You say in your book that the labor movement has become part of the establishment. In what way?

In the 2012 presidential election, unions contributed $141 million to the Democratic Party, one of the two establishment parties. Their main strategy for moving labor forward is electoral politics, yet they have not formed a labor party. Meanwhile, they have virtually given up the strike and any kind of harsh criticism of the capitalist system.

There is almost no organized anti-capitalist political movement in the United States. Can we expect the labor movement to be anti-capitalist?

We can’t, under the current circumstances. But agitation for an anti-capitalist politics can’t wait for some kind of apocalypse. With the living standards of the American people stagnating as tremendous riches accumulate at the top, this is the time that anti-capitalist politics can resonate with the larger public. I call for another political formation linked to the labor movement, like the Trade Union Education League (the Communist organization of the 1920s) and for a party outside of the two major parties.

You criticize union contracts because they hamper direct action and channel discontent into bureaucratic grievance procedures. Is the contract itself a bad goal, or is the problem that most contracts preclude strikes and guarantee management broad power?

The big issue is the long-term contract, because that prevents workers from taking direct action as problems arise in the workplace or the economy changes. I don’t think that powerful unions need contracts. I would settle for a one-year contract that did not have the strike prohibition and did not include management prerogatives.

You write that the biggest problem the labor movement faces is not declining numbers but declining power. But don’t numbers contribute to power?

The numbers are important, especially for workers who need organizations to be able to fight their battles [with employers]. But unions in the United States do not recognize that a militant minority can have a tremendous effect if it engages in direct action — as unions do in France, and as the Service Employees [International Union] (SEIU) has done with fast-food workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has at Wal-Mart, in conducting elective one-day strikes in several cities.

You advocate a labor movement that is “post-political.” What do you mean by that?

Post-political means that the union movement may endorse candidates or run its own, but essentially does not rely on electoral politics and public officials — that is, the state — to fulfill its goals. Instead, unions should rely on their own resources, on their own members and on their own imaginations to create conditions to make their members’ lives better, in the way that unions, especially in the early-to-mid-20th century, once established and ran very good, moderate-cost cooperative housing.

We’ve been relying for so long on politicians to solve problems that the union membership no longer really relies on its own power. The proper word is really “post-electoral” or “post-state,” and it once had a tremendous resonance among large numbers of workers. Are electoral politics no longer important?

No, unfortunately, they still are. But I do think they have been horrendously over-emphasized at the expense of organizing and issues such as education, housing and public transportation. Unions have become supplicants of the Democratic Party and depend on the electoral system to resolve workers’ problems.

You mention Occupy as a model. But its main achievement was making common political currency out of the clash between the 99% and the 1%.

Occupy refused to be programmatic, and it has virtually disappeared. But Occupy revived the old tactics of civil disobedience and direct action. And by still relying on elections and on contracts and grievance procedures rather than engaging in direct action, unions are on the road to doom.

You write that much of the problem of the American labor movement stems from weak leaders. What led to that situation? Do conservative memberships elect conservative leaders?

I don’t think that union leadership actually reflects the views of the members. Many of these unions have become general workers’ unions. They do not organize in one specific industry. And it’s very difficult for that diverse membership to create an internal democratic opposition that can win. There is no democratic education program to expose them to new ideas and information. So members are voting for leaders to be custodians of an insurance company that provides benefits. But workers don’t really expect them to be seriously involved in their day-to-day struggles, which are often led by the shop steward system — if the shop stewards are still there — and not by the national leaders.

You see some hope in movements on the outskirts of the labor movement and strategies such as minority unionism, which the United Auto Workers pursued after its organizing loss at Volkswagen.

I was very surprised and pleased by that. The only mistake is that the UAW is not going to charge dues until they have a contract. I think workers who join unions should pay their own way.

Do you see encouraging signs in unions working with community groups on housing and banking issues, or of AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently speaking out strongly on racism?

It’s a great sign, but Trumka does not have much influence over the international unions that really have the power. It will take much more than the statements by Trumka to get the labor movement to become a labor movement again. The impetus to change is going to have to come from both inside and outside of the union movement.

Some of what SEIU and UFCW have done to organize low-wage workers is very important. Unions have also reached out to many of the more than 200 worker centers, even though the amount of assistance that centers get from unions is still sparse. Also, many unions showed up at the climate change demonstration in September in New York City (though the AFL-CIO support for the Keystone pipeline is regressive). They see the need to form alliances with other social movements, as they have done with the Black Freedom Movement and the feminist movement.

You acknowledge that a major problem facing workers and the labor movement is insecurity created by globalization and new technology. What is the best way to respond to that?

Two things need to happen, or I don’t see much hope. First, there have to be actions, even if they’re inconclusive, like the fast food and Wal-Mart demonstrations — actions that give people some sense of power and of hope. Second, inside and outside of the unions, people need to be educated about their own history and the degree to which the system is no longer working for them. And they have to begin to think about a different way of life.

David Moberg, senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing in 1976. Prior to that, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.

(VIDEO) The Gas that Could end the World

LIBertea — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 12:51:33 GMT

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8 Facts About American Inequality

LIBertea — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 17:51:50 GMT

“...that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

- James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (1931)

The American Dream has been defined many ways by writers of both poetic and prosaic bent, but its essentials tend to involve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (or property, depending on your source).

The Declaration of Independence, upon which an entire nation was radically brought into existence, asserts that not only are all men created equal but that this is a “self-evident” truth. The significance of this fact lies not in its semantics, which epistemologists would challenge, but in its utilization as a primary foundational creed. By this “unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,” a contract was agreed to, that their union would be founded on this principle. Furthermore, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights that governments are created to uphold. Thus, America was endowed with its dream at the moment of its conception: the freedom to succeed.

The United States has promoted a self-congratulating exceptionalism for decades, waving its Declaration and Constitution in the faces of other sovereign nations as if the latter had never beheld such concepts. Our capital F “Freedom” sets us apart from the rest of the world, as the political rhetoric has repeated ad nauseam, no matter the freedoms enjoyed by democracies on every continent. And yet our basic freedom, the freedom to succeed, America’s contractual promise, has been shrinking for thirty years.

The freedom to succeed transcends economic systems but it is most potently expressed by capitalist gains. The ability to go “from rags to riches” is ingrained in this nation’s ethos and there is nothing intrinsically immoral about that goal. However, the current state of American inequality reveals a very real and expanding gap between the rich and poor that betrays the foundational endowment of this Union. When the freedom to succeed is denied every citizen, their equality is equally denied.

The wealth and income inequalities in America do not require socialist reforms to fix, and capitalism is not the problem. The problem is that we have let inequality advance in this country so gradually that its obviousness is masked by its familiarity. Below I outline eight facts about inequality in America that every American should know.

1) 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined. To put that into context, as of 2013 there are an estimated 316,128,839 people living in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Just 400 Americans have more money than over 158 million of their fellow citizens. Their net worth is over $2 trillion, which is approximate to the Gross Domestic Product of Russia. This ratio has been verified by Politifact and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. One explanation for the vast discrepancy in wealth is the definition of “worth,” which includes everything a person or household owns. This means savings and property but also mortgages, bills and debt. Poorer households can owe so much in debt that they possess a negative net worth.

2) America has the second-highest level of income inequality, after Chile. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development studies thirty-four developed countries and ranks them both before and after taxes and government transfers take effect (government transfers include Social Security, income tax credit and unemployment insurance). Before taxes and government transfers, America ranks tenth in income inequality. After taxes and transfers, it ranks second. Whereas its developed peers reduce inequality through government programs, the United States’ government exacerbates it.

3) The current state of inequality can be traced back to 1979. After the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the gap between the rich and the poor began to narrow. For fifty years, wages still differed greatly between the upper- and working-classes, but a robust middle-class took shape, as well as the opportunity for working-class individuals to ascend. In his book, “The Great Divergence,” journalist Timothy Noah traces today’s inequality to the beginning of the 1980s and the widening gap between the middle- and upper-classes. This gap was influenced by the following factors: the failure of American schools to prepare students for new technology; poor immigration policies that favor unskilled workers and drive down the price of already low-income labor; federally-mandated minimum wage that has failed to keep pace with inflation; and the decline of labor unions.

4) Non-union wages are also affected by the decline of unions. The Economic Policy Institute claims that 20% of the growth in the wage gap between high-school educated and college educated men can be attributed to deunionization. Between 1978 and 2011, union representation for blue-collar and high-school educated workers declined by more than half. This has also diminished the “union wage effect,” whereby the existence of unions (more than 40% of blue-collar workers were union members in ’78) was enough to boost wages in non-union jobs - in high school graduates by as much as 8.2%. Not only did unions protect lower- and middle-class workers from unfair wages, they also established norms and practices that were then adopted by non-union employers. Two prime examples are employee pensions and healthcare. Today about 13% of workers belong to unions, which has reduced their bargaining power and influence.

5) There is less opportunity for intergenerational mobility. In December 2011, President Obama spoke at Osawatomie High School in Kansas. He was very clear about the prospects of the poor in today’s United States:

“ver the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk. You know, a few years after World War II, a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50-50 chance of becoming middle class as an adult. By 1980, that chance had fallen to around 40 percent. And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a one-in-three chance of making it to the middle class - 33 percent.”

As refreshing as that honesty is, Obama promised no fix beyond $1 trillion in spending cuts and a need to work toward an “innovation economy.”

In a speech one month later, Obama’s Chairman of Economic Advisers, Alan Krueger, elaborated on the dire state of America’s shrinking middle-class. The contraction, he stated, could partially be attributed to “skill-biased technical change”: work activities that have become automated over time, reducing the need for unskilled labor and favoring those with analytical training. He also highlighted the 50 year decline in tax rates for the top 0.1%, increased competition from overseas workers, and a lack of educational equality for children. Poor children are denied the private tutors, college prep and business network of family and friends available to their wealthier peers, which locks them into the class they are born into.

6) Tax cuts to the wealthiest have not improved the economy or created more jobs. Krueger also revealed that the tax cuts of the 2000s for top earners did not improve the economy any better than they did in the 1990s (meanwhile, income growth was stronger for lower- and middle-class families in the 1990s than in the last forty years). Tax rates for the top income earners in America peaked in 1945 at 66.4 percent. Following decades of gradual reductions, they have since been cut in half. During the same time, the payroll tax has increased since the 1950s and individual income tax has bounced between 40-50% through the present day. Conversely, corporate tax declined from above 30% in the 1950s to under 10% in 2011. All of these tax cuts are made ostensibly to improve the economy and create jobs. However, the National Bureau of Economic Research has concluded that it is young companies, “regardless of their size,” that are the real job creators in America. Tax cuts to the wealthiest do not create jobs.

7) Incomes for the top 1% have increased (but the top 0.01% make even more). Between 1979 and 2007, the average incomes of the 1% increased 241%. Compare that to 19% growth for the middle fifth of America and 11% for the bottom fifth. Put another way, in 1980 the average American CEO earned forty-two times as much as his average worker. In 2001, he earned 531 times as much.

Average income across the 1% is actually stratified into widely disparate echelons. Compare the $29,840 average income for the bottom 90% to the $161,139 of the top 10%. Compare the $1 million average income of the top 1% to the $2.8 million of the top 0.1%. Yet both still pale beside the $23 million average income of the top 0.01%.

If those numbers seem a bit overwhelming, Politizane has created a video that illustrates this staggering inequality:

8) The majority of Congress does not feel your pain. Empowered by the Constitution to represent their constituents, United States Congress members are, for the first time in history, mostly millionaires. The 2012 financial disclosure information of the 534 current Congress men and women reveals that over half of them have a net worth of $1 million or more. After the past seven facts it is difficult to read this last one and believe that these 268 legislators have the best interests of the remaining 99% at heart. But if that is too presumptuous a leap, it is not too bold to say that wealthier donors, lobbyists and special interest groups enjoy greater access to these lawmakers than the average American.

Life, and the Liberty to Go Hungry

Last week Congress failed to extend emergency benefits for unemployment, leaving 1.3 million people without federal aid. Congress is currently on a weeklong recess that will keep them from debating the issue until their return on January 27. The bill was too divisive for Republicans and Democrats to reach an agreement on, though unemployment is still above 7% nationally.

Thankfully, the unemployed have their Congress working for them. And at $174,000 annual pay, those representatives are sure to return from vacation committed to fresh solutions.

The pursuit of happiness is an ephemeral affair, but the freedom to succeed is not. It is something one possesses or lacks. It is the difference between enjoying a more prosperous life than one’s parents and believing there is no way out. A “self-evident” truth is one that is meaningful without proof, much akin to faith. If inequality continues to rise in America, the self-evident truths of its founding will be no more than words on an old piece of paper, its American Dream a tattered faith paid lip service by the deceitful and the blind.

Going Easy on Eric Holder’s Wall Street Inaction

LIBertea — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 16:06:03 GMT

This post first appeared at Columbia Journalism Review.

There’s one word missing in too many major press accounts of Eric Holder’s tenure as Obama’s only attorney general: bankers.

It’s a baffling lapse for outlets like the Washington Post, Bloomberg, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and ABC News, none of which, in their main stories on the resignation, mentions Holder’s dismal record prosecuting Wall Street fraud in the wake of the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression. The New York Times drops one line toward the bottom of its front-page story on the news, inaccurately calling it a “liberal” notion that the AG “should have used his power to prosecute those responsible for the financial crisis in 2008.”

Holder leaves office having been far outclassed by the Bush administration even in prosecuting corporate criminals, despite overseeing the aftermath of one of the biggest orgies of financial corruption in history.

In March 2009, a month after Holder was sworn in as attorney general, The New York Times reported that “federal and state investigators are preparing for a surge of prosecutions of financial fraud” and that the DOJ considered it a “a top priority.”

Holder came from the white-shoe DC law firm Covington & Burling, which represented half of the top 10 mortgage servicers, along with MERS, the mortgage records system that played a big role in the foreclosure fraud scandal (the firm and the Justice Department declined to tell Reuters in 2012 whether Holder worked on any of those cases). He brought along his Covington colleague Lanny Breuer as enforcement chief, and Breuer would play a key role in the lack of indictments of major executives.

By the end of 2010, it was clear the financial prosecution surge hadn’t happened, and the media began making noise about it. Holder announced the results of a financial fraud task force, claiming more than 300 scalps.

The press quickly exposed Holder’s campaign as a public relations stunt, reporting that many cases were started years earlier by the Bush administration, other were double-counted, and that almost all of the rest were small fry. Even The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, who’s no anti-bank populist, mocked Holder’s financial fraud task force as an exercise in missing the point.

Two years later, Holder did it again, announcing a mortgage fraud sweep had resulted in 530 prosecutions and a billion dollars in fines. Bloomberg immediately noticed that the DOJ had again included Bush-era cases in its tally. Several months later, the administration quietly admitted it had inflated the real numbers, which were 107 prosecutions and $95 million in fines — almost all from small-time criminals.

Then there’s the Holder Doctrine, set forth in a 1999 memo when he was Clinton’s deputy attorney general. It says that prosecutors should take “collateral consequences” into account when “conducting an investigation, determining whether to bring charges and negotiating plea agreements.”

By 2012, Breuer all but admitted that the administration didn’t criminally charge banks because it worried about the collateral consequences. “In my conference room, over the years, I have heard sober predictions that a company or bank might fail if we indict, that innocent employees could lose their jobs, that entire industries may be affected and even that global markets will feel the effects,” he said.

“Those are the kinds of considerations in white-collar crime cases that literally keep me up at night, and which must play a role in responsible enforcement.”

We know now — too late to do anything about it — that Holder never even really tried to investigate the banks. By early last year, 60 Minutes was confronting Breuer with reporting that sources inside the DOJ’s criminal division who said, “There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps” of Wall Street for the financial crisis. Eventually, after the political pressure grew intolerable, Holder squeezed billions of dollars in civil penalties from Wall Street without forcing a single individual to face trial. Contrast that with the Holder DOJ’s aggressive criminal prosecution of insider trading, which is basically a Wall Street-on-Wall Street crime.

Holder and Breuer were part of a pattern within the Obama administration of weak Wall Street enforcement — one that leads right back to the president himself. The tally of top officials who were close to Wall Street and have since left for finance or finance-related jobs includes former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, former SEC chairwoman Mary Schapiro, Breuer, former SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami, and, soon, you can bet, Eric Holder.

Here’s Holder’s legacy on the financial fraud front, which was one of the biggest issues he faced when taking office:

Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum

Pressure mounts on Senate to overhaul the National Security Agency

LIBertea — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 13:54:18 GMT

Outside voices are increasing their calls for the Senate to overhaul the National Security Agency, putting pressure on leaders of the upper chamber to bring legislation to a vote.

On Monday, a coalition of technology industry groups wrote a letter to Senate leaders in favor of Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) USA Freedom Act, which would effectively end the NSA program that collects Americans’ phone records in bulk while adding new ways for companies to disclose what information the government requests about their users.

The industry letter comes on the heels of a similar call from dozens of civil liberties organizations and the endorsement of the bill by Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

“The surveillance reforms embodied in the USA Freedom Act are necessary to help restore public trust in both the U.S. government and the U.S. technology sector, as well as to continue the innovative and competitive success of the American tech sector in global markets,” wrote the five technology trade groups, which represent most of the industry’s biggest names, including Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

Last year’s disclosures from Edward Snowden had a disastrous effect on global public trust in tech companies and has been estimated to cost them tens of billions of dollars in lost profits.

The bill Leahy unveiled earlier this summer, industry groups said, “will send a clear signal to the international community and to the American people that government surveillance programs are narrowly tailored, transparent, and subject to oversight.”

The five groups signing Monday’s letter were BSA | The Software Alliance, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the Information Technology Industry Council, the Software and Information Industry Association and the Reform Government Surveillance coalition.

The pressure could add new fire to Leahy’s push to get the bill considered this year, though the short Senate calendar and midterm elections could make action in September difficult.

Leahy unveiled his new version of the bill in July, before the upper chamber left Washington for a five-week recess.

A wide swath of senators have signed on in support of the bill — including lawmakers rarely seen on the same side of an issue, such as Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) — but Leahy will need the support of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to get the bill to the floor this year.

Lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee have voiced the loudest skepticism, and it remains to be seem whether they will mount an effort to prevent it from reaching the floor.

VIDEO prof. Mousseau: Fukushima Catastrophe - its Effects on Wildlife

LIBertea — Sat, 06 Sep 2014 20:15:39 GMT

Inequality and the USA: A Nation in Denial

LIBertea — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 19:03:09 GMT

Every August, for most of the last four decades, top central bankers from around the world have been making their way to the Wyoming mountain resort of Jackson Hole for an invitation-only blue-ribbon economic symposium.

This year’s Jackson Hole hobnob, once again hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, last week attracted the usual assortment of central bankers, finance ministers, and influential business journalists. But this year’s gathering also attracted something else: protesters.

For the first time ever, activists converged on Jackson Hole — to let the Fed’s central bankers know, as protest organizers put it, that “it’s not just the rich who are watching them.”

Over 70 groups and unions backed the protest and signed onto an open letter that calls on America’s central bankers to start nurturing an economy that works for workers. At one point, early on in the Jackson Hole gathering, protesters actually had a brief exchange with Federal Reserve Board chair Janet Yellin.

“We understand the issues you’re talking about,” Yellin told them, “and we’re doing everything we can.”

But that “everything” remains distinctly dispiriting. Many of Yellin’s fellow central bank officials, protesters note, are pushing the Fed “to put the brakes on growth so wages don’t rise” and, the fear goes, stimulate inflation.

Those “brakes”— higher interest rates — are definitely coming, Kansas City Fed president Esther George told protest leaders in another Jackson Hole exchange. America needs them, she added, to better “balance” the economy.

But America, the protesters point out, needs a balancing of an entirely different sort. The nation’s top-heavy economy needs to become less top-heavy. The nation can’t afford to be a place where far too many “struggle to secure even basic levels of dignity” while “the wealthiest Americans are richer than ever.”

The green-shirted protesters at Jackson Hole had plenty of support for that stance at last week’s other blue-ribbon global gathering of economic dignitaries, Germany’s fifth Lindau Meeting on Economic Sciences.

No hotshot central bankers show up in Bavaria for this Lindau conference, only Nobel Prize laureates in economics and aspiring economic researchers from around the world. This year’s Lindau event attracted half the world’s living Nobel laureates and over 450 young economists from more than 80 countries.

The central focus of their dialogue? Our increasing global maldistribution of income and wealth. Session after session zeroed in on “drivers of rising inequality” and the “counteractive measures” that can narrow our global divides.

Soaring inequality, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz told the Lindau assembly, has brought the global economy well past the point where any tinkering will cure what ails us. The provocative title of his Lindau address: “Inequality, wealth, and growth: why capitalism is failing.”

Wages for average U.S. workers, Stiglitz notes, have fallen over the past 40 years — at the same time that American worker productivity has doubled.

“Any economic system that doesn’t deliver for a majority of its citizens,” notes Stiglitz, “is failing.”

What sort of rebalancing could leave us with an economy that does deliver? Another Nobel laureate at Lindau, Scotland’s Sir James Mirrlees, put on the table a notion that no central banker at Jackson Hole would ever dare whisper: a 100 percent top tax rate on income over a certain point, in effect a “maximum wage.”

The 78-year-old Mirrlees explored in his address a series of model situations where a 100 percent top marginal tax rate would make eminent sense and went on to suggest applying such income caps “in certain fields or professions.”

A practical political possibility? Perhaps, says Mirrlees. “Particularly in Europe,” he observes, serious people are already discussing limiting banker pay.

In the United States, on the other hand, concern about income and wealth concentration hasn’t yet reached the point where ideas as bold as income caps are gaining any significant traction.

Why not? Another Lindau presenter, Judith Niehues of Germany’s Cologne Institute for Economic Research, has some clues.

Niehues has analyzed surveys of public perceptions about inequality in two dozen European nations and the United States. In all these nations save one, her research has found, people overestimate the level of inequality around them.

On average, for instance, the French believe that just under 15 percent of their nation’s households have incomes that fall between 80 and 110 percent of France’s median — most typical — income. In fact, nearly 28 percent of the French have middle class incomes.

And the share of the French people living in poverty, with incomes less than 60 percent the nation’s median income, is actually running at just half the poverty level that the French people estimate.

The one nation where people underestimate the inequality that engulfs them? The United States. Americans believe that just over a quarter of their fellow Americans, 25.7 percent, have incomes that fall between 80 and 110 percent of the national median. The actual share of Americans clustered in this statistical middle: just 15.3 percent.

The United States, Niehues goes on to relate, ranks as “the only country in our sample with a more optimistic perception of the society than suggested by the actual distribution of incomes.”

The United States, in sum, doesn’t just have the world’s most unequal major developed economy. The United States has the most people in denial about the inequality they live amid.

Niehues doesn’t go into the reasons for this denial. Her paper does note one consequence: People who underestimate their society’s level of inequality turn out to be less likely to support policies that would help distribute their society’s income and wealth more equally.

Inequality, in other words, matters. But the perception of inequality may matter — in the struggle for a fairer future — even more.