A travelin' gal

[Political Waves]

After two looooong years, I'm visiting for the month with family in California -- HOORAY!!!! -- and am using a computer and a writing program that is new to me, so you may find some issues with this first post, like inappropriate capitals and the like. Hopefully, I can tweak them away in the coming days.

 

Here are a couple of reads that I liked a lot regarding our current situation: corruption is the zeitgeist, how to deal with it the challenge. THAT is going to be our focus for some time to come, me'thinks!

 

Meanwhile, a few bits of interest, the non-political first:

 

There are 7 billion of us now, here on planet Terra and it's embarrassing that so many of us are deeply invested in the fact that:

 

Nancy Grace has survived Nipplegate and is still -- ugh!! -- Dancing With the Stars ...

 

Kim Kardashian has topped Paris Hilton for spoiled brat of the century ...

 

Lindsey Lohan has spit in the eye of good sense so often, she has to go back to jail ...

 

On the GOP front there are probably too FEW aware that:

 

Herman Cain has proven to be every bit as creepy as we thought he was ...

 

Rick Perry gave a performance that made our little shit-kickin' Dubya look sober and competent ...

 

Over at TruthOut, Will Pitt gave us a quick and amusing synopsis:

 

Mitt Romney is licking his chops right now. First Newt Gingrich streaked across the sky like a meteor, only to crash back to Earth with a mighty "Derp." Then The Donald did the same, but with a comedy quotient that was greater by orders of magnitude. Then came Michele Bachmann, who stomped the terra for a little while before everyone, including a lot of Tea Partiers, finally realized just exactly how crazy she really is. Then came Rick Perry, and for a month he was the Great White Hope, firing the hearts and minds of Tea Partiers by coming off even more shallow and callow than George W. Bush...until he hit the debates like a bug into a windshield, at which point Mr. Cain became the flavor of the week, until Monday's self-inflicted debacle. Mitt might be smug now, but he'd better watch his step; bad luck appears to be stalking the Republican field like a lion in the veldt.

 

Three good reads, of the moment.

 

Jude

 

 

A Voice From the 1%

Gaius, Daily Kos via Alternet

10/27/11

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/686297/a_voice_from_the_1/#paragraph2

 

The impetus behind the Occupy Wall Street movement - a vague sense that the rich are getting ever richer while everyone else suffers - was confirmed by a recent report from the Social Security Administration showing that while total employment and average wages remained stagnant, the number of people earning $1 million or more grew by 18% from 2009 to 2010. Those figures give real substance to the "We are the 99%" slogan, yet Republicans continue to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that if anything those "job creators" deserve an even greater share of our national income. The Tea Party, meanwhile, has launched its own "53%" movement, inexplicably rallying the working class to the defense of the wealthy. The one group rarely heard from in this rancorous debate is the 1%, whose incomes and taxes are its focus. I am one of them, and here is my perspective, which may surprise you.

 

***

 

First let me note that I am not part of the yacht and private jet set, which represents an even smaller subset of incomes than mine. The threshold for inclusion in the top 1% of income earners in 2008, the most recent year for which published data is available from the IRS, was $380,354, enough for an extraordinary life but nowhere near enough for a harbor berth in St. Moritz. Nevertheless, I am - for now - comfortably ensconced in that demographic. Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan would save me roughly $400,000 a year in taxes, and President Obama's tax proposals would cost me more than $100,000, yet I support the latter and consider the former laughable.

 

Thus you can imagine my amazement this summer when I watched the Republicans in Congress push the United States to the brink of default - and the world to the brink of ruin - over whether to repeal a portion of the Bush tax cuts and raise my taxes by 3.5%. I know a lot of people with high incomes and even the conservatives among them were confused by that sequence of events. Here is a secret about rich people: we wouldn't have noticed a 3.5% tax increase. That is not only because there isn't a material difference between having $1 million and $965,000, which is obvious, but also because most of us don't actually know how much money we are going to make in a given year. Most income at that level is the result of profits rather than salary, whether it comes in the form of bonuses, stock options, partnership distributions, dividends or capital gains. Profits are unpredictable and they tend to vary wildly. At my own firm, the general rule of thumb is that if we are within 5% of our budget for the year, everyone is happy and no one complains. A variation of 3.5% is merely a random blip.

 

I was not amazed but disgusted when John Boehner and his crew tried to justify the extremity of their position by rebranding the wealthy as "job creators." While true in a very basic sense, it obscures the fact that jobs are a cost that is voluntarily incurred only as a result of demand. Hiring has no correlation at all to profits or to income - none. Let me keep more of my money without increasing customer demand and I will do just that - keep it. Perhaps I will spend a little more of it, though probably not, but even if I do it won't help the economy very much. Here is another secret of the well-to-do: we don't really buy much more stuff than everyone else. It may be more expensive stuff, sure, but I don't buy cars, or appliances, or furniture, or anything else more frequently than the average consumer. The things I do spend more money on are services such as travel, entertainment, restaurants and landscaping, none of which generate well-paying middle class jobs. There, in a nutshell, is the sad explanation of what has happened to the American economy over the last 25 years of "trickle down" economics.

 

That's why I was so pleased when the Occupy Wall Street protests began. I support them wholeheartedly, for several reasons. First, because I fervently believe in the exercise of first amendment rights, and I have been waiting for years for the American people to wake up from the torpor of the Bush years, when they were seemingly cowed into submission to corporate authoritarianism. Second, because I am dismayed by the thuggish tactics of the NYPD. I would have expected as much from Michael Chertoff or Dick Cheney, but not from the Bloomberg administration. Third, there is no question that the increasing income inequality in our society is a bad thing, in the short-term and the long-term, for both workers and for business. It is bad in every way and for everyone, with the sole exception of Wall Street itself. Fourth, I love the hysterical reaction it has provoked from arch-conservatives such as Eric Cantor and Glenn Beck. As George Orwell wrote in "Homage to Catalonia" about fighting fascists, I don't always need to know what I am fighting for when it is clear what I am fighting against. Fifth, and most important, it changed the national media narrative and sucked almost all of the energy out of the tempest that was the Tea Party.

 

It is the Tea Party's effort to recapture that energy, through the "We Are the 53%" movement, that has truly bewildered me. I have spent far more hours than I should have these last few weeks puzzling over the postings on that website, trying to understand who these people are and why they would possibly care about my taxes. I don't really have an answer to those questions, but I do have a few insights.

 

To begin with, a fair number of the posters there don't seem to understand the actual issues, or even the meaning of "53%," which is supposed to refer to the percentage of people in recent years who actually owed - and paid - federal income taxes. From their own descriptions of themselves as unemployed, underemployed, or struggling to raise families, it seems likely that many of these posters actually AREN'T part of that 53%, but rather, like most of the 47% they complain about, receive full refunds of their taxes each year, or perhaps even more thanks to the Republican-sponsored family tax credits. I suspect they think that because they work, and have taxes withheld, and file a tax return, they are different than the "47%" they decry as lazy layabouts. Of course they are not, but sadly they don't even realize it.

 

Next, ALL of the posters there seem quite proud of themselves. No doubt they should be, but they seem to have derived very different conclusions from their life experiences than I have from mine, which could read like an exaggerated version of one of their posts. My family is from one of the poorest counties in the country, in rural Appalachia. My grandfather was a coal miner who left school after 5th grade to help support his impoverished family. My grandmother wasn't allowed to attend high school because according to her parents women didn't need an education. I never knew my father. My mother and I subsisted on food stamps for several years. I got my first job at 13, working as a bus boy for $2 an hour, and I have never been unemployed in the 37 years since. I worked my way through college, which I paid for myself. When I started my career I worked 60+ hour weeks every week for nearly 15 years before that effort began to pay off. I employ nearly 20 people, I have no debts, and I have no doubt that I have earned every penny I have.

 

And yet, I am living proof of Elizabeth Warren's maxim that no one gets rich on their own. If not for the UMWA helping to secure a living wage for my grandfather, I would probably have had to leave school to help support my family, as he had done. If not for my grandmother's passionate belief in the value of the education she was denied I would never have aspired to go to college at all, and if not for my mother teaching me to love books, I would never have been able to succeed there. If not for my wife I would never have been inspired to work as hard as I did to see what I could become in life. How many smart, talented children don't have those positive influences? How many have exactly the opposite?

 

My good fortune did not end there. It was sheer luck, rather than moral virtue, that I never had the criminal record many of my less fortunate friends did when I was young. It was sheer luck that neither I nor any of my family members ever had a major illness, or accident, or disability, despite lacking health insurance much of the time. How different my life could easily have been! How different the lives of others still could be.

 

I understand too that but for food stamps, I would have gone hungry as a child, that but for public subsidies and federally guaranteed loans I could never have afforded college. I know that without the internet and airports, both of which were developed with federal taxes, I could not earn an income even close to what I make today. That all seems so obvious to me that I don't understand how anyone could question it, and those are just a few of the many reasons I am happy to pay my fair share of taxes, whatever that share maybe. Paying a lot of taxes just means you make a lot of money, and it is hard, frankly, to complain about that.

 

One last observation. Many of the 53% crowd seem quite proud of their Christian faith. I am not religious myself, but I am reasonably certain that Jesus would not respond to the poor and unemployed with shouts of "Get a job!" I vividly remember what it was like to be poor. To be concise, it sucked, and my heartfelt sympathies automatically go out to anyone who has to experience it, especially children who are blameless for their circumstances. Whenever I meet someone who has not been as lucky as I have been, I recognize how easily our roles could have been reversed by the random forces of fate. And despite my lack of religion, I instinctively think "There but for the grace of God go I." If only those who actually believe in God would think the same thing more often they might not be so eager to cut my taxes. ++

 

 

Bombs, Bridges and Jobs

Paul Krugman, New York Times

October 30, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com\/2011\/10\/31\/opinion\/bombs-bridges-and-jobs.html

 

A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, Defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or

Important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that Is of course economic salvation.”

 

Right now the weaponized Keynesians are out in full force — which makes this a good time to see what’s really going On in debates over economic policy. What’s bringing out the military big spenders is the approaching deadline for the so-called supercommittee to agree On a plan for deficit reduction. If no agreement is reached, this failure is supposed to trigger cuts in the defense Budget.

 

Faced with this prospect, Republicans — who normally insist that the government can’t create jobs, and who have Argued that lower, not higher, federal spending is the key to recovery — have rushed to oppose any cuts in military Spending. Why? Because, they say, such cuts would destroy jobs.

 

Thus Representative Buck McKeon, Republican of California, once attacked the Obama stimulus plan because “more Spending is not what California or this country needs.” But two weeks ago, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. McKeon — now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee — warned that the defense cuts that are scheduled to Take place if the supercommittee fails to agree would eliminate jobs and raise the unemployment rate.

 

Oh, the hypocrisy! But what makes this particular form of hypocrisy so enduring?

 

First things first: Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence That Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this Conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more Spending would create more jobs.

 

But why would anyone prefer spending on destruction to spending on construction, prefer building weapons to building Bridges?

John Maynard Keynes himself offered a partial answer 75 years ago, when he noted a curious “preference for Wholly ‘wasteful’ forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not Wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.” Indeed. Spend money on some useful goal, like The promotion of new energy sources, and people start screaming, “Solyndra! Waste!” Spend money on a weapons system We don’t need, and those voices are silent, because nobody expects F-22s to be a good business proposition.

 

To deal with this preference, Keynes whimsically suggested burying bottles full of cash in disused mines and letting The private sector dig them back up. In the same vein, I recently suggested that a fake threat of alien invasion, Requiring vast anti-alien spending, might be just the thing to get the economy moving again.

 

But there are also darker motives behind weaponized Keynesianism. For one thing, to admit that public spending on useful projects can create jobs is to admit that such spending can In fact do good, that sometimes government is the solution, not the problem. Fear that voters might reach the same Conclusion is, I’d argue, the main reason the right has always seen Keynesian economics as a leftist doctrine, when it’s actually nothing of the sort. However, spending on useless or, even better, destructive projects doesn’t Present conservatives with the same problem.

 

Beyond that, there’s a point made long ago by the Polish economist Michael Kalecki: to admit that the government can Create jobs is to reduce the perceived importance of business confidence. Appeals to confidence have always been a key debating point for opponents of taxes and regulation; Wall Street’s Whining about President Obama is part of a long tradition in which wealthy businessmen and their flacks argue that Any hint of populism on the part of politicians will upset people like them, and that this is bad for the economy.

 

Once you concede that the government can act directly to create jobs, however, that whining loses much of its Persuasive power — so Keynesian economics must be rejected, except in those cases where it’s being used to defend Lucrative contracts.

 

So I welcome the sudden upsurge in weaponized Keynesianism, which is revealing the reality behind our political Debates. At a fundamental level, the opponents of any serious job-creation program know perfectly well that such a Program would probably work, for the same reason that defense cuts would raise unemployment. But they don’t want Voters to know what they know, because that would hurt their larger agenda — keeping regulation and taxes on the Wealthy at bay. ++

 

 

The Disuniting of America

Jim Hightower, Truthout

Wednesday 02 November 2011

http://www.truth-out.org/disuniting-america/1320237839

 

In the Bible, Paul doesn't say that money is the root of all evil -- rather, it is the love of money that he warns against.

 

In recent years, the insidious love of mammon (in the form of greed and excess) has not merely been tolerated in our country, but celebrated and even exalted into official public policy, marring our economy with dangerous inequality and injustice. The reigning ethos of those at the apex of our nation's wealth pyramid is that too much is not enough. They're not merely out to make loads of the money they love, but to make a killing, everyone else be damned.

 

New numbers from the Congressional Budget Office confirm that as the moneyed elites have been making their killing, wealth disparity has become extreme in a country that once prided itself on trying to build a more egalitarian society.

 

Analyzing 30 years of income data, the nonpartisan CBO reports that the richest 1 percent of our population has enjoyed a stunning 275 percent increase in their income during that time. As a result, these privileged few have more than doubled the slice of America's income pie that they consume, going from 8 percent to 17 percent of the whole in just three decades.

 

From whom did these richest 1-percenters get their extra-big slice? From us, the 99 percent. The share of national income going to middle class and poor families shrank in this period -- which is why there is such broad support today for Occupy Wall Street's "We are the 99 percent" movement.

 

At the extreme tip of America's wealth pyramid are the multimillionaire CEOs and billionaire Wall Streeters. They are the richest .01-percenters (a mere 14,836 households). These few now take 6 percent of all U.S. income -- the biggest piece ever consumed by America's mega-rich.

 

If the widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us is not addressed, our society will devolve into a jungle -- and not even billionaires will enjoy living there.

 

As an old country saying puts it, "Money is like manure -- it does no good unless you spread it around." Instead of recognizing such commonsense wisdom, America's corporate and political leaders have intentionally been shoveling wealth into an ever-bigger pile for those at the top. They've gotten away with this by lying to the great majority, which has seen its share of America's prosperity steadily disappearing.

 

Yes, they've told us with lying smiles, the rich are getting richer, but that's just the natural workings of the new global economy, in which financial elites are rewarded for their exceptional talents, innovation and bold risk-taking.

 

Horse dooties. The massive redistribution of America's wealth from the many to the few is happening because the rich and their political puppets have rigged the system. Years of subsidized off-shoring and downsizing, gutting labor rights, monkey-wrenching the tax code, legalizing financial recklessness and finagling, dismantling social programs, increasing the political dominance of corporate cash -- these and other self-serving acts of the moneyed powers have created the conveyor belt that's moving our wealth from the grassroots to the penthouses.

 

Not since 1928, in the Gilded Age that preceded and precipitated the Great Depression, have so few amassed so much of our nation's riches. Having learned nothing from that devastating financial crash almost exactly 82 years ago, nor from their own financial failure that collapsed their banks in 2008 and crushed our economy, the wealthiest of the wealthy fully intend to keep taking more for themselves at our expense.

 

Now, however, the people are onto their lies. In an October poll, two-thirds of Americans support increased taxes on millionaires, and two-thirds want an end to corporate tax subsidies and are for policies to more evenly distribute the wealth that all of us help create. This rising egalitarianism is the real America, and it will change our politics -- for the better. ++

 

 

 

“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.”

~ Barack Obama

 

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