Religion? Here’s a succinct summary
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More REAL Common Sense about the US Economy
It’s All About the Wages — Our Economy Would Be Fine If Everyone Made Their Fair Share
When virtually all the gains from growth go to a small minority at the top, the result is deep-seated anxiety and frustration.
By Robert Reich July 13, 2010
Missing from almost all discussion of America’s dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June’s decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.
In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.
Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans’ earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. As hiring has picked up on the Street, fat salaries are reappearing. Richard Stein, president of Global Sage, an executive search firm, tells the New York Times corporate clients have offered compensation packages of more than $1 million annually to a dozen candidates in just the last few weeks.
We’re back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground. And as long as this trend continues, we can’t get out of the shadow of the Great Recession. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing.
America’s median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class could boost its purchasing power was to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn’t pay their bills, and banks couldn’t collect.
Each of America’s two biggest economic downturns over the last century has followed the same pattern. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America’s total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income re-concentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928 — with 23.5 percent of the total.
We all know what happened in the years immediately following these twin peaks — in 1929 and 2008.
A second parallel links 1929 with 2008: when earnings accumulate at the top, people at the top invest their wealth in whatever assets seem most likely to attract other big investors. This causes the prices of certain assets — commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate — to become wildly inflated. Such speculative bubbles eventually burst, leaving behind mountains of near-worthless collateral.
The crash of 2008 didn’t turn into another Great Depression because the government learned the importance of flooding the market with cash, thereby temporarily rescuing some stranded consumers and most big bankers. But the financial rescue didn’t change the economy’s underlying structure – median wages dropping while those at the top are raking in the lion’s share of income.
The structural problem began in the late 1970s when a wave of new technologies (air cargo, container ships and terminals, satellite communications and, later, the Internet) radically reduced the costs of outsourcing jobs abroad. Other new technologies (automated machinery, computers and ever more sophisticated software applications) took over many other jobs (remember bank tellers? telephone operators? service station attendants?). By the ’80s, any job requiring that the same steps be performed repeatedly was disappearing — going over there or into software. Meanwhile, as the pay of most workers flattened or dropped, the pay of well-connected graduates of prestigious colleges and MBA programs — the so-called “talent” who reached the pinnacles of power in executive suites and on Wall Street — soared.
The puzzle is why so little was done to counteract these forces. Government could have given employees more bargaining power to get higher wages, especially in industries sheltered from global competition and requiring personal service: big-box retail stores, restaurants and hotel chains, and child- and eldercare, for instance. Safety nets could have been enlarged to compensate for increasing anxieties about job loss: unemployment insurance covering part-time work, wage insurance if pay drops, transition assistance to move to new jobs in new locations, insurance for communities that lose a major employer so they can lure other employers. With the gains from economic growth the nation could have provided Medicare for all, better schools, early childhood education, more affordable public universities, more extensive public transportation. And if more money was needed, taxes could have been raised on the rich.
Big, profitable companies could have been barred from laying off a large number of workers all at once, and could have been required to pay severance — say, a year of wages — to anyone they let go. Corporations whose research was subsidized by taxpayers could have been required to create jobs in the United States. The minimum wage could have been linked to inflation. And America’s trading partners could have been pushed to establish minimum wages pegged to half their countries’ median wages — thereby ensuring that all citizens shared in gains from trade and creating a new global middle class that would buy more of our exports.
But starting in the late 1970s, and with increasing fervor over the next three decades, government did just the opposite. It deregulated and privatized. It increased the cost of public higher education and cut public transportation. It shredded safety nets. It halved the top income tax rate from the range of 70-90 percent that prevailed during the 1950s and ’60s to 28-40 percent; it allowed many of the nation’s rich to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax and escape inheritance taxes altogether. At the same time, America boosted sales and payroll taxes, both of which have taken a bigger chunk out of the pay of the middle class and the poor than of the well-off.
Companies were allowed to slash jobs and wages, cut benefits and shift risks to employees (from you-can-count-on-it pensions to do-it-yourself 401(k)s, from good health coverage to soaring premiums and deductibles). They busted unions and threatened employees who tried to organize. The biggest companies went global with no more loyalty or connection to the United States than a GPS device. Washington deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against major losses, turning finance — which until recently had been the servant of American industry — into its master, demanding short-term profits over long-term growth and raking in an ever larger portion of the nation’s profits. And nothing was done to impede CEO salaries from skyrocketing to more than 300 times that of the typical worker (from thirty times during the Great Prosperity of the 1950s and ’60s), while the pay of financial executives and traders rose into the stratosphere.
It’s too facile to blame Ronald Reagan and his Republican ilk. Democrats have been almost as reluctant to attack inequality or even to recognize it as the central economic and social problem of our age. (As Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, I should know.) The reason is simple. As money has risen to the top, so has political power. Politicians are more dependent than ever on big money for their campaigns. Modern Washington is far removed from the Gilded Age, when, it’s been said, the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. Today’s cash comes in the form of ever increasing campaign donations from corporate executives and Wall Street, their ever larger platoons of lobbyists and their hordes of PR flacks.
The Great Recession could have spawned another era of fundamental reform, just as the Great Depression did. But the financial rescue reduced immediate demands for broader reform. Obama might still have succeeded had he framed the challenge accurately. Yet in reassuring the public that the economy will return to normal he has missed a key opportunity to expose the longer-term scourge of widening inequality and its dangers. Containing the immediate financial crisis and then claiming the economy is on the mend has left the public with a diffuse set of economic problems that seem unrelated and inexplicable, as if a town’s fire chief deals with a conflagration by protecting the biggest office buildings but leaving smaller fires simmering all over town: housing foreclosures, job losses, lower earnings, less economic security, soaring pay on Wall Street and in executive suites.
Much the same has occurred with efforts to reform the financial system. The White House and Democratic leaders could have described the overarching goal as overhauling economic institutions that bestow outsize rewards on a relative few while imposing extraordinary costs and risks on almost everyone else. Instead, they have defined the goal narrowly: reducing risks to the financial system caused by particular practices on Wall Street. The solution has thereby shriveled to a set of technical fixes for how the Street should conduct its business.
What we get from widening inequality is not only a more fragile economy but also an angrier politics. When virtually all the gains from growth go to a small minority at the top – and the broad middle class can no longer pretend it’s richer than it is by using homes as collateral for deepening indebtedness – the result is deep-seated anxiety and frustration. This is an open invitation to demagogues who misconnect the dots and direct the anger toward immigrants, the poor, foreign nations, big government, “socialists,” “intellectual elites,” or even big business and Wall Street. The major fault line in American politics is no longer between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, but between the “establishment” and an increasingly mad-as-hell populace determined to “take back America” from it.
When they understand where this is heading, powerful interests that have so far resisted fundamental reform may come to see that the alternative is far worse.
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Some REAL common sense about the US Economy
By Robert Parry- From Alter.net July 15, 2010
The Economic Crunch We’re in: Corporations Want Fewer Workers, But They Still Need Everyone to Be Consumers
The recession has been a way for employers to cull payrolls — and to discover that many jobs don’t have to be filled again.
A hard truth about the U.S. economy is that corporations don’t need as many of us as workers but still need us as consumers. That dilemma helps explain why unemployment is stuck near 10 percent and why the economic recovery is stumbling toward a double dip.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion – about one-fourth more than at the start of the recession – but won’t add personnel in part because they’re waiting for consumer demand to pick up, which isn’t happening because many Americans don’t have jobs or are afraid of losing theirs.
Yet, even if that vicious cycle could be broken, there’s another reason for the lack of hiring: companies have found they can make do with a lot fewer American workers. The recession has been a way to cull payrolls – and to discover that many jobs don’t have to be filled again, either because of new technologies or because the jobs have been shifted overseas.
Both these trends predated the recession but the rapid shedding of jobs since the Wall Street financial crash in 2008 – some eight million jobs lost – has spotlighted this structural change. Further, corporate determination to remain “lean” has turned the worker-surplus issue from a personal crisis for many American families into a systemic one for the country’s economy.
Predictably, the free-marketers at CNBC and the Wall Street Journal have echoed the political message of the Chamber of Commerce and other right-wingers who blame the sluggish rehiring on the Obama administration’s health-care reform and the likelihood that President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich will lapse.
That view fits with Ronald Reagan’s economic orthodoxy which has dominated the United States for the past three decades. It holds that the answer to the nation’s economic woes is always to cut taxes especially for the rich, to trust in corporate self-regulation, and to crack down on unions.
Yet, the realistic answer to America’s sorry economic state would seem to be the opposite: to raise taxes on the rich so investments can be made in the national infrastructure of education, transportation and technology; to impose reasonable regulations on corporations to prevent dangerous excesses and risks; and to ensure that workers (and consumers) get a fair shake.
Through the federal taxing power, Washington could put Americans to work preparing the nation for the future, building high-speed rail, developing clean energy, improving education for all, advancing medical technologies, repairing the environment, and addressing a host of other national priorities.
The Media Imbalance
But a second hard truth about today’s America is that the political/media structure is such that these steps are almost unimaginable. In the power centers of New York and Washington, in particular, Corporate America and its right-wing allies have built a propaganda apparatus that makes any serious discussion of these options political suicide.
This propaganda machinery, which reaches across the United States through right-wing talk radio, Fox News and a variety of other outlets, guarantees that any politician (or media personality) who pushes too hard or too effectively for questioning the Reagan orthodoxy will be demonized.
President Barack Obama is only the latest politician to learn this lesson. Though many on the American Left denounce Obama as a weak-kneed centrist too eager to compromise, he is portrayed to the rest of America as a radical socialist, sometimes even likened to Hitler and Stalin.
It doesn’t matter that these comparisons are as absurd as they are offensive. The point about propaganda is that if ugly attacks are repeated enough about some individual, many in the public will be influenced, consciously or subconsciously, to think of the person in a negative light.
And as that trend gains momentum – as the politician’s polls sink – the mainstream media will go with the flow, endlessly reprising stories about the person’s slipping popularity and thus hastening the political decline.
This pattern is almost inevitable unless there is a counterforce within the media that challenges the lies and distortions. But today’s America has almost no Left media to speak of, at least nothing that compares with what the Right has built, and what Left media does exist tends to resent the political compromises that Obama and other Democrats have made.
Thus, the media asymmetry causes Democratic politicians to make more compromises, hoping to limit the Right’s ability to demonize them but further alienating and demoralizing the Democratic base.
So, the outcome of Election 2010 seems likely to follow the same course as Election 1994, the last time a new Democratic president was in office and tried to enact some watered-down reforms. Again, Republicans are expected to win – and win big – which would then put them in position to block whatever is left of Obama’s agenda and thus turn him into an actual (or virtual) lame duck.
Though Bill Clinton did win reelection in 1996 against a weak Republican opponent (Bob Dole) with the help of a third-party candidate (Ross Perot), Clinton had to confine his second-term ambitions to “micro-programs” and to changes favored by the Republicans, such as the removal of Great Depression-era regulations of the banking system (a “modernization” that set the stage for the 2008 financial collapse).
Investigating Obama
If Republicans gain control of at least one house of Congress, they would surely launch a wave of investigations against Obama, much as the GOP did against Clinton.
Unlike the Democrats who shy away from investigative controversies – turning their backs even on historic scandals such as Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate and contra-cocaine trafficking in the 1980s as well as George W. Bush’s torture abuses and illegal wars last decade – the Republicans have no such qualms.
They pounced all over trivial Clinton “scandals” like Whitewater and Travel-gate and impeached Clinton for lying about sex (though they could not muster a super-majority in the Senate for conviction). And Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, has vowed to be similarly aggressive now if he gains control of the House oversight committee next year. [Washington Post, July 4, 2010
So, with Obama embattled and the Democratic congressional majorities likely to shrink or disappear, the chances for the United States to confront its structural problems will only worsen.
With unemployment staying high, many middle-class Americans will sink into a growing under-class. The rich will fight to keep as much of their oversized salaries and bonuses as possible, with the Republicans ensuring that the one political sure-thing will be that legislated tax increases won’t happen.
Indeed, the simplest way to address the nation’s myriad of problems – by restoring the marginal tax rates for the rich back to the historical levels of, say, the Kennedy era (around 60 percent on their top income) – is the one thing that is almost impossible to contemplate.
Since Reagan’s presidency, the Republicans have been determined to “starve” the government of resources so it can’t address problems like climate change, renewable energy, education, transportation, health care, housing, etc. The only big expenditure that the GOP won’t cut is military spending, especially for overseas wars.
Though the Republican vision of the future appears to guarantee a continued decline in the quality of American life, the Right’s propaganda machinery makes any suggestion about the need to tax the rich more heavily akin to socialism. The Revolutionary War slogan, “no taxation without representation,” has been transformed to something close to “no taxation, period.”
Remember the famous encounter between candidate Obama and “Joe the Plumber,” who decried Obama’s idea about the need to redistribute wealth from the upper-income levels to middle- and working-class Americans so the economy would work better.
That debate remains at the center of America’s economic struggles, as it has been since the Great Depression when income inequality and financial speculation were two key factors in the mass unemployment that followed the Crash of 1929. Two lessons learned were that a strong middle class and reasonable government regulations were necessary for a healthy economy.
New Consensus
That New Deal consensus held until 1980 when a new Reagan-era consensus took hold, claiming that tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy and reduced regulation of corporations were the route to prosperity. A corollary was that the wealthy deserved the lion’s share because of their intelligence and hard work.
Reagan and the Right sold many Americans, including large numbers of people from the lower economic strata, on the idea that it was unfair for the government to use the tax system to reverse the consolidation of wealth and the political power that went with it.
However, the counter-argument is that virtually every rich person in the United States has benefited from the investment of taxpayers’ money in creating the conditions for business success, from public education of workers, to the transportation infrastructure for shipping goods, to the research and development that opened opportunities in computer technology, medicines and the Internet.
Indeed, to ensure that the benefits from these government investments are shared with some equity would require that the excess income at the top be recycled into other improvements of the nation’s infrastructure and the quality of life for all Americans.
In other words, by raising taxes on the rich, Washington could help create the jobs needed for addressing national problems and simultaneously break the vicious cycle that has left nearly 10 percent of Americans unemployed, the key fact that has depressed consumer demand.
However, to change the dominant Reagan-era ideology – and thus to change America – would require smart investments from progressives in the information battles for the hearts and minds of the American voters.
Only with the Right’s orthodoxy challenged and the American people understanding their real choices might politicians gain the confidence and courage to do what’s needed to get the United States back on the path of a healthy economy – and toward a revived democracy.
Robert Parry’s new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.
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Will today’s EPA stop Big Coal?
This good article from the New York Times covers an issue that should be important to all who care about some of our scenic lands in West Virginia.
Project’s Fate May Predict the Future of Mining
Jimmy Weekley, who lives in Pigeonroost Hollow, W.Va., has been fighting the Spruce 1 coal project for years.
Sphere: Related ContentBecause it is one of the largest mountaintop mining projects ever and because it has been hotly disputed for a dozen years, Spruce 1 is seen as a bellwether by conservation groups and the coal industry.
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Amadeus, the movie
This movie has significance to me in ways of which only a few are aware. In spite of that history, it is probably the greatest movie I have ever seen. The cinematography, casting, acting and costuming are all tremendous but the tragic story overwhelms the technical features of the film.
The story is told by Salieri, who early in life prayed:
Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life, Amen.
When he saw the music Mozart had created effortlessly, he was astounded:
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But they showed no corrections of any kind. Not one. He had simply written down music already finished in his head. Page after page of it as if he were just taking dictation. And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.
At first, he was puzzled:
All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing… and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn’t want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?
Then, he turned upon the God to whom he had prayed:
(speaking to a crucifix) From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able.
If you haven’t seen this movie, run, don’t walk, to the nearest place you can find it and buy it- I guarantee you will want to watch it several times in your life. It will move you.
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A poison by any name- Aspartame
Aspartame, once identified as a biochemical warfare agent (no kidding!), is sold commercially under names like NutraSweet, Canderel and now AminoSweet. It is found in more than 6,000 foods, including soft drinks, chewing gum, table-top sweeteners, diet and diabetic foods, breakfast cereals, jams, sweets, vitamins, prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Another trophy for the days of Ronald Reagan, whose administration forced the FDA to approve it for use on political, not scientific grounds.
A good friend of mine used 2 packs of it in every cup of coffee he drank for several years, in spite of my warnings. His death a few years later was attributed to Alzheimer’s disease but that is one of a number of diagnosis for what could be aspartame toxicity. See the following article for a frightening description of the situation:
America’s Deadliest Sweetener Betrays Millions, Then Hoodwinks You With Name Change
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Why do Conservatives hate Wikipedia?
Among the greatest resources that the Internet has enabled is the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. In my opinion, through wonderful initial design and continued development, it has become the greatest compendium of Man’s knowledge ever assembled- and its content expands and improves every day. I was initially puzzled that Conservatives were wary of its validity until I realized that it represents a threat to their philosophy of life- personal liberty vs the collective. The power of Wikipedia comes from the sharing of information among all people. Although its content is dynamic, the mechanism that produces it is democracy in its purest form. A knowledgeable user can read not only the current content of a topic but also the background behind it by reviewing the associated Discussion page.
Similarly, I was surprised to find that the Right is very aggressive in establishing that the government of the United States is a representative republic, not a democracy. They also argue that the rights of the individual, not the society as a collective, are paramount in the design established by our Founders. In my opinion, these are selfish interpretations that they use to rationalize bad behavior. We are a nation of laws that over 200 years have established our societal values. Bad behavior required antitrust laws 100 years ago, a progressive income tax 90 years ago, Wall Street regulation 70 years ago and Civil Rights laws 50 years ago. Conservatives consistently oppose all these trends and since 1980 have too often successfully changed them, to the detriment of our society as a collective- but remember that’s not their concern.
Why has the plight of the average American worsened? Relaxation of governmental controls on the wealthiest citizens is clearly the answer. Once again, we have monopolies in virtually every business area. The tax system has been tilted to favor those with the highest income. Wall Street deregulation permitted the wealthy to gamble with societal wealth.
Once We, The People, recognize and energize the power of the Collective, our representatives will respond by returning to the controls that produced our best days in the 1950′s-1970′s. Get involved and make it happen!
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Is our country a “Christian nation”?
During discussion of politics with “Constitutionalists”, I often hear the claim that our country was intended to be a Christian Nation. In support of that thesis, David Barton, the Founder and President of WallBuilders, a national pro-family organization, has made a series of publications that he claims are based on historical fact. In response, Chris Rodda has written a book titled Liars for Jesus, in which she disproves essentially every argument made by Barton.
As an example, a letter from Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut is often used to explain that religious leaders initiated the idea of separation of Church and State. Ms. Rodda reveals the real background behind the letter and President Jefferson’s replies in Oh No! Not Another Article About Jefferson and the Danbury Baptists!.
I was surprised to see that Mr. Barton makes the case that the Democratic Party was supportive of slavery but fails to explain that the states in the Deep South switched from Democrat to Republican after the Civil Rights Act was passed.
Sphere: Related Content“The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.’s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks.”[28]
Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist
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U.S. Tax breaks for illegal settlements in the West Bank
It’s hard to believe how powerful religious groups are.
Tax-Exempt Funds Aid Settlements in West Bank
Sphere: Related ContentBelieving that Christian help for Jewish winemakers here in the occupied West Bank foretells Christ’s second coming, they are recruited by a Tennessee-based charity called HaYovel that invites volunteers “to labor side by side with the people of Israel” and “to share with them a passion for the soon coming jubilee in Yeshua, messiah.”
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Grandpa Pratte had mean neighbors
My Mother’s father, Jesse Pratte, was crippled from birth. Although he could walk, he had a severe limp in one leg that made it difficult to do simple work. His wife died of tuberculosis when their five children were quite young. Consequently, they were scattered among family, leaving him alone for most of his life. My first memories of him were during the 1950′s, when he was in his 60′s.
He couldn’t drive and relied on friends/relatives to help him get groceries and supplies. Because of cataracts, his eyesight required him to wear thick glasses. One of his “friends” gave him some “special” paper to clean his glasses. He complained to his daughter a few days later that he hadn’t been able to read since he got the new paper. When she looked at his glasses, she found them coated with something that obscured his vision. The “special” paper he was given was wax paper! If I remembered his “friend’s” name, I would put it here to embarrass him but he probably wouldn’t care anyway.
He was very poor and seldom had anything new but he once bought a new metal wash tub, of which he was very proud. He hung it in a small shed that enclosed the base of the windmill that drove his well pump. Some time later, a “friend” came over to show off a new rifle. Knowing where the tub was hung, the man painted a bulls eye on the shed wall directly in front of it and offered to let Grandpa fire the rifle at the target. After a few shots, the man said “Hey! The bullets are going through the wall. You don’t have anything that might be damaged in there, do you?” Of course, the wash tub was damaged beyond repair. I don’t think Grandpa ever forgave the man for that mean trick- with good reason!
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