NYPD officer Anthony Bologna faces two investigations as video emerges of a second pepper-spray incident
Keynes was right: only government can get us out of this jobs slump. And only taxing wealth can restore US prosperity
For years, economists have told Americans worried that cheap Chinese imports will kill jobs that the benefits of trade with China far outweigh its costs.
But new research suggests the damage to the U.S. has been deeper than these economists have supposed. The study, conducted by a team of three economists, doesn't challenge the traditional view that trade is ultimately good for the economy. Workers who lose jobs do eventually find new work or retire, while the benefits from trade, such as lower prices, remain. The problem is the speed at which China has surged as an exporter—overwhelming the normal process of adaptation.
“The promise of the American dream has given many hope that they themselves could one day rise up the economic ladder. But according to a study released those already in financially-stable circumstances should fear falling down a few rungs too. The study… found that nearly a third of Americans who were part of the middle class as teenagers in the 1970s have fallen out of it as adults… its findings suggest the relative ease with which people in the U.S. can end up in low-income, low-opportunity lifestyles — even if they started out with a number of advantages. Though the American middle class has been repeatedly invoked as a key factor in any economic turnaround, numerous reports have suggested that the middle class enjoys less existential security than it did a generation ago, thanks to stagnating incomes and the decline of the industrial sector.”Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking Up from the American Dream
“The idea that children will grow up to be better off than their parents is a central component of the American Dream, and sustains American optimism. However, Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking up from the American Dream finds that a middle-class upbringing does not guarantee the same status over the course of a lifetime. A third of Americans raised in the middle class—defined here as those between the 30th and 70th percentiles of the income distribution—fall out of the middle as adults.”
Texas Gov. Rick Perry tried to remove a state commissioner who opposed expanding a West Texas nuclear waste dump run by one of his largest political donors, Reuters reports today. When it became clear that Bobby Gregory of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission might be able to block the dump from accepting out-of-state nuclear waste, Perry's office offered him an alternative job—a prestigious post on the board of regents of a state university.
The news is certain to fuel the longstanding political scandal over the dump, which was licensed in 2008 by Perry's top environmental regulator, Glenn Shankle, over the objections of his staff, three of whom resigned rather than sign off the on the deal (Shankle later left to become a lobbyist for the dump's parent company, Waste Control Solutions). WCS is owned by Harold Simmons, a billionaire corporate raider who has given Perry's campaigns at least $1.2 million.
In the United States, we have zero job growth, with unemployment still at nosebleed levels, according to a recent government report. Meanwhile, the interest rate on 10-year bonds is down to 2.04 percent, and it’s negative on inflation-protected securities.
Aren’t you glad we pivoted from jobs to deficits a year and a half ago?
Examine the depictions of the Laffer curve drawn by Laffer and you find the graph shows only two tax-rate numbers 0% and 100% at which the government collects no revenues — at 0% because their is no tax levied and 100% because there is no incentive to produce.
Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan.
But that was then. Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.”
I’m referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”
And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”
No one can accuse the candidates on stage at Monday's Republican debate of not discussing a broad range of topics. They talked about big issues like social security, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, energy independence, repealing healthcare reform and the need for job creation. And they talked about small issues for political point-scoring: like HPV vaccines for girls.
But missing from the debate – and, in fact, much current discussion of America's politics – is the single biggest issue facing the country: the destruction of the American middle class. For stories on how America is bifurcating into haves and have-nots, with precious little in between, you have to dive behind the headlines of the latest Washington political bun-fight and find the devil in the details.
Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the "Homeland" [4]is a collaborative project with Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts.
How little - yet how much - has changed in the last 40 years. The COINTELPRO papers sound distinctly 21st century as they detail the monitoring of perceived threats to "national security" by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), Secret Service, and the military, as well as the intelligence bureaucracy's war on First Amendment protest activity.
The Church Committee investigation concluded [5] in 1976 that the "unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order."
President Obama created big expectations last week for the speech where he announced his new jobs plan. Remarkably, his rhetoric came close to fulfilling them. But what about the actual plan he sent to Congress on Monday? If it were to be enacted in its current form (which it won’t), would it have a shot at turning around the economy? As it turns out, there are definitely some things to like in Obama’s roadmap, even while there are some very big warning signs as well.
On the plus side, President Obama asked for a sizable package. The cost would be $450 billion, with most of the expense in the 2012 fiscal year. By contrast, after removing the fix to the alternative minimum tax, the 2009 stimulus package came to about $300 billion a year in both 2009 and 2010. After seeming determined to think small, Obama is asking for something resembling real money. Of course, this is still well short of what is needed to get the economy back to full employment. The collapse of the housing bubble led to a falloff in housing and consumption demand that together is close to $1.2 trillion annually.
Full text of shareholders' complaint
Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 September 2011 11.37 EDT
A prominent group of US banks and investment funds with substantial investments in News Corporation has issued a fresh legal complaint accusing the company of widespread corporate misconduct extending far beyond the phone-hacking excesses of News of the World.
The legal action, lodged in the Delaware courts, is led by Amalgamated Bank, a New York-based chartered bank that manages some $12bn on behalf of institutional investors and holds about 1 million shares of News Corporation common stock. Its lawsuit is aimed against the members of News Corp's board, including Rupert Murdoch himself, his sons James and Lachlan, and the media empire's chief operating officer, Chase Carey.
The Republican plans to weaken the United States Postal Service are starting to get more and more attention, including Sam Seder's Majority Report, Thom Hartmann, Nicole Sandler's radio show and Allison Kilkenny's brilliant Truthout article:
It was only a few years ago that the USPS was considered not only stable, but thriving. The biggest volume in pieces of mail handled by the Postal Service in its 236-year history was in 2006. The second and third busiest years were in 2005 and 2007, respectively. But it was two events: one crafted during the Bush years and another supervised by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, that would cripple this once great institution.
Perhaps it was its booming history that first drew Congress' attention to the Postal Service in 2006 when it passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), which mandated that the Postal Service would have to fully fund retiree health benefits for future retirees. That's right. Congress was demanding universal health care coverage.
The participant's in last night's GOP presidential debate once again took the opportunity to pretend that the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") put a massive dent in Medicare by cutting $500 billion from the program.
Michele Bachmann told us that "We know that President Obama stole over $500 billion out of Medicare to switch it over to Obamacare." Mitt Romney intoned "He cut Medicare by $500 billion. This is a Democratic president the liberal, so to speak, cut Medicare."
Yeah…except that nobody stole anything and Medicare was not cut by $500 billion.
A top US Air Force official, in an attempt to ensure the Air Force adheres to the Constitution as well as its own regulations and policies, issued guidelines that calls on "leaders at all levels" to take immediate steps to maintain "government neutrality regarding religion."
In his policy memorandum dated September 1, but sent Tuesday to all major commands, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton A. Schwartz said, "Leaders ... must balance Constitutional protections for an individual's free exercise of religion or other personal beliefs and its prohibition against governmental establishment of religion."
The First Amendment establishes a wall of separation between church and state and Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution specifically prohibits a "religious test."
Editor's note: The following is a transcript of a Noam Chomsky interview on Democracy Now! Chomsky covers a wide range of subjects, including the true cost of America's empire, the significance of Obama's recent jobs proposal, and the real reasons why corporate interests and conservatives are intent on demolishing wildly successful public programs like Social Security.
President Obama sent his new jobs proposal to Congress on Monday with a plan to pay for the $447 billion package by raising taxes on the wealthy. Noam Chomsky says, "The healthcare system...the huge military spending, the very low taxes for the rich [and corporations]...those are fundamental problems that have to be dealt with if there’s going to be anything like successful economic and social development in the United States." As Republican presidential candidate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, calls Social Security a "Ponzi scheme," and Democrats buy into the narrative that the program is in crisis, Chomsky notes that "to worry about a possible problem 30 years from now, which can incidentally be fixed with a little bit of tampering here and there, as was done in 1983, to worry about that just makes absolutely no sense, unless you’re trying to destroy the program."
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is MIT professor Noam Chomsky. His latest book is called 9-11: Was There an Alternative? That last question, "Was there an alternative?," referring to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Aaron?
AARON MATÉ: Well, Noam, you mentioned the changes in discourse between 10 years ago and today. And actually, this issue of the reasons behind 9/11 came up Monday night at the Republican presidential debate. Congress Member Ron Paul of Texas drew boos from the crowd and a rebuke from other candidates on the podium when he criticized U.S. foreign policy in discussing the roots of 9/11.
Three years later we still haven’t dealt with the problems in the financial crisis.
Lehman’s bankruptcy happened three years ago today. It should be quite clear at this point that another Lehman is going to happen again. Policymakers didn’t deal with the crisis of 2008-2009; they turned it into a much longer crisis with far greater lasting damage.
There are two intertwined issues with any major financial panic. One issue is liquidity — can an asset be sold or traded without significant movement in the price? Can an institution exchange its assets for assets of similar value? In a bank run, the answer is no. People are too afraid to accept that their bank deposit is worth what is in the account because they don’t trust the bank that tells them what they have in the account. The second issue is solvency — is there enough value to pay off all creditor claims? Are assets greater than liabilities, even in a liquid market?
Report published by non-partisan CPPP says poverty in Texas is higher than the rest of America – and growing faster
Republican frontrunner Rick Perry has put his economic record as Texas governor at the heart of his presidential nomination campaign, but a report has painted a stark picture of rising unemployment and spiralling poverty in the state.
The policy paper, published by the Austin-based non-partisan Center for Public Policy Priorities, said poverty in Texas was currently higher than the rest of the US and was growing faster.
The news that a "rogue trader" (I hate that term – more on that in a moment) has soaked the Swiss banking giant UBS for $2 billion has rocked the international financial community and threatened to drive a stake through any chance Europe had of averting economic disaster. There is much hand-wringing in the financial press today as the UBS incident has reminded the whole world that all of the banks were almost certainly lying their asses off over the last three years, when they all pledged to pull back from risky prop trading. Here’s how the WSJ put it:
The Swiss banking giant has been struggling to rebuild trust after running up vast losses in the original financial crisis. Under Chief Executive Oswald Grubel, the bank claimed to have put in place new risk management practices, pulled back from proprietary trading and focused on a low-risk client-driven model.
Gold is a traditional inflation hedge. Yet it has been hovering near record real levels, even as the economy careens toward an inflation-killing double-dip recession. Treasury rates are resolutely stuck at near-zero as the U.S. financial position goes to hell in a hand-basket. Watch for the skies to start raining frogs.
An intriguing paper by Zoltan Pozsar, a senior International Monetary Fund researcher, sheds a new light on these phenomena. A massive buildup of free cash in the hands of companies, hedge funds and rich individuals may be turning many of the canons of conventional banking on their heads.
The cash balloon is hardly a surprise. The top 1 percent of American households has been collecting a 20 percent to 25 percent of taxable income for some years now. At some point, you run out of pockets to stuff it in.
Dean Baker, guardian.co.uk,
Monday 12 September 2011 14.30 BST
As we prepare to celebrate the third anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the ensuing financial crisis, it's a good time to assess the situation and ask what has changed. The answer is not encouraging.
Very little has changed about either the realities on the ground or the intellectual debate on economic issues in the last three years. The "too-big-to-fail" banks are bigger than ever as a result of crisis induced mergers. Financial industry profits now exceed their pre-crisis share of corporate profits, and executive pay and bonuses are again at their bubble peaks.
Given what I've been writing for the past few years about upward mobility and the state of "the American Dream," it doesn't come as a surprise to me that downward mobility is the trend that seems likely to dominate the next decade — especially if Washington continues its current trend.
Nearly one in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.Downward mobility is most common among middle-class people who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs, the report says.
Wow, this is just embarrassing. A raspberry from businesses, the object of Obama’s tender ministrations. And the reason? Basically, too little demand, something that tax cuts won’t remedy.
From the New York Times:
The dismal state of the economy is the main reason many companies are reluctant to hire workers, and few executives are saying that President Obama’s jobs plan — while welcome — will change their minds any time soon.
[...]“You still need to have the business need to hire,” said Jeffery Braverman, owner of Nutsonline, an e-commerce company in Cranford, N.J., that sells nuts and dried fruit. While a $4,000 credit could offset the cost of the company’s lowest-cost health insurance plan, he said, it would not spur him to hire someone. “Business demand is what drives hiring,” he said.
A Wisconsin official has discouraged state workers from volunteering information about free IDs available under a controversial voter identification law that critics complain is designed to suppress votes, a memo leaked on Wednesday showed.The memo, provided to the press by Democratic State Senator Jon Erpenbach, was likely to fan concerns among critics of the Republican-backed law that it aimed to suppress votes of thousands of otherwise eligible Wisconsin voters.
Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time. It’s a way of life that undermines basic sources of wealth and well-being—such as strong family and community ties, a deep sense of meaning, and physical health.
Imagining a world in which jobs take up much less of our time may seem utopian, especially now, when a scarcity mentality dominates the economic conversation. People who are employed often find it difficult to scale back their jobs. Costs of medical care, education, and child care are rising. It may be hard to find new sources of income when U.S. companies have been laying people off at a dizzying rate.
America has always thought of itself as a land of opportunity — but where is the opportunity for our youngsters who face such bleak prospects? Historically, those who lose their jobs quickly got another, but an increasingly large fraction of the unemployed — now more than 40 percent — have been out of work for more than six months.
President Barack Obama will deliver an address tonight outlining his vision of what can be done. Others should be doing the same.
Editor's Note: Brad Friedman wrote two recent stories for Mother Jones about secret Koch tapes that caused a "political firestorm" and he follows up here with what he learned about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's tight relationship with the Kochs.
One of the firestorms my stories have created has led the Democratic Speaker of the NJ Assembly to call Gov. Chris Christie "disgraceful", charge that his comments about her were "outright lies", that he is "not fit to lead the state," and that she is "beginning to wonder if Gov. Christie is mentally deranged." All statements given to local media late today in response to our release of the tapes. Though some local Dems are still wondering if it may be the Speaker, rather than Christie, who is hiding the truth.
As I described in my BRAD BLOG piece linking to Part 2 at MoJo on Wednesday morning, the good citizens of the Garden State (and the whole of the mainstream media along with them) learned only yesterday that their Republican Governor had snuck out of state on June 26th, right after appearing on Meet the Press, jetted across the country to deliver the keynote address at the super-secret, ultra-exclusive gathering of rightwing corporate barons and billionaires --- otherwise known as the Koch Brothers 2011 Summer Seminar --- at a resort near Vail, Colorado, before he then flew back home to NJ that night, and went on to appear on three cable news shows, in studio in Manhattan, the next morning. Nobody ever knew he was gone --- at least until my story broke at MoJo yesterday morning.
I know very few rich people who got rich to make money. They got rich because, other than spivs and gamblers, they enjoyed their work and were good at it. How much they made might be due to competition, greed, love, prestige, personal rivalry or, as JK Galbraith said of senior executives, a "warm personal gesture by an individual to himself". But there is no evidence that output rises or falls in response to shifts in post-tax income, except for some hourly-paid workers. It therefore does not respond to changes in marginal income tax.
While a few obsessives may so hate paying taxes that they would rather live out their lives in an airport lounge, the differential impact on economic growth of this year's rise from 40p to 50p on incomes over £150,000 must be negligible. So why all this week's talk of abandoning the 50p rate?
By Don Peck
In October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading.
In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.
LAS VEGAS — American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, according to new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.
"Our findings show that the Tea Party movement can best be understood as a new cultural expression of late 20th century conservatism," said Andrew J. Perrin, an associate professor of sociology in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study, "Cultures of the Tea Party."
Findings are based on two telephone polls of registered voters in North Carolina and Tennessee (conducted May 30-June 3, 2010 and Sept. 29-Oct. 3, 2010), and a set of interviews and observations at a Tea Party movement rally in Washington, N.C. Nearly half of poll respondents (46 percent) felt favorably toward the Tea Party movement.
It’s all too easy to divide the world into people like us and outsiders. Newly published research points to a surprising factor that exacerbates this unfortunate tendency: Boredom.
Writing in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, University of Limerick psychologists Wijnand van Tilburg and Eric Igou report boredom increases the value we place on groups we feel a part of and decreases the value of those who feel alien to us. They describe five experiments that provide evidence backing up this idea.
