Falling from the Middle with You

Posted: July 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Economy, income inequality, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | 20 Comments

I spend a lot of time writing on US income issues partly because it’s one of those economist things and a lot because I know that so many of us have been struggling since the turn of the century.  Our country’s economic growth has been extremely paltry since 2001. Also, what US growth has occurred has benefited very large corporations and extremely wealthy individuals.  Compounding the issue of low growth is the fact that these very large corporations and extremely wealthy individuals don’t keep their money, their jobs, and their investments in the USA any more.  All of this has led to a very sad situation for the backbone of the historical US economy; the middle class.

Economix blog at the NYT is going to have a series of articles examining the recent fall from grace that we’ve experienced since our economy has morphed into something that focuses its policies on enabling these rich people and huge corporations to abandon our country and our citizens. This first article sums up the problem.  We’ve been progressively giving up Keynesian economics and replacing it with “Supply Side” economics that continues to show opposite results of what’s promised.  Yet, our policy makers scream for more of the same punishment! Our last Keynesian-policy embracing President was probably Richard Nixon. Since then, elements of Supply Side economics have provided terrible results like huge deficits, income inequality, and  the return of financial panics.

First, economic growth in this country has been relatively slow in recent years, which means the total bounty that the American economy produces, to be shared by all of its citizens, has not been growing very rapidly. Even before the financial crisis began in 2008, economic growth in the decade that started in 2001 was on pace to be slower than growth in any decade since World War II.

Then of course came a deep recession that caused the economy to shrink.

In addition to the slow growth in overall size of the pie, the share that has been going to anyone but the richest Americans has been declining. The top-earning 1 percent of households now bring home about 20 percent of total income, up from less than 10 percent 40 years ago. The top-earning 1/10,000th of households — each earning at least $7.8 million a year, many of them working in finance — bring home almost 5 percent of income, up from 1 percent 40 years ago.

In the simplest terms, the relatively meager gains the American economy has produced in recent years have largely flowed to a small segment of the most affluent households, leaving middle-class and poor households with slow-growing living standards.

One of the major things that’s upsetting to me is the absolute denial by the current extremists that have taken over the Republican party is acknowledgement that their policies have caused disaster.  I can’t imagine any one voting for Romney who is pushing these failed policies to the extreme.  Republicans actually think just talking about this problem and the middle class in general is instigating class warfare.  It’s like if we don’t coddle the extremely rich all the time they will throw a hissy fit and the economy will collapse.  This is a proverbial crock of crap and at this point, who cares?  Huge corporations and extremely rich folks like Equity Capital managers don’t create the majority of jobs.  Those come from middle-to-large businesses that operate consistently within the boundaries of our nation.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Kyl claimed that the president’s usage of the phrase “middle class” is “misguided and wrong and even dangerous.” Calling for an end to rhetoric about classes, Kyl blasted Obama for “incessantly” talking about class, “particularly the middle class”:

KYL: Most prominently, we have a president who talks incessantly about class, particularly the middle class. Maybe you’ve noticed that. He defines class strictly by your income. In the president’s narrative, someone who makes $199,000 a year is a member of one class and someone who makes $200,000 belongs to another class. Does that make sense? Indeed, each day the president’s out on the campaign trail championing himself as the great protector of what he calls the middle class and pitting these Americans against their fellow citizens by arguing that the wealthiest class is victimizing them through the tax code.

Again, we can’t talk about our issues as ordinary Americans because no one wants to hear the servants complaining, I guess. We can’t complain when they take national wealth, jobs, and investments out of the country while being subsidized by our tax dollars. Again, I have to argue that Mitt Shady represents everything that’s created this horrible situation. He’s like the poster child for our modern, self-destructive policies.

Phillip Longman characterizes this as a “Hole in our Bucket”.  We’ve blown up just about everything that helps the middle class build wealth recently.  One of the first things that disappeared in the Carter years and Reagan years was our traditional approach to usary laws.  You can read about the history at the link.  However, here’s the impact of that alone.

This short history of usury laws puts into perspective just how bizarre the credit markets of the United States have become over the last forty years. Usury law is, in the words of one financial historian, “the oldest continuous form of commercial regulation,” dating back to the earliest recorded civilizations. Yet starting in the late 1970s, some powerful people decided we could live without it.

First to go were state usury laws governing credit cards. Before 1978, thirty-seven states had usury laws that capped fees and interest rates on credit cards, usually at less than 18 percent. But in 1978 the Supreme Court, in a fateful decision, ruled that usury caps applied only in the state where the banks had their corporate headquarters, instead of in the states where their customers actually lived. Banks quickly set up their corporate headquarters in states that had no usury laws, like South Dakota and Delaware, and thus were completely free to charge whatever interest rates and fees they wanted. Meanwhile, states eager to hold on to the banks headquartered within their borders promptly eliminated their usury laws as well.

Later, in 1996, the Supreme Court handed usurers another stunning victory. In Smiley v. Citibank it ruled that credit card fees, too, would be regulated by the banks’ home states. You might think that market forces would set some limits on how high credit card fees and interest can go—after all, there are only so many creditworthy borrowers, and much competition for their business. But with shrewd use of “securitized” debt instruments and hidden fees, banks and other lenders found they could make more money from those who could not afford credit cards than from those who could.

And this was only the beginning. By the early 2000s, thanks to the combination of deregulation and “financial engineering” on Wall Street, middle- and lower-class neighborhoods across America were being flooded with what could be called financial crack. In the years between 2000 and 2003 alone, the number of payday lenders more than doubled, to over 20,000. Nationwide, the number of payday lender franchisees rivaled that of Starbucks and McDonald’s combined.

If you read this article you will become very aware that the finance industry has created laws and removed laws that has created a situation that has transferred the benefits of traditional savings and borrowing vehicles of the middle class to themselves. This has happened in concert with the decrease in real incomes resulting from corporations moving away from US job sources and huge wealth portfolios disappearing to offshore havens. All this has been enabled by policies that started during the Carter years, went full blast during the Reagan years, continued through the Clinton years, went on steroids during the Bush years, and have basically stayed in place during the Obama years. Most of us have a sense that things have changed.  It’s been a bit like boiling the frog by raising the temperature slowly.  Forty years of policy that favors the global multinational companies and the finance industry coupled with favorable tax treatment for rich individuals has created the hole.  We no longer are assured that good university degrees give us good paying jobs.  We are no longer seeing our 401(k)s and other investment vehicles provide safe, reliable returns and we no longer are assured decent pension or retirement plans.  We also are subject to gaming when we borrow money.  Plus, we have no way to get out from under any of this that blows up on us because bankruptcy laws have also been changed to benefit our creditors.  It’s the perfect storm of reckless policy.  It’s been bought and paid for by lobbyists for the Finance Industries who have been on the leading edge of profiteering too. Top this off with the high cost of health insurance and the ever volatile commodity prices and you’ve got a recipe to kill off the livelihoods of the majority of your population.

Probably the main reason that Romney refuses to share his agenda, his taxes, and anything specific and only touts lies is that he really wants a continuation of this agenda.  His accident of birth has put him in the best of places to be the modern day version of a Pirate of the Caribbean.  Mitt Shady is a privateer. All he does is pound away at the President and try to use rhetorical flourishes that bring back the myth of Reagan.

At Mr. Romney’s pancake breakfast stop, more than a thousand people braved the stormy weather, lining up hours in advance with their umbrellas and waterproof trash bags for protection. Thunder clapped periodically, but when Mr. Romney finally took the stage, the rain slowed to a light spit and the sun crested, prompting him to reflect on the improving weather.

“But it looks like the sun is coming out, and I think that’s a metaphor for the country,” he said. “The sun is coming out, guys! Three and a half years of dark clouds are about to part. It’s about to get a little warmer around this country, a little brighter.”

Whatever this passage indicates about Romney’s rhetorical powers, it really is a pretty accurate reflection of his economic message: relentlessly unspecific, focused on framing the election as an up-or-down referendum on how people feel about Life Under Obama, and implicitly offering himself as a non-ideological Mr. Fix-It whose reassuring presence will make the clouds part. Romney does, of course, have a specific economic agenda, much of it encompassed by his endorsement of the Ryan Budget and his various pledges to reflect his party’s hostility to regulation, progressive taxation, workers’ rights and fiscal or monetary stimulus. But what he seems determined to convey is that there’s a great big confidence fairy in the sky who will make the economy boom at the very sight of his rugged visage and fine posture. And while his weather forecast at the pancake breakfast may not truly be a “metaphor for the country,” it’s definitely the metaphor for his campaign message.

We’re going to have a bottomless bucket if this man is elected and we continue sending Republicans and Democrats to Washington that promote policies that screw over the middle class.  The only politician I know right now that really gets this is Elizabeth Warren. President Obama has been cribbing from her play book.  We can only hope that he actually means it.  We should know that Romney is the poison and not the antidote to what ails us. His vagueness, dodges, and overall shadiness should force every one to buy a clue.

Tuesday Reads

Posted: July 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, corporate greed, Crime, Hillary Clinton, income inequality, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Scott Brown, The Bonus Class, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 47 Comments

Good Morning!!

I was working on this post for a good hour last night, and when I went to save what I had written, WordPress logged me out and wiped out the whole thing! I couldn’t begin to recall everything I had written, and I was extremely discouraged to put it mildly.

Next time, I’ll try to remember to save my work more often. For awhile there WordPress had managed to save posts even when they did their stupid logout trick. But not last night. I did my best to redo the stuff I lost, but I know I lost some bon mots.

After a brief truce in deference to the latest mass murder in the U.S., President Obama and Mitt Romney returned to campaigning yesterday. President Obama spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars while his challenger raised more millions. The LA Times summarizes the back and forth.

President Obama’s campaign…accus[ed] Romney of harboring a “secret” foreign policy, and pushing him to detail his plans to end the war in Afghanistan and his approach to Russia and Israel. The Romney campaign responded by saying the president had eroded key alliances and promising Romney would “restore the pillars of American strength.”

In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Obama portrayed his foreign policy record as one of promises fulfilled, and he took veiled jabs at Romney and other critics of his withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and drawdown of troops from Afghanistan.

Today Romney will speak to the VFW before heading off to London to see the Olympics, attend two posh fundraisers, and meet with some British VIPs. After that he heads to Israel for a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu and another fundraiser, and then on to Poland, where he

will visit Gdansk and Warsaw on July 30 and 31 at the invitation of Lech Walesa, the communist-era dissident who in 1983 won the Nobel Peace Prize for his defiance of the communist regime.

There were a couple of good hit pieces on Romney at the Huffington Post yesterday.

Ryan Grim: Mitt Romney Made Over $25 Million In Foreign Income While Governing, Campaigning.

Mitt Romney accumulated more than $25 million in foreign income between 2005 and 2010, while he was governor of Massachusetts and a presidential candidate, according to an analysis of his 2010 tax return.

The 2010 return lists foreign tax payments Romney made dating back to 2000. By Romney standards, the payments were modest through 2004, averaging $37,000 a year. In 2005, however, his foreign tax bill shot up to $333,149 and stayed high for the next three years, before dipping in 2009, as the financial crisis hit hard.

In 2010, Romney’s foreign tax bill was down to $67,173 on declared foreign income of $1,525,982. That’s a 4.4 percent rate. After expenses and various other deductions, Romney declared a net foreign income of $392,000, making his net tax rate 17 percent.

Because the presumptive GOP presidential nominee has so far declined to release his earlier tax returns, HuffPost made a rough calculation of his prior foreign earnings by assuming he paid similar tax rates in previous years.

Read the rest at the link.

Jason Cherkis and Laura Bassett: Bain Capital Created ‘Demoralizing’ Culture of Layoffs At Florida Plant.

When Dade Behring started cutting employees under Bain Capital’s management in the late ’90s, Cindy Hewitt was on the front lines. As a human resources manager for the Dade East plant in Miami, Hewitt had to decide which employees had needed skills and whose jobs were expendable.

News of the latest layoffs trickled down to the Dade company cafeteria. The room could seat more than 1,000, and it had been enough of a draw that it even offered breakfast.

But as the layoffs hit, the mood in the cafeteria could be as somber as a funeral, Hewitt recalled. Multiple members of the same family might be gathered to commiserate over being laid off one by one by one. Some of them had worked for the medical diagnostics company for more than a decade.

Hewitt saw her colleagues crying on a daily basis and loudly celebrating on the rare occasion that someone found a comparable new job. “There was a tremendous sense of loss and this kind of outpouring of grief and mourning as every day they waited for the announcement of who was going next,” she said. “People were on pins and needles. Who’s going next? They’re worried for themselves, worried for their co-workers, worried for their families. They’d talk about how they were going to send their kids to college. It was an incredibly depressing and demoralizing environment.”

There’s lots more at HuffPo.

Here’s some more proof that the rich keep getting richer and the poor get poorer: Yankees Acquire Ichiro Suzuki From Mariners

With a little more than two months remaining in the season, the Yankees acquired Ichiro Suzuki, who became the first Japan-born position player in the majors when he joined the Mariners in 2001, when he was named the rookie of the year and the Most Valuable Player.

Before Monday’s game between the two teams at Safeco Field, the Yankees sent minor league pitchers D. J. Mitchell and Danny Farquhar to the Mariners for Suzuki , whose five-year, $90 million contract expires after this season. The Yankees will also receive cash considerations to offset the financial commitment.

Wearing a dark blue suit with gray pinstripes, Suzuki walked down the hallway from the Seattle clubhouse over to the visitors’ side, stopping in the middle to speak at a news conference.

“I am going from a team with the most losses to a team with the most wins,“ he said through his interpreter, “so I am not able to contain my excitement in that regard.“

Once a great player, Suzuki is now just another mercenary.

Scott Brown has pulled another dumb trick. He’s using a line from a famous poem by Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” to attack President Obama and Elizabeth Warren for saying that governments provide services and infrastructure that support businesses. If that makes no sense to you, you’re not alone. Interestingly, Rick Santorum used the same line during the Republican presidential primaries and was mightily mocked for it. But Scott Brown was probably meeting with Kings and Queens at the time and missed the uproar. Besides, he’s really not all that bright, poor thing.

A new video from Brown, soliciting donations for his neck-and-neck campaign against Democrat Elizabeth Warren, is headlined “Let America Be America Again” – the title of Hughes’ well-known 1935 poem, first published in Esquire magazine, that suggests the American dream never really existed for many Americans, including the lower classes, blacks, Native Americans, and other minority groups.

“There’s never been equality for me/Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free,’” Hughes writes in an aside between verses. “America never was America to me.”

The Brown campaign’s two and a half minute video tribute to small business, complete with stirring music and iconic images such as flags and white picket fences, chronicles what it portrays as a change in the United States from the words of John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson – Democrats all – as well as Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, to current President Barack Obama and Warren, his uber-progressive rival.

watch?v=oqDIjGsBEP8&feature=player_embedded&w=400

Langston Hughes died in 1967 at the age of 65, but chances are if he were still alive today he would not be a Republican. Hughes’s poetry was frequently published in the Communist Party USA newspaper and he was involved in various initiatives supported by leftist organizations. Hughes traveled widely in the Soviet Union in 1932, and was later inducted into the International Union of Revolutionary Writers.

Oh, and BTW, Hughes is believed to have been gay.

USA Today had an interesting article on a polar bear DNA study.

Polar bears split from ancient bears more than 4 million years ago, suggests ancient DNA and the gene maps of multiple bears.

The polar bear genome finding reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal contradicts earlier gene studies finding much more recent times for the ancestral split, within 600,000 years, between polar bears and grizzly bears, which can still mate and produce viable offspring.

What’s more, the report suggests that polar bear numbers have been on the decline for at least 500,000 years, driven by climate fluctuations.

“Although polar bears ( Ursus maritimus) and brown bears (Ursus arctos) are considered separate species, analyses of fossil evidence and mitochondrial sequence data have indicated a recent divergence of polar bears from within brown bears,” begins the study led by Penn State’s Webb Miller.

For those who are still interested in thinking about the why of mass murders, I suggest reading a 2005 interview with Mark Ames, who wrote a book on school and workplace shootings called “Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion — From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond.”

Ames is a true radical, and so of course he has a radical hypothesis about these horrible murders that have become pretty common in our culture. He argues that they are rooted in Reganomics and the philosophy of greed and avarice that he made popular back in the ugly ’80s. From the interviewer’s introduction:

Ames takes a systematic look at the scores of rage killings in our public schools and workplaces that have taken place over the past 25 years. He claims that instead of being the work of psychopaths, they were carried out by ordinary people who had suffered repeated humiliation, bullying and inhumane conditions that find their origins in the “Reagan Revolution.” Looking through a carefully researched historical lens, Ames recasts these rage killings as failed slave rebellions.

And from Ames himself:

Put it this way: rage murders in the workplace never existed anywhere in history until Reagan came to power. Reagan made it respectable to be a mean, stupid bastard in this country. He is the patron saint of white suckers. He unleashed America’s Heart of Vileness — its penchant for hating people who didn’t get rich, and worshipping people who despise them, and this is the essence of Reaganomics.

I hate to sound like a Clintonite here, but let’s remember Hillary Clinton became the most hated human being alive because she tried to give most Americans the opportunity to lead longer, healthier lives, while these same Americans adored goons like Sam Walton, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump — everyone who has dedicated their lives to transferring wealth, health and pleasure from the masses to a tiny elite. Liberals are hated in America precisely because they want to help people, which is seen as “patronizing.”

You can see how this kind of cultural insanity, unleashed by Reaganomics after decades of New Deal (relative) harmony, could make someone snap, when the cognitive dissonance suddenly strikes on a very personal level, and you realize that you’ve been screwed hard by your own dominant ideology.

Here’s an interesting 2007 review of Ames’ book by Ed Vulliamy from The Guardian UK.

Ames also wrote a lengthy analysis of One L. Goh’s rampage at Oikos University in Oakland, CA.

For a more mainstream take on the recent events in Aurora, Colorado, check out this piece by Dave Cullen, author of the book “Columbine.” He points out that just about everything the media immediately assumed about Harris and Klebold was wrong and that we still know almost nothing about James Holmes or his motives. Obviously, I agree.

Finally, here’s a piece that provides some support for Mark Ames’ argument that our culture has just plain turned mean and is getting meaner all the time: The Elites Are Unanimous: Lower Everyone’s Wages and Standard of Living — Except They Don’t Say it Out Loud

That’s it for me for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

Tuesday Reads, Class Warfare Edition

Posted: July 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Democratic Politics, income inequality, morning reads, Political and Editorial Cartoons, Republican politics, Tea Party activists, The Bonus Class, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 59 Comments

Good Morning!!

As I wrote yesterday, President Obama’s campaign tactics are starting to get under Mitt Romney’s skin. Molly Ball of The Atlantic has also noticed this.

Mitt Romney has had enough. Fed up with President Obama’s attacks on his business record, he is — or at least his surrogates are — going to drop the Mr. Nice Guy act and start calling his opponent a liar, BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins reports. Romney’s campaign had already gone there — an email Saturday from spokeswoman Andrea Saul was headlined “Obama’s Desperate Lies,” for example — but to turn the L-word, usually avoided in politics, into a surrogate talking point represents a new front.

Of course the Romney campaign has been trying to get Obama’s goat for months, and they’ve gotten exactly nowhere.

This is the same Romney campaign that sent bubble-blowing hecklers to David Axelrod’s press conference in Boston, deployed its campaign bus to circle and honk outside Obama events, and had a staffer confront Joe Biden personally at a restaurant in Ohio. In another move that seemed designed to get in Obama’s face, Romney himself staged a press conference in front of the failed solar-energy company Solyndra.

But the Obama campaign’s response to this, aside from a bit of huffiness about Romney’s failure to condemn such tactics, has largely been “meh.” Meanwhile, the president continues to conduct a gleefully negative campaign, complete with misleading attack ads and disingenuous character slams. (Romney, of course, has been guilty of the same types of distortions.) Romney prides himself on being thick-skinned — “I’ve got broad shoulders,” he’s fond of saying — but now he appears to have been driven to his limit.

This could be really fun to watch.

Of course Obama’s announcement  yesterday that he wants Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts for the 98% of Americans who earn less than $250,000 per year is likely to enrage Romney and the rest of the Republicans even more. And it’s all part of the Obama campaign’s strategy. Michael Shear of The New York Times reports:

President Obama’s push on Monday to extend tax cuts for the middle class — but not for the rich — is being joined by an all-out effort from his allies to portray Mitt Romney as a wealthy candidate who is out of touch with most Americans.

The president’s campaign and his surrogates are accusing the presumptive Republican nominee of hiding the sources of his multimillion-dollar fortune and of refusing to release multiple years of his tax returns. On Monday, they also mocked Mr. Romney’s weekend fund-raisers at glamorous estates in the Hamptons.

In an interview with a New Hampshire television station on Monday, Mr. Obama added his voice to the criticism of his rival, saying that Americans should “know who you are and what you’ve done and that you’re an open book. And that’s been true of every presidential candidate dating all the way back to Mitt Romney’s father.”

The White House also said yesterday that Obama will veto any effort to extend the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans.

Mitt Romney is a very rich man, but he’s not the richest man to ever run for President. John Kerry is at least as rich as Romney and probably slightly richer; and if Kerry’s wealth is combined with that of his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry, he is probably a billionaire.

When he ran in 2004, Kerry released 20 years of tax returns! Teresa Heinz Kerry resisted releasing her tax returns and that became an issue in the campaign. She eventually released some minimal information. But Kerry himself was exceedingly transparent:

His campaign released all of his military records after conservative critics questioned stories related to his time in service. He also released 15 years worth of meetings he had with more than 300 lobbyists while serving as a U.S. senator. As The New York Times reported on April 23, 2004:

The list, detailing meetings between 1989 and late last year that were often held over lunch, dinner or cocktails, identifies many participants who have contributed to his campaigns and, in some cases, become fund-raisers for his presidential run.

As far as I can tell, Kerry did not have millions stashed in secret offshore tax shelters. Another important difference between Kerry and Romney is that Kerry was not advocating tax policies that would help the wealthiest Americans and hurt the poorest Americans as Mitt Romney is.

Of course the most shocking thing about the tax information we do have about Romney is that he paid around 13 percent of his income in taxes–a lower proportion than is paid by people in the lowest tax bracket.  I think that is why these attacks on his as an out-of-touch rich guy are working.

I can’t see the Obama campaign letting this go until Romney either is more forthcoming or somehow explains why he is being so secretive about his money. As long as he refuses to be more open, we can only assume he has something to hide, as Paul Krugman wrote this morning.

In line with yesterday’s news about Mitt Romney’s fund raisers in the Hamptons and the clueless types who attended them, Mother Jones has a funny story about internecine class warfare among the Hamptons’ super-rich denizens. You’ll need to read it all, but here’s the introduction.

With twin 2,520-horsepower engines and up to 19 seats, the Sikorsky S-92 is among the world’s most powerful civilian helicopters. “Helibuses” typically service offshore oil platforms and the like, but two years ago billionaire industrialist Ira Rennert acquired a posh version to shuttle himself between Manhattan and Long Island’s exclusive Hamptons, where he owns a 63-acre, 110,000-square-foot villa complex. One of the first to notice the giant bird was Frank Dalene, founder and CEO of a successful luxury homebuilding company, who lives on a ridge along Rennert’s flight path. Its whumping rotor was like “a lightning bolt striking nearby,” says Dalene, a fast-talking 58-year-old with a long nose and narrow-set eyes. He blames the vibrations for “literally damaging my home.”

Dalene and his neighbors near the East Hampton Airport might have abided Rennert’s choppers—he owns two—had they been an anomaly. But the situation has become intolerable over the past few years, Dalene says, thanks to a whirlybird craze among the investment bankers and hedge fund gurus who weekend in Sagaponack and Southampton. On Friday afternoons the tiny airport is a beehive. Come summer, some CEOs commute daily between their beach chalets and Manhattan’s East 34th Street Heliport. “They don’t give a crap about nobody,” Dalene gripes.

Last year, he founded the Quiet Skies Coalition, an anti-helicopter group that has become one of the most potent political forces in the Hamptons. Its wealthy members north of the Montauk Highway launched what Dalene describes as a “knock-down, drag-out battle” against “ultra-wealthy” helicopter owners who largely live on the south side, accusing them of shattering the island’s tranquillity, contributing to climate change, and poisoning the air with leaded fuel. “I am beginning to think Mr. Rennert is practicing class warfare,” Dalene wrote Rennert’s Manhattan secretary in an email that likened the noise assaults to “throwing their garbage on the other side of the tracks for us poor folks to live with.”

Rennert, a multimillionaire lives on “the poor side of the tracks” in the rarified atmosphere of the Hamptons. He is a long-time Republican, but he’s so angry at the pro-helicopter Republicans that he plans to switch his registration to Independent.

At The Daily Beast Peter Beinert argues that Republicans are the ones who have traditionally engaged in class warfare.

Joseph McCarthy, the man whose specter terrified Democrats for a generation, was all about class warfare. “It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out,” he told the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950, in the speech that catapulted him to stardom, “but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been worst.”

Richard Nixon seethed with class anger. “What starts the process really are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid,” he confided to a friend. “Sometimes it’s because you’re poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.”

Then there are the more recent examples. In 1988, George H.W. Bush accused Michael Dukakis of having learned his views in “Harvard Yard’s boutique,” a bastion of “liberalism and elitism.” (Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, later declared that had he been running Dukakis’ campaign, he would have shown ads featuring Bush on his private tennis court alongside images of his waterfront mansion in Kennebunkport, before having the narrator intone: “No wonder he wants to cut capital gains taxes on the wealthy.”)

Joseph McCarthy actually started out as a Democrat, but by the time he got the Senate he was a Republican. He once

denounced the entire Democratic Party as a group of traitors: “The issue between the Republicans and Democrats is clearly drawn. It has been deliberately drawn by those who have been in charge of twenty years of treason. The hard fact is — the hard fact is that those who wear the label, those who wear the label Democrat wear it with the stain of a historic betrayal.”

He would have fit right in with today’s Tea Party Republicans.

The right wing blogs are accusing President Obama of “class warfare” because he wants the top 2 percent of income earners to pay the same proportions of their incomes in taxes as they did during the Clinton administration. Princeton History Professor Julian Zelizer “Obama should ignore ‘class warfare’ gibes.”

During a meeting with historians in 2011, Politico reported, President Obama said: “What you could do for me is to help me find a way to discuss the issue of inequality in our society without being accused of class warfare.” For Obama, this is not an esoteric question. Rather, this is a challenge that will be integral to his campaign and, if he is re-elected, to his second term as president.

Many Democrats have argued that Obama should have tackled this issue from his first day in the White House. But this is an issue the president didn’t think he had the political capital to address. He has also continually feared that touching on inequality would open him up to Republican attacks of being left of center.

And being “left of center” is bad because….? {Sigh….} Zelizer then discusses FDR and LBJ, two presidents who weren’t afraid to address issues of inequality. He ends with this advice for Obama:

a vibrant national discussion about inequality, with the president taking the lead, is essential. The 2012 campaign offers Obama an opportunity to put this problem on the national agenda.
The challenge for Obama is that there really is no way around the inevitable attacks, and there is no way to talk about economic inequality other than talking about it. Rather than looking for rhetorical tricks, Obama should instead focus on having the best arguments in response to the conservative attacks.

This will require borrowing from Roosevelt a defense of how a vibrant middle class will be crucial to revitalizing America’s economic position in the world, and from Johnson an argument that the ethical obligation to help the poorest is incumbent on our democracy.

I wholeheartedly agree. It’s time for Obama to suck it up and deal with the attacks that come along with doing the right thing. It appears that he is getting a little more daring these days. Certainly calling for extending the middle-class tax cuts now instead of waiting till after the election was a good opening gambit. It also appears that Obama is pretty good at letting Romney’s foolish attacks roll off his back.

Class warfare has been a useful tactic for Republicans in the past, as Peter Beinart pointed out. This year Obama is running against the perfect representative of the monied classes in Mitt Romney. It’s perfectly appropriate to run on the issue of inequality in incomes and opportunities.

I sincerely hope the Obama campaign continues this strategy right up until November–along with coming up with specific policies to change the current trend toward greater distance between the super-rich and the rest of us.

Enough of my ranting, what are you reading and blogging about today?

Friday Morning Reads

Posted: June 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, Affordable Care Act, income inequality, morning reads, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Good Morning!

BB sent me this wonderful link last night to something that’s always fascinated me.  I’ve had an enduring interest in the beautiful cave art of prehistoric peoples in Europe.  New dating evidence has given us some new takes on these very first expressions of humanity in early people.

Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported on Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists.
Hand stencils at the El Castillo Cave in Spain have been dated to have been created earlier than 37,300 years ago, making them the oldest cave paintings in Europe.

A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art — 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain — was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe.

The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo sapiens populations were living in England 41,500 to 44,200 years ago and in Italy 43,000 to 45,000 years ago, and that they were making flutes in German caves about 42,000 years ago. Then there is the new genetic evidence of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, suggesting a closer relationship than had been generally thought.

The successful application of a newly refined uranium-thorium dating technique is also expected to send other scientists to other caves to see if they can reclaim prehistoric bragging rights.

In the new research, an international team led by Alistair W. G. Pike of the University of Bristol in England determined that the red disk in the cave known as El Castillo was part of the earliest known wall decorations, at a minimum of 40,800 years old. That makes it the earliest cave art found so far in Europe, perhaps 4,000 years older than the paintings at Grotte Chauvet in France.

Obama gave a speech on the economy yesterday in swing state Ohio.  Here’s the transcript of the speech from WAPO if you’re interested.

This has to be our north star, an economy that’s built not from the top down but from a growing middle class; that provides ladders of opportunities for folks who aren’t yet in the middle class.

You see, we’ll never be able to compete with some countries when it comes to paying workers lower wages or letting companies do more polluting. That’s a race to the bottom that we should not want to win, because those countries don’t have a strong middle class, they don’t have our standard of living.

The race I want us to win — a race I know we can win — is a race to the top. I see an America with the best-educated, best- trained workers in the world; an America with a commitment to research and development that is second to none, especially when it comes to new sources of energy and high-tech manufacturing.

I see a country that offers businesses the fastest, most reliable transportation and communications systems of anywhere on Earth.

I see a future where we pay down our deficit in a way that is balanced — not by placing the entire burden on the middle class and the poor, but by cutting out programs we can’t afford and asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute their fair share.

That’s my vision for America: education, energy, innovation, infrastructure, and a tax code focused on American job creation and balanced deficit reduction.

This is the vision behind the jobs plan I sent Congress back in September, a bill filled with bipartisan ideas that, according to independent economists, would create up to 1 million additional jobs if passed today.

This is the vision behind the deficit plan I sent to Congress back in September, a detailed proposal that would reduce our deficit by $4 trillion through shared sacrifice and shared responsibility.

This is the vision I intend to pursue in my second term as president because I believe..

… because — because I believe if we do these things — if we do these things more companies will start here and stay here and hire here, and more Americans will be able to find jobs that support a middle class lifestyle.

You can fact check the Obama and Romney economics speeches here.  Here’s two of Romney’s more obvious honkers.

“How about Obamacare? The president said the other day that he didn’t know that Obamacare was hard for small business. Oh, really? The Chamber of Commerce carried out a survey, some 1,500 businesses across America. Seventy-five percent of those people surveyed said Obamacare made it less likely for them to hire people.”

 Oh my. The governor clearly had not read Thursday’s Fact Checker column showing that (a) Obama did not really say that and (b) he was answering a misinformed question. However, with the phrase “those people surveyed,” Romney did properly characterize the Chamber of Commerce survey, which because of its design cannot be used to draw conclusions about all small businesses — only the ones that were surveyed.

“The president said that if we let him borrow $787 billion for a stimulus, he’d keep unemployment below 8 percent nationally. We’ve now gone 40 straight months with unemployment above 8 percent.”

We earlier had dinged Romney with Two Pinocchios for this statement, because the president never said this; this was a staff estimate before he took the oath of office.

The most outrageous example of the Republican war on women happened yesterday in the Michigan legislature.  Two Democratic Women members were banned from speaking on the floor because they dared stand up for women’s rights to abortion services.  Yesterday, we heard the ban was for using the word vagina. Today, we’re being told it’s for being ‘disruptive’. You can watch their speeches at this link at TP.

A male Republican House leader in Michigan silenced two female Democratic state legislators on Thursday after the pair tried to advance a measure that would have reduced access to vasectomies.

While discussing a bill that would erode the availability of abortion, Reps. Barb Byrum and Lisa Brown introduced an amendment to apply the same regulations to vasectomies that GOP lawmakers wanted to add to abortion services. The debate grew heated, as Republicans sought to gravel down the women. Byrum was not permitted to speak in favor of the measure and Brown was repeatedly interrupted. “I’m flattered that you want to get in my vagina, but no means no,” she said. The next day both were silenced.

This article at Bloomberg shows US Income Equality is actually worse than we’ve even imagined.

The Federal Reservereleased new numbers on Monday. Unsurprisingly, wealth distribution is even more skewed than income distribution. In 2010, the median family had assets (including their house but subtracting their mortgage) of $77,300. The top 10 percent had almost $1.2 million, or more than 15 times as much.

But the headlines — and rightly so — went to the dismal fact that household wealth has been sinking for all categories of Americans. As I said, the net worth of the median family in 2010 was $77,300. In 2007, the net worth of the median family was $126,400. That’s a drop of almost 40 percent in just three years. (All these numbers are corrected for inflation.)

Characteristically taking the longer view, the New York Times led with the fact that household savings were back to where they had been in the early 1990s, “erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity.”

Most of the lost household net worth of recent years is due to the drop in housing prices. This is comforting, in a way, because the price of land and things built on land — and what, ultimately, is not? — are different from the price of other goods and services.

Here’s a great story at The Nation that shows how fear of sharia law taking root in the US is just good old fashioned bigotry and based on nothing but fear and loathing.

The true story of Sharia in American courts is not one of a plot for imminent takeover but rather another part of the tale of globalization. Marriages, divorces, corporations and commercial transactions are global, meaning that US courts must regularly interpret and apply foreign law. Islamic law has been considered by American courts in everything from the recognition of foreign divorces and custody decrees to the validity of marriages, the enforcement of money judgments, and the awarding of damages in commercial disputes and negligence matters.

As an attorney, consultant or expert witness, I have handled more than 100 cases involving components of Sharia. In a case I tried in 2002, Odatalla v. Odatalla, a New Jersey couple had signed an Islamic marriage contract consistent with their cultural traditions. When the wife filed for divorce, she asked the court to enforce the mahr, or dowry provision, in her contract, which called for the husband’s payment of $10,000 upon the dissolution of their marriage. Superior Court Judge John Selser found the marriage contract valid under New Jersey law, concluding, “Clearly, this court can enforce a contract which is not in contravention of established law or public policy.”

In a 2003 case involving Exxon Mobil and a Saudi oil company, the parties had agreed as part of a commercial transaction that Saudi law would govern any potential disputes. After the Saudi company sued its former business partner, Exxon Mobil, the Delaware Superior Court heard testimony on Saudi law, which applies traditional Sharia, and the judge instructed the jury to base its decision accordingly. The jury returned a $400 million–plus verdict in favor of Exxon Mobil and against the Saudi firm.

Finally, in a more recent case I was involved in, a state judge declined to recognize a Syrian court order that would have transferred the custody of a child to her father because of the mother’s remarriage. The judge reasoned that remarriage alone is not sufficient to transfer custody. Far from deferring to judgments from foreign countries, US courts regularly refuse to recognize such orders due to the constitutional and due-process implications.

Had an anti-Sharia ban been in place in these courts, Exxon could not have won its verdict, nor would the wife in Odatalla have been able to enforce her marriage contract. The ban would have stripped those judges of their ability to fully and fairly consider the cases. For litigants in states where such a ban exists, these statutes are an unconstitutional infringement of the people’s freedom of contract, free exercise of religion and right to equal protection.

So, that’s a few things to get you started this morning.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Occupy 2.0

Posted: March 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, 2012 elections, Action Memo, Anti-War, Austerity, Banksters, Civil Liberties, corporate greed, corporatism, corruption, Economy, Global Financial Crisis, income inequality, social justice, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | 12 Comments

Until this past weekend, the Occupy Movement was flying under the radar, percolating beyond public view.  But members returned to Zucotti Park on St. Pat’s Day to celebrate the Movement’s six-month anniversary.  From on the ground reports, the demonstration was peaceful.  Until the NYPD arrived.  Then there was trouble—a number of arrests and one woman reportedly had a seizure after she was thrown to the ground and handcuffed.  Several participants said it took 17 minutes for the police to react, after which an ambulance was called.

For naysayers, the Occupy Wall St. Movement [OWS], their members and reasons for being were summarily dismissed before they began.  Who is the leader of this motley group? journalists and pundits asked repeatedly.  What do these people want?

Surprisingly, there is a leader or so I’ve read, someone well known to Occupy organizers but deliberately kept out of public view.  As far as what they want?  The answer seemed perfectly clear to me at the start because I think it’s what most Americans want or if they don’t want it, they expect it: an end to the gross inequality in the country, for which Wall St. and Government collusion holds the lion’s share of responsibility and an end to ‘bought’ elections, where the 1% and corporate interests routinely choose our leaders, shape policy and control the message, known in polite circles as ‘perception management.’

All of this transcends parties, btw.  We’re talking Republican and Democratic parties alike, regardless of how many times we enter the ‘lesser than two evils’ spin.

You don’t need to be a psychic to ‘get’ the OWS message.  You don’t even need to be a member of Occupy.  All that’s needed is a modicum of alertness, a shaking-off of the trance-inducing distraction and deflection of pundits, media hounds and political operators.

So, what has OWS managed to accomplish, thus far?   According to the critics—not a damn thing.  But is that really the case?

Last summer, the headlines were ripe with talk of deficits, crushing debt and woe is me.  We need a Grand Bargain, wisemen crooned [translation: we need to cut public services].  Somehow, we always have money for foreign adventures, national security, weapons and surveillance equipment.  For instance, how many drones will be in American skies by 2020?  Hummm.  Try 30,000.  That’s the Federal Aviation Administration’s rough estimate.  The ever popular ‘shop ‘til you drop’ hee-haw isn’t working either, even with the news that ‘average’ Americans are flocking back to restaurant dining. Despite a stumbling economy there is money for weapons and drones and assorted homeland security gear.  When it comes to education, infrastructure, home mortgage write downs, decent healthcare, aide to our poor, disabled and elderly?  We’re just stone-broke and need to be put on an austerity diet. See Paul Ryan’s reiteration on social program slashes and numbers that don’t add up.  It’s a nice set piece that will contrast with the soon-to-come kinder and gentler Democratic version.

One could call the dialogue change a bizarre coincidence but public conversation pivoted after Occupy came on the scene.  We went from Oooooo, we need to slash Medicare, Medicaid and refigure Social Security to why is Wall St. getting bailed out on the backs of the taxpayer?  Why do we have a system where the profits go to the top income bracket, while risk is carried by Main Street?  Why have the wages of middle-class workers[if they’re fortunate enough to still have a job] barely kept pace with inflation, while the top 1% has had a 275% increase in income?

Uncomfortable questions, the sort that make politicians squirm.

OWS has also focused attention on home foreclosures, working with foreclosed families to save their homes.  The Movement rallied the public in a Change Your Bank Day strategy that is estimated to cost TBTFs a $185 billion in transfers to community banks and credit unions.  Religious organizations have joined the effort.  According to Think Progress, The New Bottom Line, a coalition of faith groups has pledged to remove $1 billion from the major banks this year alone.  OWS also pushed against the ATM fee-increase proposal; the banks pulled back.  In late February, Occupy the SEC submitted a 300+ page document, urging regulators to resist the financial sector’s desire to water down the Volker Rule, part of the Dodd-Frank Wall St. reform.  The group that put the document together was comprised of former Wall St. workers.  OWS members also stood with private landowners, Tea Party members and environmentalists protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that the President has expressed a new-found love for.

Not too shabby for six months activism.  Yet still the critics howl.  Where is the direction, what are the goals?

The Movement is young and still developing but you cannot fault it for sitting on its hands.  More importantly, the Occupy spirit is global in nature because many activists are ‘graduates without a future’—young, educated and fed up.  Paul Mason documented this facet of the worldwide

Arundhati Roy

social/political movements in his book, “Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere,”  and Arundhati Roy wrote this in a recent essay: “Capitalism, A Ghost Story”:

As Gush-Up concentrates wealth on to the tip of a shining pin on which our billionaires pirouette, tidal waves of money crash through the institutions of democracy—the courts, Parliament as well as the media, seriously compromising their ability to function in the ways they are meant to. The noisier the carnival around elections, the less sure we are that democracy really exists.

Sound familiar?  The neoliberal model, the gross inequality that rewards the few at the expense of the many has circled the globe, creating universal discontent and misery.

So, what’s coming up for 2012?  What will Occupy 2.0 look like?

I’d suggest checking the OWS page here for an updated list of scheduled actions.  OWS plans to be in Chicago in mid-May to protest the NATO Summit although the city is throwing up barriers to prevent demonstrations.  Somehow, I don’t think the protest will be stopped.

May 1 will be a National Action, the day traditionally known as International Worker’s Day.  This year OWS is calling for a General Strike across the country.  From the Occupy site:

We are calling on everyone who supports the cause of economic justice and true democracy to take part: No Work, No School, No Housework, No Shopping, No Banking – and most importantly, TAKE THE STREETS!

This Saturday, March 24, a Disrupt Dirty Power protest has been called in NYC to jumpstart a month-long action until Earth Day, April 22.  More information here.

Sunday, March 25, Occupy Town Square IV will focus on public parks and other public spaces in NYC.  More info here.

If you’re interested in local actions in particular states, towns, cities or countries, info can be found at the Occupy Together site here.

And if you want to eliminate the idea of ‘a failed movement’ from your brain. Check out the participation map here.  The scope is massive.

The essay I mentioned by Arundhati Roy is well worth a read—highly informative, even shocking about vulture capitalism’s impact on India.  Be prepared, it’s long.  As Roy moves into her concluding paragraphs, she writes this:

Capitalism is in crisis. Trickledown failed. Now Gush-Up is in trouble too. The international financial meltdown is closing in. India’s growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is pulling out. Major international corporations are sitting on huge piles of money, not sure where to invest it, not sure how the financial crisis will play out. This is a major, structural crack in the juggernaut of global capital.

Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.

Disaster capitalism has certainly lived up to its name, be it continuous war, environmental degradation or exploding poverty.  What is Occupy about?  Speaking for myself, Occupy is about a break of faith with a global economic system that serves no one but an elite minority, where infinite money and power is the only morality.  The movement is a massive rejection of the ongoing mantra: there’s no other way.  Occupy challenges that static position, calls on us to envision something else, something better than the consensus mind.  It dares us to shake off the old and embrace a sense of possibility.  It demands we wake up, now.

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