Live Blog: Unions Join #OccupyWallStreet for March in NYC Today!

Posted: October 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment | Tags: , , , , , , | 31 Comments

I have to admit, I’m getting really excited by the way the #OccupyWallStreet movement is taking off. I just got home and turned on MSNBC to find that they are covering the Wall Street protests live this afternoon. They have a number of network personnel on the ground, including Dylan Ratigan. And get this: even Beltway Bob is there! That has to be sign that the mainstream Villagers are taking note.

Right now Harrison Schultz, a spokesman for the protesters is on, and he just said, “I call this a revolution. No one is organizing it. It’s just happening.” He says the media is obsolete. The media thinks they are driving people to the protest, but that’s not true. If he would in charge of a major media outlet, he would be nervous now, because this would be happening whether the mainstream media paid attention or not. He says no one knows what is going to happen or where this will go.

The union march will take place at 4:30 this afternoon, according to MSNBC, but ABC says 3PM. If you have access to MSNBC right now, please watch with us and let us know if anything is happening in your area. Awhile ago, they put up a map to show where all the protests are now, and they were in so many states! I’ll see if I can find the map and post it. Meanwhile, here is a little about what we can expect this afternoon.

The cavalry has arrived in Lower Manhattan. Representatives from no fewer than 15 of the country’s largest labor unions will join the Occupy Wall Street protesters for a mass rally and march today in New York City.

The AFL-CIO, United Auto Workers, and Transit Workers’ Union are among the groups expected to stand in solidarity with the hundreds of mostly young men and women who have spent the better part of three weeks sleeping, eating, and organizing from Zuccotti Square.

Their arrival is being touted as a watershed moment for the “Occupy” movement, which has now seen copycat protests spring up across the country. And while the specific demands of the “occupiers” remain wide-ranging, the presence of the unions – implicitly inclined to making more direct demands – may sharpen their focus.

Today’s action is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. ET, when the protesters in Zuccotti Square march approximately one mile north to Foley Square, where they will be met by community and labor leaders. Then, at 4:30 p.m., they plan to match together back down toward Wall Street. They do not yet have a city-issued permit for the gathering, but are now pursuing one.

ABC is anticipating more arrests today, but on MSNBC, a spokesman said the unions got a permit for today’s march. Furthermore, if NYC chooses to try to break up the protests today, it will only help the growth of this movement.

Here’s a report from Democracy Now today:

UPDATE: MSNBC has moved on to other things for now. But the Guardian has a live blog. It figures we have to go to a British newspaper to find out what’s happening in our own country.

Occupy Wall Street website

Tuesday Reads: Occupy Boston, Occupy Wall Street, and a Modern Day Whisky Rebellion

Posted: October 4, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Economy, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , | 35 Comments

Good Morning!! Today I want to focus on articles about Occupy Wall Street protests, which despite the critiques of those on both the right and left, are still going on in NYC and many other U.S. cities, including Boston, I’m happy to say. The Boston Phoenix has a blog to document the protests. On September 28, Chris Faraone wrote:

At this early juncture it’s already safe to say that Occupy Wall Street has succeeded. I’m not being sarcastic. Yesterday I wrote about the media storm that’s showered their protests from early on, and that’s rained down even harder since the New York Police Department began brutalizing demonstrators. And after last night’s Occupy Boston meeting on the Common, I’m convinced that the hordes have achieved something even greater than attracting press: regardless of what they actually accomplish in the end, Occupy has already become the hottest protest franchise since the Tea Party. Which is why it makes sense that contrarian Boston is emerging as the first city to strike while the brand is hot.

Last night’s kickoff meeting was at least a testament to the popularity of this movement. People have been angry for some time, but for many it was Occupy that motivated them – not the countless other protests that take place every week around here. Roughly 300 showed –with a significant number of reporters on the scene documenting –despite the event having been announced less than a day ahead of time, and almost exclusively through social media (Steve Annear, who you should follow on Twitter if you’re keeping tabs on the actions, also broke the story in the Metro). By a show of hands, a few dozen folks on the Common got their feet wet in Liberty Square during the first stretch of Occupy Wall Street. But for the most part, these were people – mostly young, but overall from a mix of backgrounds, ages, and ethnicities – who’d become interested by what they’d seen online and in the news.

Occupy Boston meeting on Boston Common

The Guardian even published an article about the Boston organization:

There were socialists, anti-poverty campaigners, students, anarchists, computer hackers, the unemployed, and workers ranging from a vet to an accountant.

And, numbering around 200 and meeting to plot until late in the night, a group of Bostonians have decided to recreate the anti-Wall Street protests that are gripping New York.

Unlike previous attempts, such as a march that fizzled out in Chicago with just 20 people, the people behind Occupy Boston showed a strong dose of media savvy and organisational skill on Monday night, as they drew a committed crowd of volunteers to their cause: to occupy a slice of the city. Local TV crews were in attendance at the evening mass planning meeting, and it had been flagged on the front pages of Boston’s newspapers.

The move raises the first serious prospect of the Wall Street protests spreading beyond New York and comes as other events are also being planned in Los Angeles and Washington.

Noam Chomsky even made a youtube video of support.

This thing is really growing. Could it be that the young people of this country are really going to stand up and fight? I sure hope so. Is this happening where you live? If so, please share what you know. I’m starting to get excited about this!

Getting back to the New York protests, Emptywheel had a post today on the NYPD and their history of violations of civil liberties. I’m not going to excerpt from it, because you really need to read the whole thing–it’s not very long.

At FDL, David Dayen has a post about Van Jones’s Take Back the American Dream organization and how it is “building off #Occupy Wall Street.”

The Campaign for America’s Future expected their conference to be a launching pad for an American Dream Movement that would be a counterpart to the Tea Party, a left populist movement that would branch out across the country. And that movement has built itself up over the past couple months, and was in part responsible for the invisible town hall revolution over August.

But CAF found itself caught by an organic protest movement, a disparate movement organized by a simple theme, an expression of the feeling of mass injustice. Nobody on the left was totally prepared for #OccupyWallStreet, which sprung up on its own. But the groups that have been organizing in similar ways and with a similar theme were more than prepared to support it.

The spirit of #OccupyWallStreet has given a booster shot to this Take Back the American Dream Conference, which last year was completely moribund. The first session at the conference was a paean to #OccupyWallStreet, with video from New York City (the live feed crashed, unfortunately) and even one organizer who camped out in Zuccotti Park speaking. “If we demand something from Wall Street, we’re telling them that they have the power, but we do,” said the organizer from the Working Families Party in New York.

“They went down there to the scene of the crime against our future,” said Van Jones at his keynote address, in admiration of the #OccupyWallStreet protesters. “They’ve been beaten, they’ve been pepper sprayed, they’ve been falsely arrested, but they never broke their discipline. They told the police officers who were arresting them, we are the 99%, we’re fighting for you, we’re fighting for your pensions too.”

“Something’s happening in America. Don’t you give up on this movement!” Jones concluded.

Yes, something is finally happening. Will it continue to grow? I sure hope so!

I also want to call your attention to an interesting piece at Salon by William Hogeland, author of three books on the revolutionary period in American history. Hogeland compares the Occupy Wall Street movement to the so-called Whisky Rebellion. Hogeland writes about radical protests movements against our founding fathers, who were, after all, the elites of their day. Here’s just a sample:

The difficulty in dealing with our founding battle for democratic economics arises in part because the movement was not against England but against the very American banking and trading elites who dominated the resistance to England. That complicates our founding myth, possibly unpleasantly. Also, it was a generally losing battle. With ratification of the Constitution, Hamiltonian finance triumphed, and people looking to Jefferson and Madison for finance and economic alternatives to Hamilton are barking up the wrong tree, since what those men knew, or even really cared, about finance could be written on a dime. (Anyway, in pushing for creating a nation, Madison supported Hamiltonian finance down the line. Their differences came later.) When Occupy Wall Street protesters say “It’s We the People!” they’re actually referring to a preamble, intending no hint of economic democracy, to a document that was framed specifically to push down democratic finance and concentrate American wealth for national purposes. Not very edifying, but there it is.

The Tea Party, meanwhile, has taken up founding economic issues from a right-wing point of view, associating itself with the upper-middle-class Boston patriots (often mistaken for populist democrats) who led a movement against overrreaching British trade acts in the 1760′s and were important to the impulse toward American independence. I’ve written fairly extensively about where and how I think the Tea Party goes wrong on the history of the founding period. But at least they’re framing their objections to current policy, and framing the historical roots of their ideas, not mainly in cultural but in economic terms.

Like it or not, though, it is Occupy Wall Street that has the most in common, ideologically, not with those Boston merchants and their supporters but with the less well-known, less comfortably acknowledged people who, throughout the founding period, cogently proposed and vigorously agitated for an entirely different approach to finance and monetary policy than that carried forward by the famous founders. Amid horrible depressions and foreclosure crises, from the 1750′s through the 1790′s, ordinary people closed debt courts, rescued debt prisoners, waylaid process servers, boycotted foreclosure actions, etc. (More on that here and here.) They were legally barred from voting and holding office, since they didn’t have enough property, so they used their power of intimidation to pressure their legislatures for debt relief and popular monetary policies. Their few leaders in legit politics included the visionary preacher Herman Husband, the weaver William Findley, and the farmer Robert Whitehill.

I found this article absolutely fascinating!

At the LA Times, there’s an editorial about the “message” of the “Occupy” protests along with a photo of protesters at LA City Hall.

The political left has been searching for the last couple of years to find an answer to the tea party. Some hoped last year’s rally in Washington led by TV comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, a response to right-wing rallies attended by such conservative media celebrities as Glenn Beck, would spark a national movement. That didn’t happen. Now they’re pinning their hopes on Occupy Wall Street, which in many ways is a mirror image of the tea party. Both groups are motivated by frustration over the rotten economy and are vague about causes and solutions, though if their positions could be summed up in a one-line manifesto, it might be: The tea party, dominated by elderly conservatives, blames government overspending and overreach for our economic problems and would therefore like to cut federal spending, while Occupy Wall Street, dominated by young liberals, blames corporate greed and would therefore like to tax the rich and decrease corporate political power.

It is, of course, far too early to suggest that Occupy Wall Street represents a resurgence of the left. But we do seem to recall that in its initial days the tea party was similarly dismissed by pundits, especially those on the left who preferred to see the protesters as kooks rather than the vanguard of a political shift. What matters isn’t the size of the protest, the attire of the demonstrators or the misspellings on their signs; it’s whether the relatively tiny number of people who can be bothered to show up and march can inspire and energize other like-minded people enough to get them to the polls.

Finally, at Huffpo, there’s a piece by Judith Samuelson: A Baby Boomer’s Advice to the Millennials Occupying Wall Street

Whether their disgust with Wall Street is fueled by a lack of jobs or a more complex analysis was not apparent to me, but I trust we will be hearing more from the Millennials. Scholars are suggesting they will be a force to be reckoned with. In fact, you might already be experiencing their tendency to want to be heard in the workplace, in the classroom or at the dinner table, for example.

There are a lot of them; 90 million by some count, comprising the largest generation in our history. They are the most racially diverse generation ever, and they have been, and are being, shaped by remarkable events such as 9/11 and the ongoing global recession; by their parents — the boomers of yore; and, of course by technology — the first generation to take instant communications for granted. I believe that Millennials will shape our response to issues that bedevil us — through their passion about social issues, their facility with technology and social networking, and through their continued willingness to vote — as they did in big numbers in the last Presidential election.

Many of them will go to business school — or are already there. A quarter of post-graduate degrees are in business, and 20 percent of undergraduates are pursuing business degrees. Even at liberal arts colleges that may not offer “business” as a major, students flock to economics instead, or as close as they can get to the subject. This may be the result of parental pressure to exit school with some hope of finding a job (unlike baby boomers, Millennials are close to their parents and apparently even listen to them) but it is also in pursuit of the skills, language and heroes they have grown up with — more Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg than Bob Dylan and Robert Redford.

The question I have been thinking about is how they will bridge these two worlds — passion for social issues, and comfort with technology and business. I know from experience that real change is hard; that to influence business, and Wall Street, requires people skills as well as analytics, patience, and multiple approaches to gain the attention and commitment of the power brokers who set the rules and design the reward systems. Protest is a not an insignificant part of the puzzle, however, and always has been; just ask Walmart, Nike or Nestle.

In the spirit of Baby Boomers’ sharing their experience, strength, and hope with the Millennials, here’s a boomer anthem that might be appropriate:

What are you reading and blogging about today? Please share!

Guess who Started the Class War?

Posted: October 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Economy | Tags: , , | 19 Comments

It’s more than a bit disingenuous to start screaming class war now when the first shot was fired some years ago and the little guys are just finally waking up to the smell of $10 cappuccinos on $5 an hour wages. The data shows the income gap has been persistent and widening since the 1980s.  The only thing new under the sun is that the folks that started the entire thing are the ones screaming and shifting blame.

I’ve found some pretty fuzzy math that argues that Barack Obama–of ALL people–has just declared a class war some time this month by the preeminent defenders of the looting.  I thought I’d just share some of the intellectual shenanigans to inspire the pitch folk wielder in you.   This is one little whiny boy who complains the rich are just overtaxed today.  He even trots out some really really bad data to support the temper tantrum.

It’s official: America is at class war, and President Barack Obama proudly leads the charge against this country’s wealthy.

“If asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber makes me a class warrior ― a warrior for the working class ― I will accept that,” Obama shouted Tuesday at Denver’s Abraham Lincoln High School. “I will wear that charge as a badge of honor.”

“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher tax rates than millionaires and billionaires. A teacher or a nurse or a construction worker making $50,000 a year shouldn’t pay higher tax rates than somebody making $50 million.”

Obama’s assault on the affluent rests upon a sky-high stack of lies. Obama is too well staffed and too well informed not to know otherwise. So, maddeningly, he straight-out lies to the American people.

For days before Obama opened his mouth in Denver, multiple news accounts and opinion pieces annihilated the casus belli of his War on the Wealthy. Nonetheless, Obama keeps spouting falsehoods, perhaps hoping that his smooth voice will hypnotize Americans into believing his words.

“Fact check: The wealthy already pay more taxes,” read the headline above a September 20 Associated Press. “President Obama says he wants to make sure millionaires are taxed at higher rates than their secretaries,” Stephen Ohlemacher wrote. “The data say they already are.”

Nationwide, Ohlemacher and others dismantled Obama’s soak-the-rich thesis. The rich are soaked today.

Okay, the author of this stupid bit of faux economics is a “media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.”  He makes THE cardinal dumb mistake for the economic illiterate. He makes no distinction between real and nominal figures which basically means adjusting for changes in purchasing power to dollar figures over time but what do you expect from two ideological journalists.  The other idiot he quotes does the same thing.  You can’t do these kinds of figures in nominal terms and compare anything.  Here’s Paul Krugman explaining the difference between the value of a dollar today and a dollar around world war 2 which is what seems to really confuse these guys.

As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office – which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed – show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare?

Paying more in dollars today doesn’t amount to the same thing as paying more in purchasing power and real income today and yesterday.  Additionally, the argument does not take into account the differences in taxes where the money really lies.  First, corporations have weaseled so many exceptions to the tax law, many pay next to nothing in taxes. Corporations are supposed to be people now remember?  Well, they dodge taxes in a big way. Second, most extremely wealthy people get the majority of their income from capital gains and not earned income.  It’s so easy to throw around numbers when you narrow your argument down to a place that ignores the big picture.  One of the biggest problems with this argument is that it ignores the other taxes collected by the federal government.  Social Security Taxes are the most regressive taxes in the country.  They apply only to 100% of the lowest levels of income.   The majority of rich people’s income avoids this tax.  The Social Security cap effectively puts most of the earned income of the wealthiest individuals off the table.  For some reason, Social Security always counts wrong against the federal deficit for these guys but gets ignored in the federal tax equations.

Krugman has argued against the use of fuzzy math a lot on his blog.  Here’s another good example on the Distribution Effect of Tax Cuts.   Again, focusing on one narrow tax and ignoring the rest is fuzzy math.  Also, ignoring the favoritism implied in all the latest tax cut laws is presumptuous.

Another, more subtle trick involves comparing percentage changes in taxes as opposed to tax changes as a percentage of income.

The starting point is that federal taxes are indeed progressive on average (although there are billionaires who pay a lower rate than their secretaries). And this in turn means that you have to be careful about the question when evaluating a change in taxes.

Suppose that it’s 1979, and individual A is a member of the working poor, paying 12 percent of his income in taxes — basically payroll tax and not much else. Meanwhile, individual B is very wealthy, and pays 40 percent of his income in taxes — as the very wealthy did on average 30 years ago.

Now suppose that 30 years of conservative governance lead to a fall of a quarter in both individuals’ average tax rates; A’s rate falls from 12 to 9, B’s from 40 to 30. Would it make sense to say that they have gained equally from tax cuts?

Clearly not. A’s after-tax income has risen from 88 to 91 percent of pretax income, a gain of 3.4 percent. B’s after-tax income has risen from 60 to 70 percent of pretax income, a gain of 16.7 percent. The distribution of after-tax income has become substantially less equal. And that’s the calculation I was doing here.

Now, right-wingers come back and say that this is what has to happen when you cut taxes. No, it doesn’t. And anyway, cutting taxes is itself a choice — and they’re a choice that then leads to demands that we cut programs for the poor and middle class to close the deficit those tax cuts created.

The point is that yes, tax policy these past 30 years has been very much tilted toward benefiting the rich.

Here’s another perspective on that from a letter to the editor in a small daily in Prescott Arizona.  I’m taking this as an example because it’s becoming clearer that more people get this and aren’t falling for the memes.

In this newly announced war, the rich are being cast as victims. Yet the top 1 percent of American taxpaying households has been able to use the power of its wealth to influence government to cut its tax rate by 100 percent in the past generation and a half. In actuality, this groups pays only 17 percent of its income in income taxes. In the past 30 years, the income of the top one percent has increased 256 percent and their percentage of our nation’s wealth has grown from 20 percent to 40 percent.

The story is not the same for middle-class Americans. Their income has moved upward a mere 11 percent in the same time period. The wealth of the middle class resides in its owner-occupied homes. Foreclosures and declining real estate values continue to erode the holdings of the middle class. Since most middle class Americans receive wages, there is little opportunity to reduce their taxes beyond the tax rate applicable to their income.

The number of Americans falling below the poverty line has continued to grow. According to the 2010, census more than 46 million Americans live below the poverty line; or one in six.

Class warfare is indeed a fact in our nation. However, it was not initiated by President Obama. It is a fact in long standing. If Paul Revere were sounding the alarm today, he’d be about 30 years too late.

One of the most disingenuous class war memes out there came one of the truly evil people in Congress these day.  That would be Eric Cantor who suggests that taxing the rich would shut down Soup Kitchens.  If you have ever done any analysis on the types of donations given by the rich compared to that given by the rest of us you’d see pretty clearly that the rich tend to skew their donations to art and culture nonprofits. Again, we have silly arguments that ignore the big picture.

Cantor complained about the president’s proposal to limit the value of the deduction for charitable deductions (and other deductions and some exclusions) to 28 percent. That would raise the cost of giving a dollar to 72 cents because the proposal would cut the tax savings to 28 cents. The higher price of giving would likely induce people to give less (at least in total—we don’t know whether they’d cut their donations to soup kitchens).

But that logic extends to other proposals to change tax rates. By Cantor’s own logic, tax policies that he supports could also harm soup kitchens by reducing donations. Cutting the top tax rate to 25 percent, for example, would raise the cost of giving to 75 cents per dollar, leading high-income donors to give less. (That reduction would be partly offset by what economists call the “income effect”—lower taxes raise after-tax incomes, so people give more because they have more to give. But the “price effect” from raising the cost typically outweighs the income effect.)

Another example: Allowing the 2001-03 tax cuts to expire for high-income taxpayers, which the president has repeatedly proposed and which Cantor opposes, could help charities. Boosting the top tax rate to 39.6 percent would lower the cost of giving and increase contributions. (Again, an income effect would offset at least some of the gain—higher taxes reduce after-tax income so people give less.)

In any case, it’s not soup kitchens that should worry about lower donations from the rich. More than 60 percent of donations in 2005 for basic needs came from people with income under $200,000, according to a 2007 study by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. In contrast, more than 80 percent of contributions to health organizations and more than 90 percent of those for education and the arts were from people making more than $200,000. Those groups have a lot more to fear from reduced tax savings for donations.

Maybe it’s silly to complain that cutting tax rates would hurt charities by leading people to give less. But Cantor’s complaint that the president’s plan would go after soup kitchens in perilous economic times is equally silly. Both arguments are true, but both ignore larger points.

It’s truly odd that a man that wants to eliminate the safety net programs is concerned about shutting down a few Soup Kitchens. Again, the real problem is the rules that let folks like hedge fund managers avoid taxes like crazy when millionaire doctors and business owners have to search for deductions to bring down their tax bill. It wouldn’t exactly bring a windfall amount of revenues but it would at least make the tax system more reasonable.

The Top 400 tax filers  – the very richest Americans – do pay a lower rate of just 18.11 percent of their total income.  Why?  Many of them are hedge fund managers and people like Buffet — their income is pegged how much their investment fund grows.  For some reason, this income is counted as so-called “carried interest” (even though it is not interest at all; it’s more like a performance bonus) and is taxed at the lower 15 percent capital gains rate.

It’s a loophole for hedge managers, pure and simple.  But while it may be an outrage that these uber-rich hedge fund managers pay such a low rate compared to the rest of us, there are just not many of them out there.

But the top 400 tax filers represent a tiny sliver – just .00028 percent of all filers. The vast majority of those earning over $1 million a year pay at a higher rate, which is why the average tax rate for this group, according to the Tax Foundation, is 29.1 percent of taxable income.  And, yes, this number includes income taxes, payroll taxes and capital gains taxes.

So, most of the rich do contribute a good share of their income to taxes. The real conversation should be given the situation our country is in, given the level of taxes in the past, given that the wealthy actually benefit more from everything the country has to offer including its public goods, and given that these lower tax rates have really not produced any thing but bad results, why frame a return to more reasonable rates as “class warfare”?

I think this can be seen in terms of a bigger issue of the new right wing “populism” being driven by monied interests.  Many Fox newscasters and Tea Party types are actually very wealthy people who benefit from the demagoguery they promote.  It’s not so much “populism” as it is creating tension between classes of “have-nots”.  This class war far meme is just the latest in their attempt to get every one’s eye off the things that have really lowered US incomes and standards of living for 98% of the populace.  Cries of unfair taxation take every one’s attention from the real issues and problems.  As long as the political and power centers of the country are enclaves of rich, wealthy, sheltered elites, their media, their agendas, and their memes will be voiced in the corporate media and their interests will garner political attention.

Today’s Successful Economies

Posted: September 30, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Economic Develpment, Economy, U.S. Economy, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , | 6 Comments

Swedes are happier and more globally competitive than the US. Is this the real secret of blondes having more fun?

I wrote a blog post a while back about heaven having fjords. I’m very much interested in economics from a development standpoint so it’s always worthwhile checking out the top performers in the world for lessons.  It is also quite apparent when you do that Libertarian and Republican memes fail and fail badly.  It’s probably why we never hear these things in corporate media.

Societies are better when the pull together instead of pull apart.  The best performing countries in economics are the same countries that have a high commitment to public education and society at large.   The high performers–in economics, in health, and in education–are the Scandavian countries with their highly progressive tax rates, intense regulation of commerce and harmful activities and emphasis on making sure the rising tide rises all the boats rather than sinking a huge number of them to the benefit of the mega yachts.  These are also countries with parliamentary systems which makes them highly democratic. They’ve been winning consistently with the advent of the global economy.  The US has lost its position as leader of the developed nations and is moving way down into the losing positions below still developing nations. We could learn some lessons from Scandinavia.

Here’s Jeffrey Sachs at Project Syndicate with some things to think about in that vein. He has written a new book called The Price of Civilization which basically outlines the missteps that we’ve taken that were primarily started as a result of the election of Ronald Reagan. For some reason, many Americans don’t want to pay for some very simple modern facilities like roads, electric grids, airports, and railways.  They prefer to buy junk from China they probably don’t need in search of happiness in the form of hoarding and consuming.

Rather than respond to globalization with more government spending on education, infrastructure, and technology, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 by pledging to slash government spending and cut taxes.

For 30 years, the US has been going in the wrong direction, cutting the role of government in the domestic economy rather than promoting the investments needed to modernize the economy and workforce. The rich have benefited in the short run, by getting massive tax breaks. The poor have suffered from job losses and cuts in government services. Economic inequality has reached a high not seen since the Great Depression.

These adverse trends have been exacerbated by domestic politics. The rich have used their wealth to strengthen their grip on power. They pay for the expensive campaigns of presidents and congressmen, so presidents and congressmen help the rich – often at the expense of the rest of society.  The same syndrome – in which the rich have gained control of the political system (or strengthened their control of it) – now afflicts many other countries.

Sweden–as an example other than Norway who can use their oil to leverage their improvements–has been called an economic miracle.  After feeling the global recession, they are now growing GDP at rates that are twice to three times the averages of most industrial countries.  They are growing 5 times fasting than the US.   So, look at their numbers  there on the CIA Factbook and marvel where under the poverty rate comes the label: not applicable. Sweden blends capitalism with a social democracy in a way that makes the swedes the 6th most prosperous country on the planet.  They are above the US who is number 10.  They are behind  Norway, Denmark, Finland, Australia and New Zealand.  They are number 23 in GDP per capita  The US is number 11. They are also highly globally competitive ranking #3 in Global Competitiveness Index after Finland and Switzerland. The US is number 1o.

The Swedes are number 9  on the human development index.  We are number 4.  Norway is  number 1.  Sweden has high marginal tax rates (sometimes over 70%), very powerful unions, immigrants, and generous vacations and work weeks.  Under Republican fairy tales, Sweden and Norway should be worse off than Haiti.  Rather than looking at countries that are achieving great things and leaving us in the dust, we are grasping at a rigid ideology that is designed to tank us.

I haven’t read the Sachs book but I’m definitely putting it on my reading list. You may recall that this is also something Fareed Zakaria examines in his TV show, in books, and at TIME magazine. Here’s a good summary from a recent Time article.

The following rankings come from various lists, but they all tell the same story. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), our 15-year-olds rank 17th in the world in science and 25th in math. We rank 12th among developed countries in college graduation (down from No. 1 for decades). We come in 79th in elementary-school enrollment. Our infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, well behind that of every other major advanced economy. American health numbers are stunning for a rich country: based on studies by the OECD and the World Health Organization, we’re 27th in life expectancy, 18th in diabetes and first in obesity. Only a few decades ago, the U.S. stood tall in such rankings. No more. There are some areas in which we are still clearly No. 1, but they’re not ones we usually brag about. We have the most guns. We have the most crime among rich countries. And, of course, we have by far the largest amount of debt in the world.

We’re in the process of watching the Cat Food Commission Redux set our priorities for our future and its basically an agenda meant to downsize the American Dream for every one except the Mega Wealthy.  I hope that the Cheddar Revolution and the Occupy Wall Street movement turn into an American Spring Movement.  We have to regain the positive momentum towards modernity before the powers that be force us all back into a pre-civil war paradigm of laws, economic servitude, and society.

Meanwhile, as I write about these healthy economies, 90% of US citizens say our economy stinks and they are pretty unhappy about it. Its time to look at some best practices of other countries and dump the ideologues that keeping making the wrong decisions for us.

Thursday Reads: Obama and CBC, Judging Protesters, Net Neutrality, SCOTUS, and Sly Stone

Posted: September 29, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Black Agenda Report, Health care reform, Human Rights, Media, morning reads, net-neutrality, SCOTUS, the blogosphere, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 23 Comments

Good Morning!! Let’s start out with a little fire and brimstone. Glen Ford had a rousing rant at the Black Agenda Report about Obama’s disgusting treatment of the CBC last weekend. Here’s just a sample:

…in the same week that he bowed down to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the assembled nations of the world, in New York City, Obama took his church voice to the Congressional Black Caucus annual awards dinner to very pointedly demand that Blacks stop bugging their president about the economic catastrophe that has befallen them, and his own role in it. “Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” Obama hectored. “Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”

Black Caucus chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver had earlier told reporters, “If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this [Black unemployment] problem, we probably would be marching on the White House.” But Obama came to lay down the law: any marching that you might do will be for my re-election.

The well-oiled crowd cheered….

The Black Caucus, as a body, meekly murmured and mumbled as the administration transferred the equivalent of the U.S. gross domestic product to the banks while Black America disintegrated. Now, with Obama’s numbers falling, he has very publicly commanded them to shut up and perform what he believes is their only legitimate function: to get him re-elected. In the looming contest, he will again resort to Black-baiting whenever it is useful to shore up white support. In that – as with his foreign and domestic policies – Obama is no different than white corporate politicians. His one great distinction, is to have a core constituency that cares more for his security and dignity, than their own.

Sad but true.

In yesterday’s morning post, Minx highlighted the way so many “progressives” are criticizing Occupy Wall Street for all kinds of irrelevant reasons. Glenn Greenwald wrote a very good piece about it: What’s behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests? But I especially liked Kevin Gosztola’s piece at FDL.

Traditional media have characterized the plurality of voices and the number of issues the occupation is seeking to challenge as a weakness. Establishment media has been openly condescending. Ginia Bellafante’s report in the New York Times has generated significant attention for her focus on the fact that some “half-naked woman” who looks like Joni Mitchell to her is the leader of this movement of “rightly frustrated young people.” Bellafante accuses the protesters of lacking “cohesion” and “pantomiming progressivism rather than practice it knowledgeably.” NPR reiterated NYT’s focus on the “scattered nature of the movement” in its coverage of the occupation (and tellingly used a photo of a man holding a sign that reads “Satan Controls Wall St”). Local press have treated the occupiers as if they are a tribe or a group of nomads focusing on occupiers’ behavior instead of trying to understand the real reason why people are in the park.

Liberals have shown scorn, too, suggesting the occupation is not a “Main Street production” or that the protesters aren’t dressed properly and should wear suits cause the civil rights movement would not have won if they hadn’t worn decent clothing.

The latest show of contempt from a liberal comes from Mother Jones magazine. Lauren Ellis claims that the action, which “says it stands for the 99 percent of us,” lacks traction. She outlines why she thinks Zuccotti Park isn’t America’s Tahrir Square. She chastises them for failing to have one demand. She claims without a unified message police brutality has stolen the spotlight. She suggests the presence of members of Anonymous is holding the organizers back writing, “It’s hard to be taken seriously as accountability-seeking populists when you’re donning Guy Fawkes masks.” And, she concludes as a result of failing to get a cross-section of America to come out in the streets, this movement has been for “dreamers,” not “middle class American trying to make ends meet.”

First off, nobody in the last week can claim to be reporting on Occupy Wall Street and genuinely claim it isn’t gaining traction. Ellis conveniently leaves out the fact that Occupy Wall Street is inspiring other cities to get organized and hold similar assemblies/occupations. Second, if the protesters did have one demand, does Ellis really think that would improve media coverage? Wouldn’t pundits then be casting doubt on whether the one demand was the appropriate singular demand to be making? Third, so-called members of Anonymous are citizens like Ellis and have a right to participate in the protest. It is elitist for Ellis to suggest Occupy Wall Street should not be all-inclusive. And, finally, there is no evidence that just “dreamers” are getting involved. A union at the City University of New York, the Industrial Workers of the World, construction workers, 9/11 responders and now a postal workers and teachers union have shown interest in the occupation.

Gosztola is a young guy who replaced Emptywheel after she left FDL. He focuses on human rights issues, and he does a nice job.

It’s interesting that the progs keep comparing the Occupy Wall Street protesters to those in Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s, claiming that protesters should wear suits! Obviously these “very serious” yuppie bloggers don’t recall the ’60s anti-war movement. I can just imagine their shock at some of the outfits we wore in those days.

The New York Times published an odd interpretation of the world-wide protest phenomenon that minimized demonstrations: As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe, by Nicholas Kulish. Kulish explains the protests as disillusionment with voting. And why shouldn’t we all be turned off by voting when it gets us nothing but a bunch of corrupt, greedy a$$holes who stab taxpayers in the back repeatedly and suck up to the top 1%?

Not surprisingly, there is only one reference to the anti-Wall Street protests, and the organizers, Occupy Wall Street aren’t mentioned at all. Also not mentioned are the supportive protests beginning in other U.S. cities. And Kulish never mentioned Wisconsin at all!

Last week the FCC announced new net neutrality rules, and now lawsuits from both sides of the issue are starting.

Verizon and Metro PCS, both wireless carriers, had already made clear their intention to sue and were widely expected to be the first to do so. Instead, they were beaten to court by the activist group Free Press—one of the strongest supporters of network neutrality.

Free Press has asked a federal appeals court to review the FCC’s rules—not because it finds them too strong, but because it finds them too weak. The group particularly objects to the way in which wireless companies are exempted from most of the meaningful anti-discrimination policies in the rules. While wireless operators can’t block Internet sites outright, and can’t simply ban apps that compete with their own services, they can do just about anything else; wired operators can’t.

Free Press complains about the “decision to adopt one set of rules for broadband access via mobile platforms and a different set of rules for broadband access via fixed platforms.” The distinction, it says, is “arbitrary and capricious” and it violates the law.

In a statement, Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood said, “Our challenge will show that there is no evidence in the record to justify this arbitrary distinction between wired and wireless Internet access. The disparity that the FCC’s rules create is unjust and unjustified. And it’s especially problematic because of the increasing popularity of wireless, along with its increasing importance for younger demographics and diverse populations who rely on mobile devices as their primary means for getting online.

Here is a summary of the final FCC rules, from Connected Planet:

The FCC highlighted a total of four rules, which specify that:

— A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service shall publicly disclose accurate information regarding the network management practices, performance and commercial terms of its broadband Internet access services sufficient for consumers to make informed choice regarding use of such services and for content, application, service and device providers to develop, market and maintain Internet offerings

— A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband Internet access service . . . shall not block lawful content, applications, services or non-harmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.

— A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband Internet access service . . . shall not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic over a consumer’s broadband Internet access service.

— A person engaged in the provision of mobile broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block consumers from accessing lawful websites, subject to reasonable network management; nor shall such person block applications that compete with the provider’s voice or video telephony services, subject to reasonable network management.

A DIY glass partition designs is taking into account of the particular architecture and technology of the future service.” Furthermore, if you’re interested to know the seo site architecture guide, visit templatemonster.com

I’m sure you’ve heard that the Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to rule on the health care law ASAP. Dalia Lithwick at Slate had an interesting article on the case: The Supreme Court is less interested in ruling on Obama’s health care law than you think.

Apparently the Obama administration believes that 2012 will not be crazy enough already. That would explain why it has decided not to appeal a ruling from a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals striking down the individual mandate at the heart of its health reform law. Instead of asking the full, 11-member court to hear the case, the administration has voluntarily cleared the path toward the Supreme Court as early as this spring. That means there could be a ruling by the end of June, just a few months before the election.

Right now the individual mandate has been upheld, by a 2-1 margin by the Sixth Circuit and struck down 2-1 at the 11th Circuit, while the Virginia lawsuit challenging the act was dismissed on procedural grounds at the Fourth Circuit. This split between the federal appeals courts almost demands that the high court agree to hear the case, as does the fact that it’s the Justice Department filing the appeal.

Lithwick discusses the opinions of other writers on why the administration is doing this now. Then she offers her own assessment:

I remain unsure that there just are five justices at the high court eager to have the court itself become an election-year issue. I don’t think Chief Justice John Roberts wants to borrow that kind of partisan trouble again so soon after Citizens United, the campaign-finance case that turned into an Obama talking point. And I am not certain that the short-term gain of striking down some or part of the ACA (embarrassing President Obama even to the point of affecting the election) is the kind of judicial end-game this court really cares about. Certainly there are one or two justices who might see striking down the ACA as a historic blow for freedom. But the long game at the court is measured in decades of slow doctrinal progress—as witnessed in the fight over handguns and the Second Amendment—and not in reviving the stalled federalism revolution just to score a point.

That’s why I suspect that even if there are five justices who believe the individual mandate is unconstitutional, there probably aren’t five votes to decide that question in this instant. Lyle Denniston over at Scotusblog reminds us that the court has a lot of options to forestall a showdown with the president. If the justices opt to consider the technical question raised at the Fourth Circuit—about who has legal standing to challenge the mandate in the first place—the court could dodge the constitutional question altogether until 2015, when the first penalties will be paid. It’s not so much a matter of the court having to decide whether to bring a gavel to a knife fight. It’s just that this isn’t really this court’s knife fight in the first place.

Roman Polanski is back in the news, because he supposedly “apologized” to the woman he raped when she was only 13.

In a documentary about his life, the Oscar-winning director, 78, admitted Samantha Geimer had been left scarred by his exploitation three decades ago. The Polish-French film maker publicly apologised for the first time for his “mistakes” that included the sexual attack on Mrs Geimer, now 47.

The director of Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown admitted she was a “double victim” after being caught up in the subsequent media storm, forcing her to move to Hawaii for privacy.

The married mother-of-three successfully sued him and accepted a private apology in 2009, saying she had been left more traumatised by ensuing legal battles to bring him to justice than the assault itself.

Finally, here’s another celebrity story: According to the New York Post, 1960s rock star Sly Stone is homeless, living in a van in L.A.

Today, Sly Stone — one of the greatest figures in soul-music history — is homeless, his fortune stolen by a lethal combination of excess, substance abuse and financial mismanagement. He lays his head inside a white camper van ironically stamped with the words “Pleasure Way” on the side. The van is parked on a residential street in Crenshaw, the rough Los Angeles neighborhood where “Boyz n the Hood” was set. A retired couple makes sure he eats once a day, and Stone showers at their house. The couple’s son serves as his assistant and driver.

Inside the van, the former mastermind of Sly & the Family Stone, now 68, continues to record music with the help of a laptop computer.

“I like my small camper,” he says, his voice raspy with age and years of hard living. “I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving.”

It’s a pretty nice van, BTW. But the LA Times says if Stone is homeless, it’s his own choice.

If Sly Stone is homeless, it’s by choice and not necessity, according to sources close to the funk legend.

Stone’s attorney Robert Alan has supposedly rented a four-bedroom home in Woodland Hills for his client, one unnamed source told Showbiz411 exclusively. “He’s too paranoid to come inside,” another source told writer Roger Friedman. That person was described as a friend of the singer.

Though Alan wouldn’t comment on the rental house, Friedman said, the lawyer confirmed that Sly Stone documentarian Willem Alkema had paid the singer $5,000 upfront for a recent interview. (An additional $2,000, source unknown, was reportedly paid when the story was picked up.) Alkema, whom Friedman says is trying relaunch his documentary and could benefit from the publicity, co-wrote Sunday’s “Sly Stone Is Homeless and Living in a Van” article for the New York Post.

That’s not to say Stone hadn’t admitted struggling with drugs, nor that he isn’t in financial trouble of the maybe-a-$50-million-lawsuit-will-fix-it variety — he sued former manager Jerry Goldstein in early 2010, alleging fraud and the diversion of $20 million to $30 million in royalties.

I’m just glad to know that Sly is still with us. What a great band he had. I remember seeing Sly and the Family Stone at an outdoor concert at Harvard Stadium–I think it was in 1969. It was fabulous! So in honor of Sly and nostalgia…

So…. what are you reading and blogging about today?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →