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Trans-Pacific Partnership is the answer to the question: How can we make the rich richer?

Dean Baker, Truthout | 28 Oct 2013

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) stands at the top of the Obama administration’s trade agenda. The argument from its supporters is that this agreement is part of the never-ending quest for freer trade. The evidence from what we know of this (still secret) pact is that the TPP has little to do with free trade. It can more accurately be described as a pact designed to increase the wealth and power of crony capitalists.

[snip]

The TPP is about crafting rules that will favor big business at the expense of the rest of the population in both the United States and in other countries. For example, we can expect to see limits on the ability of national and sub-national governments to impose environmental restrictions, such as requirements that companies engaging in fracking disclose the list of chemicals they use. There may also be limits on the extent to which governments can restrict the sale of genetically modified foods, with rules on labeling. And, the TPP may prevent governments from imposing restraints on financial firms that would prevent the sort of abuses that we saw during the run-up of the housing bubble. 

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Park Avenue: money, power and the American dream - Why Poverty?

740 Park Ave, New York City, is home to some of the wealthiest Americans. Across the Harlem River, 10 minutes to the north, is the other Park Avenue in South Bronx, where more than half the population needs food stamps and children are 20 times more likely to be killed. In the last 30 years, inequality has rocketed in the US -- the American Dream only applies to those with money to lobby politicians for friendly bills on Capitol Hill.



How much inequality is too much? To find out more and get teaching resources linked to the film, go to www.whypoverty.net

Sen. Bernie Sanders: 'Angry, disgusted, frustrated'

Mark Leibovich on America's Gilded Capital | Bill Moyers

This Town by Mark Leibovich is the story of how Washington became an occupied city, its hold on reality distorted by greed and ambition. Leibovich pulls no punches, naming names and revealing the city’s bipartisan lust for power, cash and notoriety.

Inside Job [2010 documentary]

Winner of 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature

Inside Job is a 2010 documentary film about the late-2000s financial crisis. The film is described as being about "the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption". In five parts, the film explores how changes in the policy environment and banking practices helped create the financial crisis.
Inside Job Documentary from Splashy on Vimeo.

NY Attorney General: Banks have no fear of law enforcement

Eric W. Dolan | Raw Story
6 May 2013

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman on Monday suggested that big banks were not afraid of skirting the law because they didn’t believe law enforcement would target them.
But he plans to change that.

Schneiderman announced a lawsuit against Wells Fargo and Bank of America earlier in the day. He alleged the two major banks repeatedly violated the terms of a mortgage settlement reached by the Department of Justice, Department of Housing and Urban Development and 49 state attorneys general last year.

“The problem is the banks have overwhelming confidence that law enforcement is not taking this seriously,” he told MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “They have overwhelming confidence that whatever the rules are, they won’t be followed up on.”

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The Top Ten things Black America will have to show for eight years of President Obama — none of them are good

In 2017, it will be routine for US presidents to unilaterally murder with or without announcement of cause anybody, anyplace on the planet within the reach of US drones, special operators and mercenaries.

Bruce A. Dixon | alternet.org
30 April 2013

When Barack Obama leaves the White House in January 2017, what will black America, his earliest and most consistent supporters, have to show for making his political career possible? We'll have the T-shirts and buttons and posters, the souvenirs. That will be the good news. The bad news is what else we'll have... and not.

To hear our black political class tell it, the election of the first black US president was its ultimate achievement to date, a giant step toward fulfillment of a previous generation's insurgent agenda for social transformation. Is that real? Has the career of Barack Hussein Obama really advanced any of the historic goals of the Freedom Movement? Is the question even fair?

With corporate media already speculating about next year's midterm elections, and the presidential contest of 2016, it's entirely appropriate to discuss the president's legacy. And fair is fair --- the black political class doesn't want its meager achievements compared to the agenda of those who fought for our freedom a half century ago, it probably ought to abandon its ceaseless self-promotion as the inheritors of that tradition.

It was the overwhelming black and brown vote, along with the utter, unwavering and uncritical support of African America which made President Obama's career possible. When he leaves office in January 2017, what will be the top ten things we can say black America gained or lost from his two terms in the White House?

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Health coalition swipes family-planning funds from State of Texas

Federal government bypasses state agency, awards Title X grant to Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas.

Carolyn Jones 
25 March 2013

Some family-planning funding in Texas will soon be under new management.

The federal government announced today that it would no longer give a large slice of federal family-planning funds to the state of Texas. Instead, the feds will award the $6.5 million grant to the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas, a coalition of providers led by Fran Hagerty, to distribute to clinics for birth control, wellness exams,  STD screenings and other family-planning services.

The Observer reported in November that the coalition would apply directly to the federal government for the grant—called Title X (Title 10)—one of three federal funding streams that pay for family-planning services in the state.

Before today, the sole grantee for Texas’ Title X funds had been the Texas Department of State Health Services. The health department had in turn distributed the grant money to family planning providers statewide.

But the 2011 Legislature slashed the $111-million family-planning budget by two thirds, causing more than 60 clinics to close. The loss of clinics resulted in the number of Texans receiving services through Title X to drop by 50 percent, according to an annual review by the Texas Department of State Health Services.

The collateral damage wrought by the budget cuts has been widespread. Many of the providers in Hagerty’s coalition had lost state family-planning funds and are struggling to stay open.

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Rick Perry's $487 million corporate slush fund doesn't need your stinkin' audit

The Texas governor doesn't agree that his corporate-handout fund needs an audit—because he and two other GOP pols already monitor it.

Dana Liebelson | Mother Jones
20 March 2013

snip

 Perry maintains that the fund gives Texas a competitive edge and has brought more than 56,000 new jobs to the state and generated more than $14.7 billion in capital investment. But the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice found that by the end of 2010, companies getting cash from the fund were only creating about 37 percent of the number of jobs promised. The administration has lowered standards in the past so that companies could create fewer jobs than they had promised, and it has canceled contracts after criticism over companies such as Bank of America's Countrywide, which continued to be an Enterprise grantee as it collapsed and laid off thousands of workers nationwide.


snip

"Perry's office is basically accommodating a process by which taxpayer money is transferred to corporations, not invested in state infrastructure," says Matt Angle, the director of the Lone Star Project, a political action committee devoted to strategic communications and research for Democrats. He would like to see Enterprise funds start going to education, family planning, and roads. (In 2011, Perry cut $5.4 billion in state funding from public schools, and he is turning down $100 billion to expand Medicaid while also shuttering 53 family planning clinics.)"

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Wealth Inequality in America

Published on Nov 20, 2012

Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.

Rick Perry shows his love for corporate welfare queens

 Libby Shaw | Texas Kaos
11 Feb 2013

Now that we know the Governor's political appointees have turned the state's taxpayer funded cancer prevention institute (CPRIT) into a cash cow for themselves and their cronies in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, state legislators want to take a hard look at two of Rick Perry's pet projects. This is especially necessary now that CPRIT is under criminal investigation.
 
These funds would be none other than the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technology Fund.  These funds were created as a means by which to attract businesses to the state as well as to advance various technologies here.

But both have been shrouded in secrecy with little oversight or accountability. Since the Governor controls these funds and knowing what we know about CPRIT, one has to wonder if their prime motive is to merely serve as corporate welfare programs or as slush funds from which Rick Perry can reward his campaign donors.  

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Tea Parties planned years ago by Koch Brothers and Big Tobacco

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance.

Brendan DeMelle
11 Feb 2013 | Huffington Post

A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.


Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption.

snip

The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Both groups are now "supporting the tobacco companies' political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws."

Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity were once a single organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch, and received over $5.3 million from tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, between 1991 and 2004.

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Truth about the war on Hostess employees

Paul Krugman explains the keys to our recovery | BillMoyers.com

January 11, 2013
Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that saving money is not the path to economic recovery. Instead, he tells Bill, we should put aside our excessive focus on the deficit, try to overcome political recalcitrance, and spend money to put America back to work. Krugman offers specific solutions to not only end what he calls a “vast, unnecessary catastrophe,” but to do it more quickly than some imagine possible. His latest book, End This Depression Now!, is both a warning of the fiscal perils ahead and a prescription to safely avoid them.

MSNBC Krystal Ball’s timely rant on Union Membership

25 Jan 2013

MSNBC Krystal Ball’s Timely Rant On Union Membership – Americans, Wake the “F” Up!

Union membership rates are at a 97-year low. She correctly implies that unions are to Democrats what big business and the wealthy are to Republicans. She correctly states that as labor unions go, so goes the middle class. One of her best statements was:
"The America we know and love is the America we know and love because of unions. They fought for better wages, equal pay, equal rights, worker safety, and even the weekend. They continue to fight today for the vision of America articulated so eloquently by the President".

FRONTLINE: The Untouchables

FRONTLINE examines why no Wall St. execs have faced fraud charges for the financial crisis

Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Matt Taibbi: Secret and Lies of the Bailout

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come.
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Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
4 Jan 2013

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue...
...
...The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout…
…
…So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.

Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.

THE WHOLE STORY

Bernie Sanders: "The Republican party is now an extreme right-wing party that is owned by their billionaire campaign contributors"

Who Stole the American Dream?

The promise of a prosperous middle-class life with decent work, rising living standards, and the potential for a better future has long been the foundation of the American dream. But as America continues to struggle to recover from the Great Recession, it has become clear that the middle class is in jeopardy – and many of the policies of the last 40 years are to blame.



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