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.

GOP has to rig elections to win

"Republicans in Virginia snuck an election rigging plan through the state Senate while everyone was focused on the inauguration. I'll tell you what they did - and more importantly why they did it - and how it speaks to the fundamental difference between Conservatives and Liberals." It's because republicans know they can't win, not on a national level. Republicans poll around 26% as a party, the Tea Party is at its lowest levels ever, and Americans continue to reject the ant-science, anti-education, anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-gay, anti-environment, pro-pollution, pro-plutocrat, racist platform. When the country does not agree with you on any major issue, all you have left is to cheat. Even top officials in the party have hinted that they fear they may not be able to win another national election for a long time.

Inequality Is Holding Back The Recovery

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ | nytimes.com
19 Jan 2013

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. And yet, after four decades of widening inequality and the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, we haven’t done anything about it.

 ...

Our skyrocketing inequality — so contrary to our meritocratic ideal of America as a place where anyone with hard work and talent can “make it” — means that those who are born to parents of limited means are likely never to live up to their potential. Children in other rich countries like Canada, France, Germany and Sweden have a better chance of doing better than their parents did than American kids have. More than a fifth of our children live in poverty — the second worst of all the advanced economies, putting us behind countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Greece.

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Smartphone shopping perils publishers | Newsosaur.com

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Here's why smartphone shopping matters: While local media in the un-wired age were the primary conduit for connecting sellers with potential buyers, the efficiency and immediacy of smartphone-assisted shopping has created an unprecedented opportunity for both on- and off-line retailers to build powerful, personalized and direct relationships with consumers. The stronger and more efficient those ties become, the less merchants will need to buy ads from such traditional intermediaries as newspapers, radio and television.

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Unless newspapers want to get shut out of their lucrative and long-standing partnership with the retail industry, the shift to smartphone shopping merits their full attention.

Unfortunately, publishers are so technologically out of touch that, according to the Newspaper Association of America, only 110 (8%) of the nation’s 1,382 dailies have gotten around to launching apps for the tablet, which happens to be the fastest-growing electronics product since electricity was discovered.

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Ross Perot in 1992 on NAFTA and the "Giant Sucking Sound"

Statement by Gov. Perry on President Obama’s Executive Actions

Rick Perry phones it in from Xanax-and-booze-land:

"There is evil prowling in the world - it shows up in our movies, video games and online fascinations, and finds its way into vulnerable hearts and minds. As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help. Above all, let us pray for our children.

"In fact, the piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally. The second amendment to the Constitution is a basic right of free people and cannot be nor will it be abridged by the executive power of this or any other president."

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Isolation of the American South

George Packer
21 Jan 2013

Every President elected between 1976 and 2004 was, by birth or by choice, a Southerner, except Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed a sort of honorary status. (When he began the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, scene of the murder, in 1964, of three civil-rights workers, many Southerners heard it as a dog whistle.) A Southern accent, once thought quaint or even backward, became an emblem of American authenticity, a political trump card. It was a truism that no Democrat could win the White House unless he spoke with a drawl.

Now the South is becoming isolated again. Every demographic and political trend that helped to reelect Barack Obama runs counter to the region’s self-definition: the emergence of a younger, more diverse, more secular electorate, with a libertarian bias on social issues and immigration; the decline of the exurban life style, following the housing bust; the class politics, anathema to pro-business Southerners, that rose with the recession; the end of America’s protracted wars, with cuts in military spending bound to come. The Solid South speaks less and less for America and more and more for itself alone.

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Paul Krugman on why jobs come first

January 11, 2013 | BillMoyers.com
The New York Times columnist explains why our top priority should be getting America back to work – if only Washington would stop throwing distractions in the way.

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

The Betrayal of the American Dream

By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
PublicAffairs: New York

Before beginning Donald Barlett and James Steele's The Betrayal of the American Dream, put away any implements with which you might be tempted to harm yourself. This is grim, grim stuff. Some of the grimmest stuff possible: an unvarnished picture of the place of middle- and working-class people in our economy, with a glimpse of the political and economic forces putting the squeeze on that place.

Much of the material in the book will be familiar if you follow progressive media—if you're a regular reader of Daily Kos or Paul Krugman or a watcher of Chris Hayes or any number of others—but having so much of that information compiled in one relentless, compulsively readable volume is ... a lot. Imagine reading a year's worth of class war-themed blog posts or magazine articles or newspaper columns—the big-picture ones filled with numbers and facts and the history of tax and regulatory policy, mostly, seeded with a few affecting individual stories bringing home how brutally the numbers and facts and policies hit actual people. Only whereas you get a break between the short pieces, time to catch your breath and decide when to go back for more, The Betrayal of the American Dream just keeps gathering steam.

Really, there's nothing for the book to do but keep gathering steam, though, since while the problems come through loud and clear, the solutions are not nearly as well developed. That's a common problem for a book like this, and with good reason: if it was obvious how to fix things, we'd probably be making more progress toward doing so. But The Betrayal of the American Dream suffers from the lack of solutions more than most, because it actively undermines the hope that solutions are possible. Barlett and Steele are correct to emphasize the degree to which the rich and powerful (corporations and people) operate by a different set of rules than the rest of us, writing, for instance, that:

Because they conduct business around the world and move money in and out of tax havens and other countries to secure the lowest possible rate, many [U.S. multinational corporations] stash their cash offshore rather than bring it home, where they would be obliged to pay taxes on it. They will bring it back only if Washington will agree to a tax holiday. [...] If you want to understand the differences between you and the ruling class, try that ploy with the IRS someday. Just tell them if they don't lower your tax rate you are going to move your money to another country.

It's important to be clear that the existence of two sets of rules is part of the problem. And it's important to be clear, as Barlett and Steele are, that Republicans are not the only problem, that Democratic politicians are complicit in many of the policies that perpetuate and solidify this system. (Even if at times it feels a bit unfair that they emphasize the participation of Democrats while taking for granted that Republicans are acting to the detriment of the working and middle classes.) But the grim tone, the lack of proposed solutions, the lack of any indication that there are forces fighting the expansion of this system, make you feel as hopeless as you feel angry after reading it. The Betrayal of the American Dream would benefit from providing even a little more perspective on ways to fight, on people and movements that are fighting, on leverage points. The final chapter offers some policy ideas, but it would be helpful to hear more about those throughout.

Nonetheless, the book is packed with important information and examples of the damage wrought by policies that allow companies to, for instance, avoid taxes, profit from sending jobs overseas, and strip workers of their pensions. And it does the important work of making clear just how badly the deck is stacked against the 99 percent. In the final analysis, if you're the sort of person who responds to an overwhelming dose of that knowledge by becoming too depressed to fight, avoid The Betrayal of the American Dream. But if getting mad primes you to fight, by all means, read this.

LINK

Molly Ivins: Taking a stab at our infatuation with guns

Molly Ivins | 15 March 1993
Creators Syndicate

As a civil libertarian, I of course support the Second Amendment. And I believe it means exactly what it says: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Fourteen-year-old boys are not part of a well-regulated militia. Members of wacky religious cults are not part of a well-regulated militia. Permitting unregulated citizens to have guns is destroying the security of this free state.

In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster. Those who want guns---whether for target shooting, hunting or potting rattlesnakes (get a hoe)---should be subject to the same restrictions placed on gun owners in England---a nation in which liberty has survived nicely without an armed populace. […]

Michael Crichton makes an interesting argument about technology in his thriller "Jurassic Park." He points out that power without discipline is making this society into a wreckage. By the time someone who studies the martial arts becomes a master---literally able to kill with bare hands---that person has also undergone years of training and discipline. But any fool can pick up a gun and kill with it.

"A well-regulated militia" surely implies both long training and long discipline. That is the least, the very least, that should be required of those who are permitted to have guns, because a gun is literally the power to kill. For years, I used to enjoy taunting my gun-nut friends about their psycho-sexual hang-ups---always in a spirit of good cheer, you understand. But letting the noisy minority in the National Rifle Association force us to allow this carnage to continue is just plain insane.

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President Obama's emotional statement on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting

The pre-funding mandate: bringing down the American Postal Workers Union

By Michael Monk Friday | firedoglake.com 
August 19, 2011

At the heart of the matter is a 2006 Congressional mandate put on the US Postal Service contained in the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006” to pre-fund healthcare benefits of future retirees, a 75 year liability over a 10 year period. No other agency or corporation is required to do this. This provision costs the Postal Service $5.5 billion a year. When you add in an adjustment that was made in how workers’ compensation costs were calculated based on interest rate assumptions and long term predictions concerning health care and compensation of $2.5 billion (a non cash accounting adjustment), you come up with $8 billion in cost. Actual loss was $500 million and when added, comes to the $8.5 billion reported for 2010. While $500 million is a lot, it doesn’t compare with $8.5 billion and is down from the previous year loss of $1 billion. If you took out the onerous pre-funding mandate, the Postal Service actually shows a $700 million profit over the last four years instead of the $20 billion loss. The Postal Union has been trying to get Congress to authorize the transfer of the Postal Service’s money estimated to be between $50 billion and $75 billion overpaid in the Civil Service Retirement System transferred into the PSRHBF.

http://my.firedoglake.com/mmonk/2011/08/19/the-pre-funding-mandate-bringing-down-the-american-postal-workers-union/

‘Right to work’ laws increase poverty, decrease productivity

By Darrell Minor, Columbus State Community College

 According to 2009 data, the GDP per capita for worker-friendly states collectively was $43,899, while the GDP per capita for the RTW states was $38,755 or 13.3 percent lower. It is worth emphasizing that GDP represents goods and services produced, and is not the same as per capita income. Thus, the initial analysis of this measure indicates that the worker-friendly states appear to be significantly “more productive” than the RTW states.

Poverty rates: Obviously a state with a high standard of living would be expected to have fewer residents living in poverty. Using U.S. Census income data, and applying it to the two groups of states, we find again that RTW states have a lower standard of living. Eleven of the 15 states with the highest poverty rates are RTW states, while nine of the 11 states with the lowest are worker-friendly. Furthermore, the percentage of the 2008 population living in poverty in RTW states was 14.4 percent, while the percentage in worker-friendly states was 12.4 percent. To put this difference in perspective, if the rate of poverty in RTW states was extended across the nation, an additional 3,670,000 American men, women, and children would be living in poverty today.

Health insurance: One would expect that a state with a high standard of living would have more of its citizens covered by basic health insurance, giving them access to preventive care and swift medical treatment. And, once again, the Census data show that the worker-friendly states have a higher standard of living. Fully 11 of the 13 states with the lowest uninsured rates are worker-friendly states, while 11 of the 15 states with the highest uninsured rates are RTW states. The median uninsured rate for worker-friendly states is 12.6 percent, while for RTW it is 15.7 percent. Again, to put this in perspective, if the rates of non-insured citizens in RTW states were spread across the country, then an additional 8,640,480 Americans would be uninsured and suffer a lack of access to affordable health care.

Life expectancy: While there may seem to be little reason for a correlation to exist between RTW laws and the life expectancy of citizens in those states, life expectancy data from the Harvard School of Public Health was included here because it is a very common measure of standard of living. And, as it turns out, the data reveal a surprising trend. Of the 13 states with the highest life expectancy rates, 10 are worker-friendly states. Conversely, of the 12 states with the lowest life-expectancy rates, only two are worker-friendly states. In worker-friendly states, citizens can expect to live 77.6 years (the median), while citizens in RTW states can expect to die at 76.7.

http://neatoday.org/2012/08/14/right-to-work-laws-increase-poverty-decrease-productivity/

Jon Stewart: ‘Right-to-work’ like strip bars calling themselves gentlemen’s clubs

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Warren Buffet: A minimum tax for the the wealthy

Millionaires and billionaires shouldn’t be able to lobby their way out of paying their share of America’s bills.

Warren Buffet | newyorktimes.com | 25 Nov 2012

"...we need Congress, right now, to enact a minimum tax on high incomes. I would suggest 30 percent of taxable income between $1 million and $10 million, and 35 percent on amounts above that.

"A plain and simple rule like that will block the efforts of lobbyists, lawyers and contribution-hungry legislators to keep the ultrarich paying rates well below those incurred by people with income just a tiny fraction of ours. Only a minimum tax on very high incomes will prevent the stated tax rate from being eviscerated by these warriors for the wealthy.

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Johnny Winter - "Be Careful With A Fool" (1969)

Secessionists can self-secede by renouncing their citizenship

Gary Norton @ Daily Kos
14 November 2012

Federal law provides an easy process for people to renounce their citizenship. There are a few requirements, but they are easily met. All they have to do is appear in person before a U.S. consular or diplomatic officer in a foreign country (normally at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate) and sign an oath of renunciation.

Sure they will have to pay all the taxes they owe and a special tax penalty under the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2008. But that's a tiny price to pay for freedom from the United States and its evil Kenyan, Socialist, post hoc colonial, communist President and all those who voted for him.

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Pat Robertson excuses Petraeus, blames Broadwell for affair