California Free Press

France's 'Toughest' Budget: Super Tax on the Super Rich

Published on Friday, September 28, 2012 by Common Dreams

New budget released Friday has 75% tax on millionaires, still commits to spending cuts

- Common Dreams staff

France unveiled on Friday what it describes as its toughest budget ever, which includes a 75% tax on millionaires in an attempt to tackle its deficit.

France unveiled on Friday a new budget that includes a 75% tax on millionaires. (photo: badlyricpolice via Flickr) "It's a combat budget to fight against a debt that only continues to increase and that rests on the shoulders of French taxpayers and generations to come," Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Friday morning.

The Guardian notes that the new "suptertax," a two-year 75% tax rate on earned income for people earning more than €1m a year, "is expected to hit only 2,000 taxpayers. A new 45% income tax band is to be introduced for those earning more than €150,000 a year."

"We're asking the wealthiest taxpayers to make an effort," Ayrault added after a cabinet meeting. "As for companies, we're bringing back justice. CAC-40 firms pay less taxes than small companies…now we're asking them to contribute."

But the budget also includes austerity measures for France's middle class.  CNN reports that "A third of the savings will come from cuts to public spending."  The BBC notes that the cuts to public spending are set to increase:  "While the cuts in 2013 will be two-thirds comprised of tax increases and one-third from spending cuts, the government said that from 2014 it would be divided equally."

The Guardian adds that the budget also "commits the government to an austerity program that will be unpopular with leftwingers in the party, at a time when unemployment is rising and the economy teeters on the brink of recession." Economist Nouriel Roubini remarked that President "Hollande was not elected by his base to pursue austerity and reforms, but rather to boost growth and hiring in the public sector." 

The government's goal to cut the annual deficit to the eurozone limit of 3% of GDP next year won't come without growth, Pierre Laurent, national secretary of the French Communist party, says, and adds that "the budget will rather worsen the situation, because we know that the current austerity recipe is pushing the economy into a recession."

* * *

What Mitt Romney Really Represents

by Robert Reich

Friday, September 21, 2012

It’s not just his giant income or the low tax rates he pays on it. And it’s not just the videotape of him berating almost half of America, or his endless gaffes, or his regressive budget policies.

It’s something that unites all of this, and connects it to the biggest underlying problem America faces — the unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the very top that’s undermining our economy and destroying our democracy.

Romney just released his 2011 tax returns, showing he paid $1.9 million in taxes on more than $13 million of income last year — for an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent. (He released his 2010 return in January, showing he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent.)

America has had hugely wealthy presidents before — think of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt; or John F. Kennedy, beneficiary of father Joe’s fortune.

But here’s the difference. These men were champions of the working class and the poor, and were considered traitors to their own class. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the “malefactors of great wealth,” and he busted up the oil and railroad trusts.

FDR thundered against the “economic royalists,” raised taxes on the wealthy, and gave average working people the right to form unions — along with Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour workweek.

But Mitt Romney is not a traitor to his class. He is a sponsor of his class. He wants to cut their taxes by $3.7 trillion over the next decade, and hasn’t even specified what “loopholes” he’d close to make up for this gigantic giveaway.

And he wants to cut benefits that almost everyone else relies on — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and housing assistance.

He’s even a warrior for his class, telling his wealthy followers his job isn’t to worry about the “47 percent” of Americans who won’t vote for him, whom he calls “victims” and he berates for not paying federal incomes taxes and taking federal handouts.

(He mangles these facts, of course. Almost all working Americans pay federal taxes — and the federal taxes that have been rising fastest for most people are Social Security payroll taxes, which aren’t collected on a penny of income over $110,100. Moreover, most of the “47 percent” whom he accuses of taking handouts are on Medicare or Social Security — the biggest “entitlement” programs — which, not incidentally, they paid into during their working lives.)

Money means power. Concentrated wealth at the top means extraordinary power at the top. The reason Romney pays a rate of only 14 percent on $13 million of income in 2011 — a lower rate than many in the middle class — is because he exploits a loophole that allows private equity managers to treat their income as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent. 

And that loophole exists solely because private equity and hedge fund managers have so much political clout — as a result of their huge fortunes and the money they’ve donated to political candidates — that neither party will remove it.

In other words, everything America is learning about Mitt Romney — his tax returns, his years at Bain Capital, the video of his speech to high-end donors in which he belittles half of America, his gaffes, the budget policies he promotes — repeat and reenforce the same underlying reality.  

So much wealth and power have accumulated at the top of America that our economy and our democracy are seriously threatened. Romney not only represents this problem. He is the living embodiment of it.

The Fed's Quantitative Easing Policy: What's in it For You?

by John Lawrence 

from the San Diego Free Press

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, has been in the business of printing money. His program is euphemistically called "Quantitative Easing (QE)." In September 2012 Bernanke announced QE3 in which the Fed would purchase $40 billion of mortgage backed securities per month indefinitely. There had been QE1 and QE2 previously, which were one time injections of capital into the nations' money supply. All theses QEs have resulted in one thing: interest rates have been brought down to practically zero. This may be great for people wanting to buy a car or a house, but for savers, like senior citizens, they have been robbed from gaining any interest on their savings accounts. They might as well have put their money in their mattresses. However, the interest that the nation pays on its national debt has certainly been minimized and this has given the US budget deficit, already enormous, a little break.

The purpose of the Federal Reserve is to pursue full employment and stable prices. In practice the only thing the Fed can do to promote full employment is to lower interest rates in the hopes that people will borrow and spend more money. It can promote stable prices by raising interest rates in order to put a damper on inflation. However, inflation is not the present problem. Employment is. QE injects money into the economy at the top in the hopes that it will trickle down to the average person in terms of consumer loans. The general idea of QE is that the Fed buys up financial assets, injects capital into the big banks and lowers interest rates. This should get the economy moving again by encouraging people to borrow money. Only it has not worked out that way. Instead the money injected at the top of the economy, just like the Bush tax breaks for the rich, has resulted in making more money available for speculation.

At the street level the average person has been reluctant to go into even more debt by taking out more loans. This is why Bernanke has been practically begging the Congress to implement a fiscal policy to complement the Fed's monetary policy. A fiscal policy would mean that the Federal government would have to borrow money or go into more debt and then spend that money into the economy in terms of such projects as infrastructure development. A fiscal policy such as this would result in the injection of capital at a lower level than the Big Banks as construction workers would be hired lowering unemployment and presumably increasing GDP. They then might be more willing to take out a car loan, for example. Since the private sector isn't hiring to any great extent, it remains for the government to act as employer of last resort. The only problem is that conservative politicians are deadset against any expansion of government or any increase in government debt, in short, any stimulus. That leaves the situation in a stalemate with Ben Bernanke vainly trying to increase employment by giving money to people who don't need it. This is the policy that Republicans also want to pursue through the tax code: reduce taxes on the rich in the hopes that they will create jobs.

The problem is that neither of these policies - tax breaks for the rich or printing money and giving it to the rich - has worked. Both of these policies inject money into the top of the economy, into the hands of the wealthiest people. Both of these policies are debt based: fiscal policy increases the US national debt by having the government issue more Treasury bonds while getting people to borrow more money to increase GDP increases consumer debt. Ellen Brown critiques the whole idea of a debt based economy in her path breaking book, Web of Debt. She suggests that, instead of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, being privately owned, Congress itself should own the nation's central bank ^i.e. the central bank should be publicly owned. All the money that Ben Bernanke prints is fiat money. That is it's not backed by gold or anything else. A dollar is worth a dollar just because the government says it is. So instead of Ben Bernanke's "helicopter money" (another name for quantitative easing which is just dropping money out of the sky), the government itself could issue the fiat money. That way no interest would be involved! The money would just be spent into the economy. When the government issues bonds that are bought up by the Federal Reserve (quantitative easing), it has to pay interest. If the government, instead of the Federal Reserve, issues the fiat money, it doesn't. Because the government and the Federal Reserve have to go through the big Wall Street banks, the banks profit and the people go into debt. If the American people owned the nation's central bank, Wall Street profits and citizens' debts could be eliminated or at least drastically reduced.

The American government has in the past issued its own fiat money. Abraham Lincoln issued fiat money, Greenbacks, that were used to win the Civil War, build the transcontinental railroad and provide the Land Grant colleges. Greenbacks were fiat money, totally. They weren't backed by gold. In the process he saved the nation an estimated $4 billion in interest. Other countries' central banks are owned by their governments, for instance, Japan and China. Even the European Central Bank is publicly owned. Publicly owned central banks can increase the money supply without incurring ever more debt.

As Ellen Brown states on p. 384 of "Web of Debt,":

Debt-free government-created money was the financial system that got the country through the American Revolution and the Civil War; the system endorsed by Franklin, Jefferson and Lincoln; the system that Henry Clay, Henry Carey and the American Nationalists called the "American system." The government could simply acknowledge that it was pumping money into the economy. It could explain that the economy needs the government's money to prevent a dollar collapse, and that the cheapest and most honest way to do it is by creating the money directly and then spending it on projects that "promote the general welfare." Laundering the money through non-producing middlemen is giving the people's Constitutionally-ordained money-creating power away.

To summarize, the Fed's quantitative easing only enriches the big banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase who use the money to speculate. It does little for the average person including savers who are not able to get any return on their savings. Government money could have been used to bail out under water mortgagees; instead it was used to bail out Wall Street. A central bank that created fiat money and then spent it into the economy to do infrastructure rebuilding and improvement would do more to increase employment and raise GDP than the schemes that the Federal Reserve Bank and the Congress are now capable of because it would inject money at the bottom of the economy and not the top. Currently, both US fiscal policy and US monetary policy are flops.

Is the End of Monsanto Near? Prop 37 Succeeding as Nations Ban GMO Crops

by Anthony Gucciardi

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Saturday 29 September 2012 by Nation of Change

“After the study not only did France call for a potential worldwide ban on GMOs pending the results of their in-depth analysis, but Russia’s major consumer rights organization announced a ban on both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn.”

Is the end of Monsanto within reach? It has certainly been a rough couple of weeks for the mega corporation as the real dangers surrounding GMOs are being brought to the attention of consumers on a global scale like never before. It all started with the monumental French study finding a serious link between the consumption of Monsanto’s Roundup-drenched GMOs and massive tumors. Being called the ‘most thorough’ research ever published on the real health effects of GMOs, the study led to even larger victories.

After the study not only did France call for a potential worldwide ban on GMOs pending the results of their in-depth analysis, but Russia’s major consumer rights organization announced a ban on both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn.

Prop 37 Can Label Monsanto Out of Existence

And now, the Proposition to label all GMOs in the state of California is showing massive success. If Prop 37 passes, it won’t just affect California. It is very likely that other states will not just take note, but adopt similar legislation. Through this legal mechanism, we can essential label Monsanto out of existence.  This is possible when considering that the average consumer is actually opposed to GMOs and heavily in favor of proper labeling.

In a major Los Angeles Times poll, registered California voters in favor of labeling outnumber pro-GMO voters by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Altogether, a whopping 61% of those polled reported supporting the Prop 37 labeling initiative. Only 25% reported opposing it.

If GMO-containing products are properly labeled, the simple fact of the matter is that less people will buy them. As of right now, very few people are even aware of what they are putting in their mouth. In fact, if the public knew that they were consuming GMOs which were linked to massive tumors and organ failure, the overwhelming majority would abandon such products. Without labeling, however, they have no idea. The same can also be said for other ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and aspartame.

As Yes on 37 campaign manager Gary Ruskin explains:

“Monsanto, DuPont, and Coca-Cola do not want Californians to know what’s really in their food and drinks, because they fear consumers will turn away from their genetically engineered ingredients and pesticides that go with them.”

If they knew they were eating mercury in the HFCS and consuming an artificial sweetener with over 42 associated diseases, then major change would occur – change that includes forcing manufacturers to abandon these ingredients in order to stay profitable. And after all, Monsanto’s number one goal is profit. This is a company that has been caught running ‘slave-like’ working conditions in which ‘employees’ were forced to buy only from the company store and were not allowed to leave the area or their pay would be withheld.

If Monsanto’s profits were to plummet, their political reign would likely follow as well. Without an endless amount of cash to throw at crushing Prop 37, already contributing $4 million to fuel anti-labeling propaganda in California, the corporation’s massive grasp on the world of science (continually censoring studies and funding pro-GM research) and politics would virtually cease to exist.

It is essential that we ensure the passing of Prop 37 in a bid to generate the literal end of Monsanto. Once consumers actually know that they’re putting genetically modified creations into their body, real change will occur within the food supply.

Russia Bans Use and Import of Monsanto's GMO Corn Following Study

by Anthony Gucciardi

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Thursday 27 September 2012 in Nation of Change

“With Russia now acting to secure food safety, many other nations will surely follow.”

Following the ground- breaking French study that graphically linked the lifetime consumption of Monsanto’s GMO corn in rats to massive tumors and direct organ failure, Russia’s premiere consumers rights organization has suspended both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn within the nation’s borders.

The move may soon be echoed by other nations, who may soon be urged by France to ban Monsanto’s GMOs due to serious health concerns. France, who also recently upheld a key ban on growing GMOs, has been instrumental in alerting the world to the dangers of GMOs and Monsanto’s overall corruption. In the nation’s latest announcement, it was revealed that France’s Agriculture Minister was launching an investigation into the GMO study, ultimately calling for European authorities to ban Monsanto’s GMOs in order to protect citizens in the event that the study was found to be sound.

It seems that France has become somewhat of a consumer health watchdog in more than just one area, simultaneously tackling the issue of pesticide contamination as well. It was even announced that the French government was seeking to ban crop dusters in all areas possible, aiming to reduce the amount of obesity-linked pesticides within the food supply.

Monsanto Still Clinging to Old GMO Mantra

Meanwhile, Monsanto is continuing to stick to its tired statements regarding the ‘safety’ of its GMO crops and Roundup herbicide. Instead of discussing not only the French study finding that the company’s GMOs led to horrendous tumors that led to rats literally dragging them along the ground as they walked, they claim that the information ‘does not warrant’ any concern at all from European officials. Just as Monsanto (and the US government) ignored evidence linking Roundup to DNA damage and infertility, it appears they intend to do it once more and hope that it all goes away.

Unfortunately for Monsanto, it’s not going away this time.

With Russia now acting to secure food safety, many other nations will surely follow. While the United States may continue to ignore the issues surrounding GMOs and Monsanto’s blatant disregard for human health (they were caught running ‘slave-like’ working rings, after all), many foreign nations will not. Countries like Poland, Peru, and Hungary have already taken action in banning or removing Monsanto’s GMO crops. And even in the United States grassroots movements have spawned bills like Proposition 37 – the monumental bill in California that seeks to label GMOs.

Michael Hudson: QE3 Another Fed Giveaway to the Banks

 

Bill McKibben’s Rolling Stone Article Was a Hit — So Why Didn’t It Make a Splash?

Published on Thursday, September 20, 2012 by Earth Island Journal

by Jason Mark

Have you seen the numbers on Bill McKibben’s numbers? If you follow environment-related news (and even if you don’t), there’s a good chance you’ve read Bill McKibben’s recent Rolling Stone article, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math. I know this because of the numbers displayed right below the article’s headline: 112k Facebook likes, more than 12,000 mentions on Twitter, 7,300 Stumble Upon tags, and nearly 5,000 reader comments. “Wickedly viral,” is how the New England-dwelling McKibben has described the response to the piece.McKibben’s article was a success because many people are hungry to hear the cold, hard truth about global warming.

“After the article came out, a Rolling Stone editor called up Bill and said they had never seen anything like it,” a 350.org staffer, Daniel Kessler, told me recently. Mark Neschis, a spokesperson for Wenner Media (the publishing group that owns RS), was coy about discussing readership stats with me. “We don’t really get too much in[to] specifics about traffic,” he wrote in response to questions about the article. But Neschis did acknowledge that the article “was the top performing story on our site the month it came out.”

Without firm statistics from Wenner Media, figuring out the exact number of people who read the story is difficult. Still, the social media tags provide an indicator of the article’s success. I can’t find any other recent Rolling Stone story that even comes close. The magazine’s damning expose of Stanley McChrystal, “The Runaway General,” has less than a thousand thumbs-ups. Matt Taibbi’s take-no-prisoners lashing of Goldman Sachs, with its infamous line comparing the investment bank to “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” earned 15,000 Facebook likes. The only American magazine articles (excluding celebrity coverage) I can find that are in the same league are Jane Mayer’s unveiling of the Koch Brothers in The New Yorker (122k likes), and the much discussed, and much derided, Atlantic essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All (201k Facebook shares).

At the risk of hyberbole, it appears that McKibben’s Rolling Stone article is among the most widely read single articles on climate change … ever.

The success of “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” raises a couple of important questions for climate justice campaigners, climate scientists, and journalists covering climate change and the environment. First, why exactly did McKibben’s piece go viral? And, given its success, why was it greeted with such a yawn by the mainstream media?

[McKibben's article] is a long read with a short point: we’re in deep shit.

To answer the first question, it’s important to note that McKibben enjoys some advantages most environmental journalists don’t. For starters, he wrote the first popular book on global warming, The End of Nature, more than 20 years ago, giving him unmatched credibility on the issue. Probably more important, he has a global grassroots movement, 350.org, at his back. I don’t know of any other writers who can write an article and then blast it out to a 300,000-plus email list. 

But something else is going on besides the mechanics of twenty first-century social media maneuvering. Clearly the article touched a chord in people. The piece provided a candid assessment of our environmental predicament and, in doing so, delivered to readers something they rarely get from national media outlets: Real talk about the unfolding climate change catastrophe.

McKibben’s tone is bleak from the outset — terrifying math — and over the course of more than 6,000 words he barely lets up from the bad news. With global temperatures rising and vast stores of fossil fuels waiting to be tapped, we are in a “precarious —… almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless — position.” McKibben goes on to report that “among scientists speaking off the record, disgusted candor is the rule.” He is also unforgiving to the environmental movement to which he belongs, and notes, rightly, that all the efforts to stem greenhouse gas emissions have added up to a “record of failure.” This is a long read with a short point: we’re in deep shit.

So, why, given all of this gloom-and-doom, did the article become such a success? Because it was honest about the danger we are in. At some level, most people understand that climate change is a serious threat we need to address. The extreme weather of the past year has only made the danger more obvious than ever. And yet the danger is all-but-ignored by our political leadership. McKibben makes this point himself at the very beginning of the article when he writes: “We're losing the fight, badly and quickly — losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.” So it feels like a tonic when someone comes along and punctures the bubble of willful ignorance that smothers discussions of climate change. McKibben’s article was a success because many people are hungry to hear the cold, hard truth about global warming.

Yes, you can find this kind of sobering analysis other places (tip o’ the hat to Joe Romm, Dave Roberts, Justin Gillis, Elizabeth Kolbert, climatologist Ken Caldeira, and all the climate activists out there — you know who you are). But it’s all-too-rare. Most American politicians, ever-cautious, don’t want to touch to the issue. They’re afraid of angering the all-powerful energy lobby or of alienating voters. (The second concern is unfounded, as you can see here.) Most scientists understand the risks we face, but scientists are conservative by nature, preferring to arrive at consensus among their peers before making clear-cut conclusions. Few scientists are willing to sound an alarm bell; they move at a glacial pace, even as the glaciers are melting. Who’s left to tell the people about the predicament we’re in? A mild-mannered writer’s writer.

McKibben’s makes clear that we have a responsibility to address the climate change challenge: “this is, at bottom, a moral issue.” Despite the often-glum tone of the article, McKibben remains hopeful that we can come together to confront this threat. And, perhaps most importantly, McKibben isn’t shy about naming and blaming the culprit of this unfolding crime against humanity: the fossil fuel industry.

The importance of naming an enemy can’t be overstated. To fuel a fighting faith — which is what building a movement is all about — you need to have an adversary. For too long, too many of us (including the greenest of greens) have assumed that when it comes to global climate change, the enemy is industrial society, or the economy, or human nature itself. Supposedly we keep guzzling gas for the same reason we keep drinking Coke, even though we know it’s bad for us: because it tastes good. McKibben offers a counter-narrative: We keep guzzling gas because there are a handful of mega corporations that stand to lose trillions of dollars (yes, you read that right) if we were to put a price on carbon. He couldn’t be clearer. The fossil fuel industry “is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.”

Sure, all kinds of bloggers and NGO-istas have made this case before. But rarely do you see this kind of language in a magazine you can buy in the airport.

• • •

Mitt Romney: A Corporation Masquerading as a Person for President

Published on Thursday, September 20, 2012 by Common Dreams

Recently released video shows not a series of gaffes, but the real Romney

by Ralph Nader

There was something missing from the release of a tape showing Mitt Romney pandering to fat cats in Boca Raton, Florida with these very inflammatory words: “There are 47 percent who are with him, (Obama) who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. These are people who pay no income tax.” Romney said his job “is not to worry about those people.”Mr. Romney, says Nader, doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” (Photo: AP)

Hey, Mitt, why start with the 47 percent? Fully 100 percent of the nation’s 500 biggest corporations are dependent on various kinds of corporate welfare – subsidies, giveaways, bailouts, waivers, and other dazzling preferences – while many pay no tax at all on very substantial profits (see their familiar names – General Electric, Pepco, Verizon etc. – here).

Are the corporations that receive this corporate welfare going to vote for President Obama? (Mr. Romney has declared that corporations are people.) Of course they’re not. Nor are all of the 47 percent of people who are “dependent upon government.”

Mr. Romney doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” Romney has lost control of his self-consciousness. Here is a man who talks about 47 percent of American households paying no income taxes (more on this later) while he has refused, unlike his father, to release back years of tax returns because they’ll show he has parked much of his wealth and income in foreign tax havens like the Bahamas precisely in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Indeed, as tax expert and former New York Times Pulitzer prize-winner David Cay Johnston said on Democracy Now, Romney has maneuvered the tax laws so that his five sons will continue to receive millions of tax-free dollars from their parents’ enormous pot of wealth.

Why aren’t the big-time Democrats making much more of an issue of this “make or break” Romney campaign vulnerability? Maybe it is because, as author Kevin Phillips once said, “The Republicans go for the jugulars while the Democrats go for the capillaries.”

Essentially, Mitt Romney is a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.

Now, either ignorance, callousness or both infected Mitt Romney’s pejorative characterizations of the “government dependent” 47 percent with victim mentalities who believe that they are entitled to the government providing them the necessities of life without paying income tax. Let’s see who these people are in these recessionary times. Unemployed Americans. Americans who are too poor to pay income taxes. Elderly Americans who live on their social security checks from money for which they spent their decades of working years paying. Americans using the “earned income tax credit,” so vigorously supported and extended by President Ronald Reagan. And disabled Americans who have no dollars for any income tax.

What do many of the 47 percent pay to the government? They pay payroll taxes for social security and Medicare, federal fees and state and local taxes on their property, and sales taxes.

The avarice of Romney and his buddies at the strip-mining, job-exporting, bankrupting private equity company called Bain Capital has no bounds. He thinks it’s perfectly fine for companies like Verizon, Boeing, Duke Energy, Navistar, Wells Fargo and Pepco to use all of our country’s government funded public infrastructures and services, and yet not only pay no income tax but actually rig the tax system so they can get billions back in “benefits” from the U.S. Treasury, as General Electric has done for years. At the same time, Romney never speaks out against 35,000 super-wealthy Americans who also do not pay any federal income tax. He rarely questions crony capitalism, wants to maintain an even bigger bloated military budget, and spearheads the many-sided supremacy of corporations over real people throughout our entire political economy. He is, essentially, a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.

If the Democrats are anything but inept and defeatist, they will wrap Romney around Congressman Paul Ryan, his vice-presidential nominee, and recover the Congress in November. The Romney-Ryan campaign is now hanging by a few threads, unmasked even before those millions of American voters who dutifully vote for politicians who disrespect and betray their economic plight and political powerlessness once in office.

The so-called presidential debates are coming up (see Open Debates.org). Let’s see if President Obama thinks it is fair play to recall Mr. Romney’s words and put his underlying real values on the table before tens of millions of viewers.

Romney’s excursus in Boca Raton was not a gaffe. It was the inner Romney, raised by good Romneys but braised by the fevered extremists in his party who have asserted that today Ronald Reagan himself would not receive their vote.

(Kudos to David Corn and Mother Jones magazine for bringing the Romney tape to the American people.)

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.

Disdain for Workers

Published on Friday, September 21, 2012 by The New York Times

by Paul Krugman

By now everyone knows how Mitt Romney, speaking to donors in Boca Raton, washed his hands of almost half the country — the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes — declaring, “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” By now, also, many people are aware that the great bulk of the 47 percent are hardly moochers; most are working families who pay payroll taxes, and elderly or disabled Americans make up a majority of the rest

But here’s the question: Should we imagine that Mr. Romney and his party would think better of the 47 percent on learning that the great majority of them actually are or were hard workers, who very much have taken personal responsibility for their lives? And the answer is no.

For the fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn’t have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party’s affection is reserved for “job creators,” a k a employers and investors. Leading figures in the party find it hard even to pretend to have any regard for ordinary working families — who, it goes without saying, make up the vast majority of Americans..

Am I exaggerating? Consider the Twitter message sent out by Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, on Labor Day — a holiday that specifically celebrates America’s workers. Here’s what it said, in its entirety: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yes, on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.

Lest you think that this was just a personal slip, consider Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. What did he have to say about American workers? Actually, nothing: the words “worker” or “workers” never passed his lips. This was in strong contrast to President Obama’s convention speech a week later, which put a lot of emphasis on workers — especially, of course, but not only, workers who benefited from the auto bailout.

And when Mr. Romney waxed rhapsodic about the opportunities America offered to immigrants, he declared that they came in pursuit of “freedom to build a business.” What about those who came here not to found businesses, but simply to make an honest living? Not worth mentioning.

Needless to say, the G.O.P.’s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party’s policy priorities. Mr. Romney’s remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as “lucky duckies.”

What really needs cutting, the right believes, are taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, dividends, and very high salaries — that is, taxes that fall on investors and executives, not ordinary workers. This despite the fact that people who derive their income from investments, not wages — people like, say, Willard Mitt Romney — already pay remarkably little in taxes.

Where does this disdain for workers come from? Some of it, obviously, reflects the influence of money in politics: big-money donors, like the ones Mr. Romney was speaking to when he went off on half the nation, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. But it also reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.

In the eyes of those who share this vision, the wealthy deserve special treatment, and not just in the form of low taxes. They must also receive respect, indeed deference, at all times. That’s why even the slightest hint from the president that the rich might not be all that — that, say, some bankers may have behaved badly, or that even “job creators” depend on government-built infrastructure — elicits frantic cries that Mr. Obama is a socialist.

Now, such sentiments aren’t new; “Atlas Shrugged” was, after all, published in 1957. In the past, however, even Republican politicians who privately shared the elite’s contempt for the masses knew enough to keep it to themselves and managed to fake some appreciation for ordinary workers. At this point, however, the party’s contempt for the working class is apparently too complete, too pervasive to hide.

The point is that what people are now calling the Boca Moment wasn’t some trivial gaffe. It was a window into the true attitudes of what has become a party of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy, a party that considers the rest of us unworthy of even a pretense of respect.

© 2012 The New York Times

Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, The Return of Depression Economics, and his most recent, End This Depression Now!.

First Long-term GE Food Study Results Are In And They’re Not Pretty

By Genna Reed

from Food & Water Watch, September 19, 2012

Because of restrictions in technology use agreements, researchers are often unable to get access to seeds for independent feeding trials to test the safety of genetically engineered (GE) food and animal feed. One of the few scientists that has succeeded in obtaining seed and doing longer term feeding studies on rats is Gilles-Eric Séralini and his team from the University of Caen’s Institute of Biology in France.

His new two-year feeding study was just published in the most recent issue of the peer-reviewed academic journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology. Past studies were cited in our GE Foods Overview report including a 2007 study, which found significant liver and kidney impairment of rats that were fed insect-resistant Bt corn, concluding that, “with the present data it cannot be concluded that GE corn MON863 is a safe product.” Another study published in 2009 found that glyphosate caused DNA damage to human cells even at lower exposure levels than those recommended by the herbicide’s manufacturer.

Séralini’s newest research is incredibly significant because it is the longest feeding trial performed on animals fed GE crops, involves 200 rats which is the highest number of rats examined in a GE diet study, measures more metabolic differences through blood and urine sampling during the rats’ lifespans and uses the total formulation of Roundup on the feed, as opposed to just the active ingredient of glyphosate.

Some of the shocking findings of this chronic rat feeding study include:

• Female rats fed Roundup ready GE corn developed mammary tumors caused by the disruptive effects of Roundup on the female reproductive hormone, estrogen.
• Both male and female rats fed GE feed had severe liver and kidney damage, and the damage was not necessarily dose dependent. The symptoms were similar for animals fed high and low diets of GE corn.
• 50 percent of males and 70 percent of females died prematurely compared with 30 percent and 20 percent of the control group (rats fed a non-GE diet).
• In groups treated with trace Roundup levels in their water, 70 to 80 percent of the rats had 1.4-2.4 times more abnormalities in their pituitary glands than the controls. The pituitary gland is a vital hormone-producing part of the brain responsible or controlling signals for growth, metabolism, stress and fertility.
• The first detectable tumors occurred 4-7 months into the study, which shows the need for feeding studies longer than just 90 days!

The status quo for GE food safety testing is unacceptable. Biotech companies are only required to complete 90 day rat feeding trials to determine the relative safety of their GE crops, a period which only represents up to early adulthood. Without long-term studies on the health effects of GE crops, consumers are basically serving as guinea pigs. This lack of research must be acknowledged and turned into a priority for the USDA and FDA before any new GE crops are approved.

This latest study sheds a critical light on the inherent dangers of GE crops designed to withstand chemical pesticides and herbicides, like Roundup, and makes mandatory labeling even that more vital. Join Food & Water Watch’s LET ME DECIDE campaign and sign this petition to tell your state and federal elected officials to require labeling for all GE foods.

Who’s Deceiving Whom? Push to Label GMO Foods Frightens Big Ag Interests

Published on Friday, September 21, 2012 by Food & Water Watch Blog

by Anna Ghosh

Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Pepsi and Coke are scared. They’re afraid that California’s proposition 37 to make labeling of genetically engineered foods mandatory will end their unchecked, unquestioned power to hide GE ingredients in the majority processed foods without their customers’ knowledge. Which is why they’ve poured millions into an anti-Prop 37 propaganda campaign they’re calling “Stop the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme.” But who’s deceiving who?

These corporations have enjoyed the transgenic food version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” that lax regulation has afforded them for more than two decades. During this time, GE ingredients have permeated the vast majority of our food supply with little independent, long-term scientific scrutiny (Finally this week, the first long-term peer-reviewed study on GE food was released and the results are frightening). Proposition 37 and several other statewide mandatory labeling initiatives in the works are about giving the power of information back to consumers and ending the tyranny that large corporations have had over our food supply.

But first, let’s dispel some of the top myths that the “Stop the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme” front group has been busy spinning.

Myth #1: GE labeling will mean higher food costs.

TRUTH: Opponents of labeling claim that mandatory GE food labeling would increase food costs for the average family by $600 to $825 per year, but since the opponents are the ones doing the analysis, it’s not surprising that they’re grossly overestimated. On the contrary, an impartial consulting firm did a study in 2001 for the U.K. Food Standards Agency and found that GE labeling would increase a household’s annual food spending by only 0.01 to 0.17 percent — a very small figure ranging from an increase of $.33 to $5.58 in 2010 real U.S. dollars (inflation-adjusted) annually. Plus, food companies change their labels all the time (New and Improved! Heart Healthy!).

Myth #2: GE labeling means more bureaucracy and taxpayer costs.

TRUTH: The monitoring and enforcement required for mandatory labeling doesn’t have to be difficult as long as
all players participated in labeling along all steps of the food chain. Federal and state agencies could simply add GE labeling to existing food labeling requirements that they already assess during compliance inspections.

Myth #3: GE labeling would burden grocers and retailers with mountains of paperwork.

TRUTH: Changing food labeling to indicate the presence of a GE ingredient wouldn’t be any different for grocery stores than stocking a product that has changed its ingredients or added a nutritional-benefit claim to the package. For foods that the store handles (such as produce or some meat that is repackaged on site), retailers will have to be sure that GE and non-GE products are kept separately and labeled as such, just like they currently do with country-of-origin and pricing information.

Myth #4: It is not the responsibility of the states to create food-labeling requirements.

TRUTH: States often lead the way when the federal government is too slow, too gridlocked or too weak to take action. Long before the United States enacted a mandatory Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) policy, eight states required this labeling on their own. Renewable energy standards are a good example – California has been building its renewable energy program since 1998 and today leads the country in renewable energy use and is the standard other states strive to match. Hopefully California will also lead the country in establishing mandatory GE labeling when a majority of Californians vote for Prop 37 this November.

Myth #5: GE labeling conflicts with science.

TRUTH: This one couldn’t be further from the truth. The chronic effects of eating GE foods are still largely unknown. And without labeling of GE foods, we cannot associate any health problems with people who ate them — because we do not know who ate them. Since the FDA has no way to track adverse health effects in people consuming GE foods, and because there is no requirement that food containing GE ingredients be labeled, there is no effective way to gather data on health problems that may be happening. Science is all about knowledge, testing and discovery. GE labels will only increase everyone’s knowledge and institute a system whereby more testing and track-back is available to trace the possible health problems that could arise through ingesting certain GE ingredients.

MYTH #6: California’s Proposition 37 will result in frivolous lawsuits.

TRUTH: According to the California Right to Know Campaign, the lawsuits argument is a red herring. Food companies accurately label for calories, fat content and other information required by law; likewise they will abide by the requirements of Prop 37. According to an independent legal analysis by James Cooper, JD, PhD, of George Mason University School of Law, Proposition 37 is unlikely to result in frivolous lawsuits.

MYTH #7: Prop. 37 would prohibit processed foods from being marketed as “natural.” 

TRUTH: According to the California Right to Know Campaign, Proposition 37 applies only to genetically engineered foods, not other foods. Processed foods such as canned olives could still be marketed as “natural” as long as the food is not genetically engineered.

The fight to make GE labels the law is a battle of more information vs. less. These corporations are not spending millions for our benefit. They are spending millions to protect their profits and maintain the status quo of keeping it customers in the dark. To learn more, read Food & Water Watch’s latest fact sheet: How Much Will Labeling Genetically Engineered Foods Really Cost and join the campaign to make GE labels the law.

© 2012 Food & Water Watch

Anna Ghosh is a writer and activist for environmental causes and sustainable food. She is a co-founder of the Kitchen Table Talks discussion series and was on the Slow Food Nation communications advisory committee. She is currently the Western Region Communications Manager for the consumer advocacy non-profit Food & Water Watch.

Four Reasons Why Romney Might Still Win

by Robert Reich

Thursday, September 20, 2012

 

Can Romney possibly recover? A survey conducted between Sept. 12 and Sept. 16 by the Pew Research Center — before the “47 percent victim” video came to light – showed Obama ahead of Romney 51% to 43% among likely voters.

That’s the biggest margin in the September survey prior to a presidential election since Bill Clinton led Bob Dole, 50% to 38% in 1996.

And, remember, this recent poll was done before America watched Romney belittle almost half the nation.

For the last several days I’ve been deluged with calls from my inside-the-beltway friends telling me “Romney’s dead.”

Hold it. Rumors of Romney’s demise are premature for at least four reasons:

1.  Between now and Election Day come two jobs reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics – October 5 and November 2. If they’re as bad as the last report, showing only 96,000 jobs added in August (125,000 are needed just to keep up with population growth) and the lowest percentage of employed adults since 1981, Romney’s claim the economy is off track becomes more credible, and Obama’s that it’s on the mend harder to defend.

With gas prices rising, corporate profits shrinking, most of Europe in recession, Japan still a basket case, and the Chinese economy slowing, the upcoming job reports are unlikely to be stellar.

2. Also between now and Election Day are three presidential debates, starting October 3. It’s commonly thought Obama will win them handily but that expectation may be very wrong – and could work against him. Yes, Romney is an automaton — but when the dials are set properly he can give a good imitation of a human engaged in sharp debate. He did well in the Republican primary debates.

Obama, by contrast, can come off slow and ponderous. Recall how he stuttered and stumbled during the 2008 Democratic primary debates. And he hasn’t been in a real-live debate for four years; Romney recently emerged from almost a year of them.

3. During the next 7 final weeks of the campaign, the anti-Obama forces will be spending a gigantic amount of money. Not just the Romney campaign and Romney’s super PACs, but other super PACS aligned with Romney, billionaires spending their own fortunes, and non-profit “social welfare” organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove’s “Crossroads,” and various Koch-brothers political fronts – all will dump hundreds of millions on TV and radio spots, much of it spreading lies and distortions. Some of this money will be devoted to get-out-the-vote drives — to phone banks and door-to-door canvassing to identify favorable voters, and vans to bring them to the polling stations.

It’s an easy bet they’ll far outspend Obama and his allies. I’ve heard two-to-one. The race is still close enough that a comparative handful of voters in swing states can make the difference – which means gobs of money used to motivate voters to polling stations can be critical.

4. As they’ve displayed before, the Republican Party will do whatever it can to win — even if it means disenfranchising certain voters. To date, 11 states have enacted voter identification laws, all designed by Republican legislatures and governors to dampen Democratic turnout.

The GOP is also encouraging what can only be termed “voter vigilante” groups to “monitor polling stations to prevent fraud” – which means intimidating minorities who have every right to vote. We can’t know at this point how successful these efforts may be but it’s a dangerous wildcard. And what about those Diebold voting machines?

 

So don’t for a moment believe “Romney’s dead,” and don’t be complacent. The hard work lies ahead, in the next seven weeks. 

And even if Obama is reelected, more hard work begins after Inauguration Day – when we must push him to be tougher on the Republicans than he was in his first term, and do what the nation needs

 

A Second Bill of Rights Would Restore Economic Democracy

By JAMES BERTOLONE

Rochester Business Journal, August 31, 2012

On Aug. 11, union members, non-union workers and our allies from across the country joined together in Philadelphia to redirect the public debate of this election season toward what Americans really need-an investment and focus on our country and our people. The failed policies of more than a generation, which have benefited mostly the superwealthy, are destroying the American dream and the foundation of a strong economy.

The rally kicked off the Workers Stand for America campaign, with tens of thousands of people endorsing a Second Bill of Rights that sets forth principles to guide government, business leaders, organizations and individuals toward a common goal of a just and fair society. The Second Bill of Rights includes the rights to full employment and a living wage, goals well within our reach if the private and public sectors invest in America's infrastructure, promote industrial development and make job creation a top policy priority.

We also are demanding full participation in the electoral process. Recent initiatives to deny large groups of citizens the right to vote are immoral, plain and simple. At a time when our courts have empowered money over people, any attempt to reduce the rolls of eligible voters is an assault on our democracy and an affront to our nation's struggle against voting restrictions based on property ownership, race, religion and gender. Allegations of voter fraud were investigated for years under President George W. Bush with nothing to show for it. Voter apathy, due to the fewer wealthy voices drowning out the voices of the many, is the real voter problem.

America's Second Bill of Rights includes a right to a voice at work-to bargain collectively for improved wages, benefits and working conditions-since workers have been denied the freedom of association in the workplace that is required by the Bill of Rights. For a generation, most of the wealth created by increasing worker productivity has gone to the wealthiest few, destroying the post-war social compact.

We also include in the Second Bill of Rights a right to a good education, believing that this is a foundation of our democracy. A high-quality education is vital to our competitive position in the world economy and the principal means by which Americans empower themselves to participate in our nation's economic and political systems. Good, affordable education should be available to all from prekindergarten to college, including apprenticeships and skills training to prepare for work.

Lastly, America's Second Bill of Rights demands a secure and healthy future, with a baseline level of health care, unemployment insurance and retirement security. The social compact that served our nation well for many decades has been badly eroded. We call on government and private industry together to confront the issues of access to health care, weakening of unemployment coverage and inadequate pensions that undermine the ability to retire in dignity, even as Social Security and Medicare are under strain and threatened with cutbacks.

These petitions supporting America's Second Bill of Rights will be delivered to both the Democratic and Republican national conventions. Those who know their presidential history recognize that labor's push for a Second Bill of Rights is a renewal, with some updating, of Franklin D. Roosevelt's call for a Second Bill of Rights in his State of the Union message of 1944. As FDR could see World War II coming to its conclusion, he reminded the public of the causes of the war, declaring, "We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ... People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."

FDR called for moving forward toward the goals of decent jobs with living wages, an economy free from unfair competition and unfair trade, free from monopolies at home or abroad. He proclaimed a right to a decent home, medical care, a good education and protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.

He also warned of a domestic reaction like that which followed World War I. "If history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called 'normalcy' of the 1920s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home." We are seeing this now in the eurozone as austerity, with Germany calling the shots, has increased unemployment and is shredding the safety net. Violent anarchists on the left and violent Nazi-type hate groups on the right are on the rise. More than one expert has stated that if the austerity is not loosened, we will see Germany destroying Europe for the third time in a century.

Studies now show that American working people have lost about 40 percent of their wealth during this Great Recession, with African Americans and people of other minorities losing closer to 60 percent of their assets. The assets of most working people include little more than their homes and small 401(k) accounts, and the financial sector bears a heavy responsibility for the damage caused by its malfeasance. As someone who was a teenager when the Civil Rights Act became law, now seeing almost all the economic progress made by Americans of color over four decades wiped out, I view this as a devastating development for all Americans.

I am often asked to speak on labor and economic justice issues to many unions, community and political groups, advocacy groups and classes at local colleges. As the quotes from FDR's 1944 speech show, much of labor's Second Bill of Rights is not new territory; calls for implementing such reforms certainly predate FDR. In the past year I have often heard disappointment with the lack of progress on these issues as promised in 2008 by Barack Obama, and I agree with some of these criticisms and have said so in print. For the most part, however, it is not true that the president and the Democrats had control of Congress in 2009, not with the filibuster rule. The Democrats were several votes short of a filibuster-proof Senate majority after the 2008 elections. I lobbied hard on changing the filibuster rule in late 2008 and in late 2010.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand helped lead the fight on the filibuster change when the rules were set in the new Congress in January 2009. The effort fell seven votes short of the 51 needed to change the rules, mainly because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was against it, as was our senior senator, Chuck Schumer. Reid has now apologized publicly, saying he was wrong and the filibuster has allowed 41 senators, representing states with about one-third of U.S. population, to stop everything.

According to Reid's public statement, the filibuster has been used more than 360 times by Senate Republicans to stop all attempts to accelerate economic recovery. In just the last few weeks, we have seen the filibuster prevent the majority from passing the Disclose Act and the American Jobs Act. The Disclose Act would require Citizens United electioneering groups to identify the people who give more than $10,000 for political ads and campaign funding. The American Jobs Act would eliminate tax breaks for creating a job offshore or moving a job offshore, a proposal supported by a majority of Americans in both parties.

Majorities of voters in both parties also support ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, halting the outsourcing of jobs, stopping China's unfair trade practices and eliminating tax subsidies for big oil. But none of that will happen with this Tea Party Congress, a Congress with the lowest approval rating ever measured. A recent survey had the Tea Party Congress at 9 percent approval, below oil companies, banksters, CEOs and even Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Congress' approval rating is higher than only Fidel Castro's 7 percent.

It is time to demand a Congress that addresses a Second Bill of Rights for America.

James Bertolone is president of the Rochester Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He also is president of the American Postal Workers Union Local 215.

France Maintains Key Ban on Monsanto's GMO Maize Crops

from Nation of Change, September 17, 2012

by Anthony Gucciardi

“Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto is now effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace.”

In another massive victory against Monsanto and the spread of genetically modified crops, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayraul has announced that the nation will be maintaining a key ban on the only remaining GMO currently allowed in Europe. Known as Monsanto’s GMO maize crops, or MON810 maize, the original ban was brought forth back in March following the French court’s previous annulment on a November ban.

Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto is now effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace. This is even more true when you consider that France is the largest agricultural producer in Europe. This move by such a large and influential nation will surely lead to similar legislation throughout the rest of the globe. 

This decision comes in the face of emormous pressure from Monsanto to 'soften' its stance on GMOs (see first link). Monsanto has significant pull within governments around the globe, with the United States in particular being the ‘launch pad’ for the biotechnology movement. We now know thanks to WikiLeaks  that United States ambassadors have actually threatened nations opposed to Monsanto’s GMO maize crops, going as far as to threaten them with ‘military-style trade wars’. When considering that this is but one leak, it is very concerning.

France has thwarted the political preasure and led the charge against Monsanto, even finding Monsanto guilty of ‘chemical poisoning’ earlier this year. According to the prime minister, the ruling was also part a wider plan to reduce the use of chemicals in farming.

Many countries have taken action against Monsanto and its many harmful creations. Peru has banned Monsanto’s GMOs for a total of 10 years, Hungary uprooted the company’s crops from its farmland, and even the agricultural giant California is seeking to label GMOs this November. From Agent Orange (known to kill 400,000 and cause 500,000 plus birth defects) to GMO maize, Monsanto’s time for experimentation may soon be up.

Overview: Dutch vs. US Private Health Care Costs

by Frank Thomas and John Lawrence          

David Cay Johnston’s up-to-date comparison of Europe’s health care costs vs. the US is another shocking revelation of how our country still struggles to have a sane, affordable basic health care system. He shows that the average per capita cost for health care in the U.S. is 2.64 times that of the average Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country cost per capita. In other words, for every  $1 dollar of OECD personal health care cost, the US cost is $2.64.

In an extensive joint 2009 study (Health Care in the Netherlands and the US: A Comparative Study) comparing Dutch and US health care costs for a family of 4, we came up with almost exactly the same ratio of a US cost of $2.40 for each $1 of Dutch cost for a family plan. To further document the startling cost differences Mr. Johnston has so well illustrated, following  is a much abridged and edited version of our 2009 study. ____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________

PREFACE            

By Frank Thomas and John Lawrence - December 7, 2009 

The US has been consummately slow to learn from other countries that have systematically adopted transparent, standard basic health care that contain health care spending at 10% of GDP. However, US health insurance corporations with their myriad of non-standard policies continue to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions and to discontinue policies or raise premiums of those unfortunate enough to get sick. The Affordable Care Act popularly known as Obamacare, while not offering a public option, was, however, successful in eliminating pre-existing conditions and insurance firms' greedy ad hoc practice of cancelling policies or raising premiums of claimants judged sick too often. 

We have chosen to compare in detail the US and the Netherlands' health care systems based on a family of four. It's important to point out that in both countries the health insurance systems are completely privatized. However, the two systems have produced diametrically opposite results. On a macroeconomic look, total health care spending in the Netherlands was 10.2% of GDP vs. approximately 17% for the US in 2009. Further, although the US has among the highest health care costs in the world, it ranks 37^th in terms of outcomes. On a microeconomic look, both countries offer private health care via insurers … but Dutch health care providers compete on quality and service under a required basic health care system of "regulated competition" where the government has final oversight over premium prices, deductibles, costs and quality.

The following explanation puts all the detailed Dutch/US data in a "Big Picture" perspective. Figures for both countries exclude dental, except dental for children under 18 which is standard under the Dutch basic family plan. This in itself is an important bonus for the Dutch plan as US dental costs continue to soar. The Dutch plan includes something called "own risk" which simply means that people have the option of increasing the deductible by the amount of "own risk" in return for lower monthly premiums.

EXPLANATION

Key concluding observations are:

• The average US family plan total cost for 4 is $16,530 or 2.4 times that of the Dutch basic family total cost of $6,913.


• The Dutch basic plan comprises a standard comprehensive benefits package everyone purchases; the US plan is an average of a myriad of plans all with different non-standard benefit coverages.


• The Dutch basic plan own risk ($495) plus deductible ($600) is $1,095 vs. a wide range of US family plan deductibles from $1,000 to over $4,000.


• The Dutch basic plan provides 100% standard benefit coverage. US plans generally require coinsurance/cost sharing to reach 100% coverages.


• The Dutch basic family plan includes an employee tax contribution of $1,768. This relates to a 9.35% maximum wage tax on 50% of employee’s annual basic plan premium paid by the employer.


• Employer and employee split a 7.2% tax on wages up to a maximum of $45,000. This goes into an equalization fund used to compensate insurance firms for documented "high risk" insurees. It’s also used to subsidize low-income people and those who are poor with little or no income.


•  The US very high absolute employer share of up to 74% of an outrageously high premium cost of $13,375 for a family of four – vs. 50% of a far lower premium cost of $3,174 under the Dutch basic plan – may explain partly why the US middle class wages have risen a miniscule 12% of inflation adjusted over the last 31 years! Employers are apparently treating their very high health care contribution as a wage benefit, substituting for a normal wage increase.


• About 90% of the Dutch basic plan insurance for 16.5 million citizens is offered by six insurers. This provides a well-balanced actuarial risk pool of age/income/healthiness groups within an approximate 2.7 million average individual client base per insurer. Also, the Dutch regulated competition system is aimed at getting premiums/costs at affordable levels by a standard basic comprehensive benefits package required by all citizens. A competition regulator checks for any abuses of dominant market positions and creation of cartels. An insurance regulator makes sure all basic plan policies have identical coverage provisions.


• All the above gives economies of scale, easier assessment and comparison of best and worst practices by health providers. Its success depends on government’s enforcement of the rules governing premiums, costs, benefit coverage and, most importantly, quality.


• Dutch medical procedures, prescription drug costs, prices, and coding of medical services are uniform throughout the country for the basic plan. This compares to the relatively complex, non-transparent, vast cost/price variations including non-uniform coding of medical services state to state for US family plans – all making best and worst practice comparisons almost impossible.

• Unlike the US, copays, cost sharing or reimbursement limits on selected claims do not exist under the Dutch basic health care plan. Insurer and insured costs can be changed by the government increasing the ‘mandatory’ deductable (now at $275) or by the insured choosing for a higher ‘own risk-deductible in exchange for a lower health insurance premium.

_________________________________________________________________________

 TOTAL AVG. HEALTH CARE COST FOR A FAMILY OF FOUR - HOLLAND vs. U.S., 2009-2010 

1€ = $1.50 (Excluding Dental for Adults/Children)	Standard Dutch Basic Plan	Non-Standard US Plan
I. Premium:   No Upgrades	$3,174	Data Not Available
II. Premium:  + Ave. Upgrades	$4,050	$13,375
--Plus Deductible	$5145 (a)	$14,375  (b)
--Plus Coinsurance	--	$16,530  (c)
III. Premium:  (Including Upgrades/Deductible/Coinsurance) --Plus Taxes (d)	+$1,768	00
=Total System & Family of Four Cost Before Employer’s Contribution	$6,913	$16,530

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

IV. Premium: (Before Employer's Contribution) --Minus Employer’s  Premium Share Contribution  (e)	- $1,587	- $9,860
= Net Family of  Four Cost After Employer Contribution	$5,326	$6670

Source:  US data published by Kaiser Foundation in 2009  
(a)   Includes $1,095 own risk/deductible for 2 adults
(b)   Includes $1,000 deductible for 2 adults
(c)   Includes $2,155 for coinsurance for 2 adults
(d)  +$1,768 Dutch taxes;  No US federal or state taxes assumed
(e)   50% for Dutch employer;  ±70% for US employer

NOTE:
US Plan figures from Kaiser 2009 study are an average of hundreds of  non-standard plans. We have added a provision for coinsurance of $2,155. Copays, cost sharing or reimbursement limits on certain claims, and/or much higher deductibles are other typical features of US Plans. Also, many US Plans don’t offer 100% benefit coverage as does the Dutch Plan. The Dutch Plan has no coinsurance. Copays for doctor visits are netted against the own risk/deductible sum.

CURRENT SITUATION IN THE NETHERLANDS

In the Netherlands people are free to pay for more services over and above their basic plan coverage. There is no limit to the health care insurance plans that wealthy people can procure. At the same time everyone is covered by at least the basic plan, but no one is restricted to just the basic plan.

Like all advanced nations, the Netherlands is now faced with serious decisions on how to adjust their basic regulated market health care system in the face of a sharp increase in size of the older generation. This generation is also facing more costly high tech cures. This means sensible adjustments in own risk/deductibles, health sickness prevention, limits or changes in benefit coverage and strict discipline on insuring system efficiency and a sound financial balance … while continuing to provide one of the top best, affordable health care systems in the world. The challenges and changes are not easy by any stretch of the imagination … but IFrank is confident solid Dutch coalition governance will continue to pragmatically, creatively, and humanely master the hard health care cost/quality tradeoff realities.

One thing is certain – the Dutch are not about to allow their egalitarian, quality basic health care for-all-approach to be sacrificed to greedy insurer self-interests such as obscene management bonuses, profits and stockholder values FIRST and affordable, quality health care needs of claimants SECOND … as occurs under the currently costly, chaotic US private health care system.

In the US, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are promising to get rid of Obamacare on Day 1 if they should be elected to office. This would mean the continuation of sky-high premiums and insurance industry profits at the expense of the poor and lower income groups. It may also mean the possibility of being kicked off policies if people get too sick or of being denied insurance in the first place because of pre-existing conditions. 

Adding oil to the fire, the “new” Ryan-Wyden Medicare reforms offer the option of retaining the traditional ‘fee-for-service’ government payments under Medicare or the option of receiving ‘voucher’ payments (mysteriously called ‘premium support’ payments by Ryan) to buy private insurance health care plans. The Ryan plan payment would be pegged to the lower end of health care premiums rather than to actual costs. Thus, people face the risk of ending up paying too much because of inflation.

Under these two payment options, the amount the government pays remains the same. Ryan’s plan has a spending growth cap per capita that must not exceed GDP annual % growth plus 0.5%. The CBO concludes this will reduce Medicare spending 35% to 45% by 2050 – leading to some negative results such as higher out-of-pocket costs, reduced access to health care, less quality of care, and reduced investment in advanced medical technologies. Caps would certainly disproportionately affect vulnerable groups when GDP growth rates are stagnant, especially for long-lasting recessionary periods … like now.                   

Mitt Romney on Obama Voters

 

Extreme Weather Watch: 133 Billion Dollar Weather Events Since 1980

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press, September 15, 2012

Even those global warming deniers can't escape the fact that the weather events causing a billion dollars or more of damage and destruction are piling up at an increasing rate. The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is the Nation's Scorekeeper in terms of addressing severe weather/climate events. The NCDC tracks and evaluates climate events in the U.S. and globally that have great economic and societal impacts. The U.S. has sustained 133 weather/climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion - assuming Consumer Price Index (CPI) adjustment to 2012. 46 of these events occurred between 1980 and 1995 and 87 occurred between 1996 and 2011. So in the latest 15 year period there were almost twice as many billion dollar plus extreme weather events as in the 15 year period preceding it. Global warming or not, extreme weather is becoming more and more common all over the world. Losses from these events pushed the cost of weather disasters in 2011 to an estimated $150 billion worldwide. In the US last year there were a record 14 events that caused a billion dollars in damage or more. That's more than one a month!

Just a few days ago severe monsoon rains ravaged Sindh, Pakistan leaving 58 dead. On the same day tropical storm Leslie hammered New Foundland. There were recent widespread power outages in St. John’s and communities along the southeastern coast of the Avalon Peninsula. On September 8 violent thunderstorms left 4 dead on a sweep through Oklahoma.

And the beat goes on all over the world - every day, every week, every month - somewhere in the world extreme violent weather is happening, most of which doesn't make the nightly news because it is so common any more. Tens of thousands were still in the dark in Lousiana and Mississippi days after Hurricane Isaac hit on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Residents were stunned that a Category 1 hurricane could wreak so much havoc and have an estimated cost of $2 billion according to Bloomberg.com. It seems that even relatively small hurricanes can result in billions of dollars of damage.

Here is just a small sampling of weather events in June 2012:

• Wildfires blazed across 1.36 million acres of the U.S. during June, fed by antecedent drought conditions and unparalleled heat. Areas experiencing moderate to exceptional drought expanded from 37.4 percent in May to 56.0 percent in June to form the largest drought footprint of the decade, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Meanwhile, soaring temperatures produced the warmest 12-month period since the country's record-keeping began in 1895.

• In Colorado, two significant wildfires claimed three lives. The Waldo Canyon Fire became the most destructive wildfire in that state's history after consuming 346 homes, and resulted in two fatalities. The wildfire which charred over 18,200 acres and forced the evacuation of more than 32,000 residents, was estimated at $8.8 million U.S. dollars to contain. Media reported the preliminary property damages were in excess of $110 million U.S. dollars. Earlier in the month, one death amid loss of 259 homes was attributed to the High Park Fire which burned 87,284 acres and exceeded $39 million U.S. dollars in resources to bring under control.

• Torrential rains falling throughout much of June exacerbated existing conditions, and led to evacuations of nearly five million people in China. A flood assistance appeal from ACT Alliance, a humanitarian organization serving in China, attributed the devastation costs suffered from early May through mid-June at $2 billion U.S. dollars and as many as 67 deaths in addition to significant property losses.

• In Minnesota, an estimated $100 million U.S. dollars in damages to utilities, roads, bridges, parks and trails as flash floods ravaged the city of Duluth with 7.25 inches of precipitation falling over June 19^th–20^th, breaking the two-day record of nearly 6.7 inches set in 1909.

• Hail, wind, and flood damages were estimated at $2 billion U.S. dollars in the wake of two intense thunderstorms sweeping through Dallas, Texas, on June 13^th.

• As a harbinger of the massive flooding to be brought by the tropical storm in the coming weeks, U.S. Gulf regions were saturated over June 9^th–10^th by near record-breaking rainfalls, resulting in damages in excess of $20 million U.S. dollars. Parts of southeastern Alabama and Florida's panhandle were left under 5 feet of water after receiving rainfalls nearing 22 inches. The twenty-hour rainfall of 13.11 inches at Pensacola reached close to the city's all-time record of 15.29 inches set in 1934. Tornadoes touched down in a couple of locations. Residents were evacuated to Red Cross shelters, roads were closed, power outages were widespread, and one person was killed in a riptide, according to media reports.

• A destructive thunderstorm complex (known as a derecho) moved from Illinois to Virginia on June 29^th, leaving close to three million homes and businesses without power, and killing at least 18 people. Water restrictions were imposed in Maryland due to damages at water filtration facilities.

• Much of the continental U.S. sweltered under an extreme heat wave throughout June. According to NOAA's NCDC Extremes archive, a total of 645 records were set for all-time hottest June temperatures. Also, 444 new daily maximum temperature records were either set or tied on the single day of June 29^th, while 3,282 daily records were broken over the entire month. Unusually high temperatures persisted across the Central Plains near the end of the month. On June 28^th, the daily temperature of 118°F at Norton Dam, Kansas, was the highest in the nation. This extreme broke the location's all-time June record of 113°F, set just days before on June 25^th, and exceeded its previous record of that date (104°F on June 28, 1963) by a 14-degree F increase).

And this is just a cursory sampling of weather events for the month of June 2012 which includes two $2 billion events and a couple of $100 million events! When you start adding it all up, pretty soon we're talking about real money! Insured losses from weather disasters in 2011 totaled $36 billion.

According to Bill McKibben of 350.org, who also wrote the New York Times bestseller, Eaarth, the effects of global warming are not going to be delayed to some distant far off future. They are already here! Flooding occurs because the oceans and atmosphere are warmer, and so more water evaporates into the atmosphere. It's logical then that more water - actual deluges - cause floods when it rains. As moisture in the atmosphere has increased, rainfall has intensified. And this is all because we're pouring massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere on a daily basis.

A group of computer guys from MIT developed a sophisticated program that could tell you what the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would be 100 years down the road based on amounts being injected into the atmosphere now. McKibben writes (p. 20): "Here's what they found: if you took every government pledge made during the [2009 Copenhagen conference to limit CO2 emissions] and added it all together, the world in 2100 would have more than 725 parts per million carbon dioxide, or slightly double what scientists now believe is the maximum safe level of 350. Even if you took all the possible 'conditional proposals, legislation under debate and unofficial government statements,' - in other words, even if you erred on the side of insane optimism - the world in 2100 would have 600 parts per million carbon dioxide." That means global, temperatures would go up by about seven degrees Fahrenheit. McKibben continues: " That is, we'd live if not in hell, then in some place with a very similar temperature."

In 2011 Dallas residents suffered through 71 days when temperatures were 100 degrees or higher. An exceptional heat wave in Europe in 2003 took at least 35,000 lives. Some form of drought was affecting 53.7 percent of the entire country as of Sept. 11, 2012, which is a new high. Climate change is pushing subtropical areas further north. Driven by a warmer-than-average June, the hottest ever July, and a warmer-than-average August, the summer of 2012 will go down in the history books as the third-warmest summer on record for the lower 48 states, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced recently. The nation’s second-warmest summer occurred just last year, and the only other summer that was warmer than the past two occurred during the Dust Bowl era of 1936. This summer was just two tenths of a degree cooler than the summer of 1936.

McKibben's point is that THE EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING ARE HERE RIGHT NOW.

This will be an ongoing series with recent extreme weather events pointed out on a monthly basis.

 

Why Romney and Ryan are Going Down

by Robert Reich

Sunday, September 16, 2012

 

Unemployment is still above 8 percent, job gains aren’t even keeping up with population growth, the economy is barely moving forward. And yet, according to most polls, the Romney-Ryan ticket is falling further and further behind. How can this be?

Because Republicans are failing the central test of electability. Instead of putting together the largest possible coalition of voters, they’re relying largely on one slice of America — middle-aged white men — and alienating just about everyone else.

Start with Hispanics, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they become an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney-Ryan by a larger margin than they did six months ago.

Why? In last February’s Republican primary debate Romney dubbed Arizona’s controversial immigration policy – that authorized police to demand proof of citizenship from anyone looking Hispanic — a “model law” for the rest of the nation. 

Romney then attacked GOP rival Texas Governor Rick Perry for supporting in-state tuition at the University of Texas for children of undocumented immigrants. And Romney advocates what he calls “self-deportation” – making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants and their families that they choose to leave.

As if all this weren’t enough, the GOP has been pushing voter ID laws all over America, whose obvious aim is to intimidate Hispanic voters so they won’t come to the polls. But they may be having the opposite effect – emboldening the vast majority of ethnic Hispanics, who are American citizens, to vote in even greater numbers and lend even more support to Obama and other Democrats.

Or consider women – whose political and economic impact in America continues to grow (women are fast becoming better educated than men and the major breadwinners in American homes). According to polls, the political gender gap is widening. 

Why? It’s not just GOP senatorial candidate Todd Akin’s call to ban all abortions even in the case of “legitimate rape” (because he believes women’s bodies somehow reject violent sperm). The GOP platform itself seeks to bar all abortions, with no exception for rape or incest. And on several occasions Paul Ryan has voted in favor of exactly such legislation.

Meanwhile, Republican legislators in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Alabama have pushed bills requiring women seeking abortions to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasound tests. All told, over 400 Republican bills are pending in state legislatures, attacking womens’ reproductive rights.

Republicans have repeatedly voted against legislation giving women equal pay for the same work as men. Republicans in Wisconsin have even repealed a law designed to prevent employers from discriminating against women.

Or consider students – a significant and growing electoral force, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? 

Paul Ryan’s budget plan – approved by almost every House Republican and enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney – would have allowed rates on student loans to double, adding an average of $1,000 a year to student debt loads. (Under mounting political pressure, House Republicans came up with just enough money to keep the loan program going safely past Election Day by raiding a fund established for preventive care in the new health-care act.)

Now Romney wants to hand the federal student loan program over to the banks, which will charge even more. Earlier this year he argued subsidized student loans were bad because they encouraged colleges to raise their tuition, and suggested students ask their families for money.

Republicans have even managed to antagonize seniors by seeking to turn Medicare into vouchers whose value won’t keep up with rising healthcare costs, and cutting $800 billion out of Medicaid (which many seniors rely on for nursing home care).

And, of course, they’ve come out against equal marriage rights for gay couples.

Romney, Ryan, and the GOP don’t seem to know how to satisfy their middle-aged white male base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, straight, or middle-aged. Unfortunately for Romney and Ryan, the people they’re turning off are the majority.

 

Two Cheers for the Fed: At Least It’s Not Obsessing About the Budget Deficit

by Robert Reich

Saturday, September 15, 2012

 

With deficit hawks circling overhead, the responsibility for creating jobs has fallen by default to Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve. Last week the Fed said it expected to keep interest rates near zero through mid 2015, in order to stimulate employment.

Two cheers.

The problem is, low interest rates alone won’t do it. The Fed has held interest rates near zero for several years without that much to show for it. A smaller portion of American adults is now working than at any time in the last thirty years.

The biggest beneficiaries of near-zero interest rates aren’t average Americans. They’re still too weighed down with debt to be able to borrow more, and their wages keep dropping. And because they won’t and can’t borrow more, businesses won’t have more customers. So there’s no reason for businesses to borrow to expand and hire more people, even at low interest rates.

The biggest winners are the big banks, which are now assured of two or more years of almost free money. The big banks won’t use  the money to refinance mortgages – why should they when they can squeeze more money out of homeowners by keeping them at higher rates? No, they’ll use the almost free money the way they’ve been using it since the housing bubble burst  – to make big bets on derivatives. If the bets go well, the bankers make a bundle. If the bets sour, well, you know what happens then. Watch your wallets.

The truth is, low interest rates won’t boost the economy without an expansive fiscal policy that makes up for the timid spending of  consumers and businesses. Until more Americans have more money in their pockets, government has to fill the gap.

On this score, the big news isn’t the Fed’s renewed determination to keep interest rates low. The big news is global lender’s desperation to park their savings in Treasury bills. The euro is way too risky, the yen is still a basket case, China is slowing down and no one knows what will happen to its currency, and you’d have to be crazy to park your savings in Russia.

It’s a match made in heaven – or should be. America can borrow money more cheaply than ever, and use it to put Americans back to work rebuilding our crumbling highways and bridges and schools, cleaning up our national parks and city parks and playgrounds, and doing everything else that needs doing that we’ve neglected for too long.

This would put money in people’s pockets and encourage them to take advantage of the Fed’s low interest rates to borrow even more. And their spending would induce businesses to expand and create more jobs. A virtuous cycle.

And yet for purely ideological reasons we’re heading in the opposite direction. The federal government is cutting back spending. It’s not even helping state and local governments, which continue to lay off teachers, fire fighters, social workers, and police officers.

Worst of all, we’re facing a so-called “fiscal cliff” next year when larger federal spending cuts automatically go into effect. The Congressional Budget Office warns this may push us into recession – which will cause more joblessness and make the federal budget deficit even larger relative to the size of the economy. That’s the austerity trap Europe has fallen into.

Why are Republican and Democratic deficit hawks so brain dead? Even the nation’s credit-rating agencies seem to have lost their minds. Last week Moody’s said it would likely downgrade U.S. government bonds if Congress and the White House don’t come up with a credible plan to reduce the federal budget deficit. (Standard & Poor’s has already downgraded U.S. debt.)

Hello? Can we please stop obsessing about the federal budget deficit? Repeat after me: America’s #1 economic problem is unemployment. Our #1 goal should be to restore job growth. Period.

The Federal Reserve Board understands this. And at least it’s trying. But it can’t succeed on its own. Global lenders are giving us a way out. Let’s take advantage of the opportunity. 

Stanford Scientists Shockingly Reckless on Health Risk And Organics

Published on Thursday, September 6, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Frances Moore Lappé

I first heard about a new Stanford "study" downplaying the value of organics when this blog headline cried out from my inbox: "Expensive organic food isn't healthier and no safer than produce grown with pesticides, finds biggest study of its kind."

What?

Does the actual study say this?

No, but authors of the study -- "Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives? A Systematic Review" -- surely are responsible for its misinterpretation and more. Their study actually reports that ¨Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria."

The authors' tentative wording -- "may reduce" -- belies their own data: The report's opening statement says the tested organic produce carried a 30 percent lower risk of exposure to pesticide residues. And, the report itself also says that "detectable pesticide residues were found in 7% of organic produce samples...and 38% of conventional produce samples." Isn't that's a greater than 80% exposure reduction?

In any case, the Stanford report's unorthodox measure "makes little practical or clinical sense," notes Charles Benbrook -- formerly Executive Director, Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences: What people "should be concerned about [is]... not just the number of [pesticide] residues they are exposed to" but the "health risk they face." Benbrook notes "a 94% reduction in health risk" from pesticides when eating organic foods.

Assessing pesticide-driven health risks weighs the toxicity of the particular pesticide. For example the widely-used pesticide atrazine, banned in Europe, is known to be "a risk factor in endocrine disruption in wildlife and reproductive cancers in laboratory rodents and humans."

"Very few studies" included by the Stanford researchers, notes Benbrook, "are designed or conducted in a way that could isolate the impact or contribution of a switch to organic food from the many other factors that influence a given individual's health." They "would be very expensive, and to date, none have been carried out in the U.S." [emphasis added].

In other words, simple prudence should have prevented these scientists from using "evidence" not designed to capture what they wanted to know.

Moreover, buried in the Stanford study is this all-critical fact: It includes no long-term studies of people consuming organic compared to chemically produced food: The studies included ranged from just two days to two years. Yet, it is well established that chemical exposure often takes decades to show up, for example, in cancer or neurological disorders.

Consider these studies not included: The New York Times notes three 2011 studies by scientists at Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan that studied pregnant women exposed to higher amounts of an organophosphate pesticide. Once their children reached elementary school they "had, on average, I.Q.'s several points lower than those of their peers."

Thus, it is reprehensible for the authors of this overview to even leave open to possible interpretation that their compilation of short-term studies can determine anything about the human-health impact of pesticides.

What also disturbs me is that neither in their journal article nor in media interviews do the Stanford authors suggest that concern about "safer and healthier" might extend beyond consumers to the people who grow our food. They have health concerns, too!

Many choose organic to decrease chemicals in food production because of the horrific consequences farm workers and farmers suffer from pesticide exposure. U.S. farming communities are shown to be afflicted with, for example, higher rates of: "leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and soft tissue sarcoma" -- in addition to skin, lip, stomach, brain and prostate cancers," reports the National Cancer Institute. And, at a global level, "an estimated 3 million acute pesticide poisonings occur worldwide each year," reports the World Health Organization. Another health hazard of pesticides, not hinted at in the report, comes from water contamination by pesticides. They have made the water supply for 4.3 million Americans unsafe for drinking.

Finally, are organic foods more nutritious?

In their report, Crystal Smith-Spangler, MD, and co-authors say only that "published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods." Yet, the most comprehensive meta-analysis comparing organic and non-organic, led by scientist Kirsten Brandt, a Scientist at the Human Nutrition Research Center at the UK's Newcastle University found organic fruits and vegetables, to have on "average 12% higher nutrient levels."

Bottom line for me? What we do know is that the rates of critical illnesses, many food-related --from allergies to Crohn's Disease -- are spiking and no one knows why. What we do know is that pesticide poisoning is real and lethal -- and not just for humans. In such a world is it not the height of irresponsibility to downplay the risks of exposure to known toxins?

Rachel Carson would be crying. Or, I hope, shouting until -- finally -- we all listen. "Simple precaution! Is that not commonsense?"

Frances Moore Lappé just released EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want (Nation Books) on the fortieth anniversary of her Diet for a Small Planet.

America the Possible: Breaking the Chains of Consumerism

Published on Monday, September 10, 2012 by Common Dreams

by James Gustave Speth

The following is an excerpt from the recently published America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). The book, written as the third volume of Speth's award-winning American Crisis series, calls for deep, transformative change in a dozen areas of national life, including a reimagination of our political economy, a halt to debt-inducing consumerism, and a host of prescriptions for our bad case of affluenza. This appears with the kind permission of the author.

The path to a new political economy leads straight away from consumerism and commercialism to a very different world in which getting and spending, material possessions, and overall consumption have a decidedly circumscribed and modest place in everyday life.

In her insightful book, A Consumers’ Republic, Lizabeth Cohen documents that American consumerism as we know it did not just happen. It is not something in our genes or human nature, at least not wholly. Referring to the era of postwar prosperity that lasted approximately from 1945 to 1975, she notes that “this period of unprecedented affluence did much more than make Americans a people of plenty. Undergirding the pursuit of plenty was an infrastructure of policies and priorities, what I have dubbed, for shorthand, the Consumers’ Republic. In reconstructing the nation after World War II, leaders of business, government, and labor developed a political economy and a political culture that expected a dynamic mass consumption economy not only to deliver prosperity, but also to fulfill American society’s loftier aspirations.”

A consumer society is one in which consumerism and materialism are central aspects of the dominant culture, where goods and services are acquired not only to satisfy common needs but also to secure identity and meaning. Framing this situation as a matter of consumer sovereignty--where the customer is always right--is misleading. Consumption patterns are powerfully shaped by forces other than preformed individual preferences--forces such as advertising, cultural norms, social pressures, and psychological associations.

Consumerism is not, and should not be confused with, consumption that satisfies essential human needs. Consumerism is the faith that meaning, identity, and significance can be found in material, commodity consumption, which in turn requires money. But since meaning and self-realization cannot be found there, nor basic psychological needs so met, consumers remain unfilled and are driven ever on to seek more possessions, which requires still more money, all of which is well understood by marketers. Richard Layard refers to the “hedonic treadmill” to describe the phenomenon whereby people become habituated to their new incomes and their new toys. “When I get a new home or a new car, I am excited at first. But then I get used to it, and my mood tends to revert to where it was before. . . . Advertisers understand this and invite us to ‘feed our addiction’ with more and more spending. However, other experiences do not pale in the same way--the time we spend with our family and friends, and the quality and security of our job.”

A consumer society is one in which the human tendency to compare ourselves with others is grotesquely exploited. This human tendency to compare ourselves with others has not escaped the attention of humorists. There’s the joke about the Russian peasant whose neighbor had a cow while he did not. He had lived a good life, and so God asked how He could help. The peasant replied, “Kill the cow!” Numerous studies confirm that happiness levels depend inversely on one’s neighbor’s prosperity. People constantly compare themselves with others, and if everyone is better off financially, then no one is any happier. Comparative position is what counts, not absolute income, so rising incomes can leave just as many unhappy comparisons.

Consumerism thus has a doubly negative impact. It is the beating heart of the growth system. Private consumption expenditures in the United States, for example, are about 70 percent of gross domestic product, and consumer spending is the principal driver of the economy and its expansion. When the Financial Times observed that “the stamina of shoppers will be crucial for global growth,” the emphasis was on consumers serving the economy, not the other way around. Second, consumerism gives rise to a host of social pathologies. On the squirrel wheel of getting and spending, with the longest hours on the job in the OECD, and with both parents often at work, we Americans are neglecting the things that would truly make us better off, including personal relationships and social contact. Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, two leaders in the field of positive psychology, point out, “The quality of people’s social relationships is crucial to their well-being. People need supportive, positive relationships and social belonging to sustain well-being.”

In The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, sociologist Robert Lane believes Americans suffer from “a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solidary family life. There is much evidence that for people lacking in social support of this kind, unemployment has more serious effects, illnesses are more deadly, disappointment with one’s children is harder to bear, bouts of depression last longer, and frustration and failed expectations of all kinds are more traumatic.”

Our families, friends, and true companionship are thus among consumerism’s principal casualties. We have channeled our desires, our insecurities, our need to demonstrate our worth and our success, our wanting to fit in and to stand out, increasingly into material things--into bigger homes, fancier cars, more appliances and gadgets, and branded apparel. But in the process, we’re slighting the precious things that no market can provide. We are hollowing out whole areas of life, of individual and social autonomy, of community, and of nature, and, if we don’t soon wake up, we will lose the chance to return, to reclaim ourselves, our neglected society, our battered world, because there will be nothing left to reclaim, nothing left to return to.

Amitai Etzioni sees the excesses of consumerism also at the roots of our current economic troubles: “The link to the economic crisis should be obvious. A culture in which the urge to consume dominates the psychology of citizens is a culture in which people will do most anything to acquire the means to consume--working slavish hours, behaving rapaciously in their business pursuits, and even bending the rules in order to maximize their earnings. They will also buy homes beyond their means and think nothing of running up credit-card debt. It therefore seems safe to say that consumerism is, as much as anything else, responsible for the current economic mess.”

Cohen also highlighted the ironies inherent in the faith that “a prospering mass consumption economy could foster democracy.” What actually happened was we witnessed “a decline in the most critical form of political participation--voting--as more commercialized political salesmanship replaced rank-and-file mobilization through parties.” She also notes, “The Consumers’ Republic’s dependence on unregulated private markets wove inequalities deep into the fabric of prosperity. . . . The deeply entrenched convictions prevailing in the Consumers’ Republic that a dynamic, private, mass consumption marketplace could float all boats and that a growing economy made reslicing the economic pie unnecessary predisposed Americans against more redistributive actions.”

The creation of the Consumers’ Republic represented the triumph of one vision of American life and purpose. But there has always been another American vision, what historian David Shi calls the tradition of “plain living and high thinking,” a tradition that began with the Puritans and the Quakers and that provides the tradition on which to build a better America for tomorrow. This tradition that sees America as a republic of virtue has always been in tension with the allure of unfettered purchasing, of America as the venue nonpareil for consumer appetites indulged shamelessly and unapologetically. In his book The Simple Life, Shi described how the concept of the simple but good life “has remained an enduring--and elusive--ideal. . . . Its primary attributes include a hostility toward luxury and a suspicion of riches, a reverence for nature and a preference for rural over urban ways of life and work, a desire for personal self-reliance through frugality and diligence, a nostalgia for the past, a commitment to conscientious rather than conspicuous consumption, a privileging of contemplation and creativity, an aesthetic preference for the plain and functional, and a sense of both religious and ecological responsibility for the just uses of the world’s resources.”

If the creation of American consumerism was a project of the country’s political and economic leaders after World War II, as Cohen concludes, it should be possible to build a counter project aimed at something better. Overcoming our bad case of national affluenza is important if America is to achieve a host of goals: reducing its ecological footprint, expanding investment in public goods, bolstering retirement security, reducing corporate power, undermining our growth fetish, expanding civic engagement, focusing resources on vast social and economic disparities at home and abroad, and improving the social and psychological well-being of individuals and families.

Etzioni properly asks what should replace the worship of consumer goods and argues that “the two most obvious candidates to fill this role are communitarian pursuits and transcendental ones.” “Communitarianism,” he writes, “refers to investing time and energy in relations with the other, including family, friends, and members of one’s community. The term also encompasses service to the common good, such as volunteering, national service, and politics. Communitarian life is not centered around altruism but around mutuality, in the sense that deeper and thicker involvement with the other is rewarding to both the recipient and the giver. . . . Transcendental pursuits refer to spiritual activities broadly understood, including religious, contemplative, and artistic ones. . . . Communitarian activities require social skills and communication skills as well as time and personal energy--but, as a rule, minimal material or financial outlays. The same holds for transcendental activities such as prayer, mediation, music, art, sports, adult education, and so on.”

Juliet Schor has also offered a path forward, one she calls “plenitude.” It has four key features: moderation in hours of work, self-provisioning, environmentally aware consumption, and restoring investments in one another and community. In sum, “work and spend less, create and connect more.”

What policy agenda would help move America beyond consumerism? First, there are attractive steps, including some described elsewhere in this book, that would help immensely: eliminating wasteful subsidies and imposing limits on virgin materials entering the economy and on emissions, toxics, and other residuals discharged to the environment; requiring full-cost, honest prices, with border tariffs to protect U.S. producers and workers from unfair foreign competition from countries not fully internalizing costs; imposing a surtax on high-end consumption spending along with various luxury taxes; promoting new for-benefit corporations and corporate transformation generally; providing high-quality public services, infrastructure, and amenities; moving to much greater social and economic equality and security; conducting educational and social marketing campaigns that not only provide accurate information to consumers but also address deeper issues such as the shortcomings of consumerism; promoting sharing, renting, and collaborative consumption instead of owning (“do more, own less, rent the rest”); attacking waste and throwaway, made-to-break culture by requiring producers to take back products at the end of their useful lives and to design products for durability, easy repair, and even instructive conversation; imposing tight regulation on “easy credit,” predatory lending; and promoting initiatives to shift cultural norms that promote consumerism.

Two additional steps are essential. First, we need to put in place a set of new policies that will eliminate overwork and lead to a shorter work-year. Just as America legislated a forty-hour workweek, we can also legislate a thirty- to thirty-two-hour (or four-day) workweek. A take-back-your-time package of initiatives should also include measures to protect part-time workers and favor work sharing; guarantee longer, paid vacations; restrict the use of overtime; and provide for generous parental and caregiving leaves, worker sabbaticals, graduated retirement, and the option of early retirement. Allied with these measures should be support needed for non-income-generating “leisure” activities (continuing education, hobbies, recreation, family and community activities, politics, volunteering, music, the arts, reading, self-improvement, and so on).

Second, we must put advertising in its place, which should be a small place. Advertising is one of the world’s most pernicious businesses. In the United States, advertising expenditures grew from $60 billion a year in 1960 to $260 billion in 2004 (in 2003 dollars), or about half of total world spending on advertising that year. In 1983, at the behest of the Reagan administration, the Federal Communications Commission deregulated advertising to children on television. One year later, the ten best-selling toys all had ties to television programs. Between 1983 and 2011, marketing aimed at children swelled from a $100 million-a-year endeavor to a $17 billion-a-year juggernaut. The average child in the United States today sees twenty thousand commercials annually. Meanwhile, ads have invaded air travel, movie theaters, video games, comic books, postseason bowl games, public schools, universities, clothing, and popular songs. And that’s not all: “Wizmark’s ‘Interactive Urinal Communicator’ plays 10-second promotional messages to the ‘ever elusive targeted male audience you are constantly aiming for.’” The Internet is the largest segment, but “out-of-home” advertising now exceeds radio, newspaper, and magazine advertising combined. Finally, there is the advent reported in the April 23, 2011, issue of The Economist of “gladvertising” and “sadvertising:” “a rather sinister-sounding idea in which billboards with embedded cameras, linked to face-tracking software, detect the mood of each consumer who passes by, and change the advertising on display to suit it.”

These folks show us no mercy, and we should return the favor. A good start would be a ban on advertising to children in grade school, as is now done in some Nordic countries and Quebec. We should also severely restrict out-of-home advertising, especially in schools. Vermont has made a strong start with its ban on highway billboards. It should be unlawful to circulate mail-order catalogues except on request. To ensure greater truthfulness and relevancy in advertising, a committee of the corporation’s directors should be required to attest to the accuracy and relevance of all claims in major ad campaigns, and accuracy and relevance should be closely policed by the appropriate federal agencies, with fines levied when appropriate. Television and radio should be required to make time available so that the public can challenge advertising pitches and commercialism generally, much as Adbusters and others now do. Finally, advertising costs should be disallowed as a business expense for tax purposes.

There is no magic bullet with which to slay consumerism, but measures like these will carry us a good distance toward that goal.

James Gustave Speth is a professor at Vermont Law School and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan public policy research and advocacy organization. His most recent book is, America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy. A former dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, he also co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, was founder and president of the World Resources Institute, and served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. His previous books include: The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability and Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment.

A Tale of Two Healhcare Plans

Published on Wednesday, September 12, 2012 by Reuters

by David Cay Johnston

No issue affecting taxes so clearly divides the two parties in the U.S. election as healthcare. The two parties, in their platforms, describe very different approaches to healthcare economics. Both use political plastic surgery to cover up ugly truths.

The stakes are huge. Americans spend $2.64 per person for healthcare for each purchasing power equivalent dollar spent by the 33 other countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD data shows the U.S. spends $8,233 per capita compared with an average of $3,118 in the other 33 countries.

A growing share of federal tax dollars, in direct spending and in tax breaks, is going to U.S. healthcare as the population ages, even though about one in six Americans lacks health insurance.

America‘s healthcare system, more accurately described as a non-system sick care system, totaled 17.6 percent of the economy in 2010, compared to an average of 9.2 percent in the other 33 countries, as the OECD data shows.

In the United States, total public and private cost of healthcare is significantly greater than the total of corporate and individual income taxes, as well as payroll taxes. For each dollar paid in all three of those taxes in 2010, healthcare came to $1.29.

If we just lowered our costs to those of France, which has universal care in what is widely regarded as one of the best systems if not the best, it would save almost as much money as Americans paid in individual income taxes in 2010. The French spend 6 percentage points less of their economy on healthcare. In the United States, the individual income tax in 2010 came to 6.3 percent of the U. S. economy, the lowest since Truman was president.

Take a look at your pay stub to get an idea of the kind of money being spent on a system that fosters bankruptcy, bedevils small business and ranks 31st among the 34 OECD countries in preventing premature death.

REPUBLICAN PLAN

The Republicans say the federal government is “structurally and financially broken” and that “three programs - Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – account for over 40 percent of total spending,” which is “harming job creation and growth, (while) projections of future spending growth are nothing short of catastrophic, both economically and socially.”

The Republicans promise to “empower millions of seniors to control their personal healthcare decisions,” a vow immediately followed by a promise to cut federal spending.

The clearest explanation of what that would mean comes from Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee. Before he started obfuscating, Ryan laid out his plans in detail. He boasted that by changing Medicare from a plan that provides treatment for every older American into one that gives seniors a fixed sum to buy their own health insurance, taxpayers would save through 2084 the present equivalent of $4.9 trillion.

What Ryan did not mention is that his plan would also mean $8 of increased private spending by seniors and the disabled for each tax dollar saved.

We know how Ryan’s plan would raise total costs because David Rosnick and Dean Baker, economists at the Center for Economic Policy and Research which promotes government policies that it says would benefit workers and the poor, used the same formula that Ryan (or his staff) applied to the same Congressional Budget Office data, but on private medical care spending. Ryan’s spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Beyond the fact that it makes no sense to spend $8 to save $1, older people do not have the money. A tenth of Americans age 75 and older live below the official poverty line. Another 24 percent have only saved a tad more.

Every indicator shows that Americans have not enough for their old age and that a shrinking number have pensions while the Republicans now in charge of the party want to cut Social Security benefits, if not kill the program.

So why would any Americans under age 55, whose healthcare benefits Ryan wants to cut when they reach 65, think they can afford to spend $8 to save $1? Recently Ryan has softened his plan to let those who wish stay in traditional Medicare. Since anyone not rich who can count would stick with Medicare, Ryan’s promised taxpayer savings would never materialize.

Alan Grayson, the combative one-term Democratic representative from Florida, got it right when he said on the House floor in 2009: “The Republican plan – don’t get sick and if you do get sick die quickly.”

DEMOCRATS FAVOR UNIVERSAL CARE

The Democratic platform calls for universal healthcare. “We will end the outrage of unaffordable, unavailable healthcare,” they say, though after six decades that party promise remains unfulfilled.

President Barack Obama‘s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will enable those with pre-existing conditions and twenty-somethings without work to get health insurance. But the plan does nothing to address the larger economic problem. American healthcare costs too much and needs replacement, not a nip and tuck.

Portugal, with half the income per person as America, provides universal healthcare. Cuba, the CIA tells us, ranks 40th in infant mortality, while the United States is nine steps lower at 49th, an astonishing fact given U.S. spending compared to the poverty induced by Castro’s collectivist economic policies.

Doing worse than Portugal and Cuba is, in my view, not just costly but immoral.

Just as Republicans are trying to limit the franchise, so are they trying to limit who gets healthcare. The Democrats are better only because they recognize that universal care can be cheaper while removing an annoying and costly distraction from business.

Death and taxes will always be with us. What we need is to spend less on taxes while doing the best we can to stave off death.

© 2012 Reuters

David Cay Johnston is the author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).

Record Poverty Persists While Gap Between Rich and Rest of Us Increases

Published on Thursday, September 13, 2012 by Institute for Policy Studies Blog

by Karen Dolan

Sadly, those who "occupied" Wall Street and city squares across the country in 2011, were right: All of the income gains have concentrated at the top, while the rest of us saw a deterioration or stagnation in our wages and income.Food is distributed by a food bank in Deposit, New York. The converted beverage truck delivers fresh produce, dairy products and other grocery items to people in need. (Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

We can’t seem to stop having record numbers of people living in poverty in the United States. The richest continue to get richer and the rest of us continue to see our incomes get lower and lower.

New Census Bureau figures released Wednesday, show that 15 percent of the U.S. population lived in poverty in 2011. Over 46 million Americans lived at or below the poverty threshold of a household income of $23,201 per year for a family of four. One in five of our children live in poverty and over one-third of black and Latino children are struggling through impoverishment.

In 2011, we saw the first one-year increase in income inequality [L1] since 1993. The top 5% gained 5.3% in income in 2011 over 2010. The lowest quintile saw little change, but the second-lowest, middle, and fourth-lowest quintiles all experienced a decline in income over the year. Sadly, those who “occupied” Wall Street and city squares across the country in 2011, were right: All of the income gains have concentrated at the top, while the rest of us saw a deterioration or stagnation in our wages and income.

This data also confirms that safety programs work. According to the Census Bureau, unemployment benefits kept 2.3 million of us out of poverty in 2011, Social Security benefits kept over 21 million people out of poverty and, if we count the nutrition aid of the Food Stamps program as income, it would show that 3.9 million people were lifted above the poverty line in 2011.

Increasingly, all of the boost in wealth is concentrated at the top and record numbers of poverty persist, while the middle and lower-economic classes are losing ground. Now is not the time to lower taxes on the wealthiest by cutting proven, effective anti-poverty measures such as Unemployment Insurance, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Social Security, and new coverage benefits gained from the health care reform law.

The rich shouldn’t be rewarded while the rest of struggle.

© 2012 Institute for Policy Studies

Karen Dolan, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, was a co-author of the IPS report Battered by the Storm: How the Safety Net Is Failing Americans and How to Fix It. Follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/karendolan

Funding Sources of Anti-Organics Stanford Study Questioned in New Report

Published on Thursday, September 13, 2012 by Common Dreams

- Common Dreams staff

A study released last week by Stanford scientists, which claims organic foods are no more healthy than non-organic foods, was funded by corporate agriculture and biotechnology giants, according to a new report by the Cornucopia Institute.

Organic produce (Photo: Flickr/ penelope waits / Creative Commons License) "We were not one bit surprised to find that the agribusiness giant Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural business enterprise, and foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which have deep ties to agricultural chemical and biotechnology corporations like Monsanto, have donated millions to Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, where some of the scientists who published this study are affiliates and fellows," said Charlotte Vallaeys, Food and Farm Policy Director at the Cornucopia Institute, a non-profit organic farm policy organization.

On September 3, Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, released the research, garnishing widespread press coverage from corporate news outlets such as the New York Times, Associated Press, and CBS News. As the New York Times reported, the study "concluded that fruits and vegetables labeled organic were, on average, no more nutritious than their conventional counterparts, which tend to be far less expensive."

However, as Cornucopia points out, a deeper examination of the actual research reveals "glaring errors, both in understanding the important and complex differences between organic and conventional foods and in the researchers’ flawed choice of research methods."

Environmental health advocates such as the Environmental Working Group and Mark Kastel of Cornucopia have been quick to point out the wealth of research ignored in the Stanford report, which reveals the obvious risks involved in producing and consuming non-organics; however, Stanford's spin was quickly and widely accepted by journalists without fact-checking and was rushed to the pages of major news outlets.

Now Cornucopia has revealed that the Stanford researchers have direct ties to big ag players, which stand to profit from an organics smear campaign.

"Make no mistake, the Stanford organics study is a fraud," says Mike Adams of Naturalnews.com and Anthony Gucciardi of Naturalsociety.org. "To say that conventional foods are safe is like saying that cigarettes are safe. Both can be propagandized with fraudulent science funded by corporate donations to universities, and we’re seeing the same scientist who helped Big Tobacco now helping Big Biotech in their attempt to defraud the public."

"There was just no way that truly independent scientists with the expertise required to adequately answer such an important question would ignore the vast and growing body of scientific literature pointing to serious health risks from eating foods produced with synthetic chemicals," says Vallaeys.

Additionally, the study did, in fact, concede a few positive attributes to organic foods, including the fact that organic produce has fewer pesticide residues; however, such facts were buried in the presentation of the research by the Stanford researchers and public relations staff and were not widely reported by major news sources.

The Global Food System Casino

Published on Friday, September 14, 2012 by The Asian Age

by Vandana Shiva

Food is our nourishment. It is the source of life. Growing food, processing, transforming and distributing it involves 70 per cent of humanity. Eating food involves all of us. Yet, it is not the culture or human rights that are shaping today’s dominant food economy. Rather speculation and profits are designing food production and distribution. Putting food on the global financial casino is a design for hunger.

After the US subprime crisis and the Wall Street crash, investors rushed to commodity markets, especially oil and agricultural commodities. While real production did not increase between 2005-2007, commodity speculation in food increased 160 per cent. Speculation pushed up prices and high prices pushed an additional 100 million to hunger. Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan are all playing on the global food casino.

A 2008 advertisement of Deutsche Bank stated, “Do you enjoy rising prices? Everybody talks about commodities — with the Agriculture Euro Fund you can benefit from the increase in the value of the seven most important agricultural commodities.”

When speculation drives up prices, the rich investors get richer and the poor starve. The financial deregulation that destabilised the world’s financial system is now destabilising the world food system. The price rise is not just a result of supply and demand. It is predominantly a result of speculation.

Between 2003 to 2008, commodity index speculation increased by 1,900 per cent from an estimated $13 billion to $260 billion. Thirty per cent of these index funds are invested in food commodities. As the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative states, “We live in a brave new world of 24-hour electronic trading, triggered by algorithms of composite price indices, fits of investor ‘lack of confidence’ and of unregulated ‘dark pools’ of more than $7 trillion in over the counter commodities derivatives trades.”

The world commodity trading has no relationship to food, to its diversity, to its growers or eaters, to the seasons, to sowing or harvesting. Food diversity is reduced to eight commodities and bundled into “composite price index”.

Seasons are replaced by 24-hour trading. Food production driven by sunshine and photosynthesis is displaced by “dark pools of investment”. The tragedy is that this unreal world is creating hunger for real people in the real world.

In The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away with it — a cover story for Harper’s — Fredirick Kaufman says, “The history of food took an ominous turn in 1991, at a time when no one was paying much attention. That was the year Goldman Sachs decided our daily bread might make an excellent investment.”

And the entry of investors like Goldman Sachs, AIG Commodity Index, Bear Sterns, Oppenheiner and Pimco, Barclays allowed agribusiness to increase its profits. In the first quarter of 2008, Cargill attributed its 86 per cent jump in profits to commodity trading. ConAgra sold its trading arm to a hedge fund for $2.8 billion.

Gambling on the price of wheat for profits took food away from 250 million people. Speculation had separated the price of food from the value of food. As Austin Da-mani, a wheat broker, told Fred Kaufman, “We’re trading wheat, but its wheat we’re never going to see. It’s a cerebral experience”.

Food is an ecological experience, a sensory experience, a biological experience. With speculation it has been removed from its own reality. Grain markets have been transformed, with futures trading by the grain giants in Chicago, Kansas City and Minneapolis combined with speculation by investors.

And as Mr Kaufman says, “Imaginary wheat bought anywhere affects real wheat bought everywhere.” So if we do not decommodify food more and more people will be denied food; as more and more money is poured into the global casino, the artificial processes of speculation are driving up prices of food and taking it beyond the reach of millions.

The rules of the World Trade Organisation, the structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank and the IMF and bilateral free trade agreements have forced the integration of local and national food economies into the global market. And now the global financial system is speculating on food commodities, influencing prices and the right to food of the poorest person in the remotest corner of the world.

The spike in the world food prices started to reappear in 2011. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, in January 2011, the food price index was up 3.4 per cent from December 2010. Cereal price index was three per cent above December, and at the highest level since July 2008, though still 11 per cent below its peak in April 2008.

In India, the prices of onion jumped from Rs. 11/kg in June 2010 to Rs. 75/kg in January 2011. While production of onion had gone up from 4.8 million tonnes in 2001-2002 to 12 million tonnes in 2009-2010, prices also went up, showing that in a speculation-driven market there is no correlation between production and prices. The price difference between wholesale and retail was 135 per cent.

Food that has been put on a global casino is serving speculative investors and agribusiness well, but it is not serving people. We need to get food off the global casino and back on people’s plates. Food democracy and food sovereignty can only be achieved by putting an end to financial speculation.

Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the World Food Programme, related the Egyptian revolution of 2010 to the rise of food prices. “In many protests, demonstrators have brandished loaves of bread or displayed banners expressing anger about the rising cost of food stables such as lentils. When it comes to food, the margins between stability and chaos are perilously thin. Volatility on the markets can translate quickly to volatility on the streets and we all should remain vigilant.”

The growing concern about speculating on food has forced some banks to stop investing in food commodities. Germany’s Commerzbank and Austria’s Volksbanken have both removed agricultural products from their index fund products. Deutsche Bank had earlier done the same. It is time that every government and every financial institution put people’s right to food above the hunger for profits.

© 2012 The Asian Age

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist and eco feminist. She is the founder/director of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. She is author of numerous books including, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis; Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace; and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as NGOs, including the International Forum on Globalization, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and the Third World Network. She has received numerous awards, including 1993 Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) and the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize.

Romney: "I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more."

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press, September 12, 2012

What Mitt fails to say is that most of the money he makes is funneled through offshore shell corporations in no tax jurisdictions so that no taxes are legally required at all. We have written before about how easy it is to set up an offshore shell corporaration linked to a bank account in the Cayman Islands, the Seychelles, Bermuda or a whole slew of other no tax jurisdictions. When money is made by a shell corporation in these places no taxes are legally required. So Mitt Romney is in the position of deciding where he wants to make his money. Hmmm, should I make it in a no tax jurisdiction or should I make it in the US where I will have to pay taxes on it albeit at the minimal 15% "carried interest" loophole rate.

Mitt Romney has probably chosen to divert some of his profit making to the US for the tax year 2010 anyway, the tax year for which he has released his tax returns. That way he can say, well, look, I paid my taxes; here's my return for all to see. But even in his 2010 return some items are redacted - those items having to do with foreign investments. Private equity, which is the business Romney was in with Bain Capital, specializes in avoiding US taxes. But since Romney was planning on running for President, he had to show that he had paid some taxes at least in the one year that he was planning to release his tax returns.

Although Romney left Bain Capital in 1999, he has continued to make large amounts of money from it. In June 2012 he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million. And as I pointed out in the previous article, there is absolute confidentiality about these dealings. Not even the US government can find out the workings of firms in these no tax jurisdictions. In fact there is a law in the Cayman Islands that a person can be jailed for up to four years just for inquiring about such accounts!

Another technique Romney used to avoid taxes was to invest in so-called "blocker corporations" in the Cayman Islands. These are used by pension funds and foundations to avoid the Unrelated Business Income Tax. By investing in the blocker they are investing in a shell corporation in a no tax jurisdiction. The blocker can then go ahead and invest in a US corporation and the profits from that corporation are not taxable whereas, if they had invested directly in the US business, the profits would be taxable. Romney has used this device for his and Ann Romney's IRAs and trust funds as well. Again Romney the successful businessman has done everything that was "legally required" in paying his taxes which turns out to be nothing.

But let's not forget how Romney and Bain Capital made their money in the first place. Bain was a leveraged buyout firm which had been renamed "private equity" in order to make it sound more palatable. Bain bought companies with borrowed money (the leverage). The subsequent debt was not a debt of Bain Capital's; it was a debt of the company they just bought. It's as if you borrowed money to buy a house, but then obligated your uncle to pay off that debt or had a co-signer who was solely responsible for the debt. Yet you, not he, owned the house. Than as soon as Bain owned the company, they had the company borrow even more money so they could pay Romney a multi-million dollar dividend.  That's like, if you borrowed more money based on the house you just bought, you walked away with the money and your uncle was responsible for even more debt! With the companies Bain bought bogged down by debt, many of them had trouble making the monthly payments and went bankrupt.

Romney makes a big deal about Staples, a company Bain invested in but never fully owned, being a successful company. It was successful primarily because Bain wasn't in the position of loading it up with debt. They invested as a venture capitalist not as a leveraged buyout firm which means they put money in and later sold their shares when Staples became successful. They never were in a position to do a leveraged buyout because they never owned the company, and that's probably why Staples was successful.

Typical of Romney's and Bain's exploits was the American Pad and Paper (Ampad) fiasco. Bain bought Ampad in 1992 from Mead Corp. for $56 million. In 1994 Ampad acquired Smith Corona's Marion, Indiana operation. They then dissolved the union that represented the Marion employees and laid off 320 workers. They hired some back at lower wages and reduced benefits. In 1995 Bain closed the Marion plant. However, Ampad continued to lose money, but it did take out a $75 million loan to pay Bain a dividend. Bain had put down $5 million in cash to buy Ampad, and made roughly twenty times that in return. Ampad went bankrupt in 2000.

Why would a bank loan all this money to a company that was a sinking ship in order for that company to pay Bain huge dividends? For the same reason that banks loaned money to sub-prime mortgage borrowers. They made huge transaction fees, and then they sold off the loans to other investors. That means they took very little risk. The questionable loan was sloughed off to somebody else. There was not a lot of downside. Everything went well until the game of musical chairs stopped and someone else was left holding the bag.

After Bain bankrupted numerous companies including Stage Stores (2000), GS Technologies (2001), Dade Behring (2002), Details (2003) and KB Toys (2004), they were in a position to play with their profits, funnel them through offshore corporations in no tax jurisdictions, use blocker corporations and play games to avoid taxes which is what Romney is still doing today. He is no longer in the business of bankrupting companies and causing workers to lose their jobs. He is still in the business of profiting from Bain deals and avoiding tax consequences. The "absolute confidentiality" of the Cayman Islands along with transfering money to Ann Romney's trust and using "blind trusts - all these techniques represent subterfuges with which they can play the game of making even more money. Is it any wonder that the Romneys don't want to release any more of their tax returns?

Sure, Mitt Romney has paid all the taxes that were "legally required." The problem is that in the Cayman Islands where most of his money is, no taxes are or ever were legally required.

Cutting the Deficit, With Compassion

Economic View

By CHRISTINA D. ROMER

Published: September 8, 2012 by the New York Times

ASIDE from the empty chair that Clint Eastwood debated, the main prop at the Republican convention was a debt clock, highlighting the federal deficit and the growing national debt. The importance of dealing with the deficit will clearly be a major Republican theme this fall. So far, Democrats have mostly been playing defense on this issue by criticizing the Romney-Ryan approach. It’s time for them to go on offense by putting their own plan front and center.

Thanks to former President George W. Bush — remember the compassionate conservative? — I have a good name for the fundamental principle that should guide the Democratic alternative: compassionate deficit reduction. The essence is to cut the deficit in a way that does as little harm as possible to people, jobs and economic opportunity. This principle was implicit in much of what President Obama proposed in his 2013 budget, and in what he said about the deficit at the Democratic convention on Thursday. But embracing it more explicitly would improve the substance of the president’s plan, and make it easier to explain to voters.

The first tenet is to go slowly. Investors are willing to lend to the United States at the lowest interest rates in our history. That gives us the ability to cut the deficit on our own timetable. We should pass a comprehensive, aggressive deficit reduction plan as soon as possible, but the actual spending cuts and tax increases should be phased in as the economy recovers.

Why is this the compassionate approach? Because immediate, extreme austerity would plunge us back into recession. The Congressional Budget Office set off alarm bells a few weeks ago when it said that going over the fiscal cliff — a reference to the nearly $500 billion of automatic fiscal contraction scheduled for the start of 2013 — would cause a rapid rise in unemployment. Well, duh.

A crude rule of thumb is that every $100 billion of deficit reduction will cost close to a million jobs in the near term. If that isn’t a reason to move gradually, what is? But if you need another, just look at Europe.

A concrete way to adjust gradually is to pair serious long-run deficit reduction measures with equally serious, near-term jobs measures — like a sizable short-run infrastructure program and a one-year continuation of the payroll tax cut for working families first passed in 2010. President Obama advocated both in his proposed American Jobs Act last September.

Even better would be to give businesses increasing employment a tax credit so large they couldn’t help but notice it, and state and local governments a round of aid generous enough to finally stop the hemorrhaging of teacher jobs and essential government services.

A second feature of compassionate deficit reduction is well-designed tax reform that raises at least some additional revenue. Our budget problems are so large that solving them entirely through spending cuts would devastate the social safety net and slash investments essential for long-run growth and economic opportunity. So revenue increases must be part of the package.

President Obama has repeatedly urged Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000 a year. Increasing rates on top earners is an obvious way to raise revenue from those who can afford it most.

Many experts also recommend raising revenue by lowering tax expenditures — the roughly $1 trillion of deductions, credits and loopholes in the income tax code. Cutting tax expenditures would probably have fewer undesirable incentive effects than raising marginal tax rates. But it’s important to move carefully. Many tax expenditures, like the mortgage interest deduction and the tuition credit, go to middle-class families. Cutting only those expenditures wouldn’t be compassionate: it would shift tax burdens toward ordinary families already struggling to make ends meet.

One big tax expenditure benefiting the wealthy is the low tax rate on capital gains and dividends. The tax cuts of 2003 lowered the top rate on this income to 15 percent, far below the 35 percent top rate on other income. Compassionate deficit reduction requires a willingness to raise this preferential rate.

Government health care spending is a major cause of our terrifying long-run budget outlook. Any effective deficit plan has to slow that spending growth. But a compassionate plan would minimize risk to people, especially the most vulnerable.

The central question is whether Medicare and Medicaid should remain entitlement programs guaranteeing a certain amount of care, as Democrats believe, or become defined contribution programs in which federal spending is capped, as Republicans suggest.

Democrats have been forceful in explaining that if the federal contribution is limited and competition doesn’t magically slow costs commensurately, individuals and states will have to pay more. With Medicare, if individuals couldn’t pay the extra cost, they’d have to settle for less complete coverage and fewer benefits. With Medicaid, if states weren’t willing to pay the extra cost, they’d have to throw people off the rolls.

But Democrats need to explain their own plans for slowing government health care spending. To start with, they shouldn’t be defensive about having found $716 billion of Medicare savings as part of the health care reform legislation. They should explain, as former President Bill Clinton did in his speech on Wednesday, that these were reasonable changes that reduced overpayments to providers. They should ask Mitt Romney, who has vowed to roll back these reforms, why he wants to waste taxpayers’ money.

Moreover, Democrats should explain that compassionate deficit reduction will involve more such reforms. Fortunately, there is much inefficiency in the current system, so it should be possible to cut costs without lowering benefits. But if we can’t save enough money by reducing waste and finding better ways to provide care, we might have to consider more painful choices.

Making the wealthy pay a larger share of their Medicare costs, through further means-testing of benefits, would be one way to go. Gradually raising the Medicare eligibility age would be another. That may not sound like a winning message until you contrast it with the Republican plan, which trusts private insurers to decide how to cut costs.

Dealing with the deficit will require more than increasing revenue and reforming health care programs. We’ll also have to cut other spending. Compassionate deficit reduction requires that we choose carefully what to trim.

Spending that protects children, such as money for school lunches and vaccinations, must be maintained. So should assistance for workers displaced by international trade and for veterans struggling to recover from combat wounds.

Democrats shouldn’t be ashamed to advocate actually increasing spending that encourages opportunity and long-run growth. Aid for effective public education and Pell grants that help low-income students go to college aren’t luxuries — they are the building blocks of tomorrow’s labor force and the foundation of the American dream. And spending on infrastructure and basic scientific research is essential for the growth of productivity and standards of living.

BUT to make support for good spending credible, compassionate deficit reducers should be specific about what they would cut. Personally, I’d start with agricultural price supports and subsidized crop insurance programs that mainly benefit large commercial farmers. High-speed rail might be next. (Sorry, Mr. Vice President.) And if the defense secretary says that there is $487 billion that can be safely cut from the Pentagon’s budget over the next 10 years, we should listen to him.

Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it. But deficit reduction is coming, and this election will most likely determine how it’s done. Democrats owe it to the American people to detail their more compassionate approach so that voters can make an informed choice.

Christina D. Romer is an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

The Biggest Economic Challenge of Obama’s Second Term

by Robert Reich

Monday, September 10, 2012

The question at the core of America’s upcoming election isn’t merely whose story most voting Americans believe to be true – Mitt Romney’s claim that the economy is in a stall and Obama’s policies haven’t worked, or Barack Obama’s that it’s slowly mending and his approach is working.

If that were all there was to it, last Friday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the economy added only 96,000 jobs in August – below what’s needed merely to keep up with the growth in the number of eligible workers — would seem to bolster Romney’s claim.

But, of course, congressional Republicans have never even given Obama a chance to try his approach. They’ve blocked everything he’s tried to do – including his proposed Jobs Act that would help state and local governments replace many of the teachers, police officers, social workers, and fire fighters they’ve had to let go over the last several years.

The deeper question is what should be done starting in January to boost a recovery that by anyone’s measure is still anemic. In truth, not even the Jobs Act will be enough.

At the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, Romney produced the predictable set of Republican bromides: cut taxes on corporations and the already rich, cut government spending (mainly on the lower-middle class and the poor), and gut business regulations.

It’s the same supply-side nonsense that got the economy into trouble in the first place.

Corporations won’t hire more workers just because their tax bill is lower and they spend less on regulations. In case you hadn’t noticed, corporate profits are up. Most companies don’t even know what to do with the profits they’re already making. Not incidentally, much of those profits have come from replacing jobs with computer software or outsourcing them abroad.

Meanwhile, the wealthy don’t create jobs, and giving them additional tax cuts won’t bring unemployment down. America’s rich are already garnering a bigger share of American income than they have in eighty years. They’re using much of it to speculate in the stock market. All this has done is drive stock prices higher.

The way to get jobs back is to get American consumers to spend again. Consumer spending is 70 percent of the nation’s economic activity. Most of it comes from the middle class and those aspiring to join the middle class. They’re the real job creators.

But here’s the problem. Middle-class consumers won’t and can’t spend because their savings are depleted, their homes are worth a fraction of what they were five years ago, their wages are dropping, and they’re worried about keeping their jobs.

And they’re no longer able borrow against the rising values of their homes because the housing bubble burst — which means they can no longer pretend they’re in better financial shape than they really are.

This is the heart of our economic dilemma.

Last Thursday night at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, President Obama suggested a way to correct this, or at least not make things worse: Raise taxes on the wealthy rather than cut programs the middle class and poor depend on (such as Medicare and Medicaid), give tax incentives to companies that create jobs in the United States, and invest in education.

It’s a start but America’s middle class and poor need far more. They need to be able to refinance their mortgages at today’s low interest rates. They need a larger Earned Income Tax Credit – a wage subsidy for lower-paying jobs. And a higher minimum wage that’s automatically adjusted for inflation.

They could use a new Works Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps designed to put the long-term unemployed back to work.

They need stronger unions to bargain for a larger share of the gains from economic growth. And a Social Security payroll tax that exempts the first $25,000 of income and eliminates the ceiling (now $110,100) on income subject to it.

And they need an industrial policy designed to create high-wage jobs in America.

In accepting his party’s nomination for president, Obama said the “basic bargain” that once rewarded hard work and gave everyone a fair shot had come undone.

He’s right. And the U.S. economy won’t return to normal until that basic bargain is remade.

If Obama gets a second term, recreating that bargain — and getting enough votes from Congress to do so — will be his central challenge, and America’s

 

Prop 37: Labeling Genetically Modified Foods

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

I wrote a previous article in the San Diego Free Press about genetically modified (GMO) foods. One might ask, "What is the purpose of genetically modifying a food item." Is it to enhance the flavor? Is it to make it more nutritious? Well, no, not really. The sole purpose of modifying corn and soy products is to make them resistant to pesticides and herbicides.  Monsanto's Roundup Ready soy seeds grow into plants that will not be killed when Roundup is sprayed on the soy field which kills every other thing in the field EXCEPT the Roundup Ready soy plant. This allows the corporate farmer to whip through the field with his $185,000. tractor and harvest the soy plants with hardly a need for costly manual labor. Consequently, when you buy a soy or corn product at the supermarket or fast food restaurant, you are getting GMO soy or corn which has been drenched in herbicide before it was harvested in order to cut the cost of growing and processing which weeds would entail. Did I mention that Roundup was good for killing pests too? This maximizes yields and profits.

 Proposition 37 asks the simple question, "Do voters want food products that have been genetically altered to be labeled as such?" If you vote yes, you want GMO products to be labeled. If you vote no, you don't want to know that the food products you're consuming contain genetically altered organisms. According to some estimates, 40 to 70 percent of food products sold in grocery stores in California contain genetically engineered ingredients. By definition foods labeled organic cannot contain any GMO products. Naturally, the organic food industry wants GMO products to be labeled so as to give consumers a clear choice between organic products and GMO products and, not incidentally, to increase their profits. On the other side are the chemical and processed food industries including Coca-Cola, General Mills, Nestle, PepsiCo, DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto, a leading producer of genetically engineered seeds which has donated $4.2 million to defeat Prop 37.

What's at stake here is whether or not American consumers will have the knowledge and ability to distinguish between products that contain potentially harmful ingredients or products which haven't been processed and grown with a cocktail of chemicals. And do we want the food industry dominated by corporate farmers whose main interest is in maximizing profits or do we want our food produced by smaller local farmers whos main interest is in producing quality products even though they may cost a little more? The main argument of the corporatists is that labeling GMO foods would add to the price, but what they really fear is that consumers would make a hasty exit from the supermarket doors when they see the GMO label on many of their favorite products and head for the nearest health food store.

However, Prop 37 doesn't even go far enough in my opinion. The labeling initiative largely covers processed foods that contain such ingredients, but there are exemptions for alcohol and restaurant meals. Milk, cheese and other dairy products made from cows that are injected with the bovine growth hormone or eat genetically engineered feed like alfalfa would be exempt. The GMO industry is insidious. An animal can eat a GMO product, but when you buy sirloin steak, it will not have to be labeled GMO. Likewise, Jack in the Box hamburgers as well as Ruths Criss filet mignon will not have to be labeled as GMO on the restaurant menus. While people eat out more often these days due to lack of time for food preparation, they still will not be aware of what is in their food even if Prop 37 passes. That's why every American should read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser to have their conscious raised about what they are putting in their bellies three times a day in most cases. While a direct link between eating chemicals in our food and cancer has not been established, it is likely that a build-up of Roundup, bovine growth hormone and god knows what else is not contributing to the long term health of our bodies.

Many other nations, including Japan, China and a host of European countries, already label genetically engineered food. But In the United States forget it. Nothing is labeled that might dissuade consumers. However, produce that is not cosmetically perfect is regularly tossed in the dumpster. A lot of organic growers and food companies, on the other hand, voluntarily label their products with a seal verifying that their foods do not contain genetically modified ingredients. But for some consumers and especially the poor the sole conern is price. But they can take heart. Monsanto's genetically modified sweet corn will soon be available at Walmart.

A major food fight is about to break out between consumers who want to eat healthy and corporate farmers and the chemical industry who want to maximize profits and keep the American food supply the way it is today - highly chemicalized and unnatural.

VOTE YES ON PROP 37 FOR A HEALTHIER AMERICAN FOOD SUPPLY. CONSUMERS SHOULD KNOW WHAT THEY'RE EATING.

Reference for this article: Proposition 37 in California: A high-stakes food fight  by Dana Hull, from the Silicon Valley Mercury News.com, 8/24/12

What Republicans Don't Want You To Know About Medicare

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

According to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, President Obama is taking $716 billion away from Medicare and giving it to Obamacare. No he's not. We attempt to set the record straight. The crux of the matter has to do with what's called Medicare Advantage which is a privatized version of Medicare. Neither side will use the word privatization, but in a nutshell that's what this issue is all about. That $716 billion represents a pushback by the Obama administration against the forces of privatization which have been at work against government run Medicare for years.

In 1997 our old friend, Newt Gingrich, established the privatization camel's nose under the tent of traditional Medicare with the Balanced Budget Act which included a provision for something called  Medicare+Choice, the precursor to Medicare Advantage. This act let private health care companies compete with traditional government run Medicare. This was step 1 in the privatization of Medicare. During the Bush administration the name was changed to Medicare Advantage. It was an advantage all right - for the private health care corporations who were paid more for each procedure than doctors were paid under government run traditional Medicare - 14% more. In other words Republican congressmen made Medicare Advantage a more attractive program then traditional Medicare, and this lured seniors in opting for Medicare Advantage rather than sticking with traditional Medicare. It was hardly a level playing field. Medicare Advantage was a disadvantage for traditional Medicare.

It is this "advantage" of the Medicare Advantage program that Obamacare seeks to take away which leads to the charge by Romney-Ryan that Obama is taking $716 billion from Medicare and giving it to Obamacare. What he is really doing is taking the $716 billion from the privatized version of Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and using that money to cover poor people thus approaching universal health care coverage for all. Of course, covering poor people at the expense of the private health care corporations' profits is anathema to Republicans.

But let's step back a little in order to try and understand the bewildering array of programs which constitute the social safety net of Medicare. First you pay payroll taxes your entire working life. They're called FICA (Federal Insurance Contribution Act) if you're an employee and SECA (Self Employment Insurance Act) if you're self-employed. It turns out that if you're self employed you pay twice as much in payroll taxes as you do if you're an employee thanks to changes made by Alan Greenspan and Ronald Reagan giving the lie to the Republican meme that they're all about helping the small business person, but that's another story for another day. FICA taxes consist of two parts: social security tax and hospital insurance tax. Hospital insurance tax is what pays for Medicare Part A when you're 65 and enroll in Medicare. Now Medicare Part B is a whole different story. This is the part that pays your doctor and is entirely optional. You can choose to enroll in it and pay a premium (now it's around $100. a month) or to not enroll. Medicare Advantage, which is also called Medicare Part C, is only about Medicare Part B. Confused yet? An enrollee can choose traditional Medicare (Part B) or Medicare Advantage (Part C). Both require a monthly premium.

The Republican plan is to lure seniors away from traditional or government run or "socialized" Medicare and direct them to Medicare Advantage programs run by private insurance corporations. Eventually and stealthily, this would privatize Medicare in and of itself as Medicare Advantage enrollees reach critical mass. Traditional Medicare would then be left to wither on the vine. How do the private insurance companies attract enrollees away from traditional Medicare, you might ask? Good question. They offer some services that traditional Medicare doesn't - like free annual check ups. Thanks to Republican monkeying this logical cost reducing preventative measure has been denied to traditional Medicare recipients ... until Obamacare. Obamacare gives traditional Medicare recipients free preventative benefits - an annual physical exam, colonoscopies and so on. This nullifies the advantage of Medicare Advantage, and is why the Republicans are up in arms. Their carefully laid plan to privatize Medicare is being nullified by Obamacare.

How does Medicare Advantage offer free servuces that traditional Medicare doesn't? It's all about that 114% advantage of traditional fees-for-service that the government pays to the private health care corporations. They then have the option of paying doctors more than they would get for the same service provided to a traditional Medicare enriollee or they can provide more services than a traditional Medicare enrollee is offered or they can keep the money and pay their CEOs more. That's one reason why administrative costs for Medicare provided by private insurance companies are 30% and administrative costs for government run traditional Medicare are 3%.

When Romney-Ryan assert that Obamacare would be taking Medicare away from seniors, they may be partly right because that 14% advantage enjoyed by Medicare Advantage will be taken away. That's what constitutes the $716 billion. Doctors who are receiving more for providing the same service may not be too happy about that. As it is, many doctors refuse to take on Medicare patients because the reimbursements are so low. Also the private health care corporations may cut back on their "lures" - the freebies like gym membership and visual care that they offer that traditional Medicare doesn't. That's why the Obama administration is hesitant to confront this issue head on. They don't want to piss off doctors and seniors who are already enrolled in Medicare Advantage. Many of the advantages of Medicare Advantage will be nullified.

But Medicare Advantage has a dark side. With traditional Medicare you can go to any doctor you want, even specialists, without a referral. You can get a second opinion, even a third if you choose. With Medicare Advantage you have to stick to a certain network of doctors, and you can even be refused treatment under some circumstances. Ah, there's the rub. Medicare Advantage will offer you lures ... cheap lures, but when it comes down to those expensive operations, you might be refused by the insurance corporations the permission to undergo the operation. After all, that's how they make their money - denying service for the expensive stuff while luring you with the cheap stuff.

Step 2 in the privatization of Medicare has to do with the fact that Medicare Part B (traditional Medicare) only pays 80% of the doctor's fees. That other 20% could amount to a lot of money with today's skyrocketing medical costs. But no worries - private health care corporations to the rescue! They offer Medicare supplemental or Medigap insurance. For a small premium (yeah, right) they pay the other 20%. So why doesn't the government offer 100% coverage for a slight additional premium? Right now Medicare Part B costs around $100. a month for 80% coverage. Why not charge a $120. premium for 100% coverage? Instead private health insurance corporations are charging as much or more for the additional 20% as folks are paying the government for the first 80%! Republican meddling and monkeying is responsible for getting the private health insurance corporations' camel's nose under the tent of traditional Medicare Part B. Jeez, thanks Republicans for letting me pay as much to the private health insurance corporations for 20% coverage as I pay the government for 80% coverage. Why isn't this a major issue? But you'll never hear Brian Williams, Scott Pelley or Wolf Blitzer talk about it.

Step 3 in the privatization of Medicare is the by now famous Paul Ryan plan to voucherize Medicare. Whereas the Gingrich plan resulting in Medicare Advantage (advantage to the private corporations) is a Trojan horse sneak attempt, the Ryan voucherization plan is a head long assault on Medicare. It would pay seniors X amount of dollars and then they could go fend for themselves in the private health insurance market. Seniors would have to pony up greater and greater amounts as the government supplied stipends fall increasingly short of the amount required. Also all the old health insurance corporation tricks such as rescission would be reinstated. That means that sick seniors would have to pay astronomcal premiums even to get any health insurance at all, and desperate seniors might be denied a life saving operation. The insurance company not your doctor would decide.

At the root of Medicare's problems is the skyrocketing cost of health care. Cancer drugs are coming on the market which delay death by only a few months but yet cost astronomical amounts. For instance, the cost of the drug Perjeta when combined with Herceptin costs $188,000., but delays the final denouement of death by only six months. It costs $120,000. for four injections of Yervoy which extends the life of advanced melanoma patients by about four months. A Newsweek article asks "How Much Would You Pay For Three More Months of Life?" You can bet your bippie that Paul Ryan's privatized Medicare would not pay it. So expensive therapies and life extending operations are inevitably going to be available only to the rich regardless of whether or not Medicare is privatized or left entirely to the government.

But don't take it from me that taking money away from the privatized Medicare Advantage program and putting it back into traditional Medicare is a good thing. Take it from Wendell Potter who was an insurance industry insider who turned whistleblower:

While insurers liked the part of [Obamacare] reform that would require all Americans not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid to buy coverage from them, they did not like the provision that would eliminate the overpayments the federal government has been paying private insurers for years to participate in the Medicare Advantage program, which was created when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress in the late 1990s.

A little history: A provision of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, written primarily by the insurance industry and backed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, gave Medicare beneficiaries the option of getting their benefits through private insurers. Republicans envisioned this as the first step toward the total privatization of Medicare.

The problem was that insurers were reluctant to jump in unless they could be assured of a substantial profit. To get them to market Medicare Advantage plans, the [Republicans in] government agreed to give them a big bonus. As a result, we the taxpayers now pay private insurers 14 percent more than the per-patient cost of the traditional Medicare program. These overpayments have contributed significantly to the record profits insurance companies have been posting in recent years, even though only 22 percent of people eligible for Medicare have bought what they’re selling.

The insurers were not able to keep the Democrat-controlled Congress of 2010 from eliminating those bonuses when they passed the Affordable Care Act. The law will indeed reduce future Medicare spending—not benefits—by an estimated $500 million over the next 10 years in a variety of ways, one of which is to stop overpaying insurers. This means that they will not get an extra $136 billion that they—and their shareholders—had been counting on, and they’re really bummed about that.

As per usual you won't get the straight scoop from either the Republicans or the Democrats but at heart Obamacare VS Paul Ryan's Vouchercare is an ideological struggle. It's all about privatization vs government run health care or "socialization". Neither side will mention this ideological struggle or the words "privatization" and "socialization" because they have been so thoroughly demonized. The Democrats will not try to convince you that you will be better off if government runs the Medicare program, and the Republicans will not tell you what's in store if private health insurers run the program. So neither side will get near the root of the issue. After all we don't think we want "Big Government" and we don't want to be at the mercy of the profit seeking, highly paid CEOs at their corporate desks either. And so this essentially ideological debate is trivialized.

John Lawrence is enrolled in traditional Medicare Part B and has opted out of supplemental Medicare or Medigap coverage.

Netherlands Is In Top 5 Most Competitive World Economies

by Frank Thomas                    September 7, 2012

The World Economic Forum´s 2012-2013 report is out with its annual ranking of 144 nations … The Global Competitiveness Index. For the EU 17, there’s a large difference between best-and-worst-performing countries due to four depressed southern countries. Still, six European countries were ranked in the top ten most competitive world economies … the Netherlands in the top 5!  The results are: 

 

TABLE 1:                                  

2012-13                                            2011-2012                   

(1)          Switzerland                             (1)

(2)          Singapore                                (2)

(3)          Finland                                    (4)

(4)          Sweden                                   (3)

(5)          The Netherlands                    (7)

(6)          Germany                                 (6)

(7)          U.S.                                         (5)

(8)          UK                                           (10)

(9)          Hong Kong                              (11)                  

(10)        Japan                                       (9)                     ____________________________________________________

Briefly, the 2012-2013 report says: “The Netherlands continues to progress in rankings moving up to 5^th place this year from 8^th place in 2010-2011. The improvement reflects continued strengthening of its innovative capacity as well as the heightened efficiency and stability of its financial markets. The Dutch businesses are highly sophisticated (4^th) and innovative (9^th), and the country is rapidly harnessing new technologies for productivity improvements (9^th).

Its excellent education system, ranked 5^th for health and primary education and 6^th for its higher education and training, and efficient markets – especially its goods marketing (6^th) – are highly supportive of business activity. And although the country has registered fiscal deficits in recent years (-5% of GDP in 2012 vs. -9.6% U.S. but a general national debt at a healthy 66% of GDP vs. 103% U.S.), its macroeconomic environment is more stable than that of a number of other advanced economies. Last but not least, the quality of its infrastructure is among the best in the world, reflecting excellent facilities for maritime, air, and railroad transport, ranked 1^st, 4^th, and 9^th, respectively.”

The Netherlands can still do better in its investment in R&D  and stimulation of startup firms. More investment is needed in basic and applied research knowhow and in the joint cooperation between universities and business firms. But the relatively highly educated Dutch population is a powerful plus factor along with a country rank of 12 (vs. 47 for U.S.) in the quality of math and science education.

The overall competitive index for each country reflects a ranking based on 12 Pillars … and each Pillar in turn reflects a number of social-economic factors also ranked (see pg. 288 for Netherlands). ________________________________________________________   

TABLE 2: Rank Based On 144 Countries         

A.  BASIC REQUIREMENTS                      NETH.                 U.S. 
       (PILLARS 20%)

1. Institutions                                               7                       41

2. Infrastructure                                            7                      14

3. Macroeconomic Environment                    41                     111

4. Health and Primary Education                    5                      34

B.  EFFICIENCY ENHANCERS 
        (PILLARS 50%)

5. Higher Education and Training                  6                         8

6. Goods Marketing Efficiency                        6                        23

7. Labor Market Efficiency                             17                        6

8. Financial Market Development                  20                       16            

9. Technological Readiness                             9                       11          

10. Market Size                                             20                        1 

C. INNOVATION AND SOPHISTICATION 
            (PILLARS 30%)

11. Technological Innovation                           4                       10

12. Business Sophistication                             9                         6  ________________________________________________________

 

As noted, the World Economic Forum’s report gives a detailed weighted country ranking and scores (1 to 7)  for specific social-economic factors affecting each of the 12 pillars. The cumulative weighted results in TABLES 1 and 2 confirm that European countries in mid and northern Europe (including UK) and Switzerland in the south do extremely well in the competitiveness test… the same European countries U.S. conservative politicians (Romney and Ryan leading the band) demagogically blanket-label as examples of  “Economically Unstable, Spendthrift Socialism.”

In contrast, the report highlights many escalating, unaddressed weaknesses that have lowered the U.S. overall ranking in recent years. The U.S. has one of the worst rankings for macroeconomic instability at 111^th, down from an equally weak 90^th ranking last year! Numerous business complaints include: political disputes and polarization, government’s inability to maintain arms-length relationships with the private sector, automatic spending cuts  prolonging the deep recession, wasteful government spending. On the positive side, U.S. firms receive excellent ranks for being highly sophisticated and innovative. This reflects an excellent university system that collaborates well with the business sector.

One BIG difference in the Goods Marketing Efficiency pillar is that  the Netherlands’ net exports as a percentage of GDP were 93.9% vs. 85.1% for imports, a net positive of 8.8% (and Germany’s net positive of 5.3% ) compared to U.S.’s negative net exports of -4.0%. This relatively huge disparity in net exports has long existed between the U.S. and mature EU countries. As noted in my previous writings, (e.g., “Our Fiscal-Economic Quagmire: Some Solutions”) we are steadily returning to exorbitant U.S. monthly trade deficits of $60 billion. This has long been causing a systemic, unstable imbalance in our economic model for growth where GDP = Consumption + Private Investment + Public Investment + Net Exports.

We are trapped in a self-destructing viscious circle of extreme GDP growth dependence on Consumption at 70% of  GDP  growth (vs. 58-60% of GDP in Europe plus far higher gross national Savings) combined with stagnant wage growth for the past three decades … all requiring more consumption to compensate for the negative GDP growth effects of rising trade deficits and poor public and private investments. This and outsourcing our manufacturing base knowhow has been driving mainstream America to buy ever cheaper products from China and India. Result? Constant gigantic trade deficits … an economic Catch-22 also forcing up consumer credit card debt to irresponsible levels, helping to feed the next financial crisis. Then add to the financially destabilizing mixture our grossly unaffordable Defense Spending in excess of 5.5% of GDP vs. 1.9% for the rest of the world including Europe.                              

The conclusion is that these inherently out-of-balance factors in our economic model are undermining our national financial liquidity and flexibility to invest in infrastructure and education … pressuring our very high current national debt at 103% of GDP to go ever higher. It's clear the U.S. paradigm of high consumption/ consumer credit debt and huge net export trade debt -- incited and worsened by a middle-class wage and a manufacturing-knowhow race to the bottom -- are contributing to our run-down infrastructure and weakening economic competitiveness, as noted in the World Economic Forum report. Sadly, partisan, power-hungry, winner-takes-all political gridlock makes impossible any audacious, balanced, CAN DO, best-idea initiatives … cooperative actions giving real hope of sustainably resolving serious societal problems and the self-destructive imbalances in our economic model in the interest of ALL Americans.                                                   

Labor Day 2012 and the Election of 2012: It’s Inequality, Stupid

by Robert Reich

Thursday, August 30, 2012

The most troubling economic trend facing America this Labor Day weekend is the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top – among a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people – and the steady decline of the great American middle class.

Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.

Republicans claim the rich are job creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to create jobs, businesses need customers. But the rich spend only a small fraction of what they earn. They park most of it wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

The real job creators are the vast middle class, whose spending drives the economy and creates jobs.

But as the middle class’s share of total income continues to drop, it cannot spend as much as before. Nor can most Americans borrow as they did before the crash of 2008 — borrowing that temporarily masked their declining purchasing power.

As a result, businesses are reluctant to hire. This is the main reason why the recovery has been so anemic.

As wealth and income rise to the top, moreover, so does political power. The rich are able to entrench themselves by lowering their taxes, gaining special tax breaks (such as the “carried interest” loophole allowing private equity and hedge fund managers to treat their incomes as capital gains), and ensuring a steady flow of corporate welfare to their businesses (special breaks for oil and gas, big agriculture, big insurance, Big Pharma, and, of course, Wall Street).

All of this squeezes public budgets, corrupts government, and undermines our democracy. The issue isn’t the size of our government; it’s who our government is for. It has become less responsive to the needs of most citizens and more to the demands of a comparative few.

The Republican response – as we saw dramatically articulated this past week in Tampa – is to further reduce taxes on the rich, defund programs for the poor, fight unions, allow the median wage to continue to fall, and oppose any limits on campaign contributions or spending.

It does not take a great deal of brainpower to understand this strategy will lead to an even more lopsided economy, more entrenched wealth, and more corrupt democracy. 

The question of the moment is whether next week President Obama will make a bold and powerful rejoinder. If he and the Democratic Party stand for anything, it must be to reverse this disastrous trend.

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Romney and Bain Capital

Published on Thursday, August 30, 2012 by Rolling Stone

How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill

by Matt Taibbi

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

Like John McCain four years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid. "Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party," Romney told frenzied Republican supporters in Norfolk, Virginia, standing before the reliably jingoistic backdrop of a floating warship. "He understands the fiscal challenges facing America: our exploding deficits and crushing debt."

Debt, debt, debt. If the Republican Party had a James Carville, this is what he would have said to win Mitt over, in whatever late-night war room session led to the Ryan pick: "It's the debt, stupid." This is the way to defeat Barack Obama: to recast the race as a jeremiad against debt, something just about everybody who's ever gotten a bill in the mail hates on a primal level.

Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America's federal borrowing. "A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation," he declared. "Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love." Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it's going to burn our children alive.

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

Generating PV Solar Power Close To The End Consumer

By Frank Thomas from the San Diego Free Press

This article is a continuation of the series on PV power generation. Previous articles were Learning from the Cascading Power Failures that Brought Down the Power Grid in India by Deb Severson and Power to the People or Power to the Corporations by John Lawrence.

The evidence is substantial that distributed local PV power plants have the lowest transmission loss and cost as well CO2 pollution footprint of all available energy sources. In Germany, more than 98% of all PV power plants are decentralized. Of course, this is easier for European countries each of which is a population intensive, closely knit national community. PV solar, in particular, is rapidly becoming a price competitive, significant sustainable renewable source. The development of average system prices indicates that Germany´s decentralized PV electricity production will likely achieve competitive parity with electricity from the grid for private consumption by 2013.                                                                                

In my earlier writing on energy developments, I highlighted how Germany and Denmark are totally committed to a step-by-step process of being entirely covered by renewable energy sources by 2050 – in addition to aggressive programs for effective energy conservation (waste reduction) and efficiency in both electrical generation and consumption. It is expected that PV solar energy will account for 25-30% of Germany´s total electricity needs by 2050 vs. less than 4% today!                                                                                                      

Between 2012 and 2050, Germany will have phased out of all of its nuclear power plants. This reflects a recent government decision to build no more nuclear plants and to gradually shut down its current plants! Denmark is on a similar 100% clean energy course by 2050.

Europe is playing a dominant role in the world distributed PV market systems. According to  research by the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA), PV prices are decreasing faster than expected. This along with the highly efficient and environmentally friendly (almost zero carbon) features of PV power plants is attracting more and more interest by other European countries (and countries outside Europe) in generating PV solar power close to the end customer. The EPIA makes the following forecast of European cumulative installed PV capacity by 2020:

                    PV Installed Capacity 2020   

   

EUROPE                                              240 GW

Germany                                              80 GW

Italy                                                     55 GW

France                                                 30 GW

Spain                                                    17 GW

UK                                                        11 GW

U.S.                                                     18 GW 2015* /40 GW 2020   

   Source: Solar Energy Industry Association Q1 2012 Market Report

Germany is going from 25 GW installed PV solar capacity today to  80 GW by 2020 and Europe to an amazing 240 GW by 2020. Compare this to the U.S. which is going from 5 GW of installed capacity today to 18 GW by 2015 rising to 40 GW by 2020.

It is obvious  the U.S. is way behind Europe in photovoltaic solar development … whether decentralized or centralized. BUT, on the positive side, PV solar plant activity is sharply increasing across the U.S. There are now 46 operating utility-scale plants of which 9 are in California; 28 plants under construction of which 12 are in California; and 120 are under development of which 62 are in California!  Clearly, California is one of the remarkable world leaders in its commitment to transition relatively quickly to PV solar systems.                                          

A conservative estimate of total added U.S. GWs, allowing for delay and no go-ahead for some of the planned PV power plants, is as noted above 40 GW, hopefully more, by 2020 … still far behind Europe! This along with the grand rush to exploit huge internal reserves of unconventional shale/tight oil, tar sand oil, and conventional Artic offshore oil reserves means we are stacking the cards against ever stabilizing near/long-term polluting CO2 emissions and holding to a maximum earth temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.

We simply do not a have a simultaneous, coherent national energy plan that step-for-step takes us off conventional fossil fuels (ignoring unconventional oil resources for the moment) by at least 70% by 2050 … while still getting our imported oil dependence down significantly. This 70% goal is piddling compared to Germany and Denmark’s plans to be 100% on renewable energy sources by 2050.