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10 Filthy-Rich, Tax-Dodging Hypocrites Pushing Disastrous Austerity on America

Published on Monday, October 29, 2012 by Institute for Policy Studies from Common Dreams

The Fix the Debt coalition is using the so-called "fiscal cliff" to push the same old corporate agenda of more tax breaks while shifting the burden on to the rest of us.

by Sarah Anderson and Scott Klinger

Brace yourself for one of the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns of all time. And one of the most hypocritical.

“Fix the Debt ” is a coalition of more than 80 CEOs who claim they know best how to deal with our nation’s fiscal challenges. The group boasts a $60 million budget just for the initial phase of a massive media and lobbying campaign.

The irony is that CEOs in the coalition’s leadership have been major contributors to the national debt they now claim to know how to fix. These are guys who’ve mastered every tax-dodging trick in the book. And now that they’ve boosted their corporate profits by draining the public treasury, how do they propose we put our fiscal house back in order? By squeezing programs for the poor and elderly, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Fix the Debt claims their agenda is not just about spending cuts. But when it comes to their tax proposals, they use the slippery term “pro-growth reform” to push for cuts in deductions that are likely to include credits for working families and — you guessed it — more corporate tax breaks. Chief among these is a proposal to switch to a territorial system under which corporate foreign earnings would be permanently exempted (instead of being taxed when they are returned to America).

This idea, also supported by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, would make it even more profitable for big corporations to use accounting tricks to disguise U.S. profits as income earned in tax havens. Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that such tax haven abuse will cost the Treasury more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

So who are the CEOs who are telling the rest of us to be responsible and tighten our belts after they’ve spent decades stiffing the U.S. Treasury? Of the 80 members of Fix the Debt’s CEO Fiscal Leadership Council, here are 10 that stand out as the biggest hypocrites:

1. Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric

Perhaps no tax-dodging U.S. corporation has done more to drain the U.S. Treasury than General Electric. Over the last 10 years GE reported more than $80 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits and yet paid a federal corporate income tax rate of just 2.3% .

One of GE’s favorite tricks is the “Active Financing Exception.” U.S. corporations are supposed to pay U.S. taxes on interest income earned anywhere in the world. But GE enjoys this special exception for companies that have “captive” foreign finance subsidiaries, such as their credit card arm. The measure was repealed as part of fair taxation reforms in 1986, but GE led a successful lobbying effort to bring it back in 1997. Although the exception was supposed to be temporary, Congress has renewed it six times. And, despite all the public hand-wringing over the deficit, lawmakers are seriously considering extending this and other corporate loopholes before the end of the year.

2. Jim McNerney, Boeing

Last year, Boeing was one of 25 major U.S. firms that paid their CEO more than they paid Uncle Sam in corporate income taxes, according to an Institute for Policy Studies report . The aerospace giant enjoyed a $605 million tax refund in 2011, despite reporting more than $5 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits. CEO Jim McNerney made $18.4 million in personal compensation. In fact, Boeing is a serial tax dodger , having paid federal corporate income taxes in only two of the last 10 years.

One of the ways Boeing avoids paying taxes is by taking advantage of the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit, which saved the $137 million last year alone. Government investment in basic research is not a bad idea, but current R&D credits are structured in a way that primarily benefits large, well-resourced high-tech firms like Boeing that would probably do the research anyway. CEO McNerney also chairs the Business Roundtable, which aggressively lobbies for more corporate tax breaks.

3. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs

Few corporations have been as dependent on U.S. taxpayers for their very existence as Goldman Sachs. The 2008 bailout of American International Group and the steady stream of low- and non-interest loans for the financial sector have kept the company alive.

CEO Blankfein says he’d accept a small increase in individual taxes for the wealthy in exchange for a comprehensive budget deal. But his corporate tax proposals would wipe out the revenue gains from rolling back the Bush tax cuts for top earners. Blankfein is a big supporter of the territorial tax system explained above. This is hardly a surprise, since Goldman Sachs already operates 37 subsidiaries in tax havens .

Blankfein has also used his position at the helm of the Financial Services Forum, a club for the CEOs of 20 top banks, to oppose financial transaction taxes -- small levies on trades of stock, derivatives, and other financial instruments. Goldman Sachs has made as much as $300 million per year from the volatile high-frequency trading strategies that would be hardest hit by such a transaction tax. In early October, 11 European governments announced a plan to implement such taxes, with expected revenues in the neighborhood of $ 75 billion per year . But Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms have blocked U.S. progress on this major revenue-raiser.

4. Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America

After a decade of risky and reckless mortgage lending, Bank of America survived the 2008 financial crash with the help of a $45 billion bailout. Today, Bank of America sits on $128 billion in cash — $18 billion of it is overseas —and much of that is sitting in the company’s 115 tax haven subsidiaries .

Last year, after investors saw their stock price decline 58 percent and 30,000 Bank of America employees lost their jobs to layoffs, CEO Brian Moynihan saw his compensation quadruple to more than $8 million. His predecessor, Ken Lewis, raked in more than $50 million in the two years before the housing bubble that Bank of America had help inflate burst in 2008.

5. David Cote, Honeywell Corporation

Over the last three years, Honeywell received more than $2.7 billion in federal defense contracts and reported more than $2.5 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits. And yet thanks to corporate deductions, tax subsidies, and loopholes, Honeywell has claimed $377 million in federal tax refunds during this period.

Honeywell CEO David Cote has been a fixture at Congressional hearings calling for a territorial tax system for corporations. He is also Vice-Chair of the Business Roundtable, a club for big business CEOs that has called for an extension of all the Bush tax cuts, including those for millionaires and billionaires, as well as the tax cuts on unearned income from capital gains and dividends. These combined measures would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next ten years.

6. Randall Stephenson, AT&T

AT&T is another firm that paid its CEO more last year than they paid in federal corporate income taxes. CEO Randall Stephenson made $18.7 million , while the firm enjoyed a $420 million refund from Uncle Sam.

AT&T is a major beneficiary of “accelerated depreciation” rules that allow companies to turbo-charge tax deductions in the early years of the life of an asset. A 2009 accelerated depreciation rule saved the company $5.2 billion on their 2011 taxes, according to the firm’s 10-K report. Although touted as a way to jumpstart spending in a downturn, such tax breaks often result in taxpayers bearing a substantial portion of the cost of investments firms would’ve made anyway.

7. Arne Sorenson, Marriott International

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted Marriott International for using an illegal tax shelter swindle dubbed “ Son of Boss .” The scam involved setting up a series of complex paper transactions between company subsidiaries to create $70 million in fake losses that could be offset against Marriott’s real profits. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a long-time friend of the Marriott family and named after Marriott’s patriarch J. Willard Marriott, was the head of the hotel giant’s audit committee in 1994 at the time the board first approved the Son of Boss transaction. According to Bloomberg, Marriott has also shifted profits to a Luxembourg shell company and avoided hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes through one federal tax credit for so-called synthetic fuel that Senator John McCain dubbed an “expensive hoax.”

8. Alexander Cutler, Eaton Corporation

Less than two years after accepting $90 million in taxpayer-financed subsidies to locate a new world headquarters in the suburbs of Cleveland, Eaton Corporation announced that it would be moving its headquarters and reincorporating as an Irish company. The move is part of a merger deal with Cooper Industries, another Fix the Debt coalition member. The two companies boast that Eaton’s departure after 100 years in Cleveland will cut their tax bill by $160 million . Meanwhile, Eaton is fighting a $75 million bill from the IRS for back taxes and penalties related to alleged violations of transfer pricing agreements.

9. Lowell McAdam, Verizon

Verizon is one of 30 companies identified by Citizens for Tax Justice as having paid “less than nothing” in federal income taxes over the entire 2008-10 period. Despite earning $32.5 billion in profits during these three years, the firm got so much in tax subsidies that they wound up with a net tax refund of $951 million. That works out to a tax rate of negative 2.9%. In effect, every Verizon phone customer paid more in federal telephone excise taxes than Verizon paid in federal income taxes.

10. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft

A recent Senate investigation exposed how Microsoft has used Olympic class accounting acrobatics to avoid paying taxes. Specifically, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations charged that the software giant had devised a complicated transfer pricing agreement with a subsidiary in Puerto Rico to lower its tax bill on goods sold in the U.S. market by as much as $4.5 billion from 2009 to 2011. The investigation also accused Microsoft of avoiding billions in U.S. corporate income taxes by shifting royalty revenue to low-tax jurisdictions. Subcommittee Chair Carl Levin described Microsoft’s strategies as “tax alchemy, featuring structures and transactions that require a suspension of disbelief to be accepted.” Such alchemy, while not illegal, is a major contributor to the national debt.

Sanders to CEOs: Look in the Mirror

When Fix the Debt launched their 80 CEO-strong coalition on October 25, Senator Bernie Sanders responded by stating, “Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession.”

Instead, the Fix the Debt coalition members are portraying themselves as the honorable ones who are brave enough to push the tough austerity medicine that is the only remedy for our fiscal ills. Nonsense. We are the richest nation in the history of the world. Our problem is that too much of our wealth is going into the coffers of rich individuals and corporations and to pay for misguided wars.

There are numerous budget plans by Senator Sanders, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and others that would get us on the right track. At the Institute for Policy Studies , we’ve identified a dozen policies that would collectively raise trillions of dollars to in ways that would not only address the fiscal challenge but help make our economy more equitable, green, and secure. The report also points out that until we recover from the current unemployment crisis, we should not be contemplating any spending cuts that could deepen the crisis.

The Fix the Debt coalition is using the so-called “fiscal cliff” as an opportunity to push the same old corporate agenda of more tax breaks while shifting the burden on to the middle class and the poor. If America’s CEOs really want to Fix the Debt, they should first commit to eliminating the loopholes that have allowed them to avoid paying their fair share of the cost of government, including investments necessary to keep our families and our communities strong and secure.

This article originally appeared on AlterNet

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank, in Washington DC. She’s also the co-author of the IPS report, America’s Bailout Barons: Taxpayers, High Finance, and the CEO Pay Bubble.

more Sarah Anderson

Scott Klinger is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies

Romney-Ryan and the Slashing of Medicaid

Published on Monday, October 29, 2012 by The New York Times

by Paul Krugman

There’s a lot we don’t know about what Mitt Romney would do if he won. He refuses to say which tax loopholes he would close to make up for $5 trillion in tax cuts; his economic “plan” is an empty shell.Estimates suggest that a Romney victory would deny health insurance to about 45 million people who would have coverage if he lost, with two-thirds of that difference due to the assault on Medicaid.

But one thing is clear: If he wins, Medicaid — which now covers more than 50 million Americans, and which President Obama would expand further as part of his health reform — will face savage cuts. Estimates suggest that a Romney victory would deny health insurance to about 45 million people who would have coverage if he lost, with two-thirds of that difference due to the assault on Medicaid.

So this election is, to an important degree, really about Medicaid. And this, in turn, means that you need to know something more about the program.

For while Medicaid is generally viewed as health care for the nonelderly poor, that’s only part of the story. And focusing solely on who Medicaid covers can obscure an equally important fact: Medicaid has been more successful at controlling costs than any other major part of the nation’s health care system.

So, about coverage: most Medicaid beneficiaries are indeed relatively young (because older people are covered by Medicare) and relatively poor (because eligibility for Medicaid, unlike Medicare, is determined by need). But more than nine million Americans benefit from both Medicare and Medicaid, and elderly or disabled beneficiaries account for the majority of Medicaid’s costs. And contrary to what you may have heard, the great majority of Medicaid beneficiaries are in working families.

For those who get coverage through the program, Medicaid is a much-needed form of financial aid. It is also, quite literally, a lifesaver. Mr. Romney has said that a lack of health insurance doesn’t kill people in America; oh yes, it does, and states that expand Medicaid coverage show striking drops in mortality.

So Medicaid does a vast amount of good. But at what cost? There’s a widespread perception, gleefully fed by right-wing politicians and propagandists, that Medicaid has “runaway” costs. But the truth is just the opposite. While costs grew rapidly in 2009-10, as a depressed economy made more Americans eligible for the program, the longer-term reality is that Medicaid is significantly better at controlling costs than the rest of our health care system.

How much better? According to the best available estimates, the average cost of health care for adult Medicaid recipients is about 20 percent less than it would be if they had private insurance. The gap for children is even larger.

And the gap has been widening over time: Medicaid costs have consistently risen a bit less rapidly than Medicare costs, and much less rapidly than premiums on private insurance.

How does Medicaid achieve these lower costs? Partly by having much lower administrative costs than private insurers. It’s always worth remembering that when it comes to health care, it’s the private sector, not government programs, that suffers from stifling, costly bureaucracy.

Also, Medicaid is much more effective at bargaining with the medical-industrial complex.

Consider, for example, drug prices. Last year a government study compared the prices that Medicaid paid for brand-name drugs with those paid by Medicare Part D — also a government program, but one run through private insurance companies, and explicitly forbidden from using its power in the market to bargain for lower prices. The conclusion: Medicaid pays almost a third less on average. That’s a lot of money.

Is Medicaid perfect? Of course not. Most notably, the hard bargain it drives with health providers means that quite a few doctors are reluctant to see Medicaid patients. Yet given the problems facing American health care — sharply rising costs and declining private-sector coverage — Medicaid has to be regarded as a highly successful program. It provides good if not great coverage to tens of millions of people who would otherwise be left out in the cold, and as I said, it does much right to keep costs down.

By any reasonable standard, this is a program that should be expanded, not slashed — and a major expansion of Medicaid is part of the Affordable Care Act.

Why, then, are Republicans so determined to do the reverse, and kill this success story? You know the answers. Partly it’s their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance. Partly it’s the fact that Medicaid’s success is a reproach to their antigovernment ideology.

The question — and it’s a question the American people will answer very soon — is whether they’ll get to indulge these prejudices at the expense of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

© 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!.

The Final Days, the Biggest Issue, and the Clearest Choice

by Robert Reich

Sunday, October 28, 2012

As we go into the final days of a dismal presidential campaign where too many issues have been fudged or eluded — and the media only want to talk about is who’s up and who’s down — the biggest issue on which the candidates have given us the clearest choice is whether the rich should pay more in taxes. 

President Obama says emphatically yes. He proposes ending the Bush tax cut for people earning more than $250,000 a year, and requiring those with high incomes to pay in taxes at least 30 percent of any income over $1 million (the so-called “Buffett Rule”).

Mitt Romney says emphatically no. He proposes cutting tax rates by 20 percent, which would reduce taxes on the rich far more than anyone else. He also wants to extend the Bush tax cut for the wealthy, and reduce or eliminate taxes on dividends and capital gains. 

Romney says he’ll close loopholes and eliminate deductions used by the rich so that their share of total taxes remains the same as it is now, although he refuses to specify what loopholes or deductions. But even if we take him at his word, under no circumstances would he increase the amount of taxes they pay. 

Obama is right. 

America faces a huge budget deficit. And just about everyone who’s looked at how to reduce it — the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the bi-partisan Simpson-Bowles Commission, and almost all independent economists and analysts — have come up with some combination of spending cuts and tax increases that raise revenue.

Just last Thursday, executives of more than eighty large American corporations called for tax reform that “raises revenues and reduces the deficit.”

The practical question is who pays for those additional revenues. If Romney’s view prevails and the rich don’t pay more, everyone else has to.

That’s nonsensical. The rich are far richer than they used to be, while most of the rest of us are poorer. The latest data show the top 1 percent garnering 93 percent of all the gains from the recovery so far. But median family income is 8 percent lower than it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. 

The gap has been widening for three decades. Since 1980 the top 1 percent has doubled its share of the nation’s total income  — from 10 percent to 20 percent. The share of the top one-tenth of 1 percent has tripled. The share of the top-most one-one hundredth of 1 percent — 16,000 families — has quadrupled. The richest 400 Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.

Meanwhile, the tax rates paid by the wealthy have dropped precipitously. Before 1981 the top marginal tax rate was never lower than 70 percent. Under President Dwight Eisenhower it was 93 percent. Even after taking all the deductions and tax credits available to them, the rich paid around 54 percent. 

The top tax rate is now only 35 percent and the tax on capital gains (increases in the value of investments) is only 15 percent. Since so much of what they earn is from capital gains, many of the super-rich, like Mitt Romney himself, pay 14 percent or less. That’s a lower tax rate than many middle-class Americans pay. 

In fact, if you add up all the taxes paid — not just on income and capital gains but also payroll taxes (which don’t apply to income above incomes of $110,100), and sales taxes — most of us are paying a higher percent of our income in taxes than are those at the top. 

So how can anyone argue against raising taxes on the rich? Easy. They say it will slow the economy because the rich are “job creators.”

In the immortal words of Joe Biden, that’s malarky. 

The economy did just fine during the three decades after World War II, when the top tax rate never fell below 70 percent. Average yearly economic growth was higher in those years than it’s been since, when taxes on the rich have been far lower. 

Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich and the economy did wonderfully well. George W. Bush cut them and the economy slowed. 

The real job creators are America’s vast middle class, whose spending encourages businesses to expand and hire — and whose lack of spending has the opposite effect. 

That’s why the recovery has been painfully slow. So much income and wealth have gone to the top that the vast majority of Americans in the middle don’t have the purchasing power to get the economy moving again. The rich save most of what they earn, and their savings go anywhere around the world where they can get the highest return.

It would be insane to compound the damage by raising taxes on the middle class and not on the rich. 

Logic, fairness, and common sense dictate that the rich pay more in taxes. It’s the key to avoiding January’s fiscal cliff and coming up with a “grand bargain” on taming the budget deficit. And it’s central to getting the economy back on track.

Romney's Job Creation Plan That No One Is Talking About

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Mitt Romney has a jobs creation plan if he becomes President, alright. But no one including Mitt Romney himself is talking about it. Remember the $2 trillion he wants to spend on the military? That $2 trillion he wants to spend on the military which the Pentagon doesn't even want (but Defense contractors certainly do) translates into a huge jobs program. What Romney is really advocating here is more government spending, but government spending of the right wing socialism (otherwise known as fascism) sort: a military buildup, exactly the kind of military buildup that got Hitler's Germany and Roosevelt's America out of the Great Depression. While Obama is advocating left wing government spending - spending on infrastructure, research and development, clean energy, education and social programs to help the poor - Romney's jobs program represents government spending on the military reinforcing the US as a national security state. Military spending represents a huge jobs program for individuals and defense contractors that work in the military-industrial complex and are hugely invested in war and the build-up towards war. And Romney is counting on all these people to vote for him.

If you figure that government can create a job by spending $100,000. into the private sector including wages, overhead, management and profit, $2 trillion over 10 years  represents 2 million jobs. Do the math! $2 trillion over 10 years is $.2 trillion per year. .2 trillion divided by 100,000. is 2 million. These jobs will also have multiplier effects as the defense contractor employees spend their paychecks into the local communities for houses, cars, TV sets and everything else that consumers spend their money on. In other words defense related jobs will become - even more than they are now - the engine of the economy. And the US will be invested even more than it is now in the fact that defense work is the basis of its economy, thus making the US in toto a national security state. When Romney says he will create 12 million jobs and "I  know how to do it.", spending $2 trillion on the military-industrial complex and the multiplier effect from that spending is where those 12 million jobs will come from.

Of course, the same amount of money having the same multiplier effects could be invested in rebuilding America. It could be invested in roads and bridges, a smart electrical grid, renewable energy that will not change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, undergrounding utilities on a national level so that they don't have to be re-erected after each hurricane and tornado and high speed rail equivalent to the rest of the world's advanced economies. But these potential industries don't have armies of lobbyists in Washington, DC whose job it is to convince Congressmen to vote for ever more funding for the military-industrial complex. And the Lockheed Martins and Northrop Grummans of the world along with Republican politicians will also do their best to convince the American people that we need even more in the way of Defense spending than we have now. That's why they run so many TV ads.

The Defense Department's $680 billion budget pays for over 3.1 million employees, both military and civilian. Another 3 million people are employed by the defense industry both directly and indirectly, such as working in local businesses where the military-industrial complex employees spend their take home pay. The Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the United States. More than the post office and Wal-Mart combined! There are multiple millions of contractors whose jobs are directly related to defense.

The military/defense industry is San Diego's second largest economic sector, bringing more than $13 billion into the local economy annually. The Marine Corps' Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar, Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Station San Diego, and Naval Submarine Base are among San Diego's military installations. In the 1970s I worked for the Naval Electronics Laboratory (NEL) for six years. It has since undergone several name changes to protect the guilty - Naval Electronics Laboratory Center (NELC), Naval Ocean Systems Command (NOSC), Naval Research and Development (NRAD), and now it has been absorbed into SPAWAR (Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command). The point is though that before every election a wave of fear goes through the entire plant because, if a Democrat were to be elected, there would be a reduction in military spending and people would lose their jobs in a RIF (Reduction in Force). There was considerable pressure to vote Republican to prevent that from happening so people could continue to feed their families.

Lockheed Martin employs 123,000 people worldwide. In 2009 US Government contracts accounted for $38.4 billion (85%) of its budget. In 2011 I wrote this on Will Blog For Food:

"This is from "Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex," by William D Hartung:

It is a striking ad. An intimidating combat aircraft soars in the background, with the slogan up front in all capital letters: 300 MILLION PROTECTED, 95,000 EMPLOYED. The ad—for Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor fighter plane—was part of the company's last-gap effort to save one of its most profitable weapons from being "terminated," as they say in standard budget parlance. The pro—F-22 ad ran scores of times, in print, on political websites, and even in Washington's Metro. One writer at the Washington Post joked that at a time when many companies had been cutting back on their advertising budgets, Lockheed Martin's barrage of full-page ads in February and March 2009 was the main thing keeping the paper afloat. When an arms company starts bragging about how many jobs its pet project creates, hold on to your wallet. It often means that the company wants billions of dollars' worth of your tax money for a weapon that costs too much, does too little, and may not have been needed in the first place. So it is with the Raptor, which at $350 million per plane is the most expensive combat aircraft ever built. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that the F-22 needs to be cut because even with wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has never been used in combat. In fact, in its first "mission"—flying to Japan for deployment at a US air base there—the plane had technical difficulties and had to land in Hawaii, far short of its final destination.

So the plane is a piece of shit, but it creates jobs, jobs, jobs. And jobs are what the country needs, right? And more profits for Lockheed Martin and higher salaries for Lockheed Martin's CEO. Not to mention the lobbying industry. Those poor suckers need jobs too—desperately."

Other top players besides Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are General Dynamics, Boeing and Raytheon. Located on San Diego Bay, and part of General Dynamics Marine Systems, NASSCO has been building ships for commercial customers and the U.S. Navy since 1960. NASSCO is the last vestige of General Dynamics' prescence in San Diego. At one time it was San Diego's largest employer. Now it is a bit player. I also worked for General Dynamics Convair for three years in the 1970s. During the time I was employed there, I wrote a muckraking article for the original paper version of the San Diego Free Press. What I remember from the article was that somebody at General Dynamics came up with the brilliant idea that, in order to get out of paying local property taxes, it could sell its plants to the Federal Government and then lease them back. The Federal Government does not have to pay local property taxes, and voila, General Dynamics' profits would go up albeit at the expense of local schoolchildren. In 1994 most of the company's divisions were sold to McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed, with the remaining components deactivated in 1996.

Given that the Defense Department creates jobs, what most people don't know is that other industries are simply better at it. For instance, $1 billion spent on clean energy, health care or education would do far more for job creation than $1 billion spent by the Pentagon, a group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst concluded. Every billion dollars the Defense Department gets generates 11,600 jobs, their study contends, whereas that same investment would produce 17,100 in clean energy jobs, 19,600 in health care jobs and 29,100 in education jobs. Why isn't Obama touting the fact that less government spending than Romney proposes, when spent on rebuilding America, would produce even more jobs than Romney's proposed spending on the military?

If Obama is reelected, he should take the $2 trillion Romney wants to give the military-industrial complex and spend it on infrastructure, clean energy, a national smart grid, high speed rail, education, research and development and other peaceful pursuits in order to rebuild and strengthen America. To continue and double down on right wing government spending on the military only reinforces America's role as a national security state, one in which the only jobs created are related to war. The only problem is that Obama could never get a program of this sort passed by a Republican controlled House and/or Senate. That is why, unfortunately, the US will never do the things it needs to do in order to remain a great nation.

Monsanto's Lies and the GMO Labeling Battle

Published on Tuesday, October 23, 2012 by Common Dreams

by John Robbins

You may have never heard of Henry I. Miller, but right now he is attempting to determine the future of food in this country.  And he has enormous financial backing.

Mr. Miller is the primary face and voice of the “No on Prop 37” campaign in California.  At this very moment, Monsanto and other pesticide companies are spending more than $1 million a day to convince California voters that it’s not in their best interest to know whether the food they eat is genetically engineered.  And Henry I. Miller is their guy.

If you live in California today, he’s hard to miss.  You see him in TV ads, hear him in radio spots, and his face is all over the expensive fliers that keep showing up uninvited in your mail box.  Initially, the ads presented Miller as a Stanford doctor.  But he isn’t.  He’s a research fellow at a conservative think tank (the Hoover Institute) that has offices on the Stanford campus.  When this deceptive tactic came to light, the ads were pulled and then redone.  But they still feature Miller trying to convince the public that Prop 37 “makes no sense,” and that it’s a “food-labeling scheme written by trial lawyers who hope for a windfall if it becomes law.”

Actually, Prop 37 makes all the sense in the world if you want to know what’s in the food you eat.  It was written by public health advocates, and provides no economic incentives for filing lawsuits.

Who, then, is Henry I. Miller, and why should we believe him when he tells us that genetically engineered foods are perfectly safe?

Does it matter that this same Henry Miller is an ardent proponent of DDT and other toxic pesticides? Does it matter that the “No on Prop 37” ads are primarily funded by pesticide companies, the very same companies that told us DDT and Agent Orange were safe?

I find it hard to avoid the impression that Henry Miller is a premier corporate flack.  He was a founding member of the Philip Morris backed front group that tried to discredit the links between tobacco products and cancer.  After the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, he argued that exposure to radiation from the disaster could actually provide health benefits.  He argues that drug companies, not the FDA, should be responsible for testing new drugs.  And he is a board member of the George C. Marshall Institute which, funded by oil and gas companies, is notorious for its denial of climate change.

Now he’s telling us that we should vote No on 37 because, he says, the labeling law contains exemptions included “for special interests.”  As if the corporations he fronts for weren’t the biggest “special interests” of all.  And by the way, the exemptions in Prop 37 conform to those found in GMO labeling laws in the 61 other nations around the world, including the European Union, that already require labeling for foods that are genetically engineered.

Miller and the No on 37 campaign say that labeling would increase family food bills by hundreds of dollars per year.  Interestingly, the study they cite to justify this claim was paid for by the No on 37 campaign itself.  It was the work of a Maine public relations firm, Northbridge Consulting, that has no economic expertise, but has worked on behalf of Coke and Pepsi against laws that would require the recycling of soda pop bottles.

Would the passing of Prop 37 actually raise the price consumers pay for food?  Henry Miller adamantly proclaims that it would.  But according to the only fully independent economic analysis of Prop 37, prepared by researchers at Emory University School of Law, “Consumers will likely see no increase in prices as a result of the relabeling” required by the bill. 

Somehow I keep getting the feeling that Henry Miller may not be the man you want to listen to when your health is at stake.  But Monsanto and its allies are seeing to it that this man’s face and beliefs are everywhere in California today.  One television viewer in San Francisco reported seeing ads featuring Miller no less than 12 times in a single day.

Other “No on 37” ads feature a physician, Ronald Kleinman, dressed of course in the obligatory white coat.  Though the ads don’t mention it, Dr. Kleinman’s ethical principles don’t seem to hamper him from being a highly paid voice for the interests of the junk food companies.  While working for Coca-Cola, he advocated for “the safety…of sugar, artificial colors and nonnutritive sweeteners in children’s diets.”

Not content with misrepresenting Stanford University (three times), the pesticide and junk food companies behind No on 37 have also:

1. Misled voters in the state voter guide by claiming falsely that the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, believes GMO foods are safe.
2. Illegally affixed the official US FDA seal to their campaign propaganda, and attributed a fabricated quote to the FDA, falsely implying that the FDA has taken a position against Prop 37.

Regrettably, this deluge of deception seems to be having an impact.  Although polls originally showed that more than 80% of the California public want genetically modified food to be labeled, more recent polls are showing a virtual dead heat on Prop 37, with the advertising deluge only increasing in intensity.

Some daily newspapers in California are contributing to this unhappy trend by coming out against Prop 37, with editorials that use entire paragraphs directly from the “No on 37” press releases.  Might this have anything to do with the fact that processed foods companies are the primary source of advertising revenue for newspapers today?  And that the lobby for the processed food companies, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, has called the defeat of Prop 37 its single highest priority for the year?

The famed food author Michael Pollan wrote recently that Proposition 37 is the litmus test for whether or not there is actually a food movement in this country.  Public health activist Stacy Malkan adds that it also may be the litmus test for whether there is democracy left in this country.

These are good points.  There is no food movement if Monsanto has its way with us.  And there is no democracy without an informed citizenry.

The question now is whether we are going to allow special interests to dictate what we are allowed to know about the food they sell us.

In this case, ignorance is not bliss.  It’s subservience to the agenda of Monsanto and the other pesticide companies.  Without labeling, we are eating in the dark, with potentially disastrous consequences.

What remains to be seen is whether Californians will, come November 6th, allow Monsanto and its allies to control what you are allowed to know about the food you eat.

Find out more and get involved here.

Sign a petition to Congress calling for labeling of genetically engineered foods here.

John Robbins is cofounder of the Food Revolution Network, which provides information and inspiration to help you heal your body and your world with food.  He is the author of many bestsellers, including The Food Revolution, No Happy Cows, and Diet For A New America.  He is also the recipient of the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey’s Courage of Conscience Award, Green America’s Lifetime Achievement Award and many other accolades.

ROMNEY & RYAN PUBLIC MISREPRESENTATIONS … CONTINUED

by Frank Thomas

As documented in my previous writing, in the debates and during the campaign both Romney and Ryan constantly play poker with the truth to the public about all sorts of statistics the media can’t keep up with. I’ll pick just three obvious examples: expansion of poverty level, food stamps, and  official U-3 unemployment and unofficial U-6 total unemployment rates under Obama. Of course, jumps in poverty and food stamps levels are closely tied to negative job growth 2001-08.

Romney keeps saying that during Obama’s term the number of people below the poverty line has increased from 32 to 49 million or over 50%!  TABLE 5 presents the facts. 

________________________________________________________

TABLE 5: PERSONS BELOW POVERTY LEVEL – 2000 to Sept. 2012

                  Millions Below               Percentage
                  Poverty Level               of Population  

2000                 31.6                              11.3%

2008                 39.8                              13.2%

Increase Under Bush II    8.2 = 26.0% 

2009                  43.6                              14.3%

2010                  46.2                              15.1%

2011                  48.0                              15.7%

2012                  49.0                              15.9%
Estimate Sept.

Increase Under Obama     9.2    = 23.1%  

Facts show that the 9.2 million or 23% increase in people below the poverty level under Obama are almost half what Romney has been propagandizing. And this number is hardly abnormal given a severe, prolonged mini-depression and negative -1.8 million eight year job growth on a fiscal-year basis under Bush II (see prior writing-Table 3) This gigantic job destruction spilled over “big time” into Obama’s presidency. Of the 9.2 million increase in people under the poverty line during Obama’s term, 3.8 million in 2009 were a recession carryover from Bush II’s  gross economic  mismanagement. In fact, is the number of people below the poverty level has been on an upward  growth trend the last 30 years.      

Romney has been making outlandish misrepresentations when pointing to the increase in food stamp users during Obama’s term. TABLE 6 presents the facts.

________________________________________________________

TABLE 6: SNAP/FOOD STAMP PARTICIPATION – 2000 to Sept. 201

                                     Food Stamps (Millions of Users) 

2000                                                17.2                             

2008                                                31.8                            

Increase Under Bush II              14.6  = 85%                                     

2009                                                 39.0

2010                                                 44.1

2011                                                 44.7

2012 Estimate Sept.                          45.2                                                   

Increase Under Obama              13.4 = 42%                                      

Increase 2000-2012                     163%    

The 2000-2008 sharp 85% rise in number using food stamps during Bush II’s term accelerated  into 2009 with a 23% increase in that year alone – largely caused by the worst recession since WWII. On a fiscal-year basis, the number of food stamp users increased less than +-20% under Obama vs. +-120% under Bush II … despite fact the Obama Administration increased benefits and eligibility for food stamps as part of the economic stimulus act.  Romney’s repeated claim that the number of people on food stamps “exploded” on Obama’s watch is verbal hyperinflation.                          

Not surprisingly, the substantial 2000-2012 163% increase in food stamp users to 45 million in 2012 matches closely the rise in number of people under the poverty level to 49 million in 2012. This reflects an expanding poor class, a shrinking middle class, an unchanging wealth class but with far more financial resources.

Little wonder food stamp costs have been sharply rising, doubling from $39 billion in 2008 to $80 billion for 2012. Core causes are a deep recession hangover with high unemployment/underemploy-ment, record long-term unemployment, an ongoing middle class wage/benefit race-to-the-bottom driven by a profits first, human beings second culture of outsourcing, automation, robotization.

Romney and Ryan OVERBLOW the Obama Administration’s responsibility for high rates of unemployment, using for effect a high number of 23 million total unemployed and underemployed. They misrepresent this knowing that Republicans have obstructed all of Obama’s job development initiatives. To put 2009-12 unemployment levels in an accurate perspective, let’s look at historical U-3 official unemployment rates under various presidents and official unemployment rates and timing of total U-6 unofficial unemployment rates. TABLES 7A and 7B present these facts.          

________________________________________________________

TABLE 7A:    HISTORICAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATES UNDER VARIOUS  PRESIDENTS – 1977-2012                                                                    

                                          Average Annual Unemployment Rates                                        

Carter:    1977-80                                6.5%                                                  

Reagan:  1981-84                                 8.6%                                                                 

Reagan:  1985-88                                 6.5%                                                   

Bush I:    1989-92                                 6.3%                                                       

Clinton:  1993-96                                  6.0%                                                       

Clinton:  1997-20                                  4.4%

Bush II:   2001-04                                 5.5%

Bush II:   2005-08                         5.0% vs. 7.3% in 2008

Obama:  2009-12                                      8.9%

________________________________________________________

 

TABLE 7B:  U-3 OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT and U-6  UNOFFICIAL TOTAL  UNEMPLOYMENT RATES – 2000-2012, YEAR END DATA

Year-End December            U-3 Rates             U-6 Rates

2000     = CLINTON                     3.9%                6.9%                     

2001       = BUSH II                      5.7%                9.6%                     

2002                                           6.0%                9.8%                      

2003                                           5.7%                9.8%                   

2004                                           5.4%                9.2%                   2005                                           4.9%                8.6%                  2006                                           4.4%                7.9%                      2007                                           5.0%                8.8%                          

2008                                          7.3%              13.5%                       

2009 = OBAMA                             9.9%             17.1%                      

2010                                            9.4%             16.6%                     

2011                                            8.5%             15.2%                         

2012 Sept.                                   7.8%             14.7%

Source: Portal Seven, Bureau of Labor Statistics

________________________________________________________

Tables 7A and particularly 7B show the true scale of job losses Bush II passed on to Obama. This caused U-3 official unemployment year-end rates to jump from 5.0% in 2007, to 7.3% in 2008 to 9.9% in 2009. As Table 7B shows, despite the immense job destruction tsunami under Bush II’s watch, the Obama  Administration has brought the 2009 9.9% U-3 rate caused by Bush to 7.8% in 2012 … not a meager achievement as the conservative right is propagates.                    

The U-6 total unemployment rate began exploding in Bush’s term to 13.5% in 2008 or 20.9 million total unemployed, clearly indicating something terribly was going wrong! In 2009, this splurged and expanded quickly into Obama’s term to a sky high U-6  17.1% rate or 26.2 million total unemployed! BUT, Obama’s Administration has brought the 17.1% 2009 rate inherited from Bush down to a 14.7% 2012 rate  or 22.8 million total unemployed  … again, not a meager achievement. 

Now Romney and Ryan claim that recent promising 7.8% official unemployment rate improvement is artificial and false because it ignores greater numbers of those no longer registered as unemployed. Further, they blame Obama for U-6 23 million total unemployed now. This is inflated nonsense!  When one looks carefully at U-3 and U-6 unemployment rates in 2008 through 2012 Sept., one gets a clearer idea of how PHONEY this claim is by Romney/Ryan and company.                 

As Table 7B shows, U-6 total unemployment rates have declined remarkably to 14.7% or 3.4 million fewer people unemployed in 2012 than in 2009 on a fiscal year basis (see Table 3 , prior writing). While not the U-3  6% and U-6 10% unemployment  rate levels we still have to achieve, the current 7.8% and 14.7% rates are in the right direction and are Not the disastrous performance Romney and Ryan  falsely propagandize  that goes unchallenged by the  uninformed media.                                                                

________________________________________________________________

NOTE:

For those who may not know, the U-6 rate includes total official unemployed PLUS all persons marginally attached to the labor force, PLUS total employed part-time for economic reasons, as a % of the civilian labor force PLUS persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force include those neither working or looking for work but who want to work. It includes discouraged workers who have given a job market-related reason for not now looking for work. The part-time employed for economic reasons include those available for full-time work  and wanting it but are forced to take part-time work.                                                                                                                 

CONCLUSIONS

Romney and Ryan have grossly (but effectively) misrepresented that Obama’s Administration is totally responsible for the 2009-2012 increases in poverty, food stamps and total officially unemployed   (U-3) and unofficially unemployed (U-6) rates. Furthermore, they slickly slide over FACT the Obama Administration’s untiring efforts to improve the job situation have been obstructed and blocked at every step since the start of his presidency.                                                    

However, the improvement that Obama has managed to realize sofar have stabilized the spiral down from Bush II and have started to turn the corner on the worst mini-depression in 65 years. Much still needs to be done including some daring, creative actions. Much needs to be done still … including some daring actions.       

High poverty and food stamp levels, are NOT acceptable in one of the richest nations in the world. Outsourcing practically all manufacturing activity – accounting for over 23% of all jobs in Germany vs. less than 7% in the U.S. – is plain STUPID and SELF DESTRUCTIVE as well as INHUMANE to the working class.                                                                                                         

Our economy cannot prosper and survive on trade deficits returning to a pre-recession level of $65 billion a month or 5% of GDP. Our economy cannot prosper and survive on just service jobs and low paying Wal Mart minimum-wage jobs. Regenerating jobs by exploding Defense expenditures now at over 5% of GDP by another $2 trillion over ten years, as proposed by Romney/Ryan, is also plain STUPID.                               

That money can better be spent in infrastructure, education, transport systems, incentivizing entrepreneurism and small firms, R&D, and going GREEN aggressively while exploiting internal own   environmentally polluting fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal)  … the latter understandably motivated by irresistible opportunities to eliminate dependence on Mid-East oil and gas. Why not do both under the banner of being at least 50% on green energy by 2050 … a paltry goal when compared to Germany and Denmark’s goals to be at least 80%, if not 100%, free of fossil fuels and nuclear by 2050.

POSTSCRIPT - 10/28/12           

CITIBANK REPORT ON DISSIMILARITY AND SCALE OF THIS RECESSION FROM PRIOR RECESSIONS

In past writings I’ve said the US hasn’t done badly in the recovery process given how badly we fell!

A report just released by Citibank confirms this in its comparison of  the recession Obama inherited from Bush II with recessions the last 40 years. The report concludes this recession was not a typical overheating, rising inflation recession where the Fed steps in and pushes the higher interest rate button. No, this recession was a unique credit crisis of complex immense scale involving exploding house prices, out-of-hand debt in the banking system, households, and firms (similar to Japan’s 1992 “great recession” crisis) … requiring a much longer recovery process than typical of past U.S. recessions.

Romney’s trick question, “Are you better off today?,” covers up the real question, “Are you better off than after the previous recessions?” The Citibank report says no because of the enormous, disastrous intensity and size  of the current recession. Citibank sites following evidence of this fact:

• The economic deep point of the 2007-09 recession inherited from Bush was the 2^nd quarter of 2009. Normally, after a typical recession, economic growth 3.5 years later would be 3.5%-4%. BUT,  the current reality is 2% after this recession – given the unique scale of the economic damage done. BUT, the IMF has just concluded the US is coming out of its “great recession” better than Europe and  predicts 3% growth rates in 2013-16.
• Normally, after a typical recession, the economy will be producing near existing capacity. BUT this time there is a 6% output gap.
• Normally, after a typical recession, the government debt will have increased only 12%, BUT, this time it has increased 40%.

An $800 billion stimulus, a record jump in joblessness, and significant deleveraging by firms and banks have all contributed to reduced tax revenues.   

• Normally, after a typical recession, private lending increases soon thereafter. BUT, this time a 10% deleveraging of private debt and bank debt has been taking place for many months and is still ongoing. 
• Normally, after a typical recession, housing prices rise 5-6% per year.  BUT, this time prices are still stagnating if not declining.
• Normally, after a typical recession, consumption is 12-14% higher. BUT, this time consumption is only 7% higher reflecting a 6.5% unemployment rate after most past recessions vs. 7.8% now.

Both the Citibank report conclusions (echoed also by Ken Rogoff of Harvard) and IMF’s prediction that the US is on path for an economic  turnaround 2013 and beyond suggest that NO presidential administration could have done better than Obama’s has in stabilizing the worst recession in 65 years and laying the basis for a sound, albeit slower than usual recovery.

In short, we fell so far down it’s taken much more time to recover.

Romney’s Bain Capital To Send Nearly 200 High-Tech Jobs to China the Day Before the Election

from San Diego Free Press on October 20, 2012 · 4 comments

Alternet / By Joshua Holland

On the day before an election that’s supposed to hinge on jobs, taxes and the middle class, Bain Capital, the company Mitt Romney founded, will close the doors of a factory in Freeport, Illinois, and ship 170 good, high-tech jobs to China.

The employees of Sensata Technologies were forced to train their Chinese replacements, and the American flag that long flew over the factory was reportedly removed while the Chinese engineers were visiting the site. A group of workers have set up camp across from the factory — calling it “Bainport” — and some supporters have tried to block the trucks hauling equipment out of the plant. According to Dave Johnson, there have been several arrests.

Sensata workers have asked to meet with Mitt Romney and hoped to enlist his help keeping their jobs in the United States, but he has refused, instead remaining on the campaign trail where he speaks often about “getting tough” with China.

The most important part of the story is that Sensata Technologies is profitable operating in Illinois. Net income last year was $355 million, up 16 percent from 2010. The company reported total revenues of $1.8 billion in 2011, up almost 19 percent from the year before. According to a company financial statement, “both 2011 net revenue and adjusted net income represent record levels for the company.”

So this has nothing to do with “making hard choices” in the process of turning around a failing business, which is how the Romney campaign describes Bain’s corporate raiding. Bain’s partners are looking for a modest boost in profits by locating the plant closer to the booming Asian automotive market (Sensata makes high-tech automotive parts). They’ll get a small tax break for relocating the plant – the one Mitt Romney insisted did not exist during the first debate – and possibly defer taxes on some of the income the company generates.

It takes both capital and labor to make a successful business like Sensata Technologies. In order to make a few more bucks, 170 of the people who helped make the company thrive will be cast aside like so much trash. The layoffs will surely have a ripple-effect in Freeport – a town of 25,000 with a declining population and a poverty rate well above the national average. The move is the epitome of corporate America’s lack of patriotism – it’s capital unmoored from any sense of responsibility for the people that make the profits or the communities where they live. The city passed a resolution Monday asking Romney to intervene.

But the Sensata story has, so far, had little impact on the presidential race, mostly because Mitt Romney has no direct involvement in the operations of the company he established (despite continuing to make millions as a “passive retired partner”). But this is reading the story of Bain Capital too narrowly. Mitt Romney is directly responsible for its business model.

As Tom Gaulrapp — a lifelong resident of Freeport and 33-year employee of Sensata – told the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel, “They’re still using his business model. He’s the one who taught them how to do this. These guys were put there by him. So you can say he doesn’t run the day-to-day operations, but he’s still at blame for the way they do business.”

Mitt Romney started the firm, and built it up on a strategy of buying firms with little money down, loading them with debt, raiding their pension funds and breaking their unions and then “harvesting them” – in his words – for a profit. Romney is the only person to ever serve as Bain’s CEO – since his departure, the firm has been run by a managing committee.

The story is bigger than Sensata, and bigger than Bain. The issue is the turn America’s corporate culture has taken, and what the consequences of its model are for our economy and, indeed, our society. And it is Mitt Romney’s embrace of that model – ravage capitalism that is loyal to no nation-state and blind to every human virtue but profit – that should be disqualifying.

In the New York Times, Chrystia Freeland, author of “Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else,” wrote about the historical tendency of elites to self-destruct by extracting wealth from the broader community to such a degree that the society becomes dysfunctional and mired by social problems. She recalls how the Venetians became the most prosperous society in the world during the 14th century by opening their economy to a broad swath of the population. Then, at the height of its golden age, “the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.”

She then notes parallels to the United States, which featured one of the most egalitarian economies through much of the last century, but is now plagued by rising inequality and decreasing economic mobility. She writes:

The 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent…

Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new [Venice]. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine.

Much of this is the result of the 30-year assault on organized labor. It’s worth noting that Sensata Technologies is a non-union shop, which is a big reason the firm can move profitable operations abroad without much resistance.

Employment, in raw jobs numbers, should not be the defining issue of this election viewed in isolation. We also need to consider what kinds of jobs are being created. A recent study conducted by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) found that while only 21 percent of the jobs lost during the recession were low-paying (with median hourly wages from $7.69 to $13.83), a majority of those created during the recovery – 58 percent – have come with such low wages.

These trends are not Mitt Romney’s doing, but he is the walking, talking personification of what’s been happening in the American economy. Mitt Romney was an innovator in offshoring. He and his family will make a few more dollars as a result of shipping those jobs to China, at the expense of the workers who “built that” in the first place. That’s why the story of Sensata Technologies should have an impact in this race.

Pesticide Industry Backed Opponents of GMO Labeling Get Criminal in California

Published on Friday, October 19, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Zack Kaldveer

The $36 million No on 37 campaign, bankrolled by $20 million from the world's six largest pesticide companies, has been caught in yet another lie, this time possibly criminal.

These companies and their allies in the junk food industry know that their profit margins may suffer if consumers have a choice whether to purchase genetically engineered foods or not.  And that's why opponents are spending nearly a million dollars per day trying to make Prop 37 complicated. But really it's simple - we have the right to know what's in our food.

To date, the No on 37 campaign has been able to repeat one lie after another with near impunity. But has this pattern of deceit finally caught up to it?

Yesterday, the Yes on 37 campaign sent letters to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting a criminal investigation of the No on 37 campaign for possible fraudulent misuse of the official seal of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  

The No on 37 campaign affixed the FDA's seal to one of the campaign's mailers. Section 506 of the U.S. Criminal Code states: "Whoever...knowingly uses, affixes, or impresses any such fraudulently made, forged, counterfeited, mutilated, or altered seal or facsimile thereof to or upon any certificate, instrument, commission, document, or paper of any description...shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

The letter also provides evidence that the No on 37 campaign falsely attributed a direct quote to the FDA in the campaign mailer. Alongside the FDA seal, the mailer includes this text in quotes. "The US Food and Drug Administration says a labeling policy like Prop 37 would be 'inherently misleading." The quote is entirely fabricated. The FDA did not make this statement and does not take a position on Prop 37.

In addition, the three identified authors of the "Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Proposition 37" include a Dr. Henry I. Miller, who is identified solely as "Founding Director, Office of Biotechnology of the Food & Drug Administration." Dr. Miller in fact, does not currently work for the FDA in any capacity - as millions of California voters have been erroneously led to believe.

This is not the first blatant act of deception that the No on 37 campaign has been caught perpetrating on the citizens of California - particularly relating to their "top scientist" Dr. Henry Miller.

Consider Miller's growing "rap sheet":

• On Oct. 4 the No on 37 campaign was forced to pull its first ad off the air and re-shoot it after they were caught misrepresenting Miller as a doctor at Stanford University  when he is actually a researcher at the Hoover Institute on Stanford's campus, as the Los Angeles Times reported.
• Last week, the campaign was reprimanded by Stanford again for misrepresenting the university in a mailer that went out to millions of voters. And this week, the campaign was caught sending out yet another deceptive mailer involving the University.

In addition to allowing his university affiliation to be repeatedly overblown, Miller has a sordid history of parroting the talking points of some of the world's most notorious corporate bad actors: he's a founding member of a now defunct tobacco front group that tried to discredit the links between cigarettes and cancer, he's repeatedly called for the reintroduction of DDT - known to cause premature birth, fronted for an oil industry funded climate change denial group for Exxon, claimed that people exposed to radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster "may have benefited from it", and attacked the US Food and Drug Administration's efforts to ensure proper vetting and testing of new drugs safety while urging it to outsource more of its functions to private industries.

This is the man the No on 37 campaign has portrayed to voters as an arbiter of good science and promoted as an expert worthy of our trust. In reality, Miller is nothing more than a corporate shill that will say whatever his paymasters ask him to, be it Exxon, Phillip Morris, Monsanto, or DuPont.

Does the No on 37 campaign stand behind Miller's fringe views on tobacco, climate change, nuclear radiation and DDT?

But this pattern of deceit doesn't end with Miller:

• On Oct. 5, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the nation's largest professional association for nutritionists and dieticians, accused the No on 37 campaign of misrepresenting its position and misleading voters in the official California Voter's Guide that went to 11 million voters.
• And the anti-Proposition 37 ads that are now blanketing the state have been described as misleading by the San Jose Mercury News, Sacramento Bee, and San Francisco Chronicle.

Perhaps these latest revelations will prompt the mainstream press to begin focusing their attention on the No on 37 campaign's pattern of deceptions - including a potentially criminal act - rather than on easily discredited pesticide industry Prop 37 "red herrings" like common sense exemptions, phony lawsuit scares, bogus "big bureaucracy claims", and "cost increase hysteria".

So who should we trust?

Who should we trust when it comes to our right to know what's in the food we eat: Monsanto, DuPont, and Henry Miller or the millions of California consumers and leading consumer, health, women's, faith-based, labor and other groups; 61 countries that already require GMO labeling; and a growing stack of peer-reviewed research linking genetically engineered foods to health and environmental problems?

Who has our best interests at heart, the pesticide and junk food industry, or Prop 37 supporters like Consumers Union, California Nurses Association, California Democratic Party, California Labor Federation, United Farm Workers, American Public Health Association, Consumers Union, Sierra Club, Whole Foods Market, California Council of Churches, Organic Consumers Association, Center for Food Safety, Consumer Federation of America, Public Citizen, and Food Democracy Now!?

Zack Kaldveer is the assistant media director for the Yes on Prop 37 campaign.

SEMPRA Energy Wants Ratepayers to Pay for Their Negligence

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

It's standard operating procedure for San Diego based SEMPRA Energy, parent corporation of San Diego Gas and Electric, to delay costly maintenance and then, when there is a breakdown in the system such as the 2007 Witch Creek Fire which burned 198,000 acres, killed two people, injured 40 firefighters and destroyed more than 1,100 homes, to go to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and get a ruling that would allow them to charge the ratepayers for costs associated with that disaster. This is standard business procedure for SEMPRA which has the CPUC in the palm of its hands. They have played this game time and again.

The problem is aging infrastructure, infrastructure that SEMPRA has a responsibility to maintain and upgrade. But upgrading infrastructure and maintaining its power and gas lines is expensive and subtracts from its bottom line profit margins. So SEMPRA's strategy is very simple. Don't spend the money on maintenance and then, when a disaster happens, go to the CPUC whose members it has wined and dined, and ask for a rate increase so that the ratepayers, not SEMPRA, pays for the costs associated with the disaster such as paying off homeowners whose homes have been burned down in the fire. Hey, it's cheaper than doing routine maintenance.

SEMPRA's problems in the Witch Creek fire arose because its insurance policy was not sufficient to cover all the costs of the fire. Total costs of the fire are in the $2 billion range with insurance only covering $1.1 billion. A state inquiry found that SDG&E lines ignited the 2007 firestorms because the company did not properly design, build and maintain its equipment. So naturally instead of SEMPRA hitting up its stockholders for the difference, it expects its ratepayers, many of whom were actual victims of the fire, to pay the bill. It has filed with the CPUC for approval for a rate increase on the grounds that it is needed to pay for the fire that SDG&E itself caused due to lack of maintenance and negligence. An attorney for UCAN (Utility Consumers' Action Network) said it works out to about $356 more a year for an average utility customer. How could the California PUC make it possible for SEMPRA to charge its ratepayers for its own negligence which caused a large swath of death and destruction in San Diego County in 2007?

Simple. The CPUC is in the pocket of not only SEMPRA but the other big California utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric based in San Francisco. For example, commissioners have twice approved rate increases in the tens of millions of dollars for SDG&E customers to cover the company’s higher wildfire liability insurance costs. CPUC members and staffers have had paid vacations courtesy of SEMPRA, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. After Mike Peevey ended his term as President of the CPUC, he helped to create the California Public Utilities Commisssion Foundation which held a fund-raising dinner where tables sold for $20,000. each. Among the buyers were San Diego Gas & Electric, child of parent SEMPRA. Up until 2000, the CPUC was regarded as the best utility regulatory body in the nation, but under Peevey it became the utility corporations' best friend. Par for the course for the Bush years.

And politicians who support the utility corporations' agenda get their share of free travel as well. Each year more than a dozen California state lawmakers enjoy a free trip to Hawaii. In 2011 they checked into the luxurious Fairmont Kea Lani hotal in Maui. California law prohibits state lawmakers from taking more than $400 a year in gifts. But as ever there's a loophole. The $13,000. trip to Maui per lawmaker was paid for by this loophole which in this case is a nonprofit corporation, the Independent Voter Project (huh?), which was a front group for the utility companies. San Diego politicians are among other recipients of SEMPRA's largesse. Bob Filner is the only mayoral candidate who has not received money from SDG&E, its parent company SEMPRA, or their employees. Nathan Fletcher, Bonnie Dumanis and Carl DeMaio have all taken SDG&E or SEMPRA money, but claim that it hasn't affected their judgment or proclivities. Yeah, sure.

But free trips for regulators and cozying up to lawmakers is not the only way utility corporations screw the public. There's another way. While your payroll and income taxes are taken out of your paycheck before you get paid, Congress lets corporations earn money today and defer taxes till years later. For example, Pacific Gas & Electric, a company responsible for the 2010 San Bruno gas line explosion which killed 8 people and destroyed 38 homes, had about $450 million of deferred taxes in its ADIT (Accumulated Deferred Income Tax account) in 2011 when it filed with the CPUC for a rate hike. The filing explained how long it holds on to this money before actually paying the government. In some cases it was 37 years. Meanwhile, inflation has reduced the value of the money it owes and investment has increased it. From 1954 to 2006, corporate-owned electric utilities got tax benefits worth $450 billion. So while you pay your taxes upfront, utilities can delay paying them for up to 37 years.

It's important to realize that not only does SEMPRA want San Diego ratepayers to pay for the 2007 Witch Creek fires; they also want the CPUC to rule that ratepayers should pay for all future fires. “The people of San Diego County will rise up if they find out they’re going to be charged for past fires, future fires, negligent behavior or not," said Diane Conklin, of the citizens watchdog group Mussey Grade Road Alliance. "They will be furious.”

It's not like SEMPRA thinks it has the CPUC in their hip pocket or anything. Profits are maximized by deferring maintenance, waiting for disasters to happen and then gouging ratepayers and taxpayers, average citizens, to pay for it. David Cay Johnston in his newly published book, The Fine Print ,says:

No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange workers and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news, which informs us about the world around us, addresses the private government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward. When news breaks about one company buying another, the focus is almost always on the bottom line and how shareholders will benefit from higher prices and less competition; much less is said about added costs for customers as competition wanes. This powerful yet subtle bias appeals to advertisers such as mutual funds and other financial services companies who wish to address investors.

Are We Heading for a Servant Economy?

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Jobs in the US are undergoing a huge transformation. People are being laid off from good paying jobs with benefits, and, to the extent they are finding new ones, they are being paid about half what they were at their previous job with no benefits. Most of the newly created jobs in the "promising" recent jobs report were part time or temporary jobs. The September Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report indicated that 114,000 jobs were added in September and that the unemployment rate dipped to 7.8%. This is good news to be sure, but the fact remains that the issue is more about the quality of jobs added than the actual number.

Half of all college graduates are not able to find work. The good jobs out there are only for elite students from elite institutions. Half of all graduates including graduates in science and engineering from universities like Harvard and Duke are going to work on Wall Street. This is where the top talent is going, and they're making big bucks - six figures to start plus signing bonuses. If you are just an average college student though from a run of the mill college, chances are the only job you will find is as a barrista at Starbucks or at the Apple genius bar. The Microsofts, Qualcomms, Googles and Intels are only hiring the top 1% or 2% from elite colleges.

The myth that with a college education you will be able to get a good paying job is being laid to rest. The social contract that, if you work hard, play by the rules and graduate college, there will be a job waiting for you is just a myth. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say anything about guaranteeing college graduates a job. That would be a social contract, and there ain't no social contract.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that for the top ten fastest growing occupations for the years 2010 - 2020, only two will require a college degree. Four don't even require a high school diploma! Two require an Associate's Degree. Jeff Faux in his book, "The Servant Economy," explains why he believes politicians of both parties working for America’s elite are systematically destroying the economic aspirations and quality of life for America’s middle class. 

Jeff Faux: "The future — you walk into an Apple store and you think you’re looking at the future, and you are, but it’s not in the technology. It’s in all of those smart college educated kids with the T-shirts on who are working as retail clerks at $12 an hour or so. Now if you talk to them, they will say, well, I’m just here temporarily." But they may still be there well into their 30s. That's what's happening. When you consider the BLS projections about the jobs of the future, you realize that many of these kids, these 20-something’s thinking that they’re going to be on a professional track, are going to be 30-something’s with dead end jobs well into the future. The BLS projections give the lie to the much repeated myth that with a college education you will make more over your lifetime than you will with just a high school diploma. Heck, where the jobs really are is for people without even a high school diploma. And the kids coming out of college that can't find jobs, that is the non-elite kids from non-elite colleges, they are loaded down with student loan debt. They wind up in a dead end job barely able to make their payments to Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The fact is that corporations are robotizing, computerizing and automating most aspects of most jobs. The kind of work that can't be robotized is outsourced to sweatshop workers in Asian contries where workers slave away for less than a dollar an hour. This is mostly assembly work. For instance, the Apple iPhone is a sophisticated device most of whose parts are manufactured by robots. However, they haven't figured out a way to have robots do the final assembly. So the iPhones are assembled by hand by Foxconn workers in China. These corporations, like Apple, however, are working on robots that will even do this bit of final menial assembly work. At that point they will not even need the sweatshop workers. That is the final goal: a product that can be entirely produced from start to shrink wrap by an automated assembly line without the need for human intervention.

This "hollowing out" of the US economy is nothing new. It didn't just start with the Great Recession of 2008. This is a trend that has been going on for 30 years or more. The first shot fired was Reagan's firing of the unionized PATCO workers. The gradual demise of the unions combined with the globalization of the work force has resulted in the reduction of the status of American workers to the point that the middle class is doing a disappearing act. Some economists would argue that, as the work force is becoming more productive, workers should share in those productivity gains. But its not that the work force is becoming more productive, the robots are becoming more productive. Capital itself in the form of robots is becoming more productive replacing the need for workers altogether. So to the extent that workers are necessary in the production process at all, it's not that they in and of themselves are becoming more productive. It's that less human work is required for the same amount of output due to the fact that robots are doing most of the work. In any event the non-unionized work force doesn't have the power to demand wage increases tied to increases in productivity.

Rana Foroohar in a Time article entitled "More Jobs, Less Pay," says: "Corporate profits are at record highs... and companies are buying plenty of cool new technology. The problem is that they are using it to replace human workers everywhere, with software eliminating white collar administrative jobs and robots getting Chinese factory gigs. ...

"The upshot: while technology is still doing a good job of displacing workers, it's not creating the kinds of megashifts in productivity and income growth that allow for major increases in standards of living."

Service sector jobs have by and large replaced manufacturing jobs and temporary and part time jobs have replaced full time jobs with benefits. Most large employers in the service sector manage their workforce as if their workers didn't depend on their jobs for anything essential like rent or child support. Most Wal-Mart workers are on food stamps. These are great jobs for people who don't really need them to pay their bills. In "No Logo," a book published in 2000 well before the Great Recession, Naomi Klein says: "And so the mall and the superstore have given birth to a ballooning category of joke jobs - the frozen-yogurt jerk, the Orange Julius juicer, the Gap greeter, the Prozac-happy Wal-Mart 'sales associate' - that are notoriously unstable, low-paying and overwhelmingly part-time."

She goes on: "Never mind that the service sector is now filled with workers that have multiple university degrees [and student loan debt], ... laid-off nurses and teachers, and down-sized middle managers. Never mind, too, that that the students who do work in retail and fast food - as many of them do - are facing higher tuition costs, less financial assistance from parents and government and more years in school." Many of these workers who consider their positions temporary, until they can find a real job in their field, end up with a de facto career in a job that doesn't even require a university degree and at wages that can't really support a middle class life.

Instead of entering the "servant economy" where job applicants are expected to conduct themselves in a servile manner, those who are able would be better off creating their own jobs instead of expecting that a university degree will be their ticket to a stable long-term, well-paying job. They should, if possible, be their own "job creators" instead of expecting that the so-called job creators, whose only real interest is in reducing the number of jobs and increasing automation and offshoring, will do it for them. One who creates his or her own job does not necessarily have to be an "entrepreneur," one who comes up with the next "Big Thing." There are plenty of self-created jobs in well established fields which require little if any credentialization. For instance, trades such as carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, handyman, gardening/landscaping, these are jobs which one can create for oneself with little capital investment required. Windowcleaning is a profession that doesn't even require a contractor's license or any formal training in the state of California and hardly any capital investment. I should know: I've been one for 36 years.

And in a country that espouses freedom, one cannot really be free working in a servant economy where in essence one must bow down to your boss or supervisor. That's not really being free. There is no freedom like being self-employed, and earning your living from multiple sources and a large customer base. That way no one customer has any power over you. No one can order you around. Only then are you truly free, and you can tell the so-called "job creators" to go to hell. It really is exhilarating.

 

 

Extreme Weather Watch: September 2012 Hottest on Record

by John Lawrence

The average global temperature across land and ocean surfaces during September was 0.67°C (1.21°F) above the long-term 20^th century average. This temperature ties with 2005 as the record warmest September in the 133-year period of record. The Northern Hemisphere tied with 2009 as second warmest on record, behind 2005. The Southern Hemisphere also ranked second warmest on record, behind 1997. It was also the highest departure from average for any month in the Southern Hemisphere since May 2010.

The average global land surface temperature was the third highest for September on record, behind 2009 (highest) and 2005 (second highest), with widespread warmth around the globe. It was the third warmest September over land in the Northern Hemisphere and fourth warmest in the Southern Hemisphere. In the higher northern latitudes, parts of east central Russia observed record warmth, as did parts of Venezuela, French Guinea, and northern Brazil closer to the tropics. Nearly all of South America was much warmer than average as were western Australia and central to eastern Europe. Far eastern Russia, a few regions in southern Africa, and parts of China were cooler than average.

September also brought the lowest Arctic sea ice extent on record. Studies have shown that manmade global warming is the cause of the majority of sea ice loss that has occurred since the beginning of the satellite record in 1979. More than 4.57 million square miles of ice melted in 2012, NOAA said, which is the size of the entire U.S. and Mexico combined. The six lowest sea ice extents have all occurred in the past six years, a sign of the rapid disappearance of summer sea ice in the Far North, a development that may have far-reaching implications for weather patterns in the northern hemisphere in particular.

At the same time, in Antarctica, winter sea ice extent edged past 2006 to reach its all-time highest extent on record, although climate scientists said that this, too, is paradoxically connected to global warming. 

Here's what the first six months of 2012 brought:

• The hottest January to June ever recorded in the continental United States.
• More than 22,000 daily high temperature records tied or broken.
• The largest drought declaration in over 50 years, with more than two-thirds of the continental United States in drought at the end of July.
• One of the most destructive freak derecho storms in history.
• Fires in Colorado that have destroyed more than 700 homes.

Unfortunately, the first half of 2012 is not the exception. It's becoming the new normal. In 2011, for instance, an unprecedented 14 disastrous weather events resulted in an estimated $53 billion in damage –- not including health costs. But the trend goes back much further. In fact, the 13 warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 1997, according to the United Nations World Meteorological Organization. June 2012 also marks the 328th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average.

The first half of 2012's historic drought saw more than 80 percent of the country in abnormally dry or drought conditions in mid-July. Drought of course threatens our water and food supplies and is driving up the cost of everything from corn to milk. Unfortunately, drought conditions are expected to become the new normal for many parts of the country if we don’t do more to address climate change.

More than 1,100 U.S. counties -- one-third of all counties in the lower 48 states –- will face higher risks of water shortages by mid-century as the result of global warming. Some states are taking steps to address long-term drought. New York, for instance, is developing comprehensive drought monitoring programs and emergency water supplies, while Oregon is implementing ways to increase water storage capacity for times of drought.

There are solutions to addressing the effects of drought. For one thing, we can stop wasting so much water, and energy that's required to pump it around. We also need our lawmakers to quit ignoring climate change and start limiting carbon pollution that is heating our planet and increasing the intensity of extreme weather.

According to a staff report, issued by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.):

"Beyond the loss of life and impact on communities and livelihoods, severe weather has resulted in large economic costs. The number of natural disasters has increased steadily over the past thirty years with natural disasters in 2011 resulting in the most costly toll in history —$154 billion worth of worldwide losses from floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and other extreme weather events. In the United States alone, 2011 extreme weather events caused almost $60 billion in damages. This total does not include expenses associated with sickness or injuries triggered by the disasters. Given the number and severity of extreme events that have thus far occurred this year, weather-related costs in 2012 could equal or exceed those in 2011."

How Obama Can Smoke Out Mitt: Call for Breaking Up the Biggest Banks, and Resurrecting Glass-Steagall

by Robert Reich

Thursday, October 18, 2012

President Obama should propose that the nation’s biggest banks be broken up and their size capped, and that the Glass-Steagall Act be resurrected. 

It’s good policy, and it would smoke out Mitt Romney as being of, by, and for Wall Street — and not on the side of average Americans. 

It would also remind America that five years ago Wall Street’s excesses almost ruined the economy. Bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity traders speculated on the upside, then shorted on the downside — in a vast zero-sum game that resulted in the largest transfer of wealth from average Americans to financial elites ever witnessed in this nation’s history. 

Most of us lost big — including over $7 trillion of home values, a $700-billion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, and continuing high unemployment.

But the top 1 percent have done just fine. In the first year of the recovery they reaped 93 percent of the gains. The latest data show them back with 20 to 25 percent of the nation’s total income — just where they were in 2007.

The stock market has about caught up to where it was before the crash. The pay and bonuses on the Street are once again sky-high. So are the pay and perks of top corporate executives. The Forbes list of richest Americans contains more billionaires than ever. 

And the tax rates of the top 1 percent are lower than ever — courtesy of their armies of lobbyists.

Mitt Romney, private equity manager and financier — well within the top one-tenth of 1 percent, collecting more than $20 million a year yet paying 14 percent in taxes because of tax preferences for capital gains and for private-equity — is the avatar for all that’s happened.

Just like the rest of the Street, Romney used other peoples’ money to make big bets, leveraging like mad, pumping and then dumping companies regardless of the human costs. 

Worse, Romney wants to cut taxes even further on the top 1 percent — giving them them lion’s share of a $4.7 trillion tax cut — while shredding safety nets the rest of us rely on. 

And he wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act that goes some way to preventing the worst excesses of the Street. 

And this man has an almost 50-50 chance of becoming president? 

The President should counter Romney’s extraordinary solicitude toward the Street with a proposal to cap the size of the nation’s biggest banks so that no bank is ever again too big to fail. And to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act, which once separated commercial from investment banking.

In the 1980s the ten biggest banks had less than 30 percent of bank depositary assets. Now they have 54 percent. And the four biggest now dominate the Street almost completely. Because lenders and investors know they’re too big to fail, the four biggest banks have a competitive advantage over smaller rivals that pose larger financial risks. That means they’ll only get bigger. 

Breaking up the biggest banks and capping the size of all banks is hardly a radical suggestion these days. The Dallas Federal Reserve Board, which has never been accused of excessive liberalism, has called for it. So has Sanford Weill, the creator of Citigroup, one of the biggest of the big. So has Daniel Tarullo, the Federal Reserve governor charged with bank regulation. So have conservative commentators such as George Will. 

It’s not too late for the President to advocate these measures. In fact, now may be the perfect time. Besides, it’s not as if Wall Street is going to pour campaign contributions into Obama’s coffers anyway; the Street is going with Mitt.

Calling for a breakup of the biggest banks and a resurrection of Glass Steagall would smoke out Mitt Romney — revealing clearly and decisively he’s not on the side of most Americans.

New Solar Energy Program Signals a Paradigm Shift in Our Approach to Energy Development on Public Lands

by Jessica Goad

Climate Progress / News Analysis

Published: Sunday 14 October 2012

The way that solar energy is sited and built on federal public lands just got simpler. Earlier today, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signed into law a new plan outlining the best places for solar to be developed on public lands and incentives for avoiding places that are ecologically sensitive.

At the beginning of this administration, there were literally no solar energy projects on public lands, despite hundreds of applications lined up.  Currently one project is operating while five others are under construction.

“Energy from sources like wind and solar have doubled since the President took office, and with today’s milestone, we are laying a sustainable foundation to keep expanding our nation’s domestic energy resources,” said Secretary Salazar in a statement.

Perhaps the most unique idea in the “Solar Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement” announced today is that of zones for solar development.  These areas were screened for their high solar resource potential, transmission capacity, and lack of resource conflicts, the idea being that projects located within them will benefit from faster permitting and easier mitigation.  Altogether, 17 zones covering approximately 285,000 acres were identified in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.  Solar development is also allowable in 19 million acres outside of the zones, but will receive less agency attention and more environmental analyses.

“This historic initiative provides a roadmap for landscape-level planning that will lead to faster, smarter utility-scale solar development on public lands and reflects President Obama’s commitment to grow American made energy and create jobs,” said Salazar.

Importantly, this announcement reflects a major step forward in the philosophy about how our public lands are used for energy development.  Up until now, the priority use of public lands for energy has been fossil fuels — oil, gas, and coal.  Although a handful of wind and geothermal projects were up and running, it wasn’t until this year that any solar projects started generating electricity.

The solar decision follows an announcement earlier this week from the Department of the Interior that 10,000 megawatts of solar, wind, and geothermal energy have been authorized on public lands.  This meets a goal for the agency laid out by Congress in 2005 of approving 10,000 megawatts of non-hydro renewable energy on public lands by 2015, which was echoed by President Obama in this year’s State of the Union address.

Now that federal land management agencies have met their megawatt goal and completed this seminal plan for solar energy, they will need to determine what the next steps in the process will be. It remains to be seen how well the new framework for solar energy development works, particularly whether or not it encourages more developers to look to federal lands for opportunities. In addition, the process for establishing new zones has yet to be tested.

The Center for American Progress has called on the agencies to institute a new goal of ensuring that 35 percent of the electricity from resources from public lands and waters is renewable by 2035. Currently, 66 percent of the resources from public lands used for electricity are from coal, while only 1 percent is from wind, solar, and geothermal combined. Establishing a “clean resources standard” will help bring coal and renewable energy sourced from public lands back into balance and continue to help us transition the use of our lands for energy development from fossil to clean.

European Victory on Taxing Speculation

Published on Sunday, October 14, 2012 by IPS blog

The goofy stunts weren't the only game-changers.

by Sarah Anderson

European campaigners for a financial transaction tax have done some awfully goofy things over the past three years.

At one French demonstration, they stripped down to their skivvies to emphasize the small size of the tax (0.1% on trade of stocks and bonds and 0.02% on derivatives under the European Commission's proposal). In Germany, they rented a limo and crashed the Berlinale film festival, dressed as Robin Hood characters. In many countries, they've gotten elected officials to pose with silly hats and fake bows and arrows.

But after this week, the opponents of the financial transaction tax (aka Robin Hood Tax) will no longer snicker at such antics. At a meeting of European finance ministers on October 9, 11 governments committed to implementing the tax. This is two more than the minimum number needed for an official EU agreement. And it is a huge victory for those of us -- not just in Europe but also in the United States and around the world -- who've been pushing for such taxes as a way to curb short-term speculation and generate massive revenue for job creation, global health, climate, and other pressing needs.

Of course the goofy stunts weren't the only game-changers. Campaigners have also built up strong technical arguments about the feasibility of such taxes. And a growing number of financial professionals have come out in support, blunting the industry backlash.

The broader European crisis has also been a major factor. In fact, there are rumors that Italy and Spain may have sold their support in exchange for some debt concessions from Germany. The additional eight governments in the new coalition of the willing are France, Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Greece, Portugal, Slovakia, and Slovenia. More may join in the coming months.

There are still a few hurdles ahead. There will be a round of negotiations that could result in the European Commission's proposal being watered down by lowering the rates or narrowing the base to only cover securities. There will be a fight to make sure revenues help people and the planet instead of the big banks. And EU heads of state will have to vote by a qualified majority to give the initiative the green light. This means some countries that don't plan to implement the tax themselves will still need to sign off on it. The biggest opponent, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, may have some obstructionist tricks up his sleeve.

But according to Peter Wahl of WEED, one of the key forces behind the German campaign, "there is now quite a strong political will behind the project, so that we can expect definitive implementation rather soon, perhaps already during 2013."

Europe's dramatic step forward can only boost the growing U.S. grassroots efforts for a Robin Hood Tax. Our current Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, has been a naysayer, sometimes even chastising European leaders for considering the idea. But with Geithner heading out the door after the election and Europe moving towards raising revenue off the tax, we may get a blast of fresh thinking.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank, in Washington DC. She’s also the co-author of the IPS report, America’s Bailout Barons: Taxpayers, High Finance, and the CEO Pay Bubble.

Five Practical Reasons Not To Vote Republican

Published on Monday, October 8, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Paul Buchheit

There is no shortage of reasons not to vote Republican. The litany includes tax cuts for the rich, cutbacks in government programs, obstructing needed legislation, disregard for the environment, denial of women's and other human rights, military escalation.

But the following five reasons have to do with money -- specifically, who's paying for the $1 trillion of annual tax savings and tax avoidance for the super-rich? And who's paying for the $1 trillion of national security to protect their growing fortunes? The Republicans want that money to come from the rest of us.

1. Economic Darwinism -- Republicans want the Poor to Pay

Paul Ryan's proposed budget would take about a half-trillion dollars a year from programs that support the poor. This is a continuation of a 15-year shredding of the safety net by Republicans. The GOP-controlled Congress of Bill Clinton created Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which has experienced a 60% drop in its caseload despite growing poverty, and which, according to the Urban Institute, provides "maximum benefits [that] even in the more generous states were far below the federal poverty level of $1,525 a month for a family of three."

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), another vital program that serves 50 million "food insecure" Americans, would be cut by $16 billion under the House version of the Farm Bill. The average recipient currently gets $4.30 a day for food.

Republicans also voted to end the Child Tax Credit, and favor a tax plan that would eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit.

2. Payroll Tax -- Republicans want the Middle Class to Pay

Encouraged by the steady Republican demand for lower corporate tax rates, big business has effected a stunning shift in taxpaying responsibility over the years, from corporate income tax to worker payroll tax. For every dollar of payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.

It's gotten worse in recent years, as corporations decided to drastically cut their tax rates after the start of the recession. After paying an average of 22.5% from 1987 to 2008, they've paid an annual rate of 10% since. This represents a sudden $250 billion annual loss in taxes.

Republicans claim that almost half of Americans don't pay taxes. But when payroll and state and local taxes are considered, middle-income Americans pay at about the same rate as the highest earners. Only about 17% of households paid no federal income tax or payroll tax in 2009. And average workers get little help from people who make most of the money. Because of the $110,000 cutoff for payroll tax deductions, the richest 10% of Americans save $150 billion a year in taxes.

3. Job Shrinkage -- Republicans want Young People to Pay

The jobs that exist for young Americans are paying much less than just a few years ago. During and after the recession, according to the National Employment Law Project, low-wage jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) dropped by 21 percent, and then grew back at a 58 percent rate. Mid-wage jobs ($13.84 to $21.13 per hour) dropped by 60 percent and grew back at a 22 percent rate. In other words, the median wage is falling fast.

Unemployment for workers under 25 stands at 16.4 percent, twice the national average. Half of recent college graduates are jobless or underemployed.

Yet Republicans killed a jobs bill that was supported by two-thirds of the public.

An academic study of employment data over 64 years found that an average of two million jobs per year were created under Democratic presidents, compared to one million under Republican presidents. Similar results were reported by the Bloomberg Government Barometer.

4. Retirement Planning -- Republicans want the Seniors to Pay

There's a common misconception in our country that most seniors are financially secure. Actually, Census data reveals that elderly people experience greater inequality than any other population group, with the poorest one-fifth receiving just 5.5% of the group's total resources, while the wealthiest one-fifth receives 46%.

The senior wealth gap is further evidenced by data during the great 30-year surge in inequality. The average over-60 wealth was five times greater than the median in 1995, as would be expected with a small percentage of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and a great majority of low-wealth people. Further confirmation comes from 2004 Harvard data that shows rising inequality within all age groups, including the elderly. Indeed, an MIT study found that about 46% of U.S. senior citizens have less than $10,000 in financial assets when they die.

For the vast majority of seniors, Social Security has been life-sustaining, accounting for 55% of their annual income. Because of this successful and popular program, the senior poverty rate has dropped from 50% to 10%, and due to life-long contributions from working Americans the program has a $2.7 trillion surplus while contributing nothing to the deficit. Yet Republicans want to undo it.

5. Public Fire Sale -- Republicans want Society to Pay

The common good is threatened by the Republican disdain for public resources. Drilling and mining and pipeline construction continues on public lands, and the House of Representatives has voted over 100 times since 2011 to subsidize the oil and gas industry while weakening environmental, public health, and safety requirements. The "land grab" is pitting corporate muscle against citizens' rights.

Sadly, most of America envisions a new era of energy independence that increases our world-leading consumption of energy while depending on a proliferation of dirty technologies to extract it. Threats of methane emissions, water pollution, and earthquake activity don't deter the fossil fuel enthusiasts.

It gets worse. Republicans are eager to sell public land. Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" proposes to sell millions of acres of "unneeded federal land" and billions of dollars worth of federal assets. His running mate Mitt Romney admits that he doesn't know "what the purpose is" of public lands.

That brings us to the heart of the reasons not to vote Republican. Their reckless belief in the free market, and their dependency on corporatization and privatization to run the country, means that middle-class Americans keep paying for the fabulously wealthy people at the top who think they deserve everything they've taken from society.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at [email protected].

Prop 37: Vote Yes for Labeling GMO Foods

by John Lawrence  from the San Diego Free Press

The French prime minister announced on September 15, 2012 that France would maintain a ban on Monsanto's MON810 maize, the only genetically modified organisim (GMO) currently allowed in Europe. 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.

But that's not all. 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.

Also in March, 2011 the Mexican States of Tlaxcala and Michoacán each passed legislation banning the planting of genetically modified corn to protect natural plants from further GMO contamination.  Together, both states produce about a third of all of Mexico’s corn. GMO corn can cross-contaminate ancient strains of Mexican maize.

Meanwhile, the "No on 37" ads are proliferating. They are saying that Prop 37 is arbitrary because it doesn't call for labeling alcohol, restaurant food, meat or cheese. However it does call for labeling all fruits and vegetables which are GMO products. That's certainly a worthwhile start. Since all animal products in the grocery stores have eaten GMO corn, labeling animal products as GMO because they ate GMO corn when they were alive would result in blanket labeling of all meat products except those who were fed organic grass or corn, a minuscule quantity.

Also labeling GMO foods on restaurant menus would result in every item on the menu being labeled as GMO. This would be a little extreme to start, and would guarantee massive infusions of lobbying cash into the battle for GMO labeling by the other side. Alcoholic drinks contain GMOs, but again it would be impractical at the present time to require a bartender to inform you that the drink you just ordered contained GMOs. It is better just to consume organic products insofar as possible. Organic wine is already labeled as such. There are GMO grapes, but the larger issue is the fact that grapes are heavily sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, and grapes aren't grown from seed making GMO grapes a non-issue. 

Bourbon by definition must be made with 51% corn. Nearly every distillery uses GMO corn to make bourbon. However, at present there are two organic, non-GMO choices: Four Roses and Wild Turkey. However, even those whiskies are not committed to using non-GMO corn since there is little of it available these days. Jack Daniels is ending its commitment to using non-GMO corn. In 2000, a number of their consumers, particularly those in Europe, expressed a preference for non-GM ingredients, and  they opted for only 100% non-genetically modified corn. But now they are going to GMO corn because of availability issues. I guess they will lose the European market. Here is a marketing opportunity for someone!

It is not only concern about GMO corn that calls for caution.

Colin O’Neil, regulatory policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, says he hasn’t seen any science pointing to genetic material passing through the distillation process. But, as he sees it, that’s not the only cause for concern.

“To assume that the only real risk is contamination of genetic material ignores the fact that these crops by and large either produce an insecticide (which has been shown not to break down in the human gut) or they are engineered to withstand exposure to herbicide.” And farmers are spraying an increasing amount of Roundup and other weed killers as a result of herbicide-resistant “superweeds,” he points out.  

“I don’t know what types of pesticide residues are on the corn that goes through the distillation process,” O’Neil adds, “but residue in any form presents an increased exposure to consumers.”

So bourbon aficionados will have to take their chances or demand organic whiskey because Prop 37 will not protect them. Beer drinkers should import European beers now that GMO maize, which had been previously used in beer manufacturing, has been banned there.

Major U.S. companies have dropped genetically engineered foods in Europe, citing consumer fears. There is a survey which says that Kellogg, Coke, Pepsi, Kraft, Heinz, and others comprise a growing list of companies going GMO-free - but not in the U.S. Some of these companies are behind the "No on Prop 37" campaign here in California. If enough people in the US demand GMO free foods and beverages as they have in Europe, they will have to provide them here as well.

Here are 8 reasons you want Prop 37 to pass, and why we're asking for your support.

1. GMOs have never been proven safe. The FDA conducts no independent testing of GMOs, but instead claims that they are "not substantially different" from non-GMO foods.

2. The biotech industry is not required to conduct long-term safety studies on GMOs, and it keeps researchers from conducting those tests by claiming the right to protect its patented seeds and technologies.

3. GMOs are everywhere. Today, most non-organic US corn, soy, cotton, and sugar beets - which are used in most of the sweeteners and additives used by food processors - are genetically engineered. So is the feed fed to the animals you eat. In fact, 75-85% of the processed food in your grocery store contains unlabeled GMOs.

4. The companies who want you to believe GMOs are safe are the same ones who lied to you about Agent Orange and DDT.

5. GMO crops are responsible for super weeds and super bugs, soil degradation, and a lack of diversity - which makes crops and humans more susceptible to disease.

6. The only folks who don't want you to know what's in your food are huge corporations like Monsanto, Dow AgriScience, BASF and food conglomerates like Pepsi and Coca-Cola - who along with other biotech, pesticide and processed food manufacturers have donated nearly $33 million to defeat Prop 37.

7. This is our best - and perhaps only - shot at labeling GMOs and ending Monsanto's monopoly of our food supply and destruction of our health and environment. Nineteen other states have tried - and failed - to get a GMO labeling law through the state legislative process. Prop 37 takes GMO labeling direct to the voters so Monsanto's lobbyists can't kill it.

8. If this law passes in California, food manufacturers have admitted that it may as well be a national law. They won't want to put "this product contains GMOs" on their labels, so they will reformulate their products. And if they reformulate for California, they may as well do it for all of their products.

Early voting on Prop 37 begins on October 9. By November 6, this historic initiative will have passed or failed.

Truth About Jobs

by Paul Krugman

Published October 7, 2012 by the New York Times

If anyone had doubts about the madness that has spread through a large part of the American political spectrum, the reaction to Friday’s better-than expected report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should have settled the issue. For the immediate response of many on the right — and we’re not just talking fringe figures — was to cry conspiracy.

Leading the charge of what were quickly dubbed the “B.L.S. truthers” was none other than Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, who posted an assertion on Twitter that the books had been cooked to help President Obama’s re-election campaign. His claim was quickly picked up by right-wing pundits and media personalities.

It was nonsense, of course. Job numbers are prepared by professional civil servants, at an agency that currently has no political appointees. But then maybe Mr. Welch — under whose leadership G.E. reported remarkably smooth earnings growth, with none of the short-term fluctuations you might have expected (fluctuations that reappeared under his successor) — doesn’t know how hard it would be to cook the jobs data.

Furthermore, the methods the bureau uses are public — and anyone familiar with the data understands that they are “noisy,” that especially good (or bad) months will be reported now and then as a simple consequence of statistical randomness. And that in turn means that you shouldn’t put much weight on any one month’s report.

In that case, however, what is the somewhat longer-term trend? Is the U.S. employment picture getting better? Yes, it is.

Some background: the monthly employment report is based on two surveys. One asks a random sample of employers how many people are on their payroll. The other asks a random sample of households whether their members are working or looking for work. And if you look at the trend over the past year or so, both surveys suggest a labor market that is gradually on the mend, with job creation consistently exceeding growth in the working-age population.

On the employer side, the current numbers say that over the past year the economy added 150,000 jobs a month, and revisions will probably push that number up significantly. That’s well above the 90,000 or so added jobs per month that we need to keep up with population. (This number used to be higher, but underlying work force growth has dropped off sharply now that many baby boomers are reaching retirement age.)

Meanwhile, the household survey produces estimates of both the number of Americans employed and the number unemployed, defined as people who are seeking work but don’t currently have a job. The eye-popping number from Friday’s report was a sudden drop in the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, but as I said, you shouldn’t put too much emphasis on one month’s number. The more important point is that unemployment has been on a sustained downward trend.

But isn’t that just because people have given up looking for work, and hence no longer count as unemployed? Actually, no. It’s true that the employment-population ratio — the percentage of adults with jobs — has been more or less flat for the past year. But remember those aging baby boomers: the fraction of American adults who are in their prime working years is falling fast. Once you take the effects of an aging population into account, the numbers show a substantial improvement in the employment picture since the summer of 2011.

None of this should be taken to imply that the situation is good, or to deny that we should be doing better — a shortfall largely due to the scorched-earth tactics of Republicans, who have blocked any and all efforts to accelerate the pace of recovery. (If the American Jobs Act, proposed by the Obama administration last year, had been passed, the unemployment rate would probably be below 7 percent.) The U.S. economy is still far short of where it should be, and the job market has a long way to go before it makes up the ground lost in the Great Recession. But the employment data do suggest an economy that is slowly healing, an economy in which declining consumer debt burdens and a housing revival have finally put us on the road back to full employment.

And that’s the truth that the right can’t handle. The furor over Friday’s report revealed a political movement that is rooting for American failure, so obsessed with taking down Mr. Obama that good news for the nation’s long-suffering workers drives its members into a blind rage. It also revealed a movement that lives in an intellectual bubble, dealing with uncomfortable reality — whether that reality involves polls or economic data — not just by denying the facts, but by spinning wild conspiracy theories.

It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.

 

Save Big Money: Get Your Dental Work Done in Tijuana

by John Lawrence

I have been going to Tijuana for dental work for five years. In that time I've had two root canals, several crowns and an implant. I've also taken my two granddaughters down there for routine dental work a couple of times. In the process I've saved several thousand dollars and been completely pleased with the results.

There are probably a lot of good dentists in Tijuana and some bad ones. The problem for most people is knowing who to go to. People need referrals to good dentists so please feel free to comment on experiences that you've had with dentistry in Tijuana - both whom you'd recommend and who to stay away from. Personally, I would recommend the office I've been going to which is Baja Oral Center. There is a network of dentists there ranging from children's dentistry to general dentistry to tooth implants. All the dentists speak perfect English so there is no language barrier. One call to Berniece, the receptionist, whose English also is great suffices to set up an appointment. By the way it's a local call. They have a 619 area code. So that's two barriers out of the way: language and referral. And did I mention that they're very friendly and accommodating to your schedule?

I blogged about my dental experience in Tijuana in 2007:

"I googled "dentistry in Tijuana" and checked out somewhat thoroughly what was available which was a lot. In fact I devoted an afternoon to it.  A lot of dentists had websites, and a ton of information was available. I had several criteria: qualifications and background of the dentist; quality of the website; location and appearance of the dental office. Some of these criteria are somewhat superficial, I admit, but I wanted a dentist with a nice office in a good neighborhood, not somebody who worked out of his house in a bad neighborhood. I finally settled on Baja Oral Center.  I was impresssed with the qualifications of Dr. Martinez who did the dental implants. I called a local San Diego number (they have an 800 number too) and set up an appointment with Dr. Martinez to see about a dental implant. Everyone in the office speaks fluent English including the office manager and phone answerer, Berniece. They cover all the bases at Baja Oral Center. The general dentist there is Dr. Garcia. I was impressed with his credentials too. Their equipment is the latest and most modern. And their offices and waiting rooms are immaculate.

"The day of my appointment at 11 AM, I  took the San Diego trolley from downtown. I allowed an hour and a half to get down there. My plan was to take the trolley to San Ysidro, walk across the border, then get a taxi to Jose Orosco St. where the offices are located in the Plaza Pacifico building, a relatively recently constructed high rise. It actually took me an hour and fifteen minutes including a fifteen minute walk to the trolley station from my apartment.  The taxi ride cost "cinco" dollars and took less than five minutes. The offices are located in the Zona Rio section of Tijuana, near Paseo de los Heroes and a huge modern shopping mall. There's a large statue of Abraham Lincoln (among others) nearby on Paseo de los Heroes."

There are also some good restaurants nearby.

Here is a quote and a reply I found on the web regarding dental costs in San Diego:

"I've been living in SD about four months now and I've been looking for a new dentist. It took me forever to find a good dentist where I used to live, roughly about four years if you could believe it! I don't want it to take nearly that long here! I went in for some x-rays and a consult the other week and I was shocked to hear that three fillings were $1,300! I'm used to around $60-100 per filling (now this is for the silver and these other ones would probably be the white ones) Is it common for fillings (white ones) to be around $400 each? For that much I could save up money, fly back 2,000 miles and get a crown for $400 each. Am I getting ripped cause I have no insurance and paying out of pocket or is this the going rate here? Also I was told I may need crowns in the future which are supposedly $1,200 each here..

Reply:

"1200 for a crown sounds about right. I just paid 600 for a crown after 50% copay a month ago. 400 for a filling? A bit on the high side I think, but far from outrageous. You might be able to get $60 fillings and $400 crowns in Tijuana."

In the above example, the guy paid $600 for a crown after a 50% copay. I recently paid $300 in Tijuana, half what this person paid with dental insurance in San Diego. On implants there are even greater savings. In San Diego they run $5000.-$6000. In Tijuana, my implant with Dr. Martinez and Dr. Garcia providing the crown cost a total of $1100.

US dental insurance is a farce. They pay 100% for the small stuff like X-rays and cleanings. But when it comes to crowns, root canals, dentures and implants, they usually only pay 50%. And then there are annual dollar limits on dental costs. Once you're over the limit you're screwed. There are also lifetime limits just as with health insurance until Obamacare nixed them. And there are service limits. From my analysis of the problem I think that you are better off to cancel your dental insurance and get your dental work done in Tijuana although some dental plans supposedly cover Tijuana dentists.

If you need extensive dental work done and you're not within commuting distance, it might be cheaper to check into a hotel in Tijuana, have all your work done at a tremendous savings and then return home.

Another reservation many Americans have about going to Mexico for dental work is that they've heard media reports about drug violence. I think these reports are considerably overdone especially with respect to Tijuana. This is taken from an extensive dental website at which this problem is addressed:

"Don't let exaggerations and rumors alarm you.  Tourists are not in any extraordinary dangers. Tijuana is not like Juarez nor like the Texas border. Things are fine here. The government in Tijuana has things very much under control. Most patients tell us that they feel safer here than in many large US cities.  In the nearly five years that Sam Dental has been operating, there have been several thousand of patients who have come here for treatment, and no one has ever reported that they have ever felt in danger. We will pick you up at the San Diego/Tijuana border, and transport you to and from your hotel, doing everything we can to take care of you. Everyone who has come to our clinic has been surprised at how laid back things are in the city. We want you to feel at ease and to enjoy your trip to Mexico."

Dental care in the US is in crisis mode. Most health care insurance doesn't include it. According to the LA Times, hundreds recently turned out for free dental care at the LA Sports Arena provided by Care Harbor 2012. This is from that report:

Julio Rivera leaned back in a dental chair and closed his eyes. He hadn’t been to a dentist in nearly four years. After 30 minutes of intense cleaning, Rivera, 50, said his mouth felt completely different. Rivera and hundreds of other residents from throughout Southern California flocked to the Los Angeles Sports Arena on Thursday for a massive annual free clinic put on by Care Harbor. Patients received an array of health services, including blood pressure checks, mammograms, vision screening and HIV testing. They could also meet with specialists such as cardiologists and podiatrists. But, like previous years, the demand was greatest for dental care. This year there are 100 dental chairs available for patients to receive cleanings, extractions, fillings and root canals -– up from about 80 last year. But dental hygienist Laurel Bleak said it still wasn’t enough. “We try to do the best we can with limited resources,” Bleak said. “We could easily spend five hours on each patient.”

Whether or not poor people could afford dentistry even in Mexico is an open question, but in the US, the richest nation in the world, poor people either go without or, if they're lucky, get free dental care.

Here are some practical tips about getting to Tijuana. There are two ways to get down there: 1) drive your car or 2) take the trolley, walk across the border and take a taxi to the dentist's office. For your initial visit if you don't know where you're going, walking across and taking a taxi is a better bet. In either case you need a passport to get back. A driver's license used to be sufficient, but not any more. You can get a credit card sized one that fits right in your wallet. Children need birth certificates. The agents have asked me for those when I took my grandchildren with me. And they will question the children as to who you are. This is all on the way back. No one asks you for any identification on the way in.

If I drive, it takes me about half an hour travel time from my house in El Cajon to my dentist's office. The problem is getting back over the border. That can range from 10 minutes to an hour and a half.

If you take the pedestrian route, it's easy to catch a taxi for the ride back to the border. There is usually one waiting outside the Plaza Pacifico building. Tell the taxi driver you want to go to the border. He will drop you off at the end of "La Linea," the line. As a pedestrian crossing the border your wait will vary from no wait at all to one and a half hours. It's best to go on a Wednesday. There are many more people waiting either in the auto line or the pedestrian line on Mondays and Fridays. There are advantages and disadvantages to going by auto or by foot. Waiting in the auto line, you can turn on the air conditioning and listen to the radio. On the other hand you're subject to breathing the exhaust from the vehicle right in front of you and surrounding vehicles. If it's a long wait, I find it more pleasant to be a pedestrian where at least you have fresh air and can get an ice cream at the Thrifty stand on your way up the line. I have experienced long auto lines while at the same time there was absolutely no wait in the pedestrian line.

However, driving is quicker (at least getting across the border) and cheaper. You can park right in the Plaza Pacifico building for about a dollar an hour. Driving directions to Baja Oral Center are as follows:

Baja Oral Center is located at 10122 Jose Clemente Orozco Street. If you cross the border by car bear to the right and follow signs to Tecate. Don't take the Centro or Zona Rio turnoffs. After going around several turns you will find yourself on Via Rapida Poniente. Get over to the right so that you're on the local road and can make a right hand turn. You will go past a huge parking garage on your right and a shopping center. You will see a "Cinepolis" movie theater. After you pass the second set of parking garages get ready to make a right turn. You will see a 7-11. Don't turn there, but turn just a few feet later on the very next street. That will be Jose Clemente Orozco, but it's not marked. Then on your left you will see the Plaza Pacifico building which is marked. Go up the entrance to the parking garage. Then take the elevator to the fourth floor where Baja Oral Center is located.

Coming back as you exit the parking garage take a left, then a quick right onto Paseo de los Heroes. Go to the first traffic circle, and make a right. You will see signs to San Diego. Go over a bridge and there will be two possible left turns right next to each other. TAKE THE SECOND ONE. Then follow signs to the border. As you near the border you will see several lanes with walls lining the sides. Whatever you do, do not get in the left hand lane. That will take you back to Tijuana, dump you off at an unnerving traffic circle, and it will be difficult to find your way back to the border. Don't get in the far right hand lane either. That one is just for buses and people having a Sentri pass. Stay in the middle lane right under the I-5 sign.

Note: the above directions are now for the SENTRI pass lanes only. For the regular lanes, proceed down Paseo de los Heroes and follow directions to the border.

New Study Confirms GMO Crops Causing More Pesticide Use, Superweeds

By Lisa Garber

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Saturday 6 October 2012 from Nation of Change

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) require more pesticide use on crops, say the authors of a 16-year study published in Environmental Sciences Europe. According to the researchers, 527 million pounds of a toxic herbicide have inundated farmlands since 1996. What’s more, this abhorrent amount is much greater than that promised by Monsanto, which claims that GM crops require smaller doses of herbicides like the company’s best-selling Roundup Ready.

This study found, however, that although farmers did reduce Roundup Ready use by 2 percent between 1996 and 1999, herbicide use resurged with a vengeance thereafter. This was a result of the emergence of “superweeds” that resist herbicides, requiring farmers to use more of it with each application.

Herbicide and Pesticide Use Damage Humans, Environment

These “superweeds” have become resistant to glyphosate, a chemical found in Roundup Ready. Rootworms, too, may be becoming resistant according to ongoing research by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

 Additionally, a recent French study by the University of Caen found glyphosate and herbicides like Roundup to be actively toxic to human cells—findings which led to Russia’s suspension of Monsanto crop imports. Earth Open Source, a nonprofit organization with volunteers as well as several international scientists and researchers, has linked glyphosate with birth defects. Worse (but predictable) is that in 1993 Monsanto knew “visceral anomalies such as dilation of the heart could occur in rabbits at low and medium-sized doses,” but did nothing to curb the chemical’s or Roundup’s use in agriculture.

Glyphosate also causes moderate to severe liver damage in fish and aquatic life, since herbicide runoff can reach both groundwater and seawater. This water pollution has been found to affect even city dwellers, in whose urine researchers have found glyphosate.

Farm Bill to Deregulate GMOs

Meanwhile, there is a provision lurking in the new Farm Bill which would further deregulate genetically modified (GM) foods in America. Monsanto has spent millions (over six, in fact) of dollars winning friends in Washington, DC. With the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already deep in Monsanto’s pockets, we can only hope members of Congress take note of these studies and of recent anti-GMO activity in Europe and Russia.

Cut Deficit, But Not on Backs of Needy

Published on Tuesday, October 2, 2012 by Politico.com

by Bernie Sanders

Yes. We must address the very serious problem of a $16 trillion national debt and a $1 trillion federal deficit.

But at this pivotal moment in American history, it’s essential that we understand how we got into this deficit crisis in the first place and who was responsible for it. More important, we must address the deficit in a way that is fair and does not balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor — people who are already hurting.

Let us never forget that when Bill Clinton left office in January 2001, this country enjoyed a healthy $236 billion surplus, and the projections were that this surplus would grow by a total of $5 trillion over a 10-year period.

What happened? How did we go from a significant federal budget surplus to a massive deficit? Frankly, it is not that complicated.

President George W. Bush and the so-called deficit hawks chose to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and put the funding for those wars on our nation’s credit card. By the time the last wounded veteran is cared for, those wars will end up adding more than $3 trillion to our national debt.

During this same period, Bush and the “deficit hawks” provided huge tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans who were already doing phenomenally well. These tax breaks for the very rich will increase our national debt by about $1 trillion over a 10-year period.

In addition, Bush and the “deficit hawks” established a Medicare prescription drug program written by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. This program, which is far more expensive than it should be because it prohibits the federal government from using its purchasing power to negotiate cheaper drug prices, was not paid for. As a result, about $400 billion will be added to our national debt over a 10-year period.

Further, as a result of the deregulation of Wall Street, and the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of the major financial institutions, this country was driven into the worst recession since the 1930s, which resulted in a massive reduction in revenue coming into the federal government.

And now, as we approach the election and a lame-duck session of Congress, these very same Republican “deficit hawks,” the folks who, to a significant degree, created the deficit crisis, are presenting some horrendous ideas about how we should get out of the mess that they caused. Sadly, they have been joined by some Democrats.

First, in order to cover the cost of the unpaid-for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they want to make significant cuts to Social Security that will affect not only seniors but disabled veterans as well. They want to do this despite the fact that Social Security is funded by the payroll tax, has not caused the deficit and has a $2.7 trillion surplus. Their favorite approach to cutting Social Security is through a reformulation of the way cost-of-living adjustments are calculated through the creation of a so-called chained consumer price index. Enacting this policy would result in a $560-a-year cut in Social Security benefits for 65-year-olds once they turn 75 and about a $1,000-a-year cut when they reach 85. The chained CPI will also make substantial cuts to the benefits of more than 3 million veterans, with the largest cuts affecting young, permanently disabled veterans who were seriously wounded in combat.

Second, in order to cover the cost of tax breaks given to millionaires and billionaires, they want to increase the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 and throw millions of families with children off of Medicaid.

Third, in order to cover the cost of the Medicare prescription drug program, they want to cut Pell Grants, student loans, nutrition and other programs vitally important to working families.

Fourth, at a time when the United States has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, their deficit-reduction plan calls for lowering the top tax rates for the rich to about 28 percent or even lower.

Fifth, while the United States military budget has virtually tripled since 1997 and we now spend nearly as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, they want to increase defense spending.

There are fair and sensible ways to reduce deficits, but balancing the budget on the backs of the weak and vulnerable while lowering tax rates for the rich and increasing military spending are not among them.

© 2012 Politico.com

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. Elected Mayor of Burlington, Vt., by 10 votes in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont's at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Read more at his website.

Foxconn Riot Flashes a Glimpse of China’s Slow-burning Labor Crisis

Published on Wednesday, October 3, 2012 by In These Times

by Michelle Chen

On September 23, in Taiyuan, China, about 2,000 workers erupted in a burst of anger, leaving a factory compound scarred with broken glass and flames. But the trouble was just as quickly extinguished, and it’s now back to business as usual at Foxconn, one of the world's premier electronics makers.

While details of the fracas, which left many injured, are still emerging, the pattern is familiar: the uprising reflected increasing unrest throughout China’s manufacturing workforce, as well as the intense workplace stress that has become a hallmark of the Foxconn empire since a string of well-publicized worker suicides in 2010. The question now is whether this tension will ultimately be channeled into direct action that might yield long-term changes in the global production chain that manufactures our prized gadgets.

 

In contrast to the despair workers displayed in 2010, the riot represents an angrier response to the everyday miseries of assembly-line work, which is mind-numbing, exhausting, and low-paid, and which largely feeds off of a steady flow of migrants seeking any kind of stable work in the city.

One account posted on sina.com (translation via U.S.-based China Labor Watch) suggests the violence began with a scuffle involving migrant workers and security forces, and quickly metastisized once “a guard stabbed a worker from Shandong and seriously wounded him”:

At this moment, all workers from Shandong were enraged and started to fight the guards. At first the guards were aggressive since there were hundreds of them. However, as more and more workers from Shandong gathered, the guards were overpowered and beaten. Realizing that they were outnumbered, the guards started to run away.

Soon, others joined in: “a lot of [workers] lost their minds and smashed everything they saw, including the supermarket and internet cafe on the campus.” Photographs of the scene appear to confirm this.

But neither the exact extent of the violence nor how many participated are known. Predictably, Foxconn has denied damage to the facilities, according to the New York Times. At the same time, with thousands of police reportedly sent in to suppress the protests, there should be some concern about the authorities invoking workplace violence as a pretext for a wider anti-worker crackdown.

Geoffrey Crothall, spokesperson of the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin (CLB), tells Working In These Times via email:

[T]he vast majority of work disputes, strikes and protests are peaceful. Even if police are called in, most disputes do not escalate into violence. That said, given the fact that many workers have to suppress anger and resentment against their employer because there are no formal channels for resolving grievances, we should not be surprised when violence does break out.

The riot suggests that while workers may not yet have a clear agenda for improving working conditions, they are growing more conscious of the power of collective action. Their rage is further justified by the police reaction, indicating local authorities' alignment to a powerful multinational corporation.

A translated online dialogue published by CLB indicates that long before the clash, workers were suffering from oppressive conditions:

A worker, who said he had been employed at Taiyuan Foxconn for three years, highlighted the failure of the Foxconn trade unions to properly represent workers’ interests. … He hoped workers could handle the conflict in a rational manner in order to avoid unnecessary casualties.

This post was immediately challenged by another worker, who responded that workers had not meant to instigate a riot but that they had no other way to address injustice. When they called a hotline to complain about the abusive security guards, for example, they were told their complaint could not be handled.

According to Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch, the outburst was long in the making due to the social dislocation and isolation of migrants, who “are far from their homes, and will naturally feel more vulnerable to mentally stressed. If the management does not pay attention to such issues and even suppress their with heavy workload and inhumane treatment, such things will happen again.” He noted that there have been previous workplace conflicts, “but the company ignored it and kept the same management style. That is why we believe the root cause of this riot is Foxconn, not just a random case.”

Foxconn’s most prominent client, Apple, has generally had far more to say about its shiny product line than about Foxconn workers (although the Taiyuan plant, according to one source, was not a formal iPhone assembly plant, others say it may have made Apple parts). But it has boasted an elaborate corporate social responsibility campaign, commissioning the Fair Labor Association, a mainstream U.S. auditing group, to investigate conditions at Foxconn factories. As we’ve reported previously, the FLA’s recent report card was mostly favorable, but noted inaction on “the most challenging action items--such as compliance with Chinese labor law regarding hours of work.”

That’s largely because the greatest barrier to progress is simply a lack of workplace rights, which is rooted in the interlinked forces of global capitalism and an authoritarian government that squelches independent union activity.

CLB’s research, however, suggests that young Chinese are becoming more effective at pressuring their bosses for fairer treatment. These actions will become more crucial if China’s boom, and low-wage labor market, continue to cool down.

As labor scholar Eli Friedman has pointed out, neither the state, nor the Communist Party’s official unions, nor even foreign watchdog groups, can bring about radical change. That will only be developed though homegrown, street-level worker activism that channels rage into a focused movement for economic justice in China’s volatile labor system.

We don’t know how many more riots it will take before the companies, officials and consumers who have taken advantage of China’s exploited workforce over the years recognize that nation's tattered social contract must be revised. But workers have already begun writing the second draft.

© 2012 In These Times

Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at In These Times. She is a regular contributor to the labor rights blog Working In These Times, Colorlines.com, and Pacifica's WBAI. Her work has also appeared in Common Dreams, Alternet, Ms. Magazine, Newsday, and her old zine, cain.

Sex in San Diego: Rape in the Military

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Even as a little girl Claire Russo wanted nothing more than to grow up and serve in the military. At 14, she was a Senate page for Dan Coats, worked at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, and interned for Senator Judd Gregg the following year. Later she said "I became obsessed with the Marine Corps after that. I knew the legacy of the Marine Corps was elite and the legacy of Guadalcanal. They were pretty tough and if I was going to join, I’d join the toughest out there."

When she grew up, she became a Marine who served in Iraq and later as an advisor for the Army in Afghanistan. At Officers Candidate School, where she finished fourth in a class of 65, she started hearing stories about women who had been raped by other Marines. One of her drill instructors told her, "You're either a bitch or a slut."

In 2004 she was assigned as an intelligence officer to Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego. She moved in with her cousin Tom, who was a Navy F-18 pilot and instructor on the base. Just a month after Claire arrived at Miramar, the festivities surrounding the Marine Corps' annual birthday celebration were in full swing. She accompanied her cousin Tom to his Marine Corps Ball since he didn't have a date. Before the Ball officially began they partied in a hotel room at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in downtown San Diego with some friends.

As the evening wore on, Claire had several drinks, and, since Tom had hooked up with a date, she started feeling like the odd woman out. She had been introduced to several of Tom's pilot friends for whom she had the utmost repect. She had wanted to work with pilots as part of her mission in the Marines. She made small talk and danced with some of them to whom she was introduced by their call signs such as Wallet and Dirty.

Later Dirty, who was a Marine Captain, invited her to join a group of friends at a room party upstairs. Claire said, “I would certainly never question the integrity or motivation of the Marines—certainly not at that point. I didn’t doubt this guy at all.” It turned out that the "room party" was at Dirty's room, and there was no one else there. The next thing she remembers is being forced to give Dirty a blow job during the course of which she started vomiting. The only thing she remembers him saying to her was "You're so disgusting."

After that she was in the bathroom where Captain Dirty was trying to penetrate her anally to the point that she started bleeding. He left her there naked on the bathroom floor covered in blood and vomit. She then heard her cell phone ringing in the other room. She entered the bedroom where Dirty had already retired to bed and answered the phone. It was one of cousin Tom's friends. She's incoherent. He tells her to get a cab and go home. She puts on her vomit-and-blood stained dress and jacket, leaving behind ripped stockings and a broken necklace. Without a word from Captain Dirty, she leaves, wanders abjectly around the hotel lobby looking for Tom and catches a cab home around 3 AM.

Her boyfriend Josh, another Marine who was on duty that night at Camp Pendleton calls her around 7 AM, and she can't tell him what happened. While Josh comes to get her, she takes a shower and realizes she's still bleeding. Around 4 pm Claire returns home with Tom and begins to go into shock—crying, shaking, feeling cold and panicky—as she relived the events of the previous night with Tom. A dutiful pilot, he immediately phones his Unit Executive Officer to report that there was an incident at his Marine Corps Ball, despite Claire’s protests. He then takes Claire to the Emergency Room at Balboa Navy Medical Center. Tom then receives a call from NCIS, (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) Special Agent Zach Paton, who says, “Do not let them examine her. They’re going to screw it up,” referring to the Navy Medical Center. He tells Tom to bring Claire to a Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) nurse who specializes in sexual assault exams at Palomar-Pomerado Hospital, a civilian facility.

After several conversations with different agencies of the military, Paton was told that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute; that it was a “he said, she said” case and there wasn’t anything in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) that would allow them to prosecute a rape by intoxication. So Paton took the case to the San Diego District Attorney’s office. “They about crapped in their drawers,” says Paton. “Because of his [Dirty’s] position and rank and the potential media outcome, they wanted to keep it as small as possible.” 

And so Dirty whose real name is Captain Douglas Alan Dowson went on trial in civilian court in San Diego. It turns out that he had a prior record of deviant sexual behaviour but no prior conviction. Gretchen Means was the Deputy District Attorney in San Diego's Sex Crimes Unit who prosecuted Claire's case. Dowson was charged with six counts of sexual assault. Two days into the trial Dowson accepted a plea on one count of sodomy of an intoxicated person. He was sentenced to three years in prison but served just 19 and a half months. Given the sentencing laws, Means says, it was likely he would get more time if he had been found guilty on multiple counts. Dowson is now registered as a sex offender and was discharged from the Marine Corps with an other than honorable discharge in 2006. In the summer of 2007, Claire sued Dowson for damages and he settled for $13,000.

After the rape, Claire remained dedicated to the military. In 2006 she was deployed to Iraq. After being sexually harrassed there, she returned home with PTSD and was given a medical discharge from the military in 2007. She married Josh and they traveled the world. But she still had the desire to serve. In 2009 she was hired by the Army to be part of the Female Engagement Team in Afghanistan.

Claire said the way that the military dealt with her was far more traumatizing than the actual assault. But somehow she persevered and maintained her belief in military service. Gretchen Means has seen a lot of rape victims, but Claire stands out among them:

“I’ve known Claire for a long time, I went to her wedding, I’ve seen her inside and outside this crime. I was always really super impressed with how engaged she was in getting through it.

“Look what she’s done with her life. This took away her dignity and love of her country for a little bit, but look what she’s done; amazing stuff.”

Claire is currently a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington D.C. where she interviews men in the Special Operations forces about their experiences employing women and the role of women in the military. 

Claire now has a one year old daughter named Genevieve.

This article relies on an article in Business Insider entitled, "This Marine Was Raped By A Captain and the Military Did Nothing."

The Politics of the Jobs Report

by Robert Reich

Friday, October 5, 2012

The White House is breathing easier this morning. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent – the first time it’s been under 8 percent in 43 months.

In political terms, headlines are everything – and most major media are leading with the drop in the unemployment rate.

Look more closely, though, and the picture is murkier. According to the separate payroll survey undertaken by the BLS, just 114,000 new jobs were added in September. At least 125,000 are needed per month just to keep up with population growth. Yet August’s job number was revised upward to 142,000, and July’s to 181,000.

In other words, we’re still crawling out of the deep crater we fell into in 2008 and 2009. The percent of the working-age population now working or actively looking for work is higher than it was, but still near a thirty-year low.

But at least we’re crawling out.

Romney says we’re not doing well enough, and he’s right. But the prescriptions he’s offering – more tax cuts for the rich and for big companies – won’t do anything except enlarge the budget deficit. And the cuts he proposes in public investments like education and infrastructure, and safety nets like Medicare and Medicaid, will take money out of the pockets of people who not only desperately need it but whose spending is necessary to keep the tepid recovery going.

Romney promises if elected the economy will create 12 million new jobs in his first term. If we were back in a normal economy, that number wouldn’t be hard to reach. Bill Clinton presided over an economy that generated 22 million new jobs in eight years – and that was more than a decade ago when the economy and working-age population were smaller than now.

Both Obama and Romney assume the recovery will continue, even at a slow pace, and that we’ll be back to normal at some point. But I’m not at all sure. “Normal” is what got us into this mess in the first place. The concentration of income and wealth at the top has robbed the vast middle class of the purchasing power it needs to generate a full recovery – something that was masked by borrowing against rising home values, but can no longer be denied. Unless or until this structural problem is dealt with, we won’t be back to normal.

It’s The Old Adage: "Facts Don't Lie, People Do" … We Get What We Deserve

by Frank Thomas

Our political system is so immersed in a sea of lies and distortions, not helped by a professionally uncritical, fact misinformed media that too often plays the snappy, surface, hype-searching analysis and interview game, ‘What do you think? And now what do you say to that?’

There are so many areas of factual and biased distortion of the issues, it’s hard to know where to begin. First, as Clinton rightly stated, the central issue facing us today is, “What is The Role of Government?” Republicans as supply-siders favor an inactive government, tax cuts  (lavishly for high income groups) overly decreased government spending, no unions, privatization of social nets like Medicare, minimum regulations of financial sectors under a small government … all to spur dynamic economic growth. The Democrats favor an active government, basic social nets to protect vulnerable people in bad times and volatile markets, government spurring of infrastructure development, quality public health care and  education, R&D, progressive taxes and closing tax loopholes … all to support middle class progress, a fair playing field, and to contain, if not reverse, our burgeoning, destabilizing income inequality gap.

Let’s review some facts/myths in three federal government areas under different presidencies: federal revenues and spending, federal debt, and job creation. Tables 1-3 confirm numerous recent studies showing persistent US poverty, falling middle class wages, rising inequality, and NO correlation between the top tax rates and economic growth (see “Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top 10 Tax Rates Since 1945” by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the recently released Economic Policy Institute “Review of US Economic Policy”).

I.   Federal Revenues and Spending

 We are programmed that Democrats are high government spenders, big tax and budget deficit ‘producers’ and Republicans are low government spenders, low tax and budget deficit ‘producers.’ TABLE 1 examines these “Myths” (Source: Office of Management & Budget):

________________________________________________________________________
 

TABLE 1:  FEDERAL REVENUES, SPENDING, DEFICITS AS A % OF GDP  (Average Year of Presidential Terms Starting With President Carter)

                                        Revenues          Spending        Deficit(-) 

Prior 30 Year Average      18.1%                19.6%               -1.5%

(1950-1980)

Carter:    1977-80               18.4%                 20.8%                -2.4%

Reagan:  1981-88                18.2%                 22.4%                -4.2%

Bush  I:   1989-92                17.9%                 21.9%                -4.0%

Clinton:  1993-2000             19.0%                 19.8%                -0.8%

Bush  II:  2001-08                17.6%                 19.8%                -2.2%

Obama: 2009-12 (a)         15.4%                24.4%              -9.0%

(a)    Obama inherited Bush II’s mini-depression with the following carryover Deficits: 

           2009                        -10.1%
           2010                          -9.1%
           2011                          -8.7%
           2012                          -8.5%

_____________________________________________________________________________ 

Conclusions: One can hardly call Reagan and Bush I low spending and deficit producers during their presidential terms. Neither reduced the size of government as government spending was well above the 40-year average largely from an ‘explosion’ in defense spending (as generally happens under all Republican administrations). Despite aggressive tax cutting under a false “trickle down” theory, Reagan couldn’t stop the accelerating budget deficits hitting a high of 6.3% in 1983, 5% the next 3 years, falling to 3.1%  by 1988 … largely due to several tax increases by Reagan to counter lost revenues from slashing the top rate from 78% to 28%. While Reagan reduced middle class income taxes, he sharply increased regressive payroll taxes. On the positive side, he also made it tougher to evade taxes and reduced many tax breaks and shelters. He realized his initial sharp tax decreases with exceptionally high defense spending were producing serious budget deficits and debt levels despite expanded job opportunities.

Clinton’s term showed that sound tax policy and moderate spending can go hand-in-hand to produce budget surpluses. Bush II learned nothing from Reagan’s mistakes and gyrated the top rate down while loosening financial regulations even further causing one of the most dangerous recessions since the Great Depression. Little wonder tax revenues dropped during his term of office, and declined further into Obama’s presidency as consumption plummeted well below 70% of GDP.

Then comes Obama’s massive drop in revenues and increase in spending. Now we are drowning in the political chicanery so corrupting our political system … where Republicans accuse Obama of huge deficits and debt levels arising in 2009, 2010, etc., which are mainly a carryover of the Bush Administration’s mini-depression. The same applies to the substantial national debt increase Obama inherited from Bush II’s mini-depression. 

                                       II.    Federal Debt

The political right puts all the blame on Obama for our continuing high deficits and debt levels. My view is they could have been far worse without the $800 billion Obama stimulus and far less if the stimulus had been in the order of $1.2 - 1.5 trillion. Obama can be rightly blamed for not fighting all-out for more stimulus funds, for stoppage of foreclosures, and for not increasing the top income rate back to 39.5% - a very weak compromise he allowed himself to be blackmailed into to keep unemployment benefits going for the innocent victims of Bush II’s mini-depression. As all studies have proven, the tax revenue carryover loss of the Bush tax cuts and drug industry subsidies is in the order of magnitude of $2 trillion during Obama’s term.

Let’s put the historical debt trends into perspective as we have done very briefly for federal revenues, spending, and deficits under different presidents.

________________________________________________________________________

TABLE 2:  GROSS PUBLIC DEBT ON A FISCAL BASIS IN $BILLIONS  (At End of Budget Term In September)

                                  End of Budget       Term Increase
                                   Term - Sept            Amount            %

Carter:  9/30/81               $998                       --                -- 

Reagan: 9/30/89              $2,857                 $1,859           186%

Bush I:  9/30/93               $4,411                  $1,554            54%

Clinton: 9/30/2001           $5,804                  $1,396            32%

Bush II: 9/30/09               $11,910                $6,106           105%

Obama: 9/30/12              $16,000                $4,090            34%

Obama: 9/30/13 est.     $17,000               $5,090             43%         

Source: Treasury Direct, Office of Management & Budget

________________________________________________________________________

NOTE:  Monthly statistics are quoted from January, as US presidents take office at the end of January and from September, as this is the last month of the federal fiscal year. In other words, the election in November will cause a president to take office at the end of January and begin the process of passing a federal budget which takes effect in the October following the election year. Calculating financial data and job growth in this way for each president is in fact more accurate.

Conclusions:  When one properly allocates the carryover deficits and debt caused by Bush II’s policies over 8 years, then one comes to a more accurate picture of Obama’s so-called “bad management” of our nation’s finances. Don’t get me wrong. The numbers are AWFUL! But they are, relatively speaking, from a president faced with the worst structural financial crisis in 70 years, much LESS AWFUL than the debt/deficit results under Bush II’s administration. The spiraling of deficits and debt beginning in 2003 and splurging in big measure over into Obama’s term were a result of Bush tax cuts, drug firm subsidies, wars in Iraq/Afghanistan and the Great Recession.

Again, this is not to say that Obama has sufficiently and forcefully stood up to mitigate the mess he inherited from Bush II. He has given in far too easily to Republican blackmail that started the very first month of his presidency – when both Boehner and McConnell announced they would vote against all of his Administration’s key policy measures (including job stimulus) to ensure his defeat in 2012.       

But, as Table 2 shows, the percentage debt increase over Obama’s one-term was even less than Bush I’s term where there was but one small, short war with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. But, if elected to a 2^nd term , Obama and the Democrats must come up with many more aggressive actions to keep the national debt from exploding further to the $20 trillion range by the end of his second term. This will definitely mean raising taxes on incomes – perhaps rate-stair-stepped progressively, for example,  on income  above $350,000, above $750,000, above $1,500,000, etc. Despite all of Romney’s blarney that a Defense budget of 5.5% is hardly adequate although it’s almost bankrupting us, Obama needs to get defense expenditures down to less than 4.0% of GDP (as Clinton did) over a 5 year span. This is still DOUBLE the approximate 2% of GDP expenditure rate of all other advanced countries.

Let’s now review the historical job creation trends also on a fiscal basis under various presidents as shown in Table 3.

_______________________________________________________________________

TABLE 3:  JOB CREATION ON A FISCAL BASIS – END OF BUDGET TERM  SEPTEMBER

                                               Jobs Created 1977 - 2012

Democratic Presidents              31,459,000  =  63% over  16 Years

Republican Presidents               18,097,000  =  37% over  20 years

 

Carter:               09/30/81                7,939,000

 

Reagan:    1^st Term  09/30/85           6,552,000

                2^nd Term 09/30/89          10,303,000

Sub-total                                       16,855,000

 

Bush I:                09/30/93               3,032,000

 

Clinton:    1^st Term  09/30/97           12,060,000

               2^nd Term  09/30/2001        8,106,000

Sub-total                                        20,166,000

 

Bush II:      1^st Term  09/30/05           2,716,000

                 2^nd Term 09/30/09          -4,506,000   

Sub-total                                         -1,790,000

 

Obama:          09/30/12                     3,354,000

 

Source:  BLS Data, Wikipedia          

Conclusions:  It’s seems that politicians, media, and some esteemed economists have missed the true dimensions of Obama’s turnaround of the enormous job destruction carried out under Bush II and inherited by Obama as more accurately shown on a fiscal basis in Table 3. Viewed this way: job creation went from a Positive 8.1 million under Clinton’s  2^nd term to a NEGATIVE 4.5 million under Bush II’s 2^nd term back to a Positive 3.3 million in Obama’s 1^st term of 3 years to date on a fiscal basis. Going from a positive 20 million job gain in 8 years under Clinton to negative -1.8 million job loss in 8 years under Bush II – a net disastrous negative job loss reversal of over 22 million to a positive 3.3  million jobs creation in 3 years under Obama is a significant turnaround to say the least. NOT ENOUGH BY FAR, BUT HEADED IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION!            

Let’s not forget that those officially unemployed peaked at an astronomical 15 million PLUS another 8 million underemployed as a result of the Great Recession under Bush II. During the long mini-depression created under Bush II’s watch, corporations have been taking advantage of the crisis to reduce permanently a large number of people through automation – adding more pain upon pain to the middle class while the Republican Congress has been thwarting Obama’s efforts at greater stimulus, leaving quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve as a last resort.

Given these huge comeback structural obstacles, Obama has got to step on the gas pedal for ever stronger job creation in the 200,000 a month range.  Companies are not going to do it. Only government can provide the scale of job and demand push needed through infrastructure investments. Considering the enormity of the financial chaos and job loss situation Obama inherited – the worst in 70 years - Obama has not done badly but must continue to do better.

Facts don’t lie, people do. A fact many politicians and media pundits have amorally become comfortable with in a winner-take-all political system where “hype is life” and brain dead “one-liners” sway the faithful and undecided.

POSTSCRIPT

There’s another indoctrinated MYTH out there we struggle to deal with objectively in our broken social-economic system … namely:

• High taxes discourage growth and productivity: As noted, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service research has found little relationship between the top tax rate and economic growth. In fact, 65 years of tax cuts for the wealthy have produced US “record inequality, not prosperity,” with one of the world’s highest Gini coefficients, says the CRS report.

In a recent Foreign Affairs publication, “America the Undertaxed” by Andrea Campbell, similar research also found little correlation across OECD countries between taxes as a percentage of the economy and the size of the economy itself, as measured by per capita GDP. Nor, according to this research, is there a high correlation between taxes as a percentage of GDP and the annual rate of economic growth. As Andrea Campbell says in her Foreign Affairs article:

 “With the earnings of the top one percent mostly back to their pre-recession levels ( vs. persistent stagnation for the middle class), past experience suggests that a tax hike today would NOT severely damage the economy, and productivity might even rise with the security and investments that government spending can provide.

“In proposing a mix of options to regenerate the economy, from reducing spending to raising revenue, policymakers are confronting the reality of US fiscal policy: compared with its counterparts among the advanced nations, the US tax system collects little revenue, poorly redistributes that money across the population, and is mind-bogglingly complex.”                       

This is something the Romney types unabashedly and greedily exploit to the HILT! Reagan is no doubt shouting from his grave at the elite tax avoiders and tax loophole chasers costing our nation at least $200 billion in lost tax revenues yearly!

POSTSCRIPT …Continued

May I add a few other important facts relating to how the our nation manages corporate tax revenues?

It’s important to point out that US corporate tax revenues as a source of total federal taxes has plunged from 30% in the 1950s to 10% today as described by Andrea Campbell in Foreign Affairs and my writing some time ago,  “Our Fiscal-Economic Quagmire: Some Solutions.”

Despite a seven percentage point higher gap between US top statutory corporate tax rate and the OECD average rate, the US EFFECTIVE corporate tax rate has trended around 13% vs. an  OECD rate of 16%. Thus, US business effective tax rates are LOWER, NOT HIGHER than OECD average rates, contrary to what right wing conservatives often claim.

Why is this so?

Over the years, our US superbly complex tax code has evolved through persistent insider lobbying efforts with the result that statutory rates are applied to a much narrower base of taxpayers or taxpayer adjusted income base – both for individual and corporation incomes. This has been achieved by an intricate, multi-layered barrage of business tax credits, subsidies, and breaks – all of which are practically non-existent in the tax codes of the mature OECD countries.

So, the self-serving right wing political cry the Romneys and Ryans join in that US businesses are disadvantaged with much higher effective tax rates vs. their European business competitors is simply NOT TRUE. What is TRUE, however, is that total European taxes – federal, state, and local – are higher than those of the US as a % of GDP. For example, in 2006 before the financial-crisis startup and long recession, US total tax revenues were 28% of GDP vs. 35% for the OECD. This difference was and continues to be mainly due to Europe’s very stable flowing VAT consumption tax … a tax America doesn’t have. But, over the decades for the majority of the better performing and mature European countries, this total tax difference as a % of GDP has Not resulted in notably lower GDP growth rates vs. the US. Quite the opposite, higher total taxes and clever redistribution of same have resulted in a broad-based sharing in societal progress with relatively low income/wealth gaps between the top 10% and everyone else. 

The mature OECD countries visibly and concretely see a larger share of their tax bill fairly redistributed across all regions and income classes in the form of:

• up-to-date, well-maintained infrastructures; family allowances for children and vacations; quality low-cost, standard basic health care for All with a range of standard-defined upgrades; excellent affordable coverage for serious disabilities; humanly decent unemployment compensation.

POSTSCRIPT  #3

This post Obama-Romney 1^st debate Postscript addresses the  falsehoods and non-sequiturs of the Romney/Ryan cut taxes and spending plan that they say will be Deficit Neutral – a Supply Side Economics cure-all to speed up GDP growth … a policy which caused federal debt under Reagan to increase 186% over 8 years.

Romney and Ryan’s 20% across the board tax cuts without increasing deficits raises an obvious question no one in the media or informed commentator world has raised or put in proper historical perspective.  

Romney assumes that simplifying the tax code (good idea) and then implementing broad-based aggressive tax rate cuts involving trillions in annual federal tax losses will be offset by reducing tax deductions and loopholes he doesn’t identify. BUT, this is mathematically impossible  without dramatic reductions in spending (except Defense) including social nets. This approach, says Romney and Ryan, insures a DEFICIT-NEUTRAL  effect … in other words, the same amount of taxes will be paid on a FISCAL year basis. 

The trillion dollar question is: HOW WILL THIS DEFICIT-NEUTRAL PLAN IMPROVE CONSUMER SPENDING, PRIVATE INVESTMENT and JOBS IF ABSOLUTE EFFECTIVE TAXES PAID REMAIN THE SAME ??

Romney is selling the same economic miracle Reagan/Bush II sold the public: across the board tax and spending cuts to increase jobs without gyrating deficits and debt, nor income/wealth gaps. Romney says under his plan the top 5% will still pay 60% of all income taxes as they do now … but he forgot to say 60% on a much higher total income under 20% lower marginal rates and ever lower rates on capital gains. Remember, the top 5% earn most of their income from capital gains and exploiting offshore tax havens and loopholes. 

We are hearing the same Reagan supply-sider economic assumptions that large reductions across the board in marginal income tax and capital gains tax rates will stimulate more jobs by investments while lowering deficits and debt. Table 4 captures the TRUE Big Picture of what actually happened to tax revenues, spending, deficits, debt, job creation during Reagan’s presidency.

 TABLE 4: 1981-89 FISCAL YEAR RESULTS DURING REAGAN’S TERM 

                            DATA EXPRESSED AS A % OF GDP

                                           1981-1989 Ave.     40 Year Ave.

Federal Revenues                   18.2%                            18.1%

Federal Spending                    22.4%                            20.6%

Deficit                                     -4.2%                             -2.6% 

Federal Debt (a)                    53.1%                           32.5% (Carter’s Term)

Federal Debt Increase (a)      186% = +$1.9 Trillion                             

(a) As of 9/30/1989                                                                                        

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

Average Annual Jobs Increases On A Fiscal Year Basis

Carter                                2.0  Mil.

Reagan                               2.1  Mil.                                            

Bush I                                 0.4  Mil.                                                             

Clinton                                2.5  Mil.                                                                

Bush II                               -0.2  Mil.                                                      

Obama                               1.1  Mil. (10/30/2009—09/30/2012)

Sources: Office of Management & Budget, BLS

Reagan’s Supply Side Economic plan increased average annual job growth 2.5% or 2.1 million per year vs. 4% or 2.0 million per year  under Carter. Reagan´s job growth was no better than Carter´s. GDP growth did improve to an average of 1.8% vs. 0.8% under Carter with high inflation.  BUT, Reagan´s supply-side Trickle/Down  tax-spending-cut panacea caused annual deficit and debt levels to MUSHROOM … despite his commendable efforts eliminating tax loopholes and tax avoidance and changing his mind to increase taxes 11 times to offset resulting big deficits! In fact, average yearly growth in federal tax revenues hardly grew as a % of GDP from levels that would have been realized WITHOUT the substantial net tax rate decreases.

Furthermore, unlike Reagan promised, spending INCREASED as a %  of  GDP, not helped by an explosion in Defense spending. Not surprisingly, INCOME and WEALTH GAPS began widening considerably between the top 10% and all other Americans.                      

So, just the OPPOSITE revenues, spending, deficits, debt results and  income-wealth gaps happened from what Reagan  promised – and what Romney and Ryan are now similarly promising with their extreme supply side economics of across the board tax rate cuts under the premise of being Deficit Neutral … an equitable income improvement for the middle class. These were exactly Reagan words when he said a just economic model is one where, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

WHY DID ABOVE NOT HAPPEN?

Reagan’s income tax rate cuts grossly favored the rich who did not trickle down their expanded income/wealth to the middle class. His lowering of income tax rates for the bottom 50% was largely offset by higher regressive payroll taxes for lower income people. Tax revenue growth remained stagnant and the rate of spending did NOT decline.                                                                                      

His administration forgot, as Romney and Ryan are now conveniently forgetting, that the so-called Laffer Curve  – or  better said, Laugher Curve which is the foundation of conservative Supply Side Economics theory – even warns that tax rates too high or too small will NOT MAXIMIZE tax revenues and hence GDP growth.  Reagan´s extreme tax-cut  policies fell into this trap despite curtailment of tax avoidance schemes and later raising taxes 11 times. Spending grew at a much faster rate and revenues at a very slow rate … with resultant deficit/debt acceleration.                  

What happened under Reagan´s policies was rightly called VOODOO ECONOMICS by President Bush I.  In fact, Reagan´s goal of lowering taxes to increase revenues was seen by many experts as really a “smokescreen” for starving the government of revenues, thus making it smaller.”  Does this right wing goal sound familiar today? Government under Reagan  as well as Bush I, Clinton, Bush II did NOT get smaller.                              

Reagan´s  `Trickle Down´ idea that we can produce our way out of economic slowdowns by seriously cutting taxes and spending without exploding deficits and debt proved FALSE.  California is on the constant edge of bankruptcy from extreme Supply Side Economic policies inherited from Reagan. Such a  policy idea is only TRUE  or possibly has merit  in a HIGH TAX environment which the US does not have and in a WEAK TAX REDISTRIBUTION environment which the US does have. Lowering US taxes under these two  conditions to the right level could indeed raise net tax revenues and cause improved  economic growth. BUT today, the US already has very LOW EFFECTIVE corporate and individual marginal tax rates compared to most developed countries.                                                                               

Compounding the false basis of the Romney/Ryan plan is a gross underestimation of the depth of the Bush mini-Depression hangover where companies are still engaged in balance sheet deleveraging, canceling/delaying investments, laying off/outsourcing workers all to increase cash; and  consumers are still struggling to pay off debts and increase savings; banks building up profit reserves, management bonuses, and restraining lending.                                                                   

This all means the Romney/Ryan (Reagan-like) plan of significantly reducing tax rates for personal income, capital gains, and corporate income will have a negligible effect on job growth, deficit and debt reduction even more so when incorporating idea of OFFSETTING resulting tax revenues losses in the trillions with comparable reductions tax deductions and loopholes.                                          

What Romney/Ryan are in effect saying is that total absolute federal taxes will remain the SAME.                                                              

How does this benefit anyone? Will still unknown Giant cuts in discretionary spending and social nets do the job – e.g., privatize Medicare, repeal Affordable Health Care Act while getting rid of Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation? How to do this without worsening a slow but steadily improving economic situation and without exacerbating deficits and debt as Reagan and particularly Bush II did on a perilously grand scale? How to do this without investing in infrastructure and education? Without forcing states to increase taxes and fees to compensate for vastly reduced federal support?                      

Romney and Ryan remain vague and obtuse about these questions while comforting those understandably skeptical with the words,  “Trust us, we intend to work together with our Democratic colleagues across the table to arrive at a suitable compromise.”

This brings me back to my original trillion dollar QUESTION:

HOW WILL THIS `DEFICIT-NEUTRAL´ PLAN IMPROVE CONSUMER SPENDING, PRIVATE INVESTMENT and JOBS … IF ABSOLUTE EFFECTIVE TAXES PAID REMAIN THE SAME??

Is a College Diploma Worth It?

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Getting a college degree has become part of the mythology of the American Dream. But when you consider the load of student loan debt that most students have to take on today, instead of blindly following the dictates of the American Dream, it is prudent to stop and ask ourselves if we really will be better off when that diploma comes laden with a ton of debt. In this article we do a cost benefit analysis of the worth of a college degree. We challenege the conventional wisdom that with a college degree you will be better off in the long run. For one thing that debt can never be discharged in bankruptcy. It will follow you the rest of your life. Even social security checks can be garnished to pay it. Student loan debt has more than quintupled since 1999. Earlier this year American collective student loan debt passed the one trillion dollar mark, more than the nation's collective credit card debt.

More than half of all recent graduates are either unemployed or working in jobs that don't require a college diploma. There is a surfeit of college degrees to the extent that they are being required for the most casual jobs just because employers can afford to be choosy, not that the job has anything remotely to do with the training received in college. According to Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, "Employers seeing a surplus of college graduates and looking to fill jobs are just tacking on that requirement. De facto, a college degree becomes a job requirement for becoming a bartender." Or a barrista. In a study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, entitled  Academically Adrift, the authors find that at least a third of students gain no measurable skills during their four years in college. Furthermore, for the rest their increase in knowledge is minimal.

So what is the point of a college degree? The heart of the matter is that what going to college is really all about is not gaining an education but gaining a credential. That credential tells a prospective employer that the holder was smart enough to get into college, enough of a conformist to put up with all the bullshit, and compliant enough to sit there for four years. Presumably, he or she would make a docile and compliant employee and a docile and compliant consumer, in other words, a good American living the American Dream. But for many the American Dream has become the American Nightmare. For many the dream of living independently goes by the wayside and they have to move back into their parents' house. For many their payments on their student loans take up most of their meager paychecks, and late payments, forebearances and defaults double and triple the amount owed.

Let's consider for a moment the "statistics" that maintain you are always better off with a college diploma. Who gathers these statistics? Why it's people who have a vested interest in recruiting college students, think tanks connected to colleges themselves. And as anyone with a little savvy knows, you can lie with statistics. The college-industrial complex is heavily invested in having you believe that you will make more money over a lifetime with a college diploma than you will with just a high school diploma. Problem is they never include in their statistics the likes of college dropouts like Bill Gates. In fact four of the five wealthiest Americans are college dropouts. In addition to Bill Gates, there are fellow billionaires Michael Dell who dropped out of University of Texas, Larry Ellison who dropped out of two colleges and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen who dropped out of University of Washington. Did we forget to mention Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who dropped out of Reed College? If these guys had been included in the statistics, the results would have been different for sure. They would have skewed the statistics to show that college dropouts made the most money and acquired the most wealth over the course of a lifetime. Furthermore, these guys are in high tech fields, the knowledge for which was not garnered in college!

And what people with just high school diplomas are being included in the statistical studies? It's surely not enough to just graduate from high school with some generic diploma and say, "Here I am on the job market. What you got for me?" No, but those who use their high school years to acquire useful skills and to set their sights on useful careers are way ahead of the game. People like this are probably not included in the statistical studies either. I know of a high school dropout from my home town who set up an auto body repair shop and is now a millionaire. There is no reason why a self-employed person using skills developed within and outside of high school during high school years can't be successfully self-employed. Then the college diploma which at best is only a ticket of admisssion to a corporate job is completely unnecessary. And one is not at the beck and call of one's employer. You don't have to bow and scrape and kiss your employer's ass. Or worry about being laid off!

So what college is really about is credentialization. If you want to be an employee you have to have a credential to please your employer. If you aim towards self-employment, you can not only make more money in the long run, you don't have to kiss your employer's ass. You are truly independent. In my article "10 Reasons Not To Go To College" I write about the fact that kids are finding out today that a college diploma does not guarantee you a job. There are many PhDs out there who are driving cabs. And you can be laid off, downsized, outsourced at any time. How much job security is in that? A case could be made that money spent on a college education could be better spent buying a business or investing in real estate. Then you're in a position of building wealth not just simply being immersed in the debt culture of a mortgage, car payment, student loan debt and paying bills even if you have a job. And you have a four year head start over those who go to college! The American Dream of being a worker/consumer with debt up the ying-yang is replaced with the American Dream of real financial independence. You don't have to kiss up to your boss and hope that he won't be giving you a pink slip. As I said in the previous article:

"9. College trains you to be a docile and compliant employee. Is this how you want to live your life? As Caspar Milquetoast? The second you mouth off to your boss, you're history! Be a free and independent individual instead. Have a passion for what you do. Have real knowledge instead of a piece of paper that says you know something. Do real work instead of make work. Be willing to take the risk of starting your own business instead of the pseudo-security of being somebody else's employee. Then you don't have to take crap from anyone or kiss anybody's ass!"

Learning resources are readily available and mostly free. Libraries and the internet enable anyone to receive the equivalent of a college education and learn every possible skill. Khan Academy will teach you everything from math skills to the Greek debt. MIT Opencourseware allows you to take courses ranging from the humanities and the arts to architecture and engineering. Become an autodidact. You will learn a lot more if you study what you are interested in rather than what your professor wants to cram down your throat.

In a recent Newsweek article, Megan McArdle asks "Is College a Lousy Investment"? It is if, after sitting patiently in class for four years, you come out and the only job you can get is flipping burgers or are otherwise employed in the service economy. If, instead of becoming a professional, you have become a serf. Then you are forced to move back in with your parents and contemplate the huge monthly payment you have to make on your student loan. Forget about getting married, buying a house and raising kids. You are already saddled with a mortgage! Welcome to America's Screwed Generation.

 

Is Climate Change Hell Now Inevitable?

Published on Tuesday, September 25, 2012 by Common Dreams

by John Atcheson

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!"  Ebenezer Scrooge, to The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, in “A Christmas Carol.”

Although I spent most of my career involved in climate change, in the last year, I’ve resolved to try not to think about it much.  Too stark; too grim.  But from time to time, I screw up my courage, stare into the Eye of Sauron and face the reality of global warming futures.  When I do, I write about it, and the articles have become increasingly dire.  Good friends, relatives, commenters, and colleagues have been telling me to focus on solutions: to accentuate the positive; to avoid doom and gloom.A general view of the Artic Ocean in 2008. Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, according to a 2010 study. (AFP/File/Slim Allagui)

Of course, that advice assumes our actions will make a difference, that there is still a chance to avert catastrophe.

Can we?  If we depart from our present course will the ends change?

Well, there’s a growing consensus that staying above atmospheric concentrations of 350 parts per million will permanently change our climate, and not for the better.

We’re now at 392.41 ppm and rising.  This year’s catastrophes are a mild preview of things to come.

So regardless of what we do, we have already altered the climate in ways that will cost us a great deal of money, kill millions if not tens of millions, and create as many as a billion refugees by mid century. 

Bad as this sounds, there’s strong evidence it’s about to get a hell of a lot worse.

Positive feedbacks can effectively double the amount of GHG released to the atmosphere, and the worst of these – methane releases from hydrates and permafrost -- is self-reinforcing.  That is, once started, it feeds on itself.  More methane means more heat which causes more methane and so on.  This process is slow, but inexorable, once triggered.

We know from the geologic record that runaway methane releases have occurred several times in the past.  Some 55 million years ago, during what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, temperatures soared, as clathrates (or as they are sometimes known, hydrates) released massive amounts of carbon, mostly in the form of methane.  Many scientists believe this was triggered by volcanic releases of carbon.  Other factors may have been at play, but the key takeaway is that methane releases caused runaway warming that lasted for more than 150,000 years, and that today, humans are releasing carbon at ten times the rate that is thought to have triggered the releases.

Some 600 million years ago, geologists identified another, even more extreme event: the Permian Die-Off.  The period came by the name honestly, as some 94% of the marine fossil record disappeared and biologic diversity plummeted. For a time, life itself teetered on the edge of extinction – all life.  Again, massive methane releases triggered by volcanic releases of carbon are the prime culprit.  And again, our current rate of releases is much faster than the one that started this devastating feedback.

If we have triggered a self-reinforcing methane feedback – and there is growing evidence that we have – then there is little point in talking about solutions.  What is needed is a strategy for maximizing the quality of life for those of our species who survive the coming catastrophe.  There will be fewer of us, and we will consume far less, and the world will be a far harsher place.  We will, quite literally, be inhabiting an alien environment, and our best bet is to prepare ourselves for the softest possible landing in this hostile new world.

But let’s say we’re lucky, and we haven’t triggered this cycle of hellish warming, and “all” we have to deal with is our own emissions.  Do we have the technical solutions to walk us back from the brink of the greatest disaster our species has ever faced?

Yes.  Just barely. 

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that we could provide 80% of our power needs using renewable energy by 2050, using today’s technologies.

And there are a variety of policies that would not only make that affordable, it would make it one of our best opportunities for creating jobs.

Strategies like lengthening the amortization period and lowering interest rates on renewable energy could make the cost per month to consumers less than conventional power in many states. 

Allowing efficiency and on-site renewables to bid into forward capacity markets  makes clean energy competitive with even the cheapest and dirtiest fossil fuel power for utilities. 

Feed-in tariffs assure that renewables will pay for themselves.

And fuel standards could be raised to 50 mpg – something that is achievable with several cars now available.  And improved batteries have made EVs practical.

Taxing embedded carbon on imports would force exporters to lower carbon emissions, eliminating the fear of foreign “free-riders.” 

Agricultural polices could make our farms and forests carbon sinks – actually removing carbon from the atmosphere – while improving the quality and sustainability of our food supplies and soils.

So, yes, we can meet this challenge, if we haven’t bumbled into positive feedbacks like some planetary-scale Inspector Clouseau.

What would it take?

People often speak about mounting a Manhattan Project level of effort to achieve this.

Wrong scale.

How about a World War II magnitude endeavor?

Too timid.

The bottom line is, it would take an effort unlike any humanity has ever attempted for us to avoid catastrophic global warming and devastating ocean acidification.  We would have to march in lock-step as a species, making carbon the obsessive focus of all we do, in every facet of our life, if we hope to awaken Scrooge-like, a changed species, filled with redemption, converted from history’s greatest villain, to its greatest hero.

Solutions?  Sure, they’re out there. 

But as I tell my friends, when it comes to actually using them, and using them in time, I am hopeful, but I am not optimistic.

And of course, if we have triggered feedbacks …

John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers. Atcheson’s book reviews are featured on Climateprogess.org.