California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Problem With American Democracy: Voters Will Never Vote for a Tax Increase Even if It Would Prevent One Person Dying in the Street

by John Lawrence

Question: would you be willing to pay more taxes if it would house the unhoused? Hell, no. What's more, voters don't want even a shelter in their neighborhood. Any time one is proposed, a NIMBY group pops up to protest its location. People don't want to give up even a small portion of their income to help unfortunate Americans. That's the main reason why they vote Republican. They think Democrats will raise their taxes. Other countries like Sweden have high taxes in order to help people. They're called social democracies or welfare states. That's anathema in the United States. The philosophy in the US is "Devil take the hindermost." There is support for those at the top of the economic spectrum, but little if any for those at the bottom. In the US it's all about competition, and those who have failed in the competitive game of life don't deserve our help especially if that means we will have to pay higher taxes. We want tax relief not human relief for those who have lost out in the game of life. I've got mine, and I don't want the government taking one penny of it in higher taxes.

Since heat is becoming a major cause of death due to climate change, the unhoused will be dying on the streets in even greater numbers. But Americans couldn't be less sympathetic. If they were willing to have their taxes increased by one penny, the homeless problem could be solved. It will not be solved simply by building more housing. Housing in our economic system will be priced according to the market not according to affordability. Building more housing will not lower the price of market rate housing. There are too many other factors at play. Such as corporations buying up houses, fixing them up and renting them out. This trend will turn the younger generation in particular into a nation of renters, not a nation of middle class home owners. The younger generation cannot even afford starter homes! The investor class realizes that housing is an economic asset that offers more of a return on their money than even the stock market. Housing is an asset class, not something that satisfies a human need. Investors make money off of the debts of other people, especially the young. Mortgages, credit card  debt, rents - these are the investments that make rich people richer. There's a reason why bankers are rich. They make money off of human debtors. Eliminating debt eliminates the profits of the rich. No wonder there is so much resistance to Biden's student debt relief programs.

One of the Great Society's programs was the War on Poverty. In those days - the 1960s - the poverty stricken were at least presumably housed. Today we have a subclass of poverty - the homeless - which has become a veritable culture of homelessness. This is a culture that is beneath poverty. Even in Huxley's Brave New World, the lowest class, the Epsilons, were bred to be menial laborers. He didn't have the imagination to believe that there would be a class even lower than the Epsilons - the homeless. Presumably, Huxley's Epsilons were paid laborers; the homeless are people, primarily, who don't work at all but subsist on handouts, handouts which, however, are not sufficient to put a roof over their heads. The homeless are a class of expendables. They aren't valued enough as human beings to engage the charitable instincts of most Americans so that as a society we would be willing to see everyone housed, well fed and on the road to a productive life. Instead we blame the homeless themselves for their predicament. Charity is one thing; raising taxes to provide charity is quite another. So as a society we are willing to have people urinating and defecating on the streets, expending societal resources to clean up their trash and being treated to the spectacle of having to step over people zonked out on the sidewalk to get to our favorite restaurant.

Off the Top of My Head

The Absence of War is Not Peace

by John Lawrence

Human beings do not use the absence of war to create peace. They use the absence of war to prepare for the next war. The time between wars could be used in a more constructive way and that is to do everything possible to prevent the next war. Instead what we do is to build up our offensive and defensive capacities so that whatever side we are on prevails in the next war. The US military-industrial complex is allotted almost a trillion dollars a year whether or not there is war or absence of war. There is never ever really peacetime. It's sole purpose is to prepare for the next war. Meanwhile the Peace Corps is allotted next to nothing in order to create the conditions that might prevent the next war. What are those conditions you might ask? They are very simple: creating educational opportunities for the undereducated, creating economic opportunities for those in poverty, creating hospitals and clinics for those whose health is at risk, building infrastructure for those lacking access to modern infrastructure. In other words building more successful societies from the ground up for those lacking what the most advanced societies already have. Above all poverty and lack of healthful conditions must be alleviated all over the world including in the advanced nations themselves before anything approaching world peace can be achieved.

So what is the lesson of the Israeli-Gaza war? It is that in the time period before the war, nobody did nothing to create the conditions for a lasting peace which would have been the two state solution. Instead people just stood back content to have the Palestinians live miserable lives without political or economic rights. Nobody cared. Nobody worked hard to correct or ameliorate the situation. People were content just to let the situation fester until the next violence broke out, and then it did with very dramatic and horrific results. When there was an absence of war, people just said ho hum, there's no urgency to create the conditions for a lasting peace. Then when war breaks out everyone gets very excited and upset, horrible things happen to children and old people. People want revenge. Hate proliferates. War is exciting. Peace is dull and undramatic. People get bored with the absence of war. People's senses come alive during war. During the absence of war in which there is no real peace, people pursue their self interest or in other words lining their purses. During war they get all excited. There is nonstop news coverage. People get upset by (wo)man's inhumanity to (wo)man as if people doing horrible things to other people is unimaginable. It's not. People's senses come alive and they come out of their collective stupors.

If the US just spent half its defense budget on war and the other half on peace, it would still have a larger defense budget than any other country in the world, and just think what the Peace Corps could do with a $500 billion budget. Why it could even compete with China's Belt and Road initiative which is building infrastructure in parts of the world where inadequate infrastructure exists. The two largest world economies could compete creating peace in the world instead of trying to out compete each other with larger and better weapons and more vitriolic and challenging rhetoric. However, this is not OK with conservatives who feel very threatened by the Chinese COMMUNIST Party although the Chinese system brought 800 million people out of poverty in 40 years primarily by adopting a free enterprise capitalistic system. Oh but it is still authoritarian politically, you say. That is subject to interpretation as the Chinese political system is based on Confucianism which promotes a meritocracy unlike the US where any bozo can become President.

So where is the American Department of Peace? We have the Department of Defense(Offense). We have the Department of Homeland Security. We have the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). What agencies of the Federal government are devoted to creating a more peaceful world? Basically, none, and so is it any wonder that, while the human race continues to invent a plethora of gadgets, it can do hardly anything to create world peace? Peace depends on mutual respect among the leaders of the various nations of the world. Instead US authorities criticize and lord it over the leaders of other nations because they are not exactly like us. Instead of walking a mile in their shoes, they insist that every other nation walks a mile in our shoes.

Off the Top of My Head

Does China Have Some Version of Democracy and Capitalism?

by John Lawrence

The Chinese Communist Party in reality is just the Chinese Party. It is communist in name only. Kishore Mahbuboni in the book, Has China Won, says "...is America making a fundamental error of perception when it views the CCP as a Chinese Communist Party? This would imply that the soul of the CCP is embedded in its communist roots. Yet, in the eyes of many objective Asian observers, the CCP actually functions as the Chinese Civilization Party. Its soul is not rooted in the foreign ideology of Marxism-Leninism but in the Chinese civilization." China has had a capitalist economic system ever since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in about 40 years mainly due to the component of its system that represents private enterprise. It also has state owned enterprises but they have not been mainly responsible for China's rapid growth in GDP.

Xi Jinping has been President of the people's Republic of China since 2013. He is not popularly elected by the general public. Instead, he is elected by the National People's Congress (NPC), constitutionally China's highest state body, which also has the power to remove the president and other state officers from office. Elections and removals are decided by majority vote. This is not dissimilar to how the head of parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is elected. The British head of government is not elected by a popular election of the people either. He is elected by members of Parliament similar to most other parliamentary democracies. The US also originally had a system in which the President and Senators were not elected by a popular election of the people. Passed by Congress on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913, the 17th Amendment modified Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution by allowing voters to cast direct votes for U.S. Senators and the President. Prior to its passage, the President and Senators were chosen by state legislatures. The Chinese government has been based on a meritocratic bureaucracy for thousands of years. The popular vote elects the first representative body who elects the next higher body until the National People's Congress elects the President.

The cleavage between communism and capitalism is basically an historic artifact. Capitalism won. Almost all nations of the world have capitalistic economic systems including China. None of them have systems that are identical to the US. They all have some versions of capitalism and democracy. Prior to 1912 the US had a system similar to China's in that the President was not popularly elected but was elected by a vote of the states' senates. Today in order to maintain international tensions, US politicians keep up the dichotomy between the US and China by insisting that China's leaders are not elected democratically and that China has a communist economic system. The truth is that China has a version of democracy and a version of capitalism just as the US does. Vested interests in the US are responsible for maintaining the fiction that Chinese is communist and autocratic. In fact US democracy is vulnerable to being overthrown by a demagogue like Donald Trump which almost happened on January 6, 2020. The US is still vulnerable as a near majority of Americans prefer Trump to Joe Biden, a man who has passed landmark legislation like only a very few American Presidents have accomplished.

US democracy is also vulnerable in the sense that its first past the post voting system almost guarantees that third party candidates will be spoilers as happened in 2000 when Ralph Nader took votes away from Al Gore. Despite that Gore won the popular vote. If Nader had not been in the election, Gore would have overwhelmingly won the popular vote. However in the electoral college, which is an outdated feature of American democracy, it came down to who won the popular vote in Florida. The Supreme Court stopped the hand recount giving Bush the Presidency. There is still controversy over who would have won if that hadn't happened. In any case the Bush administration lied us into the disastrous Iraq war, something Gore probably would not have done. Also Bush was a fossil fuel guy while Gore was knowledgeable about global warming and would have pursued that agenda . History might have turned out differently, and more importantly the future history of planet Earth might turn out differently if Gore had won.

Chinese philosophy is based on Confucianism which emphasizes duty to family while the US is based on individualistic ethics emphasizing individual freedom. Keyu Jin writes in The New China Playbook, "According to the World Values Survey, which explores people's beliefs and values in more than 100 countries, 93% of Chinese participants value security over freedom, as compared to only 28 % of Americans. Such differences can be fully understood only by taking culture and history into account. In China, an interventionist state is rooted in paternalism, a hallmark of government in China since Confucian times, more than 2500 years ago;..." Although China's private enterprise capitalism has resulted in the fact that 800 million people have been pulled out of poverty in 40 years, GDP growth is not the sine qua non of Chinese capitalism. Under Xi China is turning a corner and reining in certain aspects of unbridled growth in order to mitigate certain unsalutary aspects of unfettered enterprise while emphasizing producing economic benefits for the 13% of the Chinese population still in poverty. So China is much more apt to put its finger on the economic scale while the US has more of a hands off policy on private enterprise. The downside of this is the unregulated growth of toxic social media and potentially artificial intelligence in the US. The US could mitigate the spoiler effect of third party candidates for President by adopting a different voting system. The current first past the post voting system practically guarantees that there will be a 2 party system with third parties acting as spoilers, something which could result in a second Trump Presidency despite 91 criminal indictments. Replacing first past the post with a voting system such as approval voting would eliminate the spoiler effects of third parties. It could be implemented simply by a vote of Congress since it would not violate any aspect of the Constitution. However, in the sclerotic American Congress it is unlikely that there will be any major changes in the US Constitution which is well past its "use by" date.

The Democrats’ One Chance to Cut Child Poverty in Half

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

The Biden administration has a plan that is estimated to cut child poverty in half. And it’s already in place.

It’s called the Child Tax Credit.

Here’s how it works. Parents of children aged 6 and younger across the country are receiving direct payments of up to $300 per month per child, or $3,600 per year per child. The payments drop to $250 a month for children between the ages of 6 and 17, and phase out for families with higher incomes.

It’s an historic expansion of the original credit that’s already helping millions of working families.

The direct payments are coming because the Child Tax Credit is a refundable tax credit. Normal, non-refundable tax credits simply cut your taxes. But a refundable tax credit, like the Child Tax Credit, helps you even if you don’t earn enough for it to reduce your taxes — so it’s a direct payment to you.

Say you owe $3,000 in taxes. A non-refundable tax credit of $3,600 won’t be worth $3,600 to you. It would just reduce your taxes to zero. So you wouldn’t get the full benefit. And if you don’t owe any taxes to begin with, a non-refundable tax credit wouldn’t do you any good at all since you can’t reduce your taxes to less than zero dollars.

But a refundable tax credit would help you. You’d get the money no matter what, the full $3,600. That’s why this expansion is such a big deal: it ensures that the money gets to lower-income families.

The early results show that this policy is a game-changer. Over 3 million more households with children now report having enough to eat  after just the first two payments. More report being able to make rent, stay in their homes, and afford basic necessities. And 3 million children have been lifted out of poverty.

It’s reduced racial disparities, as well. Hunger has fallen by one-third among Latinx families and by one-quarter among Black families.

It bears repeating that if the credit is made permanent, and reaches everyone it should, it could cut child poverty in half.

Yet the Republican Party — the so-called “party of family values” — is dead set against it. That’s because the program works.

Every single Republican in Congress voted against the American Rescue Plan, which contained the initial expansion of the Child Tax Credit. You can bet they’re all going to vote against making that expansion permanent as part of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget plan. It’s obvious: they do not care about helping working families.

Democrats must get this done, no matter how staunch the Republican opposition. In the richest country in the world, it is inexcusable that millions of our children are living in poverty.

For decades, almost all economic gains have gone to the top, leaving working families behind. This historic expansion of the Child Tax Credit is a crucial step towards righting this wrong.

Poverty is a policy choice. Congress must make the Child Tax Credit permanent.

Afghan Crisis Must End America’s Empire of War, Corruption and Poverty

Displaced children play at a refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan, on April 16, 2021. Since entering Afghanistan in October 2001, the U.S. troops have caused more than 30,000 civilian deaths, injured more than 60,000 and made about 11 million people become refugees. (Photo: Rahmatullah Alizadah/Xinhua via Getty Images)

 

The U.S. can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to rethink its place in the world.

Medea Benjamin,  Nicolas J.S. Davies

August 30, 2021, from Common Dreams

Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban's return to power in their country—and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops. 

Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank's $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services. 

The United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second, economic war.

Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic. 

The U.S. and other Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August 24, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding aid and recognition gave them "very considerable leverage—economic, diplomatic and political" over the Taliban. 

Western politicians couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they are clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some power in the new government, and that Western influence and interests in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban's return. This leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds and euros, but it will be paid for in Afghan lives.

To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies' 20-year war was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide healthcare, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban. 

The reality is quite different, and not so hard to understand. The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the U.S. military occupation, drop over 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghans, pay private contractors, and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years. 

Since the United States fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost half a trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will continue far into the future. Medical and disability costs for U.S. soldiers wounded in Afghanistan already amount to over $175 billion, and they will likewise keep mounting as the soldiers age. Medical and disability costs for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could eventually top a trillion dollars.

So what about "rebuilding Afghanistan"? Congress appropriated $144 billion for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that was spent to recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan "security forces" that have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to their villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent between 2008 and 2017 was documented as "waste, fraud and abuse" by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The crumbs left over, less than 2% of total U.S. spending on Afghanistan, amount to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to the Afghan people in economic development, healthcare, education, infrastructure and humanitarian aid. 

But, as in Iraq, the government the U.S. installed in Afghanistan was notoriously corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and systemic over time. Transparency International (TI) has consistently ranked U.S.-occupied Afghanistan as among the most corrupt countries in the world.

Western readers may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in Afghanistan, as opposed to a particular feature of the U.S. occupation, but this is not the case. TI notes that "it is widely recognized that the scale of corruption in the post-2001 period has increased over previous levels." A 2009 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that "corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous administrations." 

Those administrations would include the Taliban government that U.S. invasion forces removed from power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied socialist governments that were overthrown by the U.S.-deployed precursors of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they had made in education, healthcare and women's rights.

A 2010 report by former Reagan Pentagon official Anthony H. Cordesman, entitled "How America Corrupted Afghanistan," chastised the U.S. government for throwing gobs of money into that country with virtually no accountability. 

The New York Times reported in 2013 that every month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with U.S. dollars for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.

Corruption also undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up as the successes of the occupation, like education and healthcare. The education system has been riddled with schools, teachers, and students that exist only on paper. Afghan pharmacies are stocked with fake, expired or low quality medicines, many smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by civil servants like teachers earning only one-tenth the salaries of better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and contractors. 

Rooting out corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary to the primary U.S. goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining or extending its puppet government's control. As TI reported, "The U.S. has intentionally paid different armed groups and Afghan civil servants to ensure cooperation and/or information, and cooperated with governors regardless of how corrupt they were… Corruption has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fuelling grievances against the Afghan government and channelling material support to the insurgency."

The endless violence of the U.S. occupation and the corruption of the U.S.-backed government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially in rural areas where three quarters of Afghans live. The intractable poverty of occupied Afghanistan also contributed to the Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned how their occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and its Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.

Well before the current crisis, the number of Afghans reporting that they were struggling to live on their current income increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018 Gallup poll found the lowest levels of self-reported "well-being" that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only reported record levels of misery but also unprecedented hopelessness about their future.

Despite some gains in education for girls, only a third of Afghan girls attended primary school in 2019 and only 37% of adolescent Afghan girls were literate. One reason that so few children go to school in Afghanistan is that more than two million children between the ages of 6 and 14 have to work to support their poverty-stricken families.  

Yet instead of atoning for our role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty, Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid that was funding three quarters of Afghanistan's public sector and made up 40% of its total GDP. 

In effect, the United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second, economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give in to their "leverage" and meet their demands, our leaders will starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing famine and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame other victims of U.S. economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran. 

After pouring trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America's main duty now is to help the 40 million Afghans who have not fled their country, as they try to recover from the terrible wounds and trauma of the war America inflicted on them, as well as a massive drought that devastated 40% of their crops this year and a crippling third wave of Covid-19. 

The U.S. should release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in U.S. banks. It should shift the $6 billion allocated for the now defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian aid, instead of diverting it to other forms of wasteful military spending. It should encourage European allies and the IMF not to withhold funds. Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021 appeal for $1.3 billion in emergency aid, which as of late August was less than 40% funded.

Once upon a time, the United States helped its British and Soviet allies to defeat Germany and Japan, and then helped to rebuild them as healthy, peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America's serious faults—its racism, its crimes against humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer countries—America held up a promise of prosperity that people in many countries around the world were ready to follow. 

If all the United States has to offer other countries today is the war, corruption and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is wise to be moving on and looking at new models to follow: new experiments in popular and social democracy; renewed emphasis on national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to the use of military force to resolve international problems; and more equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle global crises like the Covid pandemic and the climate disaster. 

The United States can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to rethink its place in the world. Americans should be ready to turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see how we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must help to build.

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Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the author of the 2018 book, "Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran." Her previous books include: "Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection" (2016); "Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control" (2013); "Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart" (1989), and (with Jodie Evans) "Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide)" (2005). 

Nicolas J.S. Davies

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Off the Top of My Head

If Republican Voters Want the Infrastructure Bill, Why Don't Republican Lawmakers?

by John Lawrence, April 12, 2021

Is this a failure of representative democracy? Polls show that a majority of Republican voters support Biden's infrastructure plan including the "care" components thereof. Yet Republican Senators are dead set against it, and the bill will probably not garner one Republican vote. It can still pass the Senate based on budget reconciliation which only requires a majority vote as long as all Democrats vote for it. Other Biden proposals involving voter's rights and gun control would require at least 10 Republican votes in the Senate under the current rules which involve the filibuster for non-budgetary items. In a representative democracy, a party should represent its voters. Otherwise, you don't really have a representative democracy which the US purports itself to be. So at present the US is in the position of being a government swerving back and forth from a representative democracy as long as Democrats control both Houses of Congress and the Presidency and a dictatorship of an elite when Republicans control either party or the Presidency.

The same applies to other issues like gun control, voter's rights and immigration which aren't subject to budgetary reconciliation and must garner 60 votes in the Senate. One of the minimum elements of democracy is majority rule. Because the filibuster is anti-majoritarian, this leaves the American democracy in the position of not really being a democracy at all in terms of non-budgetary items. So the US is on its way to being an authoritarian regime if Republicans control the Presidency and both Houses of Congress. All that would be necessary is a President like Trump with authoritarian tendencies. Then the US government becomes a government that's all about the use of power to get its way internationally and domestically, not about making the world a better place. Unfortunately, this leaves the US in the eyes of other nations as being untrustworthy since there is no consistent policy going forward. Other countries have more consistent leadership and hence are considered more trustworthy.

China, on the other hand, has very consistent policies going far into the future. China isn't perfect but most of the Chinese people and the leadership are on the same wavelength. US leadership likes to make a big deal of the plight of the Uyghurs, a Chinese minority that represents less than 1% of the Chinese population. So it's pretty remarkable that the only problem China seems to have with a minority that resents Chinese leadership  is with a minority that composes 0.31% of the population. The US should be so lucky yet the US harps on the Chinese over this situation of which little is actually know by the western world. China has pilled 800 million people out of poverty since 1990, one of the outstanding feats in human history, yet the US leadership continues to harp about the Uyghurs while giving no credit to China on poverty reduction. During the same time period the wages of US workers has stagnated. Kishore Mahbubani, author of the book, "Has China Won" writes: "In contrast to America's stagnation, China's culture, self-concept, and morale are being transformed at a rapid pace - mostly for the better." Rather than China's recent success being an assessment of the comparative values of Marxist-Leninist doctrines vis a vis American democracy, The Chinese Communist Party could more appropriately be called the Chinese Civilization Party since it reflects the 2000 year history of China more than it does Communist ideology.

So the response of the US to the progress of China in the last 30 years, instead of congratulating them on their remarkable accomplishments, is to be fearful that China is getting ahead of us. Well, duh, if you compare a society that is mostly all on the same wavelength and making remarkable steps forward with one that is divided and experienced a certain segment almost accomplishing a coup d'etat in a recent insurrection which threatened the lives of lawmakers in the seat of democracy itself. However, rather than viewing the world situation as a competition between the US and China, a more fruitful approach would be to cooperate with China with regard to climate change and pandemics, two things that affect the whole world and which require fast action, not a lackadaisical approach in which maybe we'll cooperate down the road, but in the meantime we have to compete. There's no time for that. The planet earth has almost passed an inflection point after which there will be no more time available.

Off the Top of My Head

Inflation Probably Not a Problem If Biden Programs Are Carefully Targeted

by John Lawrence, March 14, 2021

Critics have said, "Oh, My your children and grandchildren are going to have to pay back all these trillions of dollars that have been spent by both the Trump and Biden administrations on COVID relief and to get the economy going again." Not True! Modern Monetary Theory has shown that the Federal Reserve can just create the money and the Treasury Department can just spend it without ever worrying about paying it back. Finance is not the problem. The problem is potentially inflation which economist Larry Summers has sounded the alarm about. Most of Biden's relief bill is targeted at the poor which means that that money will be sucked up to pay past due rent and mortgage bills as well as providing a decent lifestyle which should not be inflationary except if you believe the nonsense of the neoliberal Phillips curve which supposedly proves that a certain segment of the population has to live in poverty and penury in order to fight inflation. That has also been debunked by Modern Monetary Theory although most politicians are still on the wavelength of neoliberal economics which has been shown to be fallacious in this and many other regards.

State and local governments likewise will just suck up the money in the relief bill to bail themselves out of debt and provide an adequate level of social services. This also is not inflationary because the money will not be just sloshing around in the economy with nowhere to go. What is inflationary is tax breaks for the rich, but this money can be sucked out of the economy by taxing the rich. What Larry Summers fails to take into account is that the US and much of the rest of the world has a two tier economy. The rich and upper middle class are doing very well, thank you, while the lower middle class and the poor are suffering. The COVID pandemic illustrated this in even starker terms with the so-called K-shaped recovery. The upper classes made money; the lower classes are on the verge of losing whatever financial gains they had made during the Trump economy. Inflation is caused by too much money sloshing around in the economic system. Most of that inflationary money is held by the rich in assets like stocks and real estate. Money injected into the economic system targeted at the poor is immediately sucked out of the system to pay debts and to provide basic necessities. There is enough physical and material capacity in the system to provide basic necessities so this money is not inflationary.

Inflation is caused when there is too much money chasing too few goods. As long as there is the material and human capacity, money directed at those sectors of the economy will not cause inflation. The real problem in future Biden administration bills involving infrastructure and the Green New Deal is that the materials to build out infrastructure, namely, steel, cement and plastics, require fossil fuels to manufacture and the manufacturing processes themselves are inherently carbon dioxide emitting. This comes about from basic chemistry which involves the carbon and oxygen atoms every step of the way. Most basic materials are composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, and the chemistry involved in manufacturing releases large amounts of carbon dioxide. The manufacture of solar panels requires mining high quality quartz and combining it with coal. It's hard to get away from fossil fuels as the Michael Moore movie, Planet of the Humans, pointed out. For this reason spending large amounts of money on infrastructure involving cement, steel, plastics and other materials could actually produce more global warming rather than preventing it. The finances are available; the proper materials are not. The manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels require the release of large amounts of greenhouse gasses.

Because of these fundamental limitations regarding materials, it doesn't make sense to throw trillions of dollars at either infrastructure or global warming mitigation. That would be either inflationary or misguided in the sense that large projects in these areas could produce even more global warming. As Bill Gates has pointed out, money should be invested in promising startups and research that can solve these basic problems and into digital nuclear which is the only renewable energy source that won't result in a lot of greenhouse gasses being created in the first place. Advanced nuclear is the most promising source of clean energy. Gates has invested in a company TerraPower which does research on advanced nuclear reactors. Their mission statement reads:

"TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries that decided the private sector needed to take action in developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, mitigate climate change and lift billions out of poverty. Advanced reactors and other isotopic applications are now possible with technology and enhanced computing capabilities that were unimaginable a few decades ago. At TerraPower, we are innovating in nuclear to improve the lives of people everywhere and to build the clean energy of tomorrow – today."

So when the Biden administration gets around to their initiatives on infrastructure and global warming, they need to heed Bill Gates' warning about traditional manufacturing methods involving cement, steel and plastic. Energy from solar and wind are inadequate to solve the problem for many reasons. Large scale demonstration and build out of nuclear energy reactors should be the order of the day, They are the only clean energy source that has the potential for diminishing the world's reliance on fossil fuels.

Off the Top of My Head

A Job Guarantee Would Win Over Trump Voters and Also Address Black Lives Matter

by John Lawrence, February 14, 2021

Joe Biden can win over disgruntled Trump voters with a job guarantee. There has been a lot of research indicating that, if government were the Employer of Last Resort (ELR) at say a wage of $15.00 an hour, this would save money on unemployment as well as setting a minimum wage. It's also the minimum wage called for in Biden's COVID relief bill. Robert Reich, Clinton's labor secretary says:

"[G]ive Republicans and independents every incentive to abandon the Trump cult.

"White working-class voters without college degrees who now comprise a large portion of it need good jobs and better futures. Many are understandably angry after being left behind in vast enclaves of unemployment and despair. They should not have to depend on Trump’s fact-free fanaticism in order to feel visible and respected.

"A jobs program on the scale necessary to bring many of them around will be expensive but worth the cost, especially when democracy hangs in the balance."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his last letter requesting support for the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”:

“It was obdurate government callousness to misery that first stoked the flames of rage and frustration. With unemployment a scourge in Negro ghettoes, the government still tinkers with half-hearted measures, refuses still to become employer of last resort. It asks the business community to solve the problems as though its past failures qualified it for success.”

It's clear that an ELT program would solve many problems not the least of which is wooing Trump voters to the Democratic party. Trump's appeal to them was partly that they had been left behind because jobs had been moved to China and Mexico and he was going to bring good paying manufacturing jobs back to America, something he never did or had a clue how to do. The ELR program will act as an automatic stabilizer adding jobs during a recession and eliminating them during an expansion when jobs will shift back to the private sector. All private employers would have to do is pay a wage slightly higher than the program wage of the ELR program which would effectively set the minimum wage. It has been thought that a certain level of unemployment was necessary to fight inflation, but that's not necessarily the case as jobs in the ELR program would not compete with jobs in the private sector. The program wage would be a floor below which wages could not drop.

The so-called "Phillips Curve" maintained that there was a trade-off between employment and inflation, that to achieve lower inflation you had to increase unemployment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines full employment as an economy in which the unemployment rate equals the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), no cyclical unemployment exists, and GDP is at its [full] potential. The Federal Reserve considers a base unemployment rate (the U-3 rate) of 5.0 to 5.2 percent as “full employment” in the economy. So government economists have been willing to trade off the misery of approximately 16 million unemployed people in order to achieve stable money. Those 16 million are mainly composed of African Americans. However, Modern Monetary Theory claims that this is not necessary. There are other policy tools to fight inflation. Taxes, for example, mainly targeted on the rich. Other countries such as Argentine and India have implemented ELR programs. The money spent would eliminate the need for food stamps, unemployment insurance and other government programs necessary to deal with poverty and homelessness. Anyone wanting a job could have one, and these jobs would be in areas like child and elder care where there is a need for additional workers.

Off the Top of My Head

When Will the Pandemic Be Over? Maybe Never

by John Lawrence, February 10, 2021

We may just have to live with it, the same way we live with most other viruses. To eradicate COVID-19, it would have to be eliminated everywhere in the world. Not likely. To add insult to injury, COVID-19 is mutating - everywhere in the world and not only in humans. These viruses are also present in animals and are mutating there as well. What this means is that all the billions spent on vaccines so far may not have resulted in vaccines effective against the mutants. So billions more need to be spent for new vaccines that might not be effective against even newer mutants. It's a race against time, and humans may need to be vaccinated multiple times each one not effective against the newest mutant.

So we may have to learn to live with COVID. After all we have learned to live with a number of other viruses including flu, which also keeps mutating, HIV, poliomyelitis, yaws, dracunculiasis, malaria, measles, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis and cysticercosis. In some cases symptoms are treatable in an individual even though the virus may still be present as is the case with HIV. The only viruses that has been eradicated from the planet are smallpox and rinderpest. The fact that humans are the only reservoir for smallpox infection and that carriers did not exist, played a significant role in the eradication of smallpox. Most viruses are present in animals as well as humans and can harbor there for years before breaking out again in humans.

The modus operandi for a virus is that the more transmissable ones win out over the less transmissable ones. So the longer the virus exists in the population, the more the virus mutates and the more transmissable the virus gets. It does not necessarily get more deadly because if it killed its host right away, it wouldn't have as much time to infect others. So an ideal virus is one that hangs around in its host for a long length of time and then kills it. Being asymptomatic but transmissable for a long length of time also contributes to the success of the virus at least from the virus' viewpoint. Time magazine reports:

"That underscores wealthy countries’ responsibility to help developing nations get access to vaccines, Mazet says–for the benefit of the people who live there, of course, but also for the rest of the world. Even if one country achieves herd immunity, that status could be threatened by new viral mutations emerging from areas without broad vaccine coverage.

"The good news is we already know how to live with viruses, like seasonal influenza and the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. These diseases aren’t harmless–the flu infects millions of people in the U.S. each year and kills tens of thousands–but we have learned to minimize their damage."

So it becomes apparent that, if we don't help poorer countries, our own lives will never be out of danger. This is true for pandemics but it is also true in many other respects which should be perfectly obvious. Global poverty contributes to global disease. Going it alone or America First or ignoring the plight of our neighbors puts our own lives in peril. This is especially true for global warming. It is also true for the refugee crisis, childhood poverty all around the world and many other things. Climate refugees are already being created thanks to the effects of global warming. All these problems can only be addressed if not solved by global cooperation. In order to do this we must overlook things about other countries that we quibble with especially on the order of human rights. From their perspective we are human rights violators. What is important is not to bully or sanction other countries but to get along with them. Diplomacy and cooperation should be the order of the day. We must deemphasize military threats and solutions to world problems, defund the military and fund programs designed to counteract the real threats to ourselves and others.

Time put it this way:

"A better solution, many experts believe, is investing in the public-health infrastructure that went neglected before the COVID-19 pandemic, thus improving our ability to contain, respond to and monitor coronaviruses and other pathogens. “We need to invest in creating a healthier country [and world!], so when there is another virus, we will not be as unprepared as we were for this one,” Galea says.

...

"Recovering from the pandemic must also involve better science communication, to improve understanding of what must be done to curtail disease spread–and to persuade Americans to actually do it.

"Part of coexisting with COVID-19 may mean recognizing the need for cooperation [emphasis mine], whether it’s getting vaccinated to contribute to herd immunity; wearing a mask to prevent spreading the virus; consenting to regular testing or contact tracing to help with monitoring; or adhering to the guidelines set out by local health authorities if an outbreak emerges. Steven Taylor, author of The Psychology of Pandemics, says it’s possible for humans to adjust to such a scenario. Wearing masks felt bizarre to many in the Western world less than a year ago; now it’s second nature for most. “The virus will adapt to its host,” he says, “and we will adapt to the virus.”"

Yes, cooperation to provide herd immunity, to provide a herd response to global warming which also affects the whole herd and elimination of war and military responses to every nonexistent but imagined threat. We are all interconnected so that the more we cooperate, the more likely it will be that we will solve these global problems. If we don't the human race could be wiped out by ongoing pandemics, global warming and warfare. Let's spend our money on the real threats to mankind and not on a bloated military-industrial complex which is proving on a daily basis that it is ineffective in confronting the real problems of mankind.

Off the Top of My Head

My Horse, My Horse, My Kingdom for a Horse

by John Lawrence, January 9, 2021

Only in Trump's case: My Twitter Account, My Twitter Account, My Kingdom for a Twitter Account. Trump has been emasculated. He's been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Shopify and God knows what else. As well he should be. This guy was not so much a President as he was a Tweeter-in-Chief and rabble rouser. He roused a lot of rabble a few days ago when he almost had Congress persons killed and taken hostage. Who thought it was a good idea to have a rally on the day the votes for the next President were to be certified? Well, Donald Trump of course. He knew what he was doing. It's just that his doofus supporters were inept at coup planning or the outcome might have been entirely different. Trump, Rudy Giuliani ("trial by combat"? he was wrong and, according to his own words, has been made a fool of and should go to jail) and Don Jr should be criminally implicated for inspiring to riot. Trump should be criminally implicated also for not calling out the National Guard till it might have been too late. It seems that only he had the authority to do so, and he was allowing sufficient time for his acolytes to do their dirty work.

Joe Biden definitely has his work cut out for him. He has to deal with a global pandemic which may be mutating. He has to deal with 40 years of neoliberal economic policies which have made the rich richer and the poor homeless. And he has to deal with a cult of domestic terrorists. To those who think that China, Russia and Iran are the problems, I've got news for you: the American people, a huge contingent of them, are the problem. Gun violence is the problem. Trillions of dollars wasted on a sitting military, on the grounds that we have enemies who justify this, is the problem. The policies of George W Bush who caused millions of deaths in the Middle East with the result of ongoing chaos is the problem. It's enough to make your head spin. While the US is in chaos as a society, the rest of the world is moving forward. While Joe Biden must play catch up, the rest of the world is moving ahead. While much of the US citizenry is composed of cultish dingbats, the rest of the world are very clear eyed by comparison. While the US culture and militarization of mindset is descending into a cesspool of self indulgence, people in the rest of the world are using their brains and feelings of compassion for their fellow inhabitants of earth to move ahead. While religious bigots use Jesus as an excuse to do dastardly deeds in the same way that the Ku Klux Klan has always done, the rest of the world is coming from a more enlightened attitude toward ethics and morality, religion or no religion.

The result is that the US has become the equivalent of a Third World country with an outsized and bloated military. Pride goeth before a fall, and the US, if it cannot get its act together, will go the way of the Roman Empire when it descended into chaos. The best the US can hope for coming out of the putrefaction of the Trump era is to be a good partner with the rest of the world as we solve enormous problems including climate change and poverty. No more yelling "We're Number One" when clearly a significant number of us are spoiled brats and worse. Let's turn the military culture into a peace culture. Let's take megaphones away from demagogues the way Twitter has denied Trump his Twitter account. Let's police social media.

Social media has not ennobled the American people; instead it has allowed a large number of Americans to be turned into a cult the way radio allowed Hitler in the 1930s to encultify, to coin a word, the German people. Cults demand that people pay obeisance to a leader. Kim Jong Un is sitting there thinking that the US is just as big a cult as North Korea. The remedy for this is that people have to be educated to think critically and not to follow some powerful figure with a huge megaphone whether it be Hitler, Mussolini or Donald Trump. Trump's megaphone has been taken away the way a parent takes away a child's favorite toy if he or she misbehaves. Trump's following have a militarized mindset. I would lay dollars to doughnuts that most of them have served in the military the way Ashli Babbit, the rioter who was shot, did. Perhaps if young Americans were required to do two years of national service or service in the Peace Corps instead of being incentivized to become Marines, sailors and airmen, attitudes would change. Instead of their minds being molded to taking commands from superior officers, they might develop an alternative mindset in which serving the poor and unfortunate of the world would be their highest priority.

The US has become a degenerate society, composed of unthinking followers of a strongman who had promised them that they're number one, Americans are number one and we're the greatest society and nation on earth. This is misguided thinking doomed to failure. This is the fall of the Roman Empire, the people of which had become a bunch of degenerate spoiled brats. There are good people here of course. The new administration represents a great many of them. There are many changes that need to be made in US society that they will try to change. It will be a sisyphean effort. Much of what has been seen as essential to American culture will have to be discarded and we will have to join the rest of the world's nations humbly in a cooperative effort to combat global warming and create a culture of love, peace and compassion.

Off the Top of My Head

The US Central Bank Can Print Money; The State of California Can't

by John Lawrence, December 27, 2020

One of the central tenets of Modern Monetary Currency (MMT) as explained in Stephanie Kelton's book, The Deficit Myth, is that a nation with a sovereign currency can always pay its debts by a few keystrokes on a computer at its central bank - the Federal Reserve in the US' case. A nation or a state without a sovereign currency must pay its debts by taxes or out of income. She dispels the myth that the US government pays its debts out of taxes or by Treasury bonds. However, the state of California must pay its debts the old fashioned way out of taxes and income. This reality hit hard in recent years in the case of Greece which gave up its sovereign currency, the drachma, when its joined the European Union. Unlike the UK which maintained its sovereign currency, the pound, Greece has to borrow money from private investors and pay its debts from the collection of taxes. Eventually, after much hardship the IMF and the European Central Bank helped Greece get back on its feet.

It's a myth that the US national debt must be paid off by our children or grandchildren or that we must suffer because of all the money owed via US Treasury bonds to China or Japan. Unlike Greece which saw its situation go from bad to worse as private investors demanded higher and higher rates of interest, the US Federal Reserve sets the interest rate (currently around zero) on the bonds it offers for sale. Other countries buy them because most of the world's business is conducted in dollars, and those countries need dollars which they get from Treasury bonds to conduct business. The US government is not competing with private corporations for loans because, when it needs money, it just prints it. Right now the way the rules are written the Fed can print money and give it to the banks, the way it did during the Great Recession when it just gave the banking system $4.5 trillion, but it cannot print money and give it to the US government without Congressional approval. It can provide direct relief to the banks, but it cannot provide direct relief to the American people. That's why the COVID relief package is being held up because, even though Congress did give it its stamp of approval, the law also requires that the President sign the bill which he has not.

In "The Deficit Myth" Kelton writes:

You've probably already seen MMT's central insights in action. ... Whenever the topic of Social Security comes up, or when someone in Congress wants to put more money into education or health care, there's a lot of talk about how everything must be "paid for" to avoid adding to the federal deficit. But have you noticed this never seems to be a problem when it comes to the defense budget, bailing out banks, or giving huge tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, even when these measures significantly raise the deficit.? As long as the votes are there, the federal government can always fund its priorities. That's how it works. Deficits didn't stop FDR from implementing the New Deal in the 1930s. They didn't dissuade John F. Kennedy from landing a man on the moon. And they never once stopped Congress from going to war.

In fact deficits don't matter as Kelton proclaims over and over again in her book. There are limits however. That limit has yet to be met as the huge bailouts of the 21st century for the Great Recession and COVID relief have yet to cause the least bit of inflation. Other big projects like a Green New Deal are pooh poohed by Congress because Congress is controlled by wealthy interests so tax breaks for the rich is no problem nor is going to war which benefits defense contractors, but anything that represents the interests of the average American is not favored by Congress. If and when Congress is controlled by the middle class, we will see large projects which promote the health and welfare of the American people in general and not just wealthy business interests.

The Chinese are building huge infrastructure projects all over China and even the rest of the world with its Belt and Road Initiative. They can do this because the Chinese renminbi is a sovereign currency and the money is available to keep the Chinese people fully employed doing constructive things. They have bought into MMT and know that Deficits Don't Matter. Besides they don't have to subject themselves to the whims of Congress. If the government wants to do it, it's full steam ahead. It seems to have worked for them as they have brought 850 million Chinese people out of poverty in the last 40 years. But as Pew Research reported, "But despite the strong labor market, wage growth has lagged economists’ expectations. In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers." So to put a fine point on it, 850 million Chinese brought out of poverty in last 40 years; average Americans no wage growth in last 40 years.

It has become clear that the old way of thinking that national deficits have to be repaid out of taxes and Treasury bonds is incorrect. Any country with a sovereign currency can just print money by a few keystrokes on its central bank's computer. The US Fed does just that. The conversion to Green Infrastructure could easily be funded in this way if Congress approved. At the same time many good paying jobs could be created. Instead of competing with China by military threats or sanctions, we could instead compete by building Green infrastructure in the US and the rest of the world. Or maybe we could cooperate in saving the world from the ravages of global warming and also providing the same benefits to the average American which the average Chinese is increasingly able to enjoy.

Off the Top of My Head

Increase Taxes on the Rich. Reduce Taxes on the Middle Class

by John Lawrence, October22, 2020

Finally, the Democrats are getting smart. Republicans have won on one issue: reducing your taxes. Unfortunately, they reduce them a lot more on the rich than they do on the middle class. So now Joe Biden has introduced some nuance. Can the American people comprehend it? Reducing taxes on everyone making less than $400,00 per year and raising them on everyone making more than $400,000. What a great idea! What took them so long? It's absolutely necessary if we want to decrease economic inequality which is out of control. So Joe Biden would increase taxes only on the upper 1%. To be among the upper 1%, a family needs an income of $421,926. In terms of wealth the upper 1% owns 38.5% of the nation's wealth. The upper 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%. The bottom 80% of Americans are net debtors. Debt is negative wealth; that should be obvious, but many Americans are financially illiterate. Financial literacy should be a course in high school. Wealth and income are two separate but related issues. Middles class Americans who own homes pay a wealth tax: property taxes. Rich people don't pay wealth taxes on most of their assets which are in stocks and bonds.

Wealthier Americans don't spend all their income on consumption. A portion of it just goes to add to their wealth. Middle class and poor Americans spend all their income on consumption, even going into debt to consume. So the wealthy extract rent and interest from the middle class and the poor who devote a huge share of their incomes to rent and interest. Now more than ever, Americans are drowning in debt. Prior to the Great Recession of 2008, many Americans were struggling to keep their heads above water. When the bubble burst, those with the most debt were left drowning in a sea of financial insolvency. While the country has since recovered financially, the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening to derail the economy once more. In order to diminish not only income inequality but wealth inequality, policies should be undertaken to tax both the wealth and income of the wealthy while encouraging the middle class and poor to build wealth and get out of debt. A small financial transactions tax would tax the wealth of the rich which is mostly comprised of stocks and bonds and real estate. If every stock trade were taxed, this would create a huge pool of money which could be spent in more constructive ways than simply adding to the wealth of the rich.

While the rich can go bankrupt and bail themselves out with golden parachutes, most struggling student loan debtors have no such option. The laws preclude them from going bankrupt. They cannot discharge their debts in bankruptcy. In addition to student loan debt, most middle class people who own a home have a lot of mortgage debt. So they don't really own the home; the bank does. They have the privilege of making payments on a home which include a lot of interest. If they are successful in paying off their mortgage, they will have an asset which represents wealth. This is the main way the middle class creates wealth for itself. Unfortunately, this wealth takes a life time to create so is unavailable to most middle class people until it's too late to enjoy it. The good thing though is that their children can inherit it. This represents an intergenerational transfer of wealth so that their children or grandchildren start out not from zero, where most children of the poor start out, but from a positive accumulation of wealth no matter how small.

Since most Americans overconsume and under save in many cases by necessity but in some just by predilection, they have nothing to fall back on when there is a disruption in the economic system like a pandemic. Since American GDP is predicated on 70% consumption, the American economy cannot stay out of recession if people stop consuming. That's why the Republican controlled government, understanding this, came up with the CARES Act. It was not so much out of a concern for the middle class and the poor as it was a consideration to keep up consumption which is essential to maintaining GDP and hence a necessary economic statistic. A Joe Biden administration will get the economy back on the right track which will increase the income and wealth of the poor and middle class while diminishing that of the wealthy. Financial literacy should make clear the importance of not going into debt but of creating wealth no matter what your income statistics are at the beginning of this process.

Off the Top of My Head

Quantitative Easing = Printing Money

by John Lawrence

In her book, "Deficits Don't Matter," author Stephanie Kelton makes the case that we don't have to worry about deficit spending. That's when the US government spends more than it takes in in taxes. So in a sense taxes don't matter either at least as far as balanced budgets go. The US dollar is a sovereign currency. This means we don't have to ask anyone's permission to print money. The US dollar was taken off the gold standard in 1971 under President Nixon. It is a fiat currency meaning that it is not backed by anything other than the word of the US government. The US has experienced the phenomenon of printing money to bail out the banks in the Great Recession of 2008. As of September of this year, the Fed's balance sheet was $7.1 trillion. As of January 2008, the Fed's balance sheet was less than $1 trillion. That means that the Fed has printed money to the tune of over $6 trillion since 2008. Yet there has been no inflation in the US economy which is the danger a lot of economists had predicted from printing so much money.

The Federal Reserve bank can print US dollars just by a few keystrokes on a computer. Approximately $3.5 trillion was printed to bail out the banks during the Great Recession. Another $2.5 trillion has been printed so far to deal with the COVID pandemic. The question arises that, if the Fed can print money any time it wants, why can't there be Quantitative Easing (QE) for the people? In other words, if the Fed can bail out the banks, why can't it bail out the homeless, why can't it bail out the $4 trillion deficit in infrastructure spending, why can't it bail out the hungry and the poor? The answer is that it can do all those things, but this tool, QE, for that is what it is - a tool - should be used judiciously. It should be used to accomplish useful and necessary goals. It should not be used frivolously. It should be used in conjunction with other tools like tax policy. It should be used to promote a full employment economy and achieve socially useful goals.

Tax policy should be used to raise most of the money needed for government spending, and it should be used to redress the balance of the high amount of inequality in the American economy. Taxing the wealthy both in terms of income and wealth while giving tax breaks to the middle class and poor while implementing policies to help them build wealth is one of the major things US Federal tax policy should do. Additional money can be obtained by reducing the bloated military and military-industrial complex budget. If, however, there are additional goals that should be met like hastening the switch to renewable energy or a fuller safety net for the American people, then QE for the people should be implemented. The goal is to have a balanced and useful economy, one that promotes net zero carbon emissions, one that promotes sustainable development on other parts of the world, one that hastens the day when no child goes hungry or uneducated, one that reduces financial inequality.

It has already been demonstrated that deficits don't matter because the Great Recession of 2008 was quelled by the Fed's policy of printing money with no adverse effects on the economy. We have seen again the salubrious effects pf printing money or QE, if you want to call it that, during the COVID pandemic during which another $2.5 trillion has been printed so far. There is no reason why any country that has a sovereign currency like the US does cannot print money. Since the US dollar is the world's reserve currency, other countries and individuals are willing to buy up most if not all of US debt. But if they didn't buy up any of it, the Fed could still take it - or as much as necessary - on its balance sheet. In other words the fact that other countries are buying US debt means that the Fed doesn't have to print as much money. Any country with a sovereign currency can do the same even if their currency is not much in demand on world markets. Since the US dollar is used a lot in world trade, other countries need a supply of US dollars and are willing to buy US debt to get them.

There is no reason why any American should go hungry or be homeless or lack health care. Speaking of health care, Medicare for All would not eliminate private health care as some have suggested. Even with Medicare some doctors refuse to see patients because they don't like the reimbursement Medicare provides. There would be a private market for the wealthy who would just pay out of pocket to doctors who refused to accept Medicare patients. The wealthy don't even need health insurance. It could not be made illegal for such a market to exist. So even though everyone would have health care under a Medicare for All plan, the wealthy would still hire private and presumably better doctors at their own expense.

The policy of the Fed's buying US debt, which is equivalent to printing money, should be used wisely and the money not wasted.  QE for the people combined with the fact that deficits don't matter should lead to a more productive society providing that those additional tools and resources are used in a constructive way and not used to further militarize the society and the world. Any tool can be used for good or for ill. QE for the people could be used for a more healthy, beneficial and well balanced society for all people, could eliminate poverty in the US and the world, bring US infrastructure into the modern era and combat global warming and future pandemics.

Off the Top of My Head

There is No Such Thing as a National Solution to a Global Crisis

by John Lawrence, October 9, 2020

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation announced its 2020 Goalkeepers report with the above words. COVID-19 has killed more than 850,000 people worldwide. Every year until this one the world has made progress towards reducing poverty and disease. Notice the Gates foundation emphasis on the world as one coherent unified organism rather than just on US national boundaries. The pandemic knows no national boundaries. Until it's stamped out worldwide, the US is vulnerable. The foolishness of spending a trillion dollars a year on the US military which was powerless to do anything about the pandemic has been demonstrated. International cooperation is crucial to ending this pandemic, as well as others which are likely to follow, and reducing the conditions of poverty and disease in the world which breed war and terrorism. When will the US get its priorities straight?

The Goalkeepers report tracked 18 indicators included in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In recent years, the world has improved on every single one. This year, on the vast majority, we’ve regressed.There is also a worldwide recession that the military and military-industrial complex is powerless to do anything about. The US is not an island. Pandemics, global warming - these are problems affecting the whole world not just the US. Nations that have the resources need to assist other nations that don't have the resources. That means that the developed world has to help the developing world to combat these problems: disease, poverty, weaponization, global warming.

In 2015, 193 world leaders agreed to a series of 17 ambitious goals to end poverty, fight inequality, and stop climate change by 2030. The Global Goals are within our reach, but we must remain committed—embracing what works and addressing what doesn’t, while holding ourselves and others accountable. In 2016 President Trump dropped out of global cooperation with his America First policy. That has gotten the US nowhere. Whichever countries handle the pandemic intelligently are going to come out of the recession as world leaders. That won't be the US unless Joe Biden gets elected and is able to turn the shambles of Trump's response to the pandemic around.

The first and most important goal is ending poverty. Eradicating poverty is not a task of charity, it's an act of justice and the key to unlocking an enormous human potential. Still, nearly half of the world’s population lives in poverty, and lack of food and clean water is killing thousands every single day of the year. Together, we can feed the hungry, wipe out disease and give everyone in the world a chance to prosper and live a productive and rich life. The second goal is zero hunger. Hunger is the leading cause of death in the world. Our planet has provided us with tremendous resources, but unequal access and inefficient handling leaves millions of people malnourished. If we promote sustainable agriculture with modern technologies and fair distribution systems, we can sustain the whole world’s population and make sure that nobody will ever suffer from hunger again.

The third goal is good health and well-being. Over the last 15 years, the number of childhood deaths has been cut in half. This proves that it is possible to win the fight against almost every disease. Still, we are spending an astonishing amount of money and resources on treating illnesses that are surprisingly easy to prevent. The new goal for worldwide Good Health promotes healthy lifestyles, preventive measures and modern, efficient healthcare for everyone. The fourth goal is quality education. Education liberates the intellect, unlocks the imagination and is fundamental for self-respect. It is the key to prosperity and opens a world of opportunities, making it possible for each of us to contribute to a progressive, healthy society. Learning benefits every human being and should be available to all.

The fifth goal is gender equality. Gender bias is undermining our social fabric and devalues all of us. It is not just a human rights issue; it is a tremendous waste of the world’s human potential. By denying women equal rights, we deny half the population a chance to live life at its fullest. Political, economic and social equality for women will benefit all the world’s citizens. Together we can eradicate prejudice and work for equal rights and respect for all. The sixth goal is clean water and sanitation. This will require major infrastructure development. It's not rocket science. The techniques involved are well known in the developed world. One in three people live without sanitation. This is causing unnecessary disease and death. Although huge strides have been made with access to clean drinking water, lack of sanitation is undermining these advances. If we provide affordable equipment and education in hygiene practices, we can stop this senseless suffering and loss of life.

Actually I would put clean water and sanitation right up there with ending poverty. It would put an end to many of the diseases that occur in the underdeveloped world. The emphasis on healthy living and basic creature comforts needs to spearhead the use of resources worldwide. That means that developed nations have to give back to the underdeveloped ones instead of putting their further enjoyment and well being first which is the gist of America First. Global cooperation to combat global problems needs to take precedence over preparations for war and bullying other nations by the most powerful ones. The negligence and incompetence with which Trump has treated the COVID pandemic, the withdrawal of the US from universal institutions, almost assures that the US will assume a secondary status in the world unless the next administration can make up for the damage Trump has done and set us on a new and more constructive course.

Off the Top of My Head

Let's Talk About the Communist Bogieman

by John Lawrence, October 8, 2020

After the vice Presidential debate last night Trump called Kamala Harris a communist. Let's be clear: communism is a system in which the government owns all property and makes all economic decisions. Let's also be clear about this: nowhere in the world today does communism exist. Not in Russia. Not in China. Not in Cuba. In Russia private ownership of enterprises and property had essentially remained illegal throughout the Soviet era, with Soviet communism emphasizing national control over all means of production. In the 1990s, during the Presidency of Boris Yeltsin, there was  large-scale privatization of Russia's state-owned assets, particularly in the industrial, energy, and financial sectors. Privatization shifted Russia from the Soviet planned economy towards a market economy, and resulted in a dramatic rise in the level of economic inequality. It facilitated the transfer of significant wealth to a relatively small group of oligarchs.

In China private property and state owned enterprises co-exist. According to the NY Times: "Today, the private sector contributes nearly two-thirds of the country’s growth and nine-tenths of new jobs, according to the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, an official business group." In fact the reason why China has pulled 800,000 people out of poverty in the last 40 years is that the economy has been partially privatized. There are more billionaires in China than in the US. Many people in China went from being poor to middle class due to the privatization of the housing market. So although China is still ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, its government is communist in name only. They should probably eliminate the word "Communist" from the party's name.

Now consider Cuba. In 2010, Cuban leaders Fidel and Raul Castro made the decision to abandon the old Soviet model of centralized planning. In 2011, new laws were enacted to expand the right to private property. In 2019, a new Constitution was approved which officially recognizes the right to private property, while also reconfirming the central government's authority over the regulation of production and land.

So if the accusation that Kamala is a communist is ridiculous, what about socialism? There is not one definition of socialism. Many of the western democracies like France, Germany, the UK and Sweden, which are US allies, have been governed by democratic socialist parties. These societies have market economies including the encouragement of entrepreneurialism, but also have a government provided social safety net including universal health care, free or inexpensive education from pre-K through college, allowances for child care, elder care etc. Sweden's government even owned a hamburger chain until recently and owns Sweden's state-run alcohol monopoly Systembolaget. The democratic socialism advocated by Bernie Sanders and others is nothing more than a model based on Sweden where there are high taxes on the wealthy which provide a government sponsored safety net for the middle class and the poor. Today there is one more reason why there should be a strong social safety net: global warming. It is clear that private enterprise is not up to the job of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero within a reasonable amount of time, reasonable meaning before the earth becomes uninhabitable.

Today in the US we  have a nominal capitalist or free market economy, but even in this economy the government institutes the rules within which the economy operates. The rules are set up and tweaked by those in power, those who have the money to hire lobbyists to convince legislators to write the rules in their favor, namely large corporations and the very wealthy. Don't be fooled by the meme that the powerful don't want government regulations. They do want regulations, but regulations that favor their interests and not the interests, necessarily, of the average person who doesn't have the resources to influence legislation by hiring lobbyists.

Today Kamala Harris and other Democratic progressives are really taking the realistic middle ground when they advocate for government policies which will mitigate and reduce climate change and provide a social safety net for the American people. This goes against the interests of the oil and gas industry to be sure. To advocate for universal health care is to advocate for the health care system that Canada and all our allies already have in pace. To advocate for policies that reduce the out of bounds economic inequality by taxing the rich and spending the money on raising the economic level of the poor and lower middle class only makes sense. None of these policies make Kamala Harris a communist since communism doesn't even exist in the world today. Formerly communist countries have given way to hybrid economies in which private enterprise and state owned enterprises coexist with, in the case of China, private enterprise having been the significant factor in improving the lives of the Chinese middle class.

Today, the US has gone way overboard towards an economy controlled by the rich and powerful in their own interests. Economic inequality has gotten way out of hand. The balance needs to be redressed and only a government which uses its authority to diminish the economic power of the wealthy and augment the power of the poor and middle class can provide the necessary change. Good paying jobs can be created which address infrastructure and climate change needs. So more or less a Green New Deal or whatever else you want to call it is necessary. Too bad that Republicans have gone out of their way to demonize that name as they've gone out of their way to demonize Obamacare or any other initiative progressive Democrats put forth. That is their stock and trade - not discussing the merits but demonizing the name.

Off the Top of My Head

The Intergenerational Transfer of Wealth

by John Lawrence, July 26, 2020

Too often when we talk about "family economics" it's all about budgeting, saving for the future, making payments on debts etc. It's never about wealth accumulation. It's as if the average person is not supposed to be accumulating wealth - just paying their bills. There are staggering differences in intergenerational transfers of wealth between black and white families. According to the Brookings Institute, "At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in 2016. Gaps in wealth between Black and white households reveal the effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception." Most middle class families accumulate wealth by means of home ownership. Poor people, both black and white are usually renters who don't accumulate any wealth to pass on to their children. So each generation starts from scratch, from zero.

Government programs by and large, while supporting the poor at some basic level have nothing to do with putting them in a position to accumulate wealth. It is assumed that, if they can just pay their bills, they will be able to rise above the poverty level. But then the intergenerational transfer of wealth is zero. A good program would be not just affordable housing, but affordable ownership of housing. The government could have expedited this in 2008 by supporting mortgages instead of letting them be foreclosed on. It bailed out banks instead. Government sponsored programs which subsidize home ownership for black people would be an effective form of reparations. Not to mention that it would also be an effective means to lift poor white families not only out of poverty in the sense of being able to pay bills to support a comfortable lifestyle, but also as a means to create wealth so that, intergenerationally, children would be starting off from a higher level - not zero.

There are many ways that black families have been denied the ability to participate in the American Dream. Efforts by Black Americans to build wealth can be traced back throughout American history. But these efforts have been impeded in a host of ways, beginning with 246 years of chattel slavery and followed by Congressional mismanagement of the Freedman’s Savings Bank (which left 61,144 depositors with losses of nearly $3 million in 1874), the violent massacre decimating Tulsa’s Greenwood District in 1921 (a population of 10,000 that thrived as the epicenter of African American business and culture, commonly referred to as “Black Wall Street”), and discriminatory policies throughout the 20th century including the Jim Crow Era’s “Black Codes” strictly limiting opportunity in many southern states, the GI bill, the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act’s exemption of domestic agricultural and service occupations, and redlining.

Wealth was systematically taken from black families or impediments were placed in their way so that things that white people were able to do were not allowed to black families. Consequently, a legacy of poverty was passed down from generation to generation. A culture of poverty perpetuated itself with possibly some government help to obtain the bare essentials. Too often single parent families became the norm. Too often the discourse was kept at the level of paying for the necessities of life and not wealth creation. Being poor has even been thought of as something noble. It's even praised in the Christian tradition. The Bible says: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." And "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."

I am not talking about "wealth" as the accumulation of things like expensive real estate, yachts and the playthings owned by the very rich. I am talking about wealth in the sense referred to earlier that a middle class family accumulates by virtue of home ownership and then passes on to their children when they die. So this might be a few hundred thousand dollars or more, but not enough to support a "lifestyle of the rich and famous." The point is that the cycle of intergenerational poverty can be broken by this transfer of wealth. Of course another way out of poverty is education but not when you have to go into hundreds of thousands of student loan debt in order to get it. That is a debt trap, and there are many others laid for poor people - payday loans, for example - in the same way that once the slaves were freed and became share croppers, they ended up indebted to their landlords who in most cases were their former owners.

Habitat for Humanity has a great program for building houses and then making a formerly poor famiiy the owner of the house. This makes it possible for wealth creation for that family in the traditional way that most white families have created wealth for themselves - home ownership. This is not merely the creation of affordable housing but the creation of the affordable ownership of housing. There's a big difference. This program should be greatly expanded and replicated by government if government wants to help black families in particular end the intergenerational cycle of poverty.

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

The Relationship Between Poverty and Pandemic

by John Lawrence, July 20, 2020

Some people think these are 2 independent phenomena that have nothing to do with each other. In fact they're interrelated. The viruses spill over from animal host reservoirs into human beings when humans are in close contact with animals. As farms, villages, agricultural and mining operations encroach on animal habitat, spillover is not far behind. Many poor people get their only protein from 'bush meat', that is wild animals of all sorts. Especially in China but elsewhere as well people eat all kinds of exotic species. This makes it more likely that there will be a transfer of animal viruses to humans. The virus probably originated from a bat in Wutan's so-called 'wet market' where they sell all kinds of animals both wild caught and farm raised.

Sanitation in many parts of the world leaves a lot to be desired. Diseases of all kinds are rampant. Some of these are confined to local areas, but some like COVID-19 can spread to the rest of the world and cause a pandemic. An estimated 2.5 billion people, more than 35% of the world’s population, lack access to adequate sanitation. Disease started in these areas can spread to the rest of the world in a pandemic so the more the developed world can do to improve these conditions in poor areas of the world, the more the developed world is protecting itself from potential future pandemics. Unsafe drinking water, inadequate availability of water for hygiene, and lack of access to sanitation together contribute to about 88% of deaths from diarrheal diseases.

Water, sanitation and hygiene has the potential to prevent at least 9.1% of the global disease burden and 6.3% of all deaths. The impact of clean water technologies on public health in the U.S. is estimated to have had a rate of return of 23 to 1 for investments in water filtration and chlorination during the first half of the 20th century. Over half of the global population or 4.2 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services. (WHO/UNICEF 2019).

Furthermore, the strain on the world's potable water supply is being exacerbated by climate change. Glaciers store about 70% of the world's fresh water. They release this water gradually during summer months as the glaciers melt. Since the climate is getting warmer, glaciers are releasing water earlier in the year and much of it is just running off never to be productively used. Then when water is really needed later on, the glaciers are spent for the year. Glaciers are receding because of climate warming so that they are containing less and less fresh water each year in the first place. The cold season in which glaciers add more ice to the glaciers is getting shorter each year so there is less ice to begin with. More than 1.4 billion people depend on water from the rivers of the Himalaya. The main rivers are the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Yellow River. The first 3 drain through India, the last through China.

As earth's population increases there are not only more mouths to feed, there is a greater need for fresh water the supply of which is diminishing. This leads to less crop production, starvation and even worse sanitation and personal hygiene. There is more pressure to trap and eat bush meat which can contain deadly viruses which can spread to the rest of the world as the current pandemic did. Therefore, if we want to live in a safe, habitable world we need to start thinking about sustainable water and food supplies for everyone on the planet and better hygiene and sanitation for all the world's people, not just the few in developed countries. It is more important to spread the knowledge of safe water and sanitation systems as well as sustainable agricultural practices. Population control in one form or other is also necessary because the planet can only support a limited number of people especially if they are all living middle class lifestyles. We need to rethink what a sustainable lifestyle is and not consume a disproportionate percentage of earth's resources.

Off the Top of My Head

Reparations and Universal Basic Income

by John Lawrence, July 14, 2020

Old Chinese proverb: Give someone a fish, and they will eat for a day. Teach them how to fish, and they will eat for the rest of their life. This is how I feel about cash payouts for both reparations and Universal Basic Incomes (UBI). I am for reparations in the sense of guaranteeing a living wage job for people who are able bodied. If not the social safety net should provide food, housing and medical care free of charge. In kind welfare is always better than cash payouts which can be squandered, gambled away, spent on drugs and alcohol or other foolish items. Besides billionaires and millionaires, black or white, don't need reparations or UBI.

I am for reparations in the sense of affirmative action for minorities and poor people in the sense of providing jobs either in the private sector or by the government as a last resort. I believe government should be the employer of last resort. In Sweden they have a national employment database which tracks every job opening in the whole country. They will do their best to hook you up with one of those jobs. This is not a bad idea. Then if no matches can be found, the government should be employer of last resort. There sure is a lot of work that needs to be done that can only be done by government like infrastructure repair and development, not only in this country but around the world.

China has exported its expertise and workers to the rest of the world to build infrastructure. This creates future trading opportunities for China, but it also guarantees that there will not be an unemployed class in China. China by virtue of its Belt and Road Initiative is a full employment society. The US could do the same. There is much to be done in terms of sanitation, health, education and job development to bring the rest of the world up to even a minimally acceptable standard of living. At the same time everyone, in both developed and developing societies needs to adopt a sustainable standard of living. The New American Dream should encompass not unlimited consumption but reasonable and sustainable consumption. Otherwise, the planet's resources will be rapidly, at least in geological terms, exhausted, and the result will be resource wars, poverty of the majority and over consumption of the few.

There is much work that needs to be done, but the private economy is not concerned with necessary work. It is only concerned with encouraging consumption that produces the most profits. It is not concerned with what is good for the environment. It is only concerned with exhausting resources if that is what produces the most profit in the shortest period of time. We need to be concerned with husbanding the earth's resources so that they are there for future generations. Renewable energy is a must instead of exhausting earth's fossil fuels. The same can be said for agriculture and other consumable items. They need to be harvested in a sustainable way. Forests need to be maintained instead of being clear cut. The environment needs to be protected. Food needs to be grown without being sprayed with chemicals. There are good practices which will sustain, maintain and renew earth's resources in such a way that everyone can be employed and everyone can benefit including future generations.

In the meantime there is much necessary and essential work to be done here at home and around the world in eliminating poverty, building housing along the Habitat for Humanity model, growing organic food, eliminating factory food operations, providing health care. China is building infrastructure, but it is not directly eliminating poverty around the world. That's a niche the US could fill. A good step would be converting the 800 military bases in various countries to hospitals, schools and affordable housing for local and indigenous people, defunding the military and reallocating resources to helping poor countries become developed in a sustainable way rather than exploiting their resources.

Off the Top of My Head

#GreenNewDeal + #BlackLivesMatter = #TheWayForward

Affirmative Action for Blacks, Latinx and Native Americans in a Green New Deal

by John Lawrence, June 29, 2020

Living with the COBID pandemic could be the new normal. Assurances of a vaccine by the end of the year might be meaningless. Here's why: for many viruses including HIV, Ebola, malaria and tuberculosis there are no vaccines available despite years of study and years of effort to develop one. It took 100 years from the first polio epidemic in the US until a vaccine wiped out polio. Just as the Trump administration misled the American people in minimizing the effects of COBID including that things would normalize after we "flattened the curve" and giving dates by which we could "open up", they misled us by raising expectations that a vaccine would be available by the end of the year. Read the book, "Spillover", if you want authoritative scientific information about viruses and how long vaccine development takes if ever.

So, if the pandemic is something we have to live with indefinitely which could well be the case, the economy, in the way it existed before the pandemic, would never be coming back. So how do we create a new economy which works for the American people which, arguably, it was not working before the pandemic despite quasi full employment. Number 1: we refund the CDC and WHO which are the major institutions dealing with viruses and pandemics. Trump tried to defund CDC, and he did defund WHO in the midst of the pandemic. Politifact reported: "As for funding, there’s no question that the Trump administration sought to cut key CDC budget categories. But thanks to Congress, that funding was restored and even increased in bills that Trump ultimately signed." He had better luck and actually did defund WHO.

The biggest thing that could be done to minimize the bad outcomes for this and future pandemics is to get rid of Donald Trump as President of the US. A Democratic President would refund the CDC and WHO. The second thing would be to take a page out of FDR's book by reinstituting the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which financed the New Deal including many infrastructure projects. In fact the Federal Reserve could finance a #GreenNewDeal without even tweaking the law. With the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) it is now resorting to, it is financing debt relief not only for banks but for hedge funds, private equity funds, bankrupt corporations and even rich individuals. It is taking trillions on its balance sheet with quantitative easing. The SPVs require deal making with the Treasury Department. It would be a very small step for the Fed using a SPV to fund a Green New Deal. The US is about $4 trillion in arrears on infrastructure rebuilding and development. Instead of just bailing out bankrupt institutions the Fed could take a more positive role and actually fund productive development. By the way the RFC actually made money on repayment of loans and user fees as opposed to the Fed which just swallows US debt.

If no vaccine is found for COBID in a timely manner, the whole economy should be restructured because many businesses are not coming back. Many including Herz, J. Crew, Neiman Marcus and Chesapeake Oil have already filed for bankruptcy. A Green New Deal could take up the slack reducing the GDP from 70% consumerism to 50% which would be in line with the EU consumption component of GDP while increasing government investment by 20%. That would represent a full employment economy but it would be reoriented from consumption to building green infrastructure.

Minority hiring for a Green New Deal could be along the lines of affirmative action with African Americans, Latinx and Native Americans being hired first. This would go a long way to reduce inequality in America while being a form of reparations in light of the fact that slave labor built much of this country and Jim Crow redlining was responsible for the fact that black families have not been able to accumulate wealth at the same rate as white families. #BlackLivesMatter plus a #GreenNewDeal could help to restore the balance while at the same time creating a full employment economy.

Off the Top of My Head

How Important is the Culture of Poverty as a Determinant of Criminality?

by John Lawrence

Police reform is now being undertaken to some extent because of the Black Lives Matter movement. Whether it is sufficient to solve any problems is questionable. Most of the policing activities take place in poor neighborhoods both black and white because most street crime takes places in poor neighborhoods. In some families and neighborhoods there is not only a culture of poverty, there is a culture of crime. The two of them seem to go together. If your uncle or brother or father has spent time in jail or in prison, it seems to young people growing up that this is a normal part of life. Close to six million kids in America have experienced losing a parent to prison or jail at some point in their lives. African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. The imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women. 45.8 percent of young black children (under age 6) live in poverty, compared to 14.5 percent of white children. This says it all.

There is a culture of imprisonment in predominantly black families and neighborhoods. My contention is that the solution is the elimination of poverty in the black community, and that would go a long way to eliminating the need for police enforcement in the first place. The culture of poverty and imprisonment is cultivated by both black and white artists, playwrights and musicians. For example, take the play Porgy and Bess written by a white man, DuBose Heyward about a poor crippled black man. It was developed into an opera by George and Ira Gershwin, also white. Porgy and Bess started out as a novel, was converted into a play, then an opera and finally a movie. It contains many cultural stereotypes of black people. Wikipedia reported:

Another production of Porgy and Bess, this time at the University of Minnesota in 1939, ran into similar troubles. According to Barbara Cyrus, one of the few black students then at the university, members of the local African-American community saw the play as "detrimental to the race" and as a vehicle that promoted racist stereotypes. The play was cancelled due to pressure from the African-American community, which saw their success as proof of the increasing political power of blacks in Minneapolis–Saint Paul.

The belief that Porgy and Bess was racist gained strength during the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power movement of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. As these movements advanced, Porgy and Bess was seen as more and more out of date. When the play was revived in the 1960s, social critic and African-American educator Harold Cruse called it, "The most incongruous, contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western World."

One of the characters in Porgy and Bess is Sportin' Life, a pimp and dope peddler. This emphasizes the connection between black people and a traditional role model - pimp and dope peddler. Now Sportin' Life is one of the most successful members of the neighborhood. Why is this? Because most of the people were extremely poor. The lesson is, if you want to be successful, if you want to have money, be a pimp or sell dope. Or gamble like Porgy does in jail. So all the associations of black people with dope, prostitution, police and jail are reinforced by this work of art which has been praised as a brilliant story filled with brilliant music. Even Miles Davis, a black jazz artist, recorded a much praised album with orchestration by Gil Evans: the Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess.

In order to have street cred, even black men make up stories to make them seem bigger criminals than they really are. Then they peddle their art to make money. Take Akon. According to the Baltimore Sun:

The world of thug culture has its own perverse equivalent, in which middle-class men with minor legal transgressions exaggerate their bad behavior, claiming to be hard-core degenerates in order to impress youngsters looking for outlaw role models. In this destructive environment, the more violent and predatory you are, the more heroic you seem.

That helps to explain why a hip-hop star known as Akon wove a tall tale of malevolence and criminal activity, claiming to have spent three years in prison for running a "notorious car theft operation," a story he's been telling for years. In fact, he has apparently never served hard prison time. A Web site called The Smoking Gun recently exposed Akon as a thug wannabe, a "James Frey with ... an American Music Award.".

So the culture of criminality is perpetuated so that some black men can make money off of it, and young kids can grow up wanting to emulate them. This culture has to change in order that black and white kids grow up with more positive role models, but the root cause of this criminal culture is poverty so, if you want to change the culture, first change the culture of poverty. Give incentives for black men to stay with their families. Give them good jobs. It's not only black people who have lived in a crime culture due to poverty. Take the Mafia. White Italians looked up to the mafia dons because they were financially successful at a time when many Italians were in poverty. Black or white, poverty breeds a criminal culture. Problems with the police are going to persist as long as there is a huge amount of poverty and homelessness in the US. Progressive and enlightened government policy could start to change that for poor people, both black and white. Positive incentives to do the right thing go a long way to dispel poverty.

Off the Top of My Head

Black Lives Matter: Police Reforms Benefit Whites as Well

by John Lawrence, June 7, 2020

No more "carotid restraints" or chokeholds is a police reform caused by the Black Lives Matter movement, but obviously it applies to whites as well. We don't know how many of the 237 times Minnesota police used chokeholds, blacks were targeted, but probably like all police violence it was disproportionate. Police reforms such as ending "no knock warrants" also obviously apply to whites as well as blacks. The point is that what black people are demanding in terms of police reform doesn't just affect black lives. It affect all lives.

So why stop with just police reform? How about prison reform.Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US population, they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015. African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. The imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women. Although only a small percentage are in prison for minor drug offenses, marijuana possession in small quantities should be made legal on a national basis. Many are in jail awaiting trial. Every day, 465,000 people are held in local jails even though they have not been convicted; legally, they are presumed innocent. Many are there because they cannot afford bail.

Let's not stop at prison reform. How about political reform? Mail-in ballots should be legalized and encouraged in every state. How many poor people can afford to take time off from work to go and vote? These people are probably disproportionately black, but it would help poor people who are white as well. Let's make the election of President be based on popular vote and not the electoral college. Let's do away with the filibuster which prevents legislation from being passed democratically. Let's limit the power of the leader of the Senate to even stop legislation from being introduced. Make it mandatory that legislation created in the House be debated and voted upon in the Senate. Let's outlaw lobbying which lets the richest and most powerful individuals and corporations determine the political agenda.

How about economic justice? That was basically Bernie Sanders' agenda. Let's eliminate poverty and homelessness in the US. Blacks are disproportionately poor and homeless, but there are plenty of poor and homeless whites as well. Instead of spending a trillion dollars a year on the military and military-industrial complex, instead of wasting money on fruitless wars, let's have a Green New Deal and rebuild American infrastructure while at the same time creating hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs. Let's cancel student loan debt which disproportionately affects blacks, but whites will benefit too. Let's have Medicare for All instead of an outrageously expensive health care system which is twice as expensive as any other country's while producing only half as good results.

You get the picture? All the reforms which could come from the Black Lives Matter movement will also bring those same reforms for whites, browns and any other colors. Let's protest to change the course of this whole country for all citizens. Then we have to help the rest of the world with a Green New Deal if we want to create a habitable planet for our children and grandchildren. Black people are leading the way for social justice, for political and economic justice, justice which will turn this country around and help turn this planet around. Let's keep on going.

Off the Top of My Head

When The Pandemic Is Over, The World Must Come Together

by John Lawrence, April 28, 2020

These are the fateful words of Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Prize Laureate and the first and only President of the Soviet Union. Recently, he recalled how the threat of nuclear war was reduced by the treaties in the 1980s made possible by his friendly relationship with Ronald Reagan. Writing in Time magazine, he said, "The leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union declared that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought." Despite the fact that the Cold War was declared to be over, the neocons running foreign policy today have been doing their best to create another one. The pandemic has made it clear that there are more important challenges than U.S.-Russian rivalry, and that the world has more to gain by cooperating even with supposed enemies or rivals than it does by perpetuating idiotic animosities. We have common enemies that affect us all with the coronavirus pandemic being just one of them.

Gorbachev mentioned "poverty and inequality, the degradation of the environment, the depletion of the earth and the oceans." Global warming is an existential threat that must be addressed now or there won't be a habitable earth left to fight over. "We have so far failed to develop and implement strategies and goals common to all mankind." Not only that the U.S. under Trump has retreated from any kind of cooperation with the other nations of the earth even our supposed allies. Instead U.S. foreign policy has been based on ordering other nations around as if we were the supreme bully. Trump's latest blunder is to defund the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of a pandemic.

"Progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, adopted by the U.N. in 2000, has been extremely uneven." The U.S. under Trump does not really support the U.N. in any way because it wants to be the ruler of nations not part of an organization that attempts to have a forum for the cooperation of nations. The United Nations Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000 commits world leaders to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women. The Eight Millennium Development Goals are:

• to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;
• to achieve universal primary education;
• to promote gender equality and empower women;
• to reduce child mortality;
• to improve maternal health;
• to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases;
• to ensure environmental sustainability; and
• to develop a global partnership for development.

I had never even heard of the Eight Millennium Development Goals although I think I'm pretty well informed. All of the media time spent on Trump's self-serving bragging could have been better spent informing us about this WHO program. But instead the media spends its time either chastising Trump's stupidity or praising his glory depending on which channel you watch. He has changed from campaign rallies to hour long daily commercials for himself.

"What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security. Even after the end of the Cold War, it has been envisioned mostly in military terms." Yes, military hubris crowds out any prospect of peace let alone a prospect of eliminating extreme poverty. Bill Gates is singlehandedly doing his best to eliminate poverty and disease in the world. He basically is a one man United Nations surrogate. He presciently tried to warn us of the pandemic in a Ted talk. Now he is spending millions of his own money on developing a coronavirus vaccine. There are some good people in the world - even billionaires. That I am sure of. It's just that not a lot of them occupy positions of power in the U.S. government.

Gorbachev continued: "The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people's health. To achieve it, we have to develop strategies, make preparations, plan and create reserves. But all efforts will fail if nations continue to waste money by fueling the arms race. I'll never tire of repeating: we need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics and political thinking."

Gorbachev is calling on national leaders to cut military budgets by 10% to 15%. It is not enough. The mindset, even among Democrats, is that we need a huge military to defend ourselves from perceived threats and perceived enemies. They don't have the mindset that they could make the world a better place by defusing tensions among nations that they perceive as threats. It might start by apologizing to Iran for overthrowing their democratically elected leader Mossaddegh and installing the brutal Shah. That would go a long way to establishing a peaceful relationship with Iran. It could start there. Instead the U.S. only fuels tensions by applying sanctions and carrying on like the rest of the world should bow down to the almighty dollar.

Off the Top of My Head

How the World Could Change When the Current Crisis is Over

by John Lawrence, April 26, 2020

Perhaps we will rethink what is essential and what is inessential. Here's my list of what is essential: 1) Health care; 2) Food; 3) Water; 4) Sanitation (Waste water and trash collection); 5) Education; 6) Transportation; 7) Electricity; 8) The Internet; 9) Grocery stores. 10) Elder care.11) Police, Fire and Paramedic services. Here are some things that are considered inessential now: 1) Spectator sports; 2) Spectator music events; 3) Parades; 4) Conventions; 5) Bars; 6) Restaurants; 7) Barber and beauty parlors; 8) Tattoo parlors; 9) Political campaign events; 10) Large parties like wedding receptions.

Everyone can come up with their own list of what they consider to be essential and what they consider to be inessential. In my opinion the least essential of inessential services are tattoo artists. There are a lot of products and services in our mass consumer culture which are also frivolous and have nothing to do with what is essential or beneficial to human well being.. It seems that the most essential workers are the least paid while the least essential are well paid indeed. Is advertising really essential? You can look up everything you might want or need online using google or amazon. Why do you have to have some irrelevant product or service pounded into you by TV advertising? It's a historical relic. I record most programs so that I can fast forward through the commercials. If I watch a live program, I put it on pause while I do something else for awhile, and then I fast forward through the commercials. In my opinion everything advertised on TV, especially pharmaceuticals, is inessential. They should be prescribed by a doctor. It's the doctor's business to know which pharmaceuticals you need, not yours.

Are hedge funds essential? Is jewelry essential? Are the products of the wedding-industrial complex essential? Many people are having weddings during the pandemic without paying the tens of thousands of dollars that current weddings fashioned by the wedding-industrial complex demand. There are many frivolous consumer items which advertising insists that people need that they don't really need, that are completely inessential. Some are nice to have, but inessential, and some are downright destructive to peoples' health and welfare.

The most essential activity at this time in history is saving the planet from global warming. Production of renewable energy alternatives is absolutely essential. The provision of green infrastructure is absolutely essential. Fossil fuels need to be left in the ground. Getting rid of plastics which pollute the oceans and other waste products that aren't biodegradable is absolutely essential. Rethinking payscales for essential workers like agricultural workers and grocery store workers is essential. If these are the most essential workers, they should be paid more. The same goes for doctors, nurses, certified nursing assistants, the CNAs who do most of the caregiving at nursing homes. CNAs make little more than minimum wage and yet they are exposed to the coronavirus. What this means is that so much that is really essential now is either being ignored or very little money is being allocated to it while huge amounts of money are being allocated to fruitless and frivolous activities.

The most fruitless activity is war and the provoking of war. The trillion dollar annual budget of the military-industrial complex has been shown to be fruitless and meaningless when the real war is against a virus. Unhealthy conditions in poverty stricken areas of the world including refugee camps can breed disease which affects the whole world including "privileged" people in the more advanced nations. Poverty and disease need to be eradicated in all parts of the world. The military cannot do that. Oh, they can be repurposed a little bit to help out with a pandemic, but they can not really do the job that needs to be done. In particular they are vulnerable to the pandemic themselves and all of the weapons of war cannot protect them. The real war needs to be against poverty and disease which are the breeders of war and pandemics. The real war needs to be against global warming. The real essential workers are construction workers who need to be constructing advanced green infrastructure.

What is clear is that real essential workers need to be paid more which argues for a lessening of economic inequality. So much of the wealth is held by people who are absolutely inessential to the health, welfare and betterment of people all around the world. A Green New Deal needs to be prioritized. Wealth needs to be taxed to pay for it. New York state needs to tax Wall Street to make up for its budget deficit. Priorities, priorities. The helping professionals and care workers need to be given more respect and money. Taxing inessential workers like hedge fund managers is what needs to pay for it.

The Self-Centered Rich Country Response to Pandemics and Crises Is Wrecking Poor Countries

Published on Thursday, April 16, 2020

by Common Dreams

Along with measures like rent freezes and guaranteeing workers’ rights, really addressing a global pandemic involves public health planning that cross borders and confronting global inequality and the climate crisis.

by Tamara Pearson

 

1 Comments

Governments and corporations should be held accountable for the inequalities they have perpetuated and that are decisive in who lives or dies, and how many. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Mexico—I’m squatting on a round piece of concrete, and a 72-year-old man is sitting in the gutter, his walking stick beside him. He tells me that after being deported from the United States, he has been hiking the streets of Mexico City trying to find somewhere to stay. But all the refuges are closed due to the pandemic, including the one we’re sitting outside of, where I volunteer. He has run out of insulin for his diabetes and says he can’t walk anymore.

I’m aware that he may not survive much longer. He’s the fifth person that day that I have to turn away and I can’t stand it.

Back in the migrant refuge, we organize working groups and events to add structure to the empty days and try to prevent tension building up. It’s bad enough that many of the refugees here have fled violence, only to wait months for their visas, to now be stuck inside because of the quarantine, unable to work, even informally.

Over a period of less than two weeks, some 7,000 migrants have been deported from the US, with the virus as the excuse. And here too, Mexico is deporting refugees and migrants to the Guatemalan border, even though it is closed and there’s no interstate transport operating there. Hondurans and others are stranded, with nowhere to stay and no way to return to their country. Many may be killed if they do return. So far, the contingency measures seem to be doing more harm than good.

Here, we watch the videos of people cheering for health workers in London, and they are inspiring, but they don’t really connect. We know our health system won’t be able to handle much. We also know that with 65% of the workforce being informal and with no such thing as unemployment benefits, the economic impact of quarantining will be devastating to us. Already, in my city of Puebla, half the population has no access to water, or not enough. Soon, people will get kicked out of homes, and hunger – already on their minds – will likely become common.

The national government has declared that only essential shops and services can stay open. Those who can, are taking the quarantine seriously. But so many people aren’t able to stay at home that it is a bit futile. The woman with the mole stall outside the Oxxo shop near my house is still serving food, the street stalls selling phone cases and gadgets on 8^th street are still there, the indigenous woman who sits on the ground selling beautiful Mexican “rag” dolls, is still there. I estimate that around 60% of shops and stalls are still going.

In Central America and Mexico, only 20% of old people have a pension. Many are still working, in close to slave-like conditions. And in South Africa, distancing is impossible when settlements can have just 380 toilets for 20,000 people. Risk, fear, and violence, are part of life for many in poor countries. Poverty is a never-ending war, and being defenseless and unsafe – health wise and economically, means life is up for grabs all the time. It’s understandable then that people react with some self-preserving indifference to the quarantine. And that’s why it isn’t reasonable to take the Chinese and European models for responding to the pandemic and transplant them on to poorer countries.

When I see tweets about “these sad times” I feel frustrated. Yes, these are tough times, but things have been horrific for a long time now for the majority of the world – for poorer people and for brown people. But the mainstream media, history books, and movies, teach us to see the world through the eyes of the white first world. That’s where the heroes come from, where news matters.

It has never been considered urgent to update the world on the daily deaths from starvation (24,600) or on the numbers of people working in forced labor or marriage (40.3 million). Awareness of the savage impact of the US’s war on Afghanistan is low. In 2018, there were an estimated 228 million cases of malaria, globally, and 405,000 deaths from it – mostly children. But the people dying are the poorest of the poor, in African countries and in India. Malaria, starvation, exploitation, femicides, slum cities and more are crises that the world won’t stop for.

When I see tweets about “these sad times” I feel frustrated. Yes, these are tough times, but things have been horrific for a long time now for the majority of the world – for poorer people and for brown people.

The so-called “third” world is the dispensable world. The year 2008 was a “financial crisis,” but the ongoing global inequality that leaves over half the world living in undignified conditions is not a crisis, it is acceptable.

Meanwhile, the economic and social consequences of the pandemic contingency measures will be much more severe in poorer countries and poorer communities. Already, some 2,500 people are murdered each month in Mexico, and violent crime is only likely to increase as more and more people lose their incomes. Sexual assault rates are also likely increasing.

Add to this the huge global resource inequality which means that most poorer countries can not respond to the virus in the same way as Europe and parts of Asia, even if they want to. The Central African Republic, for example, has just three ventilators for its population of 5 million people. While the US has around 160,000 ventilators – and that isn’t enough, Mexico has just a few hundred.

The US and Europe are hogging access to medical equipment, masks, and testing materials. The New York Times reported that African and Latin American countries have been told by manufacturers that orders for testing kits won’t be filled for months, because almost everything they produce is going to the US and Europe. Prices on these goods have also skyrocketed, making it harder for poorer regions to acquire them. So far, the numbers of confirmed cases in poorer countries are lower, but analysis of those numbers should bare in mind that such countries don’t have access to the reagents used for testing and are stuck doing nothing, unable to test even health care workers.

While the #StayAtHome movement is an incredible display of human solidarity and of our ability to actually work together for the common good, it also puts the onus of the solution to the pandemic on individual people. And indeed, we are part of the solution. But governments and corporations should be held accountable for the inequalities they have perpetuated and that are decisive in who lives or dies, and how many.

In this world, where suits and window dressings and hotel lobbies are designed with the utmost care, but health and poverty prevention plans are not, it is pointless to talk about beating this virus without addressing the context it is flourishing in. Along with measures like rent freezes and guaranteeing workers’ rights, really addressing a global pandemic involves public health planning that cross borders and confronting global inequality and the climate crisis.

Tamara Pearson is a long time journalist based in Latin America, and author of The Butterfly Prison. Her writings can be found at her blog. Twitter: @pajaritaroja

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Off the Top of My Head

Poverty in US and China

by John Lawrence, March 16, 2020

According to the World Bank, more than 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of extreme poverty; China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US $1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms. The official poverty rate in the US in 2018 was 11.8 percent, down 0.5 percentage points from 12.3 percent in 2017. This is the fourth consecutive annual decline in poverty. Since 2014, the poverty rate has fallen 3.0 percentage points, from 14.8 percent to 11.8 percent. So the poverty rate in the US is still approximately 17 times the poverty rate in China. Whoever would ever have thunk it?

In last night's debate Joe Biden called out Bernie Sanders for having the unmitigated gall to suggest that China had done a remarkable job in alleviating poverty in that country. So now you can't say a good thing about China or Cuba or Russia without the meme that they are authoritarian countries and have done horrible things. You can't say they have ever done anything good. China built two coronavirus hospitals in little over a week, but you couldn't say that on national TV. This just shows how the American public has been brainwashed by public officials so that nobody can say anything positive about one of our "enemies" without being severely criticized. Bernie happens to be right about Cuba and China and the Sandinistas, but God help him for speaking the truth. Some day maybe the American public will wake up and realize how the US CIA overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran, Argentina and elsewhere.

The New York Times reported that you have a better chance of realizing the American Dream in China than you do in the US. China used to make up much of the world’s poor. Now it makes up much of the world’s middle class. Income inequality has grown in both the US and China. However, it is much greater in the US. CBS News reported:

The top 1 percent of earners in America now take home about 20 percent of the country’s pretax national income, compared with less than 12 percent in 1978, according to the research the economists published at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Over the same time in China, the top 1 percent doubled their share of income, rising from about 6 percent to 12 percent.

While that suggests that China and the U.S. are experiencing growth of inequality in tandem, there’s one major difference, which suggests the problem may be more dire on American soil. That regards how the bottom 50 percent of income earners are taking part in -- or in the case of the U.S., losing out on -- the country’s economic growth.

America has experienced “a complete collapse of the bottom 50 percent income share in the U.S. between 1978 to 2015,” the authors wrote. “In contrast, and in spite of a similar qualitative trend, the bottom 50 percent share remains higher than the top 1 percent share in 2015 in China.”

About 117 million American adults are living on income that has stagnated at about $16,200 per year before taxes and transfer payments, Piketty, Saez and Zucman found in research published last year.

Meanwhile, economic growth in China has been so strong that -- despite widening inequality -- the incomes of the bottom 50 percent have also “grown markedly,” the economists wrote. Their analysis found that the poorest half of Chinese workers saw their average income grow more than 400 percent from 1978 to 2015. For their American counterparts, income decreased 1 percent.

“This is likely to make rising inequality much more acceptable” in China, they noted. “In contrast, in the U.S.. there was no growth left at all for the bottom 50 percent (-1 percent).”

So while the rich are much better off in China, the poor have also gotten much better off. In the US while the rich are much better off, the poor have gotten worse off. Also key industries are located in China not the US. The vast majority of key ingredients for drugs that many Americans rely on are manufactured abroad, mostly in China. The US has offshored manufacturing to China leaving the American middle class without what used to be good paying jobs. The documentary "American Factory", which won the Oscar for best documentary this year told about a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio that closed down leaving 10,000 workers without a job. A Chinese firm, Fukao Glass, bought the old plant and hired back some of the workers, but at less than half the wage they were earning before. This documentary was produced by Higher Ground, a production company owned by Barack and Michelle Obama.

The Obamas have entered into a multiyear agreement to produce TV series and movies with Netflix. “One of the simple joys of our time in public service was getting to meet so many fascinating people from all walks of life, and to help them share their experiences with a wider audience,” Barack Obama said in a statement. “That’s why Michelle and I are so excited to partner with Netflix — we hope to cultivate and curate the talented, inspiring, creative voices who are able to promote greater empathy and understanding between peoples, and help them share their stories with the entire world.”

So perhaps some truth can be brought to bear by the Obamas whose hearts have always been in the right place despite every roadblock being thrown in their faces by Republicans and their media outlets.

Off the Top of My Head

Back to the Future

by John Lawrence, February 3, 2020

In order to save the planet from global warming, we may have to go back to how life was in preindustrial times circa 1860. Before the era of the automobile, the airplane, industrialized food and electricity. The first oil well was discovered in 1859. After that it's been downhill all the way insofar as planet earth is concerned. Smokestack industries have been spewing greenhouse gasses into the fragile atmosphere. Cars, airplanes, coal burning steam locomotives, coal fired electricity generating plants - all the appurtenances of modern life  including labor saving appliances have been contributing to the destruction of earth's atmosphere with the consequence of global warming. Plastic produced from petrochemicals is polluting the ocean. Viewed form the perspective of the long term viability of earth as a place of habitability for human beings and other species, oil and coal have been more of a curse than a blessing. Modern life, industrialized life has been a tragedy for Mother Earth, and will have contributed to its destruction as a place for humans to live in less than 200 years  from the discovery of oil unless drastic action is taken.

To the extent that renewable energy can be brought online, we may not have to give up all the appurtenances. However, most Americans will not voluntarily give up their way of life. It's ingrained in the American way that we should have more energy consuming goddies and gadgets than our parents had. That's the meaning of progress. We can't regress, can we? Besides, Americans are taught to maximize their own personal success, profit and benefit. For example, Wall Street is only interested in short term profits, not the long term livability of the human habitat we call earth. We have been ingrained that we should be free to pursue our own advantage. To think that now Americans will be asked to sacrifice to save the planet for future generations is almost unthinkable.

Instead of a future utopia on planet earth, the stage has been set for dystopia. Instead of saving the planet for all people and for future generations, the American playbook, unless there are drastic changes, will be to save the planet for rich Americans and to hell with the rest of the world. If people have to die, the US will see to it that rich Americans are safe, well fed and well protected from the ravages of climate change. People elsewhere on the planet will not be so protected or kept safe. In fact if history is any example, they will continue to be exploited for the benefit of rich Americans so that they can maintain the lifestyle they feel they are entitled to.

As sea levels rise, American corporations will just continue operation in the midwest, well away from the sea coasts. As New York City becomes a waterlogged ghost town, Wall Street will just relocate to Chicago or Des Moines, no problem. Headquarter locations are fungible. While the rest of the nation is fed industrialized food, the rich will eat organic food grown on small farms the way it was in the preindustrial age. As some vacation spots in the world become uninhabitable, others will open up perhaps farther north. Siberia may become the next playground for the rich. Desalination plants will provide pure water for a limited number of people as the rivers which have historically provided drinking water dry up for lack of snow pack or glaciers.

In short instead of the hardships being shared mutually among all people on the planet, they will be visited on the lower classes the way they have always been. The ruling powers, whether it be the American Empire or some other empire, will see to that. The ideals of freedom and liberty will be in name only and mainly exercised by the upper classes while the rest of the people will be propagandized to think that they are free. As the Romans pacified their population with bread and circuses, modern dystopian society will make poor people work overtime for bread while providing circuses galore by means of mass media. The salinity of drinking water in some parts of the world as well as the acidification of the ocean which killed all the crustaceans will be of no concern to rich Americans who will have their seafood tailor made for them on elaborate farms.

In short, if we continue on our present path, most Americans will value the continuation of their present lifestyles more than the habitability of the planet for future generations. Not maximizing current levels of consumption will be seen as socialistic. Capitalism demands that the emphasis be on short term profits for ourselves not long term viability of the planet for others. If necessary, war can guarantee that only the strongest in military terms will survive.

'Staggering' New Data Shows Income of Top 1% Has Grown 100 Times Faster Than Bottom 50% Since 1970

Published on Monday, December 09, 2019 by Common Dreams

by Julia Conley, staff writer

"The bulk of a generation of economic growth has been captured and concentrated in a few hands, and many people have barely seen any of it."

New data released Monday explains the numbers behind Sen. Bernie Sanders' often-cited statistic that the three richest Americans hold more wealth than the 160 million people who make up the bottom 50% of the population.

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent published what he called "stunning" findings from Stanford University economist Gabriel Zucman, showing how both an explosion in annual earnings by the rich and an increasingly regressive tax structure have combined to allow the top 1% of Americans' wealth to triple over the past five decades.

Meanwhile, working people are taking home just $8,000 more per year than they did in 1970.

In what Sargent called "the triumph of the rich, which is one of the defining stories of our time," the richer a household is, the more its take-home wealth has grown in the past 50 years.

New data:

For top 1%, average income has risen by $800,000 since 1970.

For top 0.1%, it has risen by $4 million.

For top .01%, it has risen $20 million.

Bottom 50%? $8,000.

All this is *after taxes and transfers.*

Great work from @gabriel_zucman:https://t.co/iaxntlHdvl

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) December 9, 2019

The top 1% of earners make an average of more than $1 million per year after accounting for taxes they pay, a 50-year increase of more than $800,000—100 times the growth rate of the bottom 50%.

The wealth of the top .1% is five times larger than it was in 1970, while that of the top .01% is seven times larger, at over $24 million in 2018.

Zucman and fellow economist Emmanuel Saez, his co-author of the new book "The Triumph of Injustice," provided a chart showing how each group of earners' take-home pay has changed since 1970. The wealthiest Americans' assets skyrocketed by millions of dollars even in the first decade of the 21st century—when people in the bottom 50% saw their average take-home income decrease.

For middle-income earners since 1970, income-plus-effective tax rates have gone from $44,000 to about $75,000—a greater increase than those in the bottom 50% of earners, "but still their income growth rate has been very low," Zucman told the Post.

Zucman, who with Saez advised Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on her Ultra-Millionaires Tax, emphasized that both the explosion of yearly income at the top and the effective tax rates of people in all income brackets must be taken into account to understand the massive wealth gap.

"You have two trends reinforcing each other," Zucman told the Post. "There has been the rise in market income inequality—the rise in pretax income inequality. At the same time, the tax system has become much less progressive at the top of the income distribution."

"People have this idea that government redistribution has upset some of the rise in inequality, but essentially that's not the case," the economist added.

Zucman's findings were revealed two months after New York Times columnist David Leonhardt published a graphic showing how in 2018, for the first time in U.S. history, the 400 richest Americans paid less in taxes than any other income group.

The richest Americans have benefited from numerous changes to tax laws and enforcement in recent decades, Sargent wrote, "including domestic and international tax avoidance, the whittling away of the estate and corporate taxes, and the repeated downsizing of top marginal rates."

Tony Annett of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University wrote that Zucman's research shows how "it is no longer meaningful to rely on GDP" as a measure of economic well-being, since the benefits of growth are no longer being shared among all earners as they were in previous eras.

With this kind of distribution, it is no longer meaningful to rely on GDP, not even accounting for its other deficiencies. GDP became a widely used measure of economic well-being at a time when the benefits of growth were shared widely. https://t.co/IIL5EYMMGy

— Tony Annett (@tonyannett) December 9, 2019

Seth D. Michaels of the Union of Concerned Scientists described Zucman's findings as showing how many people of his generation have seen the bulk of economic growth "captured and concentrated in a few hands."

even if you know that inequality is increasing, the scale is staggering to consider. the bulk of a *generation* of economic growth has been captured and concentrated in a few hands, and many people have barely seen any of it. https://t.co/XldPkUoIM9

— Seth D. Michaels (@sethdmichaels) December 9, 2019

"The tiny number of people raking in the overwhelming majority of the last 40 years of economic growth are distorting the economy and the political system like a black hole, everything falling toward their interests at high speed," Michaels wrote.

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Off the Top of My Head

Democratic Socialism in America

by John Lawrence, December 2, 2019

The Democratic Socialist period in America took place between the two gilded ages. The first gilded age was in the 1890s when you had incredible fortunes being made by Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, John Rockefeller and others. The second one is today when you have incredible fortunes being made by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others. In between was the Democratic Socialist era presided over by the Democratic administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But progress breeds poverty, and the first gilded age led to the Great Depression. His administration oversaw the tools that brought America out of the Great Depression. Tools like the Works Progress Administration which built schools and civic buildings all over America including San Diego's County Administration Building and the Wantage school where I attended as a child and where my Dad was fortunate enough to have gotten the principal's and later the superintendent's job.

But progress breeds poverty, and the first gilded age led to the Great Depression. FDR's vice President was Henry Wallace, a committed Democratic Socialist in the Bernie Sanders mold or rather Bernie Sanders is in his mold. He used the term "economic democracy." While vice President in 1942 he gave a speech at Madison Square Garden in New York City in which he said "The new democracy, the democracy of the common man, includes not only the Bill of Rights but also economic democracy, ethnic democracy, education democracy and democracy in the treatment of the sexes." In 1942 President Roosevelt delivered the Four Freedoms speech in which he declared that there should be not only freedom of speech and freedom of worship but freedom from want and freedom from fear. After WW II, these ideas which amounted to economic guarantees by government in addition to the guarantees provided by the Bill of Rights were embedded in the United Nations Declarations of Human Rights.

Article 22 and 23 say;

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

There was an excellent documentary on Nova about violence - "The Violence Paradox" presided over by Steven Pinker who claims that violence has decreased over the millennia. When the data was looked at more closely they found that there were pockets of violence within a larger area that was mostly peaceful. Where were these pockets of violence? In places where there was enormous economic inequality compared to surrounding areas and enormous poverty. Makes sense, doesn't it? Such areas as the south side of Chicago which is mostly comprised of poor African Americans living side by side with the rich areas of Lake Forest and Oak Brook. The same goes for Detroit in which the worst area to live in is Forest Park. In Forest Park 94.42% of the population is Black or African American. On the other hand Grosse Pointe Shores, a Detroit suburb is the wealthiest town in Michigan. The overall crime rate in Forest Park is 275% higher than the national average. So there you go.

The legacy of racism is still extant in the US and manifests itself in gun violence in poor neighborhoods comprised mostly of African Americans. So who is doing something about it? The main idea is could violence be treated in the same way as infectious diseases for which the most important thing is to detect the first case and cut it off there before it spreads. With violence one shooting leads to revenge shootings which lead to more revenge shootings etc so if there could be an intervention after the first shooting, then maybe the others could be prevented. So a new kind of health worker has been invented - a violence interrupter.

Safe Streets Baltimore is doing just that. These guys who know the streets identify the hot spots and intervene to try to resolve problems before they escalate. They deserve a lot of credit. They are putting their own lives at risk. They know that the precipitating factors are lack of economic opportunities, lack of education, lack of all the things they have in the wealthier communities. Cure Violence International is working on the same principles around the world. But the root problem is the same. People take to street crime because they don't have the things other people take for granted - a roof over their head, proper nutrition, education, health care including mental health care, a good job, a community that cares.

Back to my first point. Bernie Sanders and his philosophy of democratic socialism is nothing new, therefore, nothing radical. It has been made to seem that way by radical Republicans and reactionaries who hated FDR, hate the UN, hate anyone or any group that is trying to alleviate poverty and, therefore, violence in the world. But the challenge now is far worse than just the eradication of poverty and violence. If the nations of the world can't cooperate and work together to ameliorate global warming, then the whole earth and its peoples don't have a chance. This calls for putting nation state conflicts aside and massive government collaboration on a global scale. We can't afford to dither while the economic forces of the elite are all about making more billions for themselves. This goes hand in hand with eliminating poverty in the world and making the whole world a better and safer place.

Off the Top of My Head

Boofer-In-Chief Could Have Googled Biden Ukraine and Found Out Everything

by John Lawrence, September 28, 2019

Proving he's a total dumb ass, Boofer-In-Chief put pressure on Ukraine's Volodymyr, good ol' Vlod, as he's affectionately called, to investigate the Bidens. You can find out everything by googling, like, for instance, that Hunter Biden was hired by a Ukraine gas company for a no show job paying $50,000 a month. Give me a break. What else do you need to know - that Joe was also Obama's point man on Ukraine at the time? He didn't need to ask ol' Vlod to investigate the Bidens. The information is hiding in plain site. And then when asked if Trump had pushed him to investigate, ol' Vlod personified the deer-in-the-headlights look as he said haltingly, "He ... did...not..push." Vlod has yet to master looking straight into the camera and lying with a straight face like most sophisticated American politicians. He'll learn some day, perhaps. Just because there's no quid pro quo doesn't mean that Trump is not guilty. Here again he demonstrates what a dumb ass he really is and Bernie Sanders is right: he's an embarrassment to the United States.

Meanwhile, there's so much more important news going on in the world that never gets reported as the only thing the American media is concerned with is Trump. Well, he's checked that box: get them talking about me and only me. Why doesn't the media ever report on what's going on at the United Nations? I guess that's only considered important by the rest of the world, but the US is too important to be concerned about what's going on in the rest of the world except to try and dominate it with its 800 military bases and sanctions. Don't forget the trillion dollar military budget. Like a speech given by Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old Swedish activist, on climate change. Trump doesn't deserve to carry her notebook.

Meanwhile, as Bernie likes to point out, billionaires like Jeff Bezos don't pay any taxes. Well Bezos pulled himself up by his bootstraps so he deserves his money, you say? Not exactly, he had a $245,573 loan from his parents to start Amazon. But what about Bill Gates? Didn't he pull himself up by his bootstraps? Not exactly. When he purchased IBM's operating system and made it the beating heart of Microsoft, Bill's mother sat on IBM's board. Wonder if that gave him an entree to IBM's CEO? In the interim Bill Gates has done a lot to make the world a better place with his foundation. Stuff the US as a nation should have been doing if they did not have a single minded focus on militarily dominating the world.

500,000 people go to bed on the streets every night in the good ol' US making a mockery out of the War on Poverty. Republican policies have turned this around into a War on the Impoverished. At least in Appalacia, they might have been poor, but they had rooves over their heads. While the US has presided over the creation of an underclass, a caste of outcasts, China has alleviated poverty for millions of people in a relatively short period of time and they're doing it in other places in the world as well. That is why, according to American conservative intelligentsia, they must be stopped! When people wake up and see how much China is doing for them and how much the US is not doing, they will shift their alliances. But China remains blissfully unaligned, probably laughing at the gridlocked US form of democracy while China powers on doing good in the world. Those do-gooders must be stopped! Do gooders would lead the US down the path to communism. Oh, I forgot, China is already communist. Well, it seems to be working out pretty wonderfully for them and their partners.

According to the World Bank, more than 850 million people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms. But who believes the World Bank? Isn't that one of those UN commy organizations?

Off the Top of My Head

China Has Done More Than Any Other Nation to Alleviate Poverty

by John Lawrence, August 31, 2019

According to the World Bank, more than 850 million people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms. So Bernie Sanders brings up an inconvenient point when he says, "But what we have to say about China in fairness to China and it’s leadership is, if I’m not mistaken, they have made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization, so they’ve done a lot of things for their people.” Oh how Fox News doesn't like someone bringing up an inconvenient fact about a country they're doing their level best to make into an adversary. Laura Ingraham made this comment: "It really shouldn't be all that surprising, I guess, that Bernie has a soft spot for the Chinese thugs. Socialism ultimately leads to more power for the state. And less power for you and your family." What she leaves out is the inconvenient truth that America, rather than alleviating poverty, has continued to increase it.

From 2016 to 2017, homelessness increased in America by 0.7 percent. The largest increases were among unaccompanied children and young adults (14.3 percent increase), individuals experiencing chronic homelessness (12.2 percent increase), and people experiencing unsheltered homelessness (9.4 percent increase). According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's Annual Homeless Assessment Report, as of 2018 there were around 553,000 homeless people in the United States on a given night, or 0.17% of the population. So while China has made miraculous strides in decreasing poverty, the US has done nothing or next to nothing and homelessness which represents extreme poverty is increasing year after year.

In May 2019, The National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) released its 2019 “State of Homelessness in America” report. NAEH’s interactive report allows users to explore national and state level data on the trends and progress toward ending homelessness in the United States. According to the report, homelessness has increased slightly by 0.3%, or 1,834 people, between 2017 and 2018 nationally. Approximately 552,830 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States on a single night in 2018 during the Point-in-Time (PIT) count. So while China makes gigantic strides in reducing poverty, the US, supposedly the world's richest nation, does little or nothing while poverty increases. But instead of focusing on a comparison of the two countries with respect to how much each has decreased poverty, Laura Ingraham instead criticizes Bernie Sanders for having the audacity to even bring up the subject puting the US in an unfavorable light with respect to China.

Maybe China is doing something right which, of course, Fox News is reluctant to admit. And while the US has made little progress in its "War on Poverty" since President Lyndon Johnson declared an ""unconditional war on poverty" 55 years ago, China lifted 850 million people out of poverty in 35 years! Not only is China’s success in reducing poverty without precedent, Beijing is best equipped to help reduce poverty globally – a fact that the Western media seems happy to skip over, preferring instead to criticise Beijing’s actions wherever possible. China is helping many other nations with its "Belt and Road" initiative. But the US sees China's alleviation of poverty and assistance in economic development in other parts of the world as a "threat" undercutting its own valiant efforts which have produced nothing but war and destruction.

China spent $250 billion on its military in 2018 while the US spent $649 billion, considerably more. How much did the US spend on economic development in other nations compared to China? China spent $460 billion in the five years since 2013 while in the US total spending was roughly $49 billion in 2016, the last full fiscal year analyzed. This accounts for about 1.2 percent of the federal budget. So while the US spends over twice as much as China on war, China spends about twice that of the US on foreign aid.

In the South China Morning Post, John F. Cooper writes in an opinion piece in April 2019:

China’s two government bodies reached decisions to alleviate rural poverty both at home and in developing countries. The sentiment was that China had done both before.

In fact, China’s accomplishments in these two realms are mind-boggling, having removed some 500 million to 700 million people from the poverty rolls. In fact, poverty in China has been cut to just a fraction of what it once was.

But China has not merely reduced poverty at home. The UN Millennium Development Goals project launched in 2000 was realized, UN officials said, with help from China’s generous, no-nonsense, market-oriented and unfettered foreign aid and investments.

According to the UN (recorded in its Sustainable Development Goals project), there are 783 million people living in poverty around the world.

The Western media has not cottoned to the fact that China had done a yeoman’s job in promoting economic growth by privatizing its economy and promoting competition, and has applied these principles to its foreign aid.

Liberals favor other means. Nor do they like Beijing’s undermining of the liberal, Western world order by proffering its own model of governance. Now, the media is unhappy that China can help the world’s poor when the West can do little.

Recently, Italy formally became the first G7 country to join China’s monumental Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious effort to coordinate trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment across the regions of Africa, Europe and Asia historically bound by the Silk Road. Investment from China’s Cosco Shipping rescued Greece’s Piraeus port three years ago, turning it into one of Europe’s fastest growing. According to the German newspaper, Die Zeit, Piraeus will displace Hamburg as Europe’s third-busiest port this year.

We dare not say that China is outcompeting the US on the world stage with its approach to helping people around the world instead of bullying them. Of course Laura Ingraham and Fox News, Trump's propaganda arm, will never admit that nor will they ever admit that perhaps China's version of capitalism is superior to the US version. No, they will continue to set up the divide between the capitalist US and the socialist China. Bernie Sanders is a truth teller and that is something that can't be allowed to stand unchallenged by Fox News.

Off the Top of My Head

China Alleviating Poverty at Greatest Rate

by John Lawrence, July 30, 2019

Between 1981 and 2008, the proportion of China's population living on less than $1.25/day is estimated to have fallen from 85% to 13.1%, meaning that roughly 600 million people were taken out of poverty. According to Wikipedia:

Since the start of far-reaching economic reforms in the late 1970s, growth has fueled a remarkable increase in per-capita income, helping to lift more people out of poverty than anywhere else in the world: China's per capita income has increased fivefold between 1990 and 2000, from $200 to $1,000. Between 2000 and 2010, per capita income also rose by the same rate, from $1,000 to $5,000, moving China into the ranks of middle-income countries. Between 1990 and 2005, China's progress accounted for more than three-quarters of global poverty reduction and a big factor in why the world reached the UN millennium development of dividing extreme poverty by two. This incredible success was delivered by a combination of a rapidly expanding labour market, driven by a protracted period of economic growth, and a series of government transfers such as an urban subsidy, and the introduction of a rural pension.

China must be doing something right. Its infrastructure is far superior to that of the US. China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI)is famous as an extension of their domestic infrastructure investments, but Russia is also investing heavily in infrastructure. Both countries need to do it in order to improve the future for their respective populations, and both Governments have avoided the Western development model of going heavily into debt in order to pay for creating and maintaining infrastructure. Both are, in fact, exceptionally low-debt Governments.

According to the “Global Debt Clock” at Economist, China has a public debt/GDP of 17.7%, and Russia’s is 8.0%. For comparison, America’s is 93.6%. The United States isn’t going into public debt in order to finance building or maintenance of infrastructure, but instead to finance expansions of its military, which is already (and by far) the world’s largest (in terms of its costs, but not of its numbers of troops).

While the US spends money on its military, some of which is sinking under the seas (see article by Chris Hedges "The Great Flood"), China is eradicating poverty in its own country and helping with its BRI all over the world, in Africa in particular. China’s most significant railway projects in East Africa are the diesel-powered Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway built in Kenya, and the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway, which is the first electrified railway of its kind in Africa. Both railway projects, costing $3.4 billion for Ethiopia and $3.2 billion for Kenya, are standard gauge railway projects paid for by Chinese loans. The two-year-old light-rail system in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, was financed by China as well to the tune of $475 million. 

While the US tries to control the world and to reshape it in its own image by means of its gargantuan military and weaponized dollar, the rest of the world led by China is concentrating on infrastructure development and eradicating poverty. In America poverty and homelessness are increasing as the rich get richer and the poor poorer. The idea that many Americans might be living on less than $2 a day once sounded almost impossible; that was supposed to be what poverty meant in the developing world, not a rich nation like the United States. But in a wildly influential 2013 study, two sociologists upended that assumption: Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer showed that by 2011, there were 1.6 million U.S. households with children that, for at least part of the year, had cash incomes that put them below the $2 per person mark. The number had risen from 636,000 in 1996—a 152.9 percent increase.

The US is spending enormous sums on its military while China is peacefully engaged in the economic development of the rest of the world. What's wrong with this picture? Is the American empire headed for the scrapheap of history just as many empires of the past including the Roman empire have been? If the US gets involved in a Green New Deal even a World Wide Green New Deal, maybe it can pull itself out of the present morass, forestall climate change and reduce homelessness in its empire. Then it could peacefully compete with China not in terms of advanced weapons systems but in terms of how much economic development and eradication of poverty it can bring to its own country and the rest of the world. Otherwise, China will be the world's preeminent empire by 2050.

The Green New Deal Could Eradicate Poverty

By Alex Kirby / Climate News Network

From truthdig, April 1, 2019

DAVID SONLUNA / Unsplash

If you haven’t yet heard of the Green New Deal, chances are that you soon will. To its growing band of supporters, it looks like an idea whose time has come.

Just suppose we could see a  way to transform the global economy, society and even the environment so that they met real needs, and promised to go on doing so far into the future. Well, we can. And it’s growing simpler all the time, futurologists say.

The bad news? Inertia and resistance. Too few of us think we really need a transformation. Too many are actively trying to prevent one. No change there then − except that the balance may be starting to shift, thanks largely to science and money − and ordinary people who are refusing to go on as we are.

Supporters of the Green New Deal say we don’t have to look very far ahead for results − no further than about mid-century.

By then, some of them told The New Yorker magazine, much of the world should be able to achieve the goal of zero carbon emissions, a goal for which they say the world already has about 90-95% of the technology it needs.

Technological Gallop

One problem often raised is the need to store the power produced by wind and solar power, which may be inconveniently unavailable just when it’s needed. But even here there are hopeful signs that the galloping pace of technological advance may soon have an answer in the form of greatly improved batteries.

The Deal’s supporters are not the first to claim we’re most of the way towards a carbon-free future in 30 years, and possibly well before that. But this Deal, itself a reminder of US President Franklin D Roosevelt’s 1933 New Deal, explores more ambitious territory still, with the prospect of also ensuring a living wage job for everyone who wants one and reducing racial, regional and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth.

To make any headway the new Deal will need strong political backing. Here it’s had a stroke of luck, being identified with the arrival in Washington DC of the politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress.

There are signs across the Atlantic of mounting involvement in the ideas spelt out in the Green New Deal, incorporating lessons learned from France, for instance, and the experience of Germany.

In Britain a rising star of the parliamentary opposition, Clive Lewis, the shadow sustainable economy minister, told a recent meeting: “The green economy will simply be ‘the economy’ under the next Labour government”.

The British economist Ann Pettifor, a fellow of the New Economics Foundation, describes the Green New Deal as “incredibly ambitious . . . a huge advance for green campaigners and, hopefully, for our threatened species.”  Pettifor was co-author of the original Green New Deal Report, published in the UK in 2008, which in many ways prefigured the present US initiative.

Her fellow co-author was Andrew Simms, now co-ordinator of the Rapid Transition Alliance (RTA), an enthusiastic backer of Ocasio-Cortez’ vision.

The RTA says: “Like the UK proposal, [the Deal] seeks to tackle the climate and economic crisis simultaneously and looks at job creation, decarbonising electricity, renovating buildings for energy efficiency and much more.

Affordable

“A Green New Deal today would cost no more than [Roosevelt’s] New Deal, less than the 2008 bailouts, and see off the worst effects of the climate crisis.”

Simms told the Climate News Network: “What does it actually look like to start transforming our economies to prevent climate breakdown and meet the internationally agreed climate targets?

“Practically it looks like a Green New Deal − a programme that meets our economic, social and environmental needs at the same time − a ‘win, win, win’ package of measures.

“Any Green New Deal worthy of the name creates millions of ‘green collar’ jobs by building the low-carbon infrastructures which respect environmental limits and are vital to modern economies − renewable energy, zero carbon homes, efficient and clean mass transport systems delivered by switching investments from old, dirty ways of doing things and with innovative financial mechanisms. The opportunities are immediate, needed and everywhere.”

Obstacles Remain

Perhaps an idea which puts the environment, the economy and social justice together can hope to mobilise mass support in a way the three distinct groups have so far not managed to achieve − especially when it exploits the potential of new technology and falling costs. But there’s still political inertia to reckon with, and financial self-interest.

Even there, change may be afoot. A British group of scientists, activists and one former archbishop of Canterbury, ExtinctionRebellion, has been staging audacious public protests in the UK for four months now, and started a spring uprising on 16 March, giving no sign yet of succumbing to inertia.

And resistance to the very idea that the world needs an energy transformation? A brief online search for the way parts of the fossil fuel industry continue to challenge and decry climate science suggests change could be coming there too. One example from the US site Inside Climate News shows the deniers are facing challenges of their own.

Change on the scale envisaged by the Green New Deal is certainly demanding, but it will be far less so than refusing to change.

Alex Kirby / Climate News Network

In this article:

alexandria ocasio-cortez climate change green new deal green new deal poverty income inequality inequality poverty social divisions

 

Off the Top of My Head

Omar Accused of Being Anti-Semitic for Suggesting that the US Contributes Too Much Money to Israel?

by John Lawrence, March 11, 2019

Yes, Israel has a lobby called AIPAC. It's purpose is to get American lawmakers to contribute more money to Israel, already a very prosperous country. Omar tweeted, "It's all about the Benjamins, baby," which some have taken to be anti-semitic. I thought the word "Benjamin" was an anti-semitic slur that I'd never heard of. But it turns out to be a reference to Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill. Meanwhile, the US gives nothing to Israel's poor neighbors, the Palestinians having cut the relatively meager $200 million it had been giving out of the budget at the urging of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. NPR reported: "The Trump administration announced Friday that it has cut nearly all the money the U.S. had planned to spend on aid projects for the Palestinians this year —including money to address a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip."

So why is the American media jumping all over Omar, a Muslim, for supporting her Muslim fellow religionists in Palestine which is suffering a humanitarian crisis? It seems that the slightest criticism of Israel will get the powers-that-be jumping all over you and calling you anti-semitic. Omar has a right to call out the US for giving a huge amount of foreign aid to a country that doesn't need it while totally neglecting its poorer neighbor. Her problem is that she and the other Muslim woman in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, will be attacked any time they take a pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel stand. This cuts off debate; it cuts off discussion about how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem and bring peace to that region. It shuts the mouths of anyone daring to be pro-Palestinian.

However, Rabbi Jill Jacobs writes in the Washington Post:

Despite what some pro-Israel organizations would have us believe, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Like all countries, Israel has a duty to uphold international human rights laws and to protect the rights of those living under its control. One may protest the use of live fire on unarmed protesters, the closure of the Gaza border and the subsequent humanitarian crisis, the military occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attacks on democracy and incitement against human rights leaders without invoking anti-Semitic tropes. Such policies would be wrong in any country, whether carried out by Jews or other people.

However, there is legitimate criticism of Israel, which the two Muslim Members of Congress should not suppress. The government of Israel has been criticized for issues regarding Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories, its treatment of Palestinian Arabs, the conduct of Israeli Defense Forces during conflicts and the blockade of the Gaza Strip.  Other historic issues with ongoing consequences have also been criticized including: the refusal to allow post-war Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, and the prolonged occupation of territories gained in war and the construction of settlements therein.

Among the most controversial policies enacted as part of its occupation, Israel has established numerous Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The international community considers these settlements illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this. The United Nations Security Council has consistently reaffirmed that settlements in that territory are void of legality and are a "flagrant violation of international law", most recently with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334. The creation and ongoing expansion of the settlements have led to Israel's policies being criticized as an example of colonialism.

Perhaps if Israel did something nice for the Palestinians like easing the humanitarian crisis, lifting the plight of those living in absolute poverty or reducing settlements in disputed lands, then the conflict between Palestine and Israel could start to be ameliorated. As long as both sides are intransigent, this area of the world will remain mired in conflict and war. The two Muslim women in Congress should continue to speak out on a more even handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli situation. They are the only ones representing the Palestinian point of view.

Off the Top of My Head

Eisenhauer's Cross of Iron Speech: Words of Wisdom Valid Today

by John Lawrence, January 10, 2019

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

One F-22 Raptor military jet costs $152 million. The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, the lead vessel of the U.S. Navy's latest class of carriers, and the most expensive warship in U.S. history costs $13 billion.

The cost of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to give every American citizen $12,000 per year, the current poverty threshold, would be roughly $3.8 trillion annually. Not every American would need that amount of money. So how about the cost just to give it to the poverty stricken? According to Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, 19 million people live in deep poverty (a total family income that is below one-half of the poverty threshold) in the United States as of 2017. So to give just those 19 million people a UBI of $12,000 would cost (.06)($3.8 trillion) or $228 billion. This could be done if the defense budget, totaling about $1 trillion over all agencies concerned with defense, not just the defense department per se, were reduced by that amount. This would still leave the US with a defense budget roughly 20 times the defense budget of Russia and more than the next several highest defense budgets combined.

Wouldn't diplomacy be a lot cheaper? Isn't it about time to put the American people first? We need a Green New Deal.

Off the Top of My Head

We Could Have the Ultimate in Border Security for a Fraction of the Cost of Being the World's Policeman

by John Lawrence, December 29, 2018

Why don't the Dems connect reduction in military bases abroad with increased border security? It's a perfect issue uniting the Left and the Right. The Dems are missing the boat if they don't latch on to this issue.They can co-opt Trump who has said as much. Not being the world's policeman doesn't mean that we don't partner with our allies if trouble arises. It just means that they pay their fail share and we work together. However, diplomacy and efforts towards the peaceful resolution of conflicts can go a long way. If we made friends with our enemies, we wouldn't need a Pentagon, but the Pentagon does the opposite. It creates enemies in order to justify its existence. Now the military is talking about hypersonics, a whole new area to spend money on, a whole new program for the Pentagon to justify larger and larger military budgets.

The US creates enemies by bombing the shit out of people and then letting the wounds fester instead of rebuilding those societies. Is it any wonder that half the world's people hate us? If we helped those in poverty instead of bombing them, maybe they would love us instead. If we helped Central America develop economically instead of aiding and abetting every dictator who ruthlessly suppresses the peasants, maybe they all wouldn't want to come here and live the American lifestyle. The internet has enabled them to see how Americans live and what they are missing. That's why they all want to cross the border.

I suspect the Dems want the status quo when it comes to the military and the military-industrial complex. That is they will vote for ever larger defense budgets. We have created more enemies, therefore we need more defense. More defense enables us to bomb more and create more enemies in a never ending cycle. Meanwhile, more and more Americans are homeless. The War on Poverty of the sixties now seems naive. Now it needs to be a War on Homelessness. The US needs to convert its bloated military budget to infrastructure development and helping the American people who need help. Instead it spends more money on the military and helps those who don't need help by giving the rich huge tax cuts.

Let's see how far the Dems get with the Green New Deal, infrastructure development, reducing the number of military bases abroad and beefing up security at the border. It's a whole plateful, but it can be done. All they need to do is to co-opt Trump.

Off the Top of My Head

Will the Border Be Open Today?

by John Lawrence, November 29, 2018

Today I go to Tijuana, and it's raining. I will pass through the same Port of Entry where the "caravan" is waiting to get into the US. I go there frequently because that's where my dentist is - Dr. Garcia at Baja Oral Center. I've had 2 root canals, a crown and an implant lately so I've been down there a lot. Today is the last visit for a while at least as Dr. Garcia will do the permanent fillings on the root canals. More and more people are going to Tijuana for medical and dental work. Why? The professionals there are just as good as those in the US or even possibly better and they don't charge you and arm and a leg ... only an arm. Ha. Ha. No, dental work in San Diego is outrageously expensive if you need anything other than a routine cleaning.

The broader point is that there is a lot of transborder business that goes on every single day. San Ysidro is the busiest Port of Entry in the world. I take people to and from the border as an Uber driver. Some people live in Tijuana and work in the US. Why? Rents and home ownership is cheaper  down there. They are building a lot of luxury high rise condos along the border. As Americans get priced out of home ownership in San Diego, it is wiser to buy a condo there and commute. San Ysidro is only about a 15 minute freeway drive from downtown San Diego.

The US better get its act together on immigration because the lack of an actual, workable policy regarding refugees, asylum seekers and everything else is affecting thansborder business. San Ysidro businessmen lost millions just because the border was shut down last Sunday for a few hours, and Trump is threatening to close the border permanently? That would be a disaster beyond measure. I just hope it doesn't get shut down while I'm down there today so I can't get back home.

But my potential suffering doesn't compare to the suffering of poor people from Honduras and Guatemala who just want a better life for themselves and their families. There are approximately 6000 of them holed up in a sports stadium in Tijuana. Some have given up and returned home despite the evident threats to their lives by the "gangs." Central and South America are in bad shape and their people are suffering. An American medical ship is giving help to Venezualans offshore that they can't get in Venezuela. If the US spent as much money on helping real people in its own hemisphere as it does on its military-industrial complex, there wouldn't have to be the drama of desperate people trying to get to the US for a better life for themselves and their families. Oh well, I guess the task of helping people in Central and South America will be left to China which is picking up the ball and running with it.

'While the Rest of the World Burned,' Billionaires Made More Money in 2017 Than Any Other Year in History

Published on Friday, October 26, 2018 by Common Dreams

"The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than the Gilded Age."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

19 Comments

"The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than the Gilded Age," the UBS's annual billionaires report notes. "That period bred generations of families in the U.S. and Europe who went on to influence business, banking, politics, philanthropy, and the arts for more than 100 years." (Photo: Super Yachts)

During a year in which so much of the world faced deep poverty, the corrosive effects of austerity, and extreme weather caused by the worsening human-caused climate crisis—from devastating hurricanes to deadly wildfires and floods—one class of individuals raked in more money in 2017 than any other year in recorded history: the world's billionaires.

"No money for health or infrastructure, all the money in the world for yachts."
—Josh Shepperd

According to the Swiss bank UBS's fifth annual billionaires report published on Friday, billionaires across the globe increased their wealth by $1.4 trillion last year—an astonishing 20 percent—bringing their combined wealth to $8.9 trillion.

"The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than the Gilded Age," the UBS report notes. "That period bred generations of families in the U.S. and Europe who went on to influence business, banking, politics, philanthropy, and the arts for more than 100 years."

UBS estimates that the world now has a total of 2,158 billionaires, with 179 billionaires created last year. The United States alone is home to 585 billionaires—the most in the world—up from 563 in 2017.

Meanwhile, according to a June report by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston, 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty and "5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty."

World's greedy billionaires became 20% richer in 2017 while the rest of the world burned https://t.co/yEW0wHF2bx

— Domenicodimaro97 (@Domenicodmaro97) October 26, 2018

No money for health or infrastructure, all the money in the world for yachts. https://t.co/AYa5Mk8L9j

— Josh Shepperd (@joshshepperd) October 26, 2018

A significant percentage of the "newly created" billionaires are hardly the self-made men—and they are overwhelmingly men—of popular lore. According to UBS, 40 of the 179 new billionaires created last year inherited their wealth—a trend that has driven an explosion of wealth inequality over the past several decades.

According to UBS, this trend will continue to accelerate over the next 20 years, given that there are currently 701 billionaires over the age of 70.

"A major wealth transition has begun. Over the past five years (2012–2017), the sum passed by deceased billionaires to beneficiaries has grown by an average of 17 percent each year," the UBS report concludes. "Over the next two decades we expect a wealth transition of $3.4 trillion worldwide—almost 40 percent of current total billionaire wealth."

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Off the Top of My Head

Left Behind America

by John Lawrence

Frontline did an excellent special on Dayton, Ohio called Left Behind America. Dayton used to be a center of innovation and manufacturing. The Wright Brothers invented the first airplane there, and it was second only to Detroit in the number of jobs in the automotive industry. Now Dayton is front and center in the Rust Belt and in the middle of the opioid crisis. It's not that there is large scale unemployment. Most people there have a job. Only they are making about a third of what they made before the old manufacturing industries left town. According to a Chinese billionaire who started a glass manufacturing business in an old GM plant, American workers are still making more than workers are making in Mexico and China. That's not much consolation to workers who can barely support their families even with both spouses working.

That in a nutshell is what is wrong with America. Expenses are rising fast and workers' paychecks have diminished Many Dayton families need assistance from soup kitchens and food pantries even with both spouses working. They are not even livving paycheck to paycheck. They are starving paycheck to paycheck. The Republican solution to this problem is for the starving parents to go back to school, take out a student loan to cover tuition and living expenses and learn a trade that will bring in more money. Unfortunately, that solution is a dead end which only burdens overstrapped families with more debt, and there is no guarantee of a job at the end of the tunnel.

Desperate people resort to desperate measures like taking opioids to give them some relief from their misery. That only leads to addiction and possibly death from an overdose. There is a culture of desperation due to the fact that their parents' good paying jobs which allowed them to raise a family and live the American dream have been replaced with shitty jobs involving crappy work. No innovation here or being a part of an exciting industry. Instead routine jobs like making cardboard boxes which will contain products manufactured elsewhere.

The solution is a transformation of society into one that actually cares about people rather than one which expedites the making of as much money as possible by the few people who are qualified and eager to do so. It requires institutions that cater not to the rich and talented but to the average Joe and Jane Sixpack that need a little help raising their kids without the false hope of opioids.

In 83 Million Eviction Records, a Sweeping and Intimate New Look at Housing in America

From the New York Times:

by EMILY BADGER and QUOCTRUNG BUI, APRIL 7, 2018

The heat in Whitney Gulley’s apartment does not work well, so on cold days she leaves the oven on. Matt Eich for The New York Times

RICHMOND, Va. — Before the first hearings on the morning docket, the line starts to clog the lobby of the John Marshall Courthouse. No cellphones are allowed inside, but many of the people who’ve been summoned don’t learn that until they arrive. “Put it in your car,” the sheriff’s deputies suggest at the metal detector. That advice is no help to renters who have come by bus. To make it inside, some tuck their phones in the bushes nearby.

This courthouse handles every eviction in Richmond, a city with one of the highest eviction rates in the country, according to new data covering dozens of states and compiled by a team led by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond.

Two years ago, Mr. Desmond turned eviction into a national topic of conversation with “Evicted,” a book that chronicled how poor families who lost their homes in Milwaukee sank ever deeper into poverty. It became a favorite among civic groups and on college campuses, some here in Richmond. Bill Gates and former President Obama named it among the best books they had read in 2017, and it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

But for all the attention the problem began to draw, even Mr. Desmond could not say how widespread it was. Surveys of renters have tried to gauge displacement, but there is no government data tracking all eviction cases in America. Now that Mr. Desmond has been mining court records across the country to build a database of millions of evictions, it’s clear even in his incomplete national picture that they are more rampant in many places than what he saw in Milwaukee.

Mr. Desmond’s team found records for nearly 900,000 eviction judgments in 2016, meaning landlords were given the legal right to remove at least one in 50 renter households in the communities covered by this data. That figure was one in 25 in Milwaukee and one in nine in Richmond. And one in five renter households in Richmond were threatened with eviction in 2016. Their landlords began legal proceedings, even if those cases didn’t end with a lasting mark on a tenant’s record.

For landlords, these numbers represent a financial drain of unpaid rent; for tenants, a looming risk of losing their homes.

In Richmond, most of those evicted never made it to a courtroom. They didn’t appear because the process seemed inscrutable, or because they didn’t have lawyers to navigate it, or because they believed there is not much to say when you simply don’t have the money. The median amount owed was $686.

Inside the courtroom, cases sometimes brought in bulk by property managers are settled in minutes when defendants aren’t present.

“The whole system works on default judgments and people not showing up,” said Martin Wegbreit, director of litigation at the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society. “Imagine if every person asked for a trial. The system would bog down in a couple of months.”

The consequences of what happens here then spread across the city. The Richmond public school system reroutes buses to follow children from apartments to homeless shelters to pay-by-the-week motels. City social workers coach residents on how to fill out job applications when they have no answer for the address line. Families lose their food stamps and Medicaid benefits when they lose the permanent addresses where renewal notices are sent.

Off the Top of My Head

Martin Luther King Jr Advocated Universal Basic Income (UBI)

by John Lawrence, April 7, 2018

As more and more jobs become automated and the divide between the haves and the have littles becomes greater, there comes a day when there is a need to shovel a little money into consumers' hands. After all 70% of the American economy is based on consumption. If consumers have no money to consume, the economy goes bust. So far that has not happened and employment by all indications is robust. Nevertheless, it is not operating at full capacity when jobs are shipped overseas and the rust belt jobs of the good old days have largely disappeared.

Martin Luther King Jr. realized that no matter how prosperous "the economy" was there would always be people who were left behind. He said:

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.

So far cheap goods have held pace with the replacement of good paying jobs with mediocre paying jobs. As long as most people can afford a car and a color TV, the economy keeps on churning. Problem is fewer and fewer people can afford to pay rent. That's why the ranks of the homeless are swelling. This never used to be a problem in America. Even in the War on Poverty, most of those poverty stricken had a roof over their heads of sorts. The War on Poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on Wednesday, January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. Now in addition to a poverty rate, there's a homeless rate.

Could a UBI solve the problem? Maybe. Government has been offering the poor in-kind goods and services for years - just not enough of either. A UBI could take the place of all kinds of welfare programs. Right now the poor may qualify for EBT - Electronics Benefits Transfer - in which their debit card is loaded with a certain amount of money each month. Problem is EBT is hackable. People don't always spend their money in the wisest way. Giving people cash and letting them decide how to spend it leads to some people spending it on booze and drugs.

The homeless are a special economic class of individuals beneath even the class that was considered to be in poverty in the 1960s. While capitalism has created a few extremely wealthy individuals and families, it has created an underclass of homeless people. A combination of UBI and in kind government supplied goods and services is probably necessary so that major tourist destinations like LA and San Diego aren't taken over by people urinating and defecating in the streets. A recent Hepatitis A outbreak demonstrated to everyone that benign neglect of the homeless is not an acceptable solution to the problem.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Housing is Unaffordable

by John Lawrence

Billionaires are bidding up the cost of housing. Asset prices such as stocks and real estate are going through the roof. If you're a billionaire, a million dollar house is nothing. Why not buy a hundred of them. That would only require a tenth of your assets. The rich are doing exactly that. In order to diversify out of their stock market portfolios, they are going into real estate. That means that average people are having to compete with them for housing. For the average person a million dollar home will strain the budget considerably.

So why isn't this happening all over the country, but only in certain selective areas? It's happening in only the most desirable areas, naturally, like coastal California and Manhattan Island. Most of the country consists of places that people have to live because they have to work and that's where the jobs are. Billionaires have no such constraints. They can live anywhere and invest anywhere. As prices go up, many are forced out of the most desirable areas as the rich people move in.

So this trend of ever rising real estate prices has, among other things, created a whole new class of people: the homeless. By now the homeless are identifiable as an economic class. It's like the Great Depression while at the same time there has never been a time period where more wealth is being created ... but only for a few. In the War on Poverty in the sixties even those living in poverty were not homeless. They had shacks or shantys but at least a roof over their heads.

From Wikipedia: The War on Poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on Wednesday, January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty.

Well the War on Poverty seems sort of quaint in light of the present day homeless situation. The homeless are sub-poverty. When are they going to implement a War on Homelessness?

Off the Top of My Head

A Rich Family Takes Care of All of Its Children ..

                ... Not Just Those With Talents Valued by the Marketplace 

                                                                                                                        — Warren Buffett

by John Lawrence

It takes a billionaire to express those sentiments. Warren Buffet can well afford to take care of his children. With a net worth of $84.3 billion, none of Warren's children will go hungry tonight or not have a roof over their heads. But many others will in the US and around the world. It's a sad commentary on a society which values the marketplace more than it values its children. And who can predict where the next genius is coming from? It just may be from one of those families that have a hard time keeping a roof over their head.

When I was at Stanford, the smartest guy in my class was from a family of about ten children none of whom other than him had any special talent whatsoever. They all became barbers or beauticians or other vocations where a high IQ wasn't demanded. This guy, Mike we'll call him, could breeze through the courses on quantum mechanics and electrodynamic theory without blinking an eye, and this was graduate school. The hard stuff. He came from a poor family and, unlike his siblings, had unlimited talent. I don't think that any of his siblings were loved less by his parents just because they were not extraordinarily talented. They deserved to have a roof over their heads as well.

Buffett commented in a recent Time magazine essay: "While the wealth of the 400 richest Americans rose to $2.7 trillion last year from $93 billion in 1982, as computed by Forbes magazine, Buffett said millions of people were left behind, "stuck on an economic treadmill." Stuck indeed. All those jobs that created the middle class in America after the Second World War are gone. In a recent Globe Trekker TV program called The Rust Belt, Megan McCormick travels to cities like Buffalo, NY, once the home of giant grain elevators, now unused but still there rusting. She goes from there to Pittsburg, once the home of giant steel mills, now still sitting there rusting. She visits Akron, Ohio, once the rubber capital of the world with factories owned by Good Year, B.F. Goodrich and Firestone, now sitting there rusting.There is not even money available to take down these rusting gigantic hulks and give them a decent burial.

The poem by Percy Busshe Shelley says it all:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The rusting hulks that represent good paying middle class jobs in America are now colossal wrecks as are the opiod infested hinterlands where people can only look on those works, monuments of a bygone era, and despair. Wealth has concentrated in a few hands in a more egregious way than it ever did in the times of Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, John Rockefeller and B. F. Goodrich. The marketplace has produced marvelous products, but the problems of war and poverty still persist. A rich family takes care of all its children not just those with talents valued by the marketplace.

Off the Top of My Head

Third World Diseases Creeping Back Into America

by John Lawrence

One of the places that Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, recently visited was Lowndes County Alabama. There there is an endemic crisis of hookworm, a disease that has been eliminated from most advanced industrialized countries, but not from Alabama. Loundes County is in the "black belt", a terminology that once referred to the black soil that forms a crescent through the state because it was so fertile. It was a great place to grow cotton in the slavery days, and many of the descendants are still there. Today the term is just as apt as a reference to them.

The Guardian reports:

Trump’s undermining of human rights, combined with the Republican threat to pare back welfare programs next year in order to pay for some of the tax cuts for the rich they are rushing through Congress, will hurt African Americans disproportionately.

Black people are 13% of the US population, but 23% of those officially in poverty and 39% of the homeless.

The racial element of America’s poverty crisis is seen nowhere more clearly than in the Deep South, where the open wounds of slavery continue to bleed.

It seems that in this Black Belt many families don't have access to adequate sanitation. Thousands of families live amid open sewers of the kind so common in the underdeveloped world, and, therefore, a disease of the developing world is thriving in the world’s richest country. Lowndes County is a majority black county that was the epicenter of the civil rights movement having been the setting of Martin Luther King’s Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in 1965. Despite its proud history, 70% of households in the area either “straight pipe” their waste directly onto open ground, or have defective septic tanks incapable of dealing with heavy rains.

The septic tanks back up into toilets and sinks when it rains, an unpleasant and unhealthy situation to say the least. Open sewage in Alabama. Homeless urinating and defecating on the streets of San Diego, LA and San Francisco. Hookworm, Hep A. Soon more once eradicated diseases will make their presence felt. Climate change wreaking havoc in Houston and Puerto Rico. It seems there is plenty of money for the war machine, but none for infrastructure, or health care. The health care system and infrastructure will have to wait because there is more killing to do in Third World countries while America becomes one of them itself.

Off the Top of My Head

Technological Progress Has Not Led to a Better World

by John Lawrence

First you have to decide what is a better world. For me a better world is a world at peace. War would be relegated to past history. but technological progress has only led to more destructive weaponry, ongoing wars that are more violent and involve more civilian casualties as time goes on. 65 million refugees roam the earth having lost everything and causing a backlash in more advanced countries straining under the pressure to take them in.

The internet represents technological progress, but right away it is criminalized, hacked, personal information stolen, hospitals extorted, electrical grids vulnerable, elections defrauded. We'd live in a more secure world without it. Handwritten letters and notes are a thing of a past, but they worked just fine. Kids are glued to the screen watching and participating in violent video games instead of playing outdoors.

A better world is one in which there is no poverty, but poverty has not been ameliorated. Millions of people live in trash dumps existing on one or two dollars a day. Children go unschooled, their only means of getting ahead joining an army where at least they will be well fed. A better world is one in which nature flourishes, but we have global warming destroying the environment because of the 20th century progress of the internal combustion engine. People and the environment were better off when the mode of transportation was the horse and buggy.

"A better World through Chemistry". Wasn't that the slogan. Instead we have the proliferation of toxic materials invented by chemists. Firefighters are getting cancer at an alarming rate due to the toxic chemical substances found in the smoke of fires. More people die each year because of the polluted environment than anything else. 9 million people a year, the Washington Post found. Plastic gyres pollute in the ocean. Plastic bags contaminate the streets. Plastics don't decompose as natural materials do. We were better off with paper bags.

The food supply  is being contaminated by GMOs which enable crops to be sprayed with pesticides and herbicides and still be reaped. Then foods are "enhanced" with artificial colors, flavors and preservatives. The result is an unnatural concoction. Farm animals are being fed with antibiotics in order to make them grown bigger and faster. The result is that antibiotics are overused and no longer perform their intended function in humans. Natural agriculture, although not as efficient, was better than the factory farms of today.

War, poverty, the environment: three things the first two of which need to be eliminated in order to have a better world, the third of which needs to be enhanced and protected. Instead we are living in a world where, if nuclear war doesn't destroy it, climate change and increasing poverty probably will.

Paul Ryan Just Now Realized He Was Ignorant About Poverty

Rana Foroohar’s new book, "Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business," gets to the stuff Ryan conveniently left out.

 

By Lynn Stuart Parramore / AlterNet April 3, 2016, 8:55 AM GMT 

Print

235 COMMENTS

 

Photo Credit: The Crown Publishing Group

This post was originally published on the blog of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. 

From the lips of Paul Ryan, Chief Spokesman of Blame-the-Poor politics, came a curious mea culpa just last week: He should not have referred to hard-working Americans trying to feed their families as “takers.” Oops! (Mitt Romney gained attention for similar remarks in 2012, but his running mate Ryan had already been on the makers/takers theme for years.) Ryan further admitted that when it comes to economic distress, he didn’t really know what he was talking about.

“There was a time when I would talk about a difference between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits,” said the speaker. “But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong.”

Well, yes. But a question: If the takers aren’t standing in the unemployment line or rushing home from the second job to change diapers, just where are they? Because an awful lot of America’s resources have gone missing. Like money that should be going to education, job training, healing the sick, retirement funds, infrastructure and, you know—life.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Sympathy for the Devil?

by John Lawrence

Trump has gotten himself in a lot of trouble for not condemning and excoriated the alt right, neo-Nazis and Ku Kux Klanners after the Charlottesville debacle. But what if he had said something like this:

"Most of the issues we are dealing with now are related to poverty. But we still want to put everything in a racial context. The problem with the ... and the reason I feel uncomfortable condemning the Klan types is they're almost the poorest of the poor. They're the forgotten Americans. They have been used, abused and neglected. Instead of giving them affordable health care, they give them black lung jobs. ... And it just doesn't make sense in today's world. And they see progress in the black community and on television and everywhere else and they don't share it."

Would Trump have been universally censured if he had said it? The person who I have exactly quoted above is Andrew Young, former civil rights leader, Ambassador to the United Nations, Congressman and Mayor of Atlanta. He said it on Meet the Press on Sunday, August 20, 2017. So he and Trump have something in common. They didn't universally declare their hatred for the "Klan types," but afforded them a measure of sympathy. Trump said "there were good people on both sides." Perhaps he didn't say it as eloquently as Andrew Young, but nobody in the media or elsewhere as far as I know condemned Andrew Young for not condemning the "Klan types."

Perhaps it boils down to poverty. Perhaps it boils down to economics. Donald Trump in a backhand sort of manner promised them jobs - redoing NAFTA, an infrastructure program, full steam ahead with oil, gas and coal production. As misguided a jobs program as Trump promised, where was the promise of jobs from Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton promised the status quo. The Democratic Party needs to get with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and lay out a jobs program, not just a free college education and Medicare for all. Those two issues are very important but what the poorest of the poor want is good paying jobs and not minimum wage jobs at WalMart and Carls Jr.

Poor whites are the "forgotten Americans"? Trump could never have said it without being condemned. Andrew Young just did.

America is wealthier, but Americans are poorer

Latest data on capital gains show enormous windfalls for wealthiest at the expense of vast majority of Americans

April 3, 2014         10:30AM ET      

                     

by     David Cay Johnston                           @DavidCayJ                              

How government policies worsen the nation’s income and wealth disparities comes into sharp focus in a new government report on capital gains. The short story: Investing is gaining and work declining as sources of income.

Capital gains come from selling assets such as stocks, real estate and businesses. Property owned for more than a year is taxed at lower rates than wages and in some cases is tax-free.

Although capital gains are growing — an indication that national wealth is growing — far fewer capital gains are going to the vast majority, while those at the absolute top of the economy are enjoying vastly more. This trend, as well as other official data, suggests that wealth is piling up at the top and that a narrowing number of Americans are wealth holders.

Larger pie, smaller slice

These findings emerge from a new report by the Statistics of Income branch of the IRS that examined a large set of taxpayers over nine years. I have reanalyzed the data, adjusted for inflation, and then compared similar, but not identical, data for 2012, the year with the latest available numbers.

To understand recent changes in capital gains, think of a pie made from the money received when stocks and other assets are sold for a profit. Call it a capital gains pie.

Now imagine we set down the 1999 and 2007 capital gains pies side by side to see how they were sliced up and handed out to four Americans sitting at the dinner table, who represent four different income classes.

The good news is that the 2007 pie is 40 percent larger than the 1999 pie. But it’s also important to consider the size of the various slices.

The smallest slice from both pies goes to the vast majority of Americans, roughly the bottom 90 percent, whose total income in both years was less than $100,000. In 1999 they got 13.9 percent of the pie, but in 2007 just 5.3 percent. That was such a dramatic decrease that even though the pie was much larger in 2007, that year’s pie slice contained only slightly more than half the dollars of the 1999 slice, $91 million reduced to $49 million. In other words, the bottom 90 percent took a huge capital gains hit, despite the overall increase in wealth.

Next are the slices going to the roughly one in eight Americans making between $100,000 and $1 million. Their slice shrank from 35.5 percent to 28.6 percent, but the dollars received grew by 13 percent, because the pie got bigger.

Next come the small number of Americans, roughly one in 400, who made between $1 million and $10 million in both years. Their slice of pie also shrank, from just over 28 percent to just under 24 percent.  But the total dollars in their slice went up by 17 percent.

And what of the top group, the slightly more than 18,000 households with total income of $10 million or more in both years? Their slice doubled to more than 42 percent of the pie. And because the pie was also bigger, their cash from capital gains in 2007 was 2.6 times greater than in 1999.

We are not getting laws that support the vast majority of Americans because members of Congress must raise money from wealthy donors, who in return for their largesse want policies bent in their favor.

So in 1999 the already very rich made almost $146 billion from capital gains, but eight years later they made more than $388 billion.

Wealth was already highly concentrated in America before the 2008 financial crisis, especially financial wealth — stocks, bonds, the cash value of life insurance policies and cash. The Great Recession was a disaster for those who were forced to sell assets due to unemployment, but a grand opportunity for those with the money to buy stocks and other assets at fire sale prices. Since Barack Obama took office five years ago the stock market has more than doubled, while average incomes have fallen.

The role of policy

So are these trends due simply to the luck of the free market? No, in fact, government polices have played an important role in generating these grossly unequal outcomes.

First, tax cuts: One in 1,000 Americans, roughly those making more than $2 million annually, enjoyed 12.5 percent of the tax cuts championed by President George W. Bush. When that’s combined with previous tax cuts under Presidents Johnson, Reagan and Clinton, the top 400 taxpayers in 2006 enjoyed a 60 percent reduction in their total tax burden compared with 1961, my analysis of a different set of IRS statistics shows.

Second, wages hardly grew during the years 1999 to 2007 — or since. Adjusted for inflation, the average wage reported on tax returns in 2007 was only 1.7 percent more than in 1999. That works out to an average annual pay increase of a nickel an hour, not that anyone would notice such a tiny sum — less than $2 per week.

In the next five years, to 2012, the average wages on tax returns remained essentially flat, up $55 compared with 2007. That’s the equivalent of getting a raise each year of about half a penny per hour — less than 20 cents per week.

When wages do not grow but the cost of living rises, people have a reduced capacity to save and invest. Those among the less well off who had saved only to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed have had to sell some or all of their investments to those who are better off.

Among the vast majority a dwindling share of people report any capital gains. In 1999 it was more than 9 percent of taxpayers, but in 2012 it was under 5 percent.

The decimation of unions, enabled by government policies that make organizing extremely difficult, is a major factor in stagnant wages. Moving factory work offshore has added to the downward pressure on wages.  Now some white-collar workers are feeling the effects, since almost any job done at a computer can be moved to a low-wage country such as India.

Third, the massive growth of subsidies to business tends to increase the value of companies that get such deals; to enable profit taking, dividends and oversized compensation; to weaken competitors not afforded these gifts (perhaps because of lack of lobbying power and campaign contributions); and to burden taxpayers generally. Many of these subsidies come from state and local governments, virtually all of which inordinately burden those down the income ladder more than the well off, because of regressive levies such as sales taxes.

Holding down wages has increased corporate profits, which have soared to heights never before seen, at least since the government started issuing consistent statistical measures in the late 1920s.

For the bottom 90 percent, roughly the same group making under $100,000 that the IRS studied, total income in 2012 was $31,000 in 2012, down almost $5,400 — or about 15 percent — compared with 1999, analysis of tax data by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty shows.

However, incomes soared for the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent — approximately 16,000 households, or a slightly smaller group than the 18,000 high earners in the IRS study. This group averaged almost $31 million in 2012, up $5 million compared with 1999.

In a representative democracy we choose our leaders, who in turn set policy. A major reason we are not getting laws and regulations that support the vast majority of Americans is that members of Congress and candidates for President must raise money from wealthy donors, who in return for their largesse want policies bent in their favor.

The Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday in McCutcheon v. FEC is probably not the last to overturn limits on campaign giving that were adopted after the Watergate scandal revealed the corrupting influence of big money. As big money’s influence grows due to the high court’s decision we can expect those slices of pie to be recut again and again with fatter slices for the political donor class and thinner slices for everyone else.

 

 

 

David Cay Johnston, an investigative reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times, teaches business, tax and property law of the ancient world at the Syracuse University College of Law. He is the best-selling author of "Perfectly Legal", "Free Lunch" and "The Fine Print" and editor of the forthcoming "Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality."

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

The United States of Poverty and Inequality

Published on Thursday, February 20, 2014 by Common Dreams

New report shows that no matter which state you live in, the 1% are making even more gains as the rest fall back

- Jon Queally, staff writer

From 1979 to 2011, the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent, while the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent. (Image: Common Dreams)Over the last three decades the wealth of the nation's very richest 1% has grown ten times that of the average worker and over that time period that same tiny elite has captured more than half of the entire income increases, leaving the bottom 99% to divide the remaining gains.

This is all based on a new state-level study, The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality by State, which looks at how inequality has seized hold of the national economy both in the generation leading up to the great recession of 2008 and in the several years following where a so-called "recovery" was experienced by the financial elite while the majority of U.S. population continues to claw its way back.

“The levels of inequality we are seeing across the country provide more proof that the economy is not working for the vast majority of Americans and has not for decades,” said Mark Price, an economist at the Keystone Research Center, who co-authored the report on behalf of the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN). “It is unconscionable that most of America’s families have shared in so little of the country’s prosperity over the last several decades.”

Check out the interactive state-by-state map on inequality generated by the study's authors.

Numerous studies in recent years have exposed the persistent pattern of income and wealth inequality in the United States, but as Price's co-author Estelle Sommeiller explains, “our study shows that this one percent economy is not just a national story but is evident in every state, and every region.”

Though some states show higher levels of inequality, the pattern nationally is firm. What is also made clear by the study is the degree to which specific policies--including the writing of tax law, the climate set for labor conditions, and the setting of wages--have all contributed directly to this pattern where those at the very top benefit from a growing economy and those at the bottom receive increasingly less reward for their hard work.

“It’s clear that policies were set to favor the one percent and those policies can, and should, be changed,” Doug Hall, director of the EARN program said. “In order to have widespread income growth, bold policies need to be enacted to increase the minimum wage, create low levels of unemployment, and strengthen the rights of workers to organize.”

Among the report's key findings:

• In four states (Nevada, Wyoming, Michigan, and Alaska), only the top 1 percent experienced rising incomes between 1979 and 2007, and the average income of the bottom 99 percent fell.
• In another 15 states the top 1 percent captured between half and 84 percent of all income growth between 1979 and 2007. Those states are Arizona (where 84.2 percent of all income growth was captured by the top 1 percent), Oregon (81.8 percent), New Mexico (72.6 percent), Hawaii (70.9 percent), Florida (68.9 percent), New York (67.6 percent), Illinois (64.9 percent), Connecticut (63.9 percent), California (62.4 percent), Washington (59.1 percent), Texas (55.3 percent), Montana (55.2 percent), Utah (54.1 percent), South Carolina (54.0 percent), and West Virginia (53.3 percent).

• In the 10 states in which the top 1 percent captured the smallest share of income growth, the top 1 percent captured between about a quarter and just over a third of all income growth. Those states are Louisiana (where 25.6 percent of all income growth was captured by the top 1 percent), Virginia (29.5 percent), Iowa (29.8 percent), Mississippi (29.8 percent), Maine (30.5 percent), Rhode Island (32.6 percent), Nebraska (33.5 percent), Maryland (33.6 percent), Arkansas (34.0 percent), and North Dakota (34.2 percent).

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The Year of the Great Redistribution

by Robert Reich

Saturday, January 4, 2014                

One of the worst epithets that can be leveled at a politician these days is to call him a “redistributionist.” Yet 2013 marked one of the biggest redistributions in recent American history. It was a redistribution upward, from average working people to the owners of America.

The stock market ended 2013 at an all-time high — giving stockholders their biggest annual gain in almost two decades. Most Americans didn’t share in those gains, however, because most people haven’t been able to save enough to invest in the stock market. More than two-thirds of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck.

Even if you include the value of IRA’s, most shares of stock are owned by the very wealthy. The richest 1 percent of Americans owns 35 percent of the value of American-owned shares. The richest 10 percent owns over 80 percent. So in the bull market of 2013, America’s rich hit the jackpot.

What does this have to do with redistribution? Some might argue the stock market is just a giant casino. Since it’s owned mostly by the wealthy, a rise in stock prices simply reflects a transfer of wealth from some of the rich (who cashed in their shares too early) to others of the rich (who bought shares early enough and held on to them long enough to reap the big gains).

But this neglects the fact that stock prices track corporate profits. The relationship isn’t exact, and price-earnings ratios move up and down in the short term. Yet over the slightly longer term, share prices do correlate with profits. And 2013 was a banner year for profits. 

Where did those profits come from? Here’s where redistribution comes in. American corporations didn’t make most of their money from increased sales (although their foreign sales did increase). They made their big bucks mostly by reducing their costs — especially their biggest single cost: wages. 

They push wages down because most workers no longer have any bargaining power when it comes to determining pay. The continuing high rate of unemployment — including a record number of long-term jobless, and a large number who have given up looking for work altogether — has allowed employers to set the terms.

For years, the bargaining power of American workers has also been eroding due to ever-more efficient means of outsourcing abroad, new computer software that can replace almost any routine job, and an ongoing shift of full-time to part-time and contract work. And unions have been decimated. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers were members of labor unions. Now, fewer than 7 percent are unionized.

All this helps explain why corporate profits have been increasing throughout this recovery (they grew over 18 percent in 2013 alone) while wages have been dropping. Corporate earnings now represent the largest share of the gross domestic product — and wages the smallest share of GDP — than at any time since records have been kept. 

Hence, the Great Redistribution.

Some might say this doesn’t really amount to a “redistribution” as we normally define that term, because government isn’t redistributing anything. By this view, the declining wages, higher profits, and the surging bull market simply reflect the workings of the free market.

But this overlooks the fact that government sets the rules of the game. Federal and state budgets have been cut, for example — thereby reducing overall demand and keeping unemployment higher than otherwise. Congress has repeatedly rejected tax incentives designed to encourage more hiring. States have adopted “right-to-work” laws that undercut unions. And so on.

If all this weren’t enough, the tax system is rigged in favor of the owners of wealth, and against people whose income comes from wages. Wealth is taxed at a lower rate than labor.

Capital gains, dividends, and debt all get favorable treatment in the tax code – which is why Mitt Romney, Warren Buffet, and other billionaires and multimillionaires continue to pay around 12 percent of their income in taxes each year, while most of the rest of us pay at least twice that rate.

Among the biggest winners are top executives and Wall Street traders whose year-end bonuses are tied to the stock market, and hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose special “carried interest” tax loophole allows their income to be treated as capital gains. The wild bull market of 2013 has given them all fabulous after-tax windfalls.

America has been redistributing upward for some time – after all, “trickle-down” economics turned out to be trickle up — but we outdid ourselves in 2013. At a time of record inequality and decreasing mobility, America conducted a Great Redistribution upward.

Upon Reflection: What I Believe

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Well the New Year is upon us, and it's time to take stock and see if I can make any sense out of the goings on of the last year and the interaction of reality with my own mind. This is my crack at it.

1. I believe that gun ownership should be a privilege and not a right. The 2nd Amendment was constucted to be similar to the Swiss model in which citizens formed a militia for national defense. There was no standing army. That was the original intent of the framers of the Constitution for exactly the same reason: there was no standing army. Today that rationale is not relevant. Even Switzerland has moved the guns from homes to depots to prevent what little gun violence takes place there.

I don't believe background checks and a database of those with mental problems will solve much. In almost every mass murder, the perpetrators had no prior record of mental health problems although in retrospect everyone agrees that there were mental health problems. In almost every case, the guns were obtained legally. That tells you something which is that it is the proliferation of military type weapons with high capacity magazines that is the problem. These guns should not only be made illegal, but they should be taken off the streets, that is, confiscated or gotten rid of with buyback programs.

Terrorists have only been able to kill 17 people in the US since 9/11, but 88,000 Americans have died in gun violence from 2003 to 2010. Britain, which has very strict gun laws, had 41 gun murders in 2010 while the US had around 10,000. 6,626 Americans have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. About 3000 died in the tragedy of 9/11. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far is around $4 trillion. At the same time zero dollars have been spent on the war on gun violence in the US in which about the same number of people die every year as died on 9/11 plus Iraq and Afghanistan (Americans, that is). Does this make any sense? As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and the enemy is us."

2. I believe there should be a floor on poverty and a ceiling on wealth. For most of the last decade, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line increased each year, from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15.1 percent in 2010. In 2011 the official poverty rate was 15 percent, meaning that 46.2 million people live below the poverty line. The Walton family has more wealth than the lower 40% of the American population combined while workers at Wal-Mart subsist on wages so low that they need to supplement their incomes with food stamps and other social services driving up the cost of government.

Much of the wealth that  the upper 1% possesses is used to distrort the political system and was gained fraudulently by those in the financial sector. I wrote this in 2010 on Will Blog For Food:

"Hedge Fund manager John Paulson helped to design the Abacus fund for Goldman Sachs and filled it with a bunch of garbage. This fund was then peddled to unwary investors while Paulson shorted it. As a result, when the garbage in the fund went south, the investors lost $1 billion and Paulson's gamble netted him $3.7 billion. But that isn't even the worst of it. Taxpayers who bailed out the system actually paid Paulson the $3.7 billion - as if he needed it."

John Paulson hasn't been prosecuted for this fraudulent investment scheme and paid taxes on his income at the "carried interest" rate of 15% just like his fellow private equity fund manager, Mitt Romney. He has used some of his ill gotten gains to contribute to conservative causes as has billionaire Sheldon Adelson who has made his money off of seniors gambling away their social security checks.

I don't think anyone needs an income of more than $10 million a year, and a family of four needs an income of at least $40 thousand. These would be my recommended limits, for what they're worth, for the ceiling on wealth and the floor on poverty. Remember anyone earning an income of $10 million is going to store much of that as accumulated wealth which is going to provide a certain percentage return on investment (ROI in plutocrat speak) as unearned income each following year in addition to the $10 million earned (yeah, sure) income.

3. I believe that global warming is happening right now and is a result of human beings polluting the atmosphere with carbon emissions. As the saying goes "Don't shit where you eat" and we are shitting on Mother Earth. Future generations are going to have to eat and breathe here. Europeans and native Americans settled this continent without sending massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. We're going to have to relearn how to do the same, and there is not much time to waste without suffering the consequences that we're already starting to suffer.

As the number of billion dollar weather events starts to pile up, we will soon run out of money. We need to divert money from the bloated and wasteful military-industrial complex and spend it on infrastructure redevelopment in order to counteract and protect ourselves from the devastating aftermaths of extreme weather events like SuperStorm Sandy and SuperTyphoon Bopha. As I previously said, we have spent trillions to avenge the deaths of approximately 3000 people while spending hardly anything on gun control or infrastructure hardening. Both of the latter are bigger threats to American security than are the handful of self-proclaimed Al-Quaeda terrorists who have done a trivial amount of damage to the US since 9/11. Yet we spend trillions of dollars on them which mainly goes into the coffers of corrupt politicians and defense contractors. Not to mention the millions of civilians we have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan which guarantees a future generation of terrorists bent on avenging those deaths.

4. I don't believe that good middle class jobs are coming back as we recover from the Great Recession. They were disappearing long before the Great Recession hit. The combination of automating and computerizing manufacturing processes combined with the outsourcing of menial labor combined with the deunionization of the country means that we shouldn't sit around and hold our collective breaths expecting that everyone who has lost a good middle class job is going to get one back as we recover from recession and the unemployment rate gets down to 5%. The jobs that are being created are for the most part minimum wage service sector jobs. Even so-called full employment, if we achieve it, will consist in large part of those kinds of jobs. So what good is full employment as a measure of anything or a goal?

The so-called job creators are really job destroyers and they know that. They are just laughing up their sleeves as they automate and outsource thereby slashing the cost of production and increasing profits while at the same time calling for lower taxes on themselves on the grounds that they are job creators. This makes Wall Street very happy and top management is handsomely rewarded for doing this. As CEO pay soars, jobs are either outsourced or subcontracted to temp agencies who hire non-full time workers at minimal wages to do the heavy lifting. By this means the major corporations take no responsibility for low wages. It's somebody else, a sub-contractor, that's paying the low wages, not them. And a college education is no panacea. Middle aged college degreed folks are being let go, laid off and downsized never to be rehired again. A good job right out of college is no guarantee of continued employment as you become technologically obsolete in about 10 years.

What's the solution? I believe that self-employment is a big part of it. When you are employed by a corporation, you are vulnerable to being laid off for any reason at any time. When you're self employed, you can never be laid off. It may be too late for a lot of people, but young people coming up in school, even those college bound, should learn a trade while in high school that they can fall back on if need be. Most trades that serve the local community cannot and will not be outsourced and are amenable to self employment. The college educated crowd needs to think about what occupations and professions allow them to be self employed and which only allow them to be employees of some corporation. And most corporations don't want you if you've been laid off after the age of 50 when you are most vulnerable and desperately need a job.

I also believe that government has to be the employer of last resort. Corporations are in the business of outsourcing and creating temp jobs. Even startups usually only need employees until they really get rolling, go public and get obsessed with their stock price which means they need to reduce the cost of labor. At that point the job creators seek to creatively destroy American jobs and pocket increased profits.

Well, folks, there you have it in a nutshell. These are some of the topics I will be writing about in 2013. I also like to bring in the San Diego connection as what's happening in the wider world is also very definitely happening here as well. As far as our political system is concerned, my prediction is that Republicans in Congress will obstruct any meaningful legislation whatsoever and put a halt to any initiative President Obama wants to make. Better hope that 2014 brings a return to majorities in both the House and Senate for Democrats and that Obama can manage to get something constructive done for the good of the country in his last two years in office.

Happy New Year to All.