California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Young People Need a Path to Home Ownership and Hence Wealth Creation

by John Lawrence

Kamala Harris needs to give young people hope that they too can be home owners. This has traditionally been the path to wealth creation for the middle class. When the GIs came back from World War II, they were able to get mortgages with no down payments although black GIs were not able to take advantage of this program due to redlining. This is the key to home ownership for young people today. There has to be a way to get a mortgage with no down payment. What is happening is that economic and  financial forces are driving the cost of home ownership out of sight. Corporations are buying up single family homes and turning them into rentals. With nothing to stop this trend America will become a nation of renters. Renters create wealth for their landlords not for themselves. Right now there is no path to home ownership for young people except if their parents help with the down payment.

The US is becoming a nation of modern day peasants who own no property just as medieval peasants did not. They created wealth for the nobility who were their landlords. Today as home ownership recedes from reality for young people, they are looking forward to living paycheck to paycheck with annual rent increases. Even with target inflation of 2%, rents will continue to rise at least by that amount as young people are saddled not only with student loan debt but car payment debt and credit card debt. They will never get ahead as the corporatization of home ownership results in wealth accumulation for corporations and the rich. Kamala needs to address this problem so that young people have a pathway to home ownership the way returning GIs from World War II did.

President Biden has already set up the American Climate Corps. This is the existential issue of our times. Young people who sign up for a two year stint in the American Climate Corps should get a no down payment pathway to American home ownership. I would like to see Kamala implement this in lieu of making this a perk of joining the military. There are already all sorts of perks for joining the military while hardly any for nonmilitary national service. There should be pathways for young people to succeed without joining the military. Right now you can get a free college education by joining the military. This perpetuates militaristic incentives to get ahead in this country. There are no such pathways for those who want to serve their country without joining the military. There should be. There should be a pathway to wealth creation and incentives for serving America by addressing the most important and impending issue of our time - climate change and environmental justice. We need important programs to put people to work in the environmental area and in return they should get a pathway to home ownership and wealth creation. Otherwise the US will become a neo medieval society with the majority of people enhancing the wealth of the already wealthy and living paycheck to paycheck with most of that paycheck going to paying rent and interest on debt.

Off the Top of My Head

According to Biden's BBB Plan, Buyers of Electric Vehicles Would Receive up to $12,500 in Tax Credits

by John Lawrence

So where is this incentive to buy electric vehicles now that gas (in CA) is about $6 a gallon? Now is the time when we need this subsidy, but, alas, the Democrats couldn't even stick together to pass this and other incentives and measures to get off fossil fuels. How about this as an incentive: preventing daily tornadoes in the heartland of the US? As extreme weather gets more extreme, Congress can't even pass programs to combat global warming and the consequent damage that's being done to people's lives and the economy in general. Not to mention the fact that major portions of the population will not be able to get property insurance which is happening right now and will only get worse. If you have a lot of brush around your house, you're an insurance liability. If you live in a flood plain, you're an insurance liability. We are told by people who know that we only have a few years to do something before we can expect catastrophic consequences from climate change and global warming. Yet we are taking our time getting off fossil fuels. There is even regret that we didn't go ahead with the Keystone pipeline.

The New York Times reported:

"In the coming decades, as global temperatures continue to rise, hundreds of millions of people could struggle against floods, deadly heat waves and water scarcity from severe drought, the report said. Mosquitoes carrying diseases like dengue and malaria will spread to new parts of the globe. Crop failures could become more widespread, putting families in places like Africa and Asia at far greater risk of hunger and malnutrition. People unable to adapt to the enormous environmental shifts will end up suffering unavoidable loss or fleeing their homes, creating dislocation on a global scale,[according to a recent UN report]."

We do know the things we need to be doing. It's just that we're not doing them or doing them at such a slow pace that we will still experience the worst effects of climate change. If you think the refugee problem is bad now, climate change will exacerbate and accelerate the refugee problem. People will be fleeing their homes and homelands when it becomes apparent that they can't make a living there. They will be coming to parts of the world where countries are wealthy enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Basically, that means that people will flee poor countries and attempt at all costs to enter rich countries. That's why the US, as the richest country in the world, should be going full speed ahead to transition away from fossil fuels and into a new era that consists of renewable energy production and more environment friendly lifestyles. Instead, Americans are determined to lead lifestyles of maximum consumption right up to the hilt of their financial resources and beyond in a last gasp of over consumption.

Common Dreams reported:

In the wake of a United Nations report that activists said showed the "bleak and brutal truth" about the climate emergency, a leading economist on Friday highlighted a step that supporters argue could be incredibly effective at combating the global crisis: nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Pollin, an economics professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and high gas prices exacerbated by Russia's war on Ukraine.

"If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC's findings seriously," Pollin wrote, "it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far, both within the U.S. and globally. Within the U.S., such measures should include at least putting on the table the idea of nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry."

Asserting that "at least in the U.S., the private oil companies stand as the single greatest obstacle to successfully implementing" a viable climate stabilization program, Pollin made the case that fossil fuel giants should not make any more money from wrecking the planet, nationalization would not be an unprecedented move in the United States, and doing so could help build clean energy infrastructure at the pace that scientists warn is necessary.

The expert proposed starting with "the federal government purchasing controlling ownership of at least the three dominant U.S. oil and gas corporations: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips."

"They are far larger and more powerful than all the U.S. coal companies combined, as well as all of the smaller U.S. oil and gas companies," he wrote. "The cost to the government to purchase majority ownership of these three oil giants would be about $420 billion at current stock market prices."

So for roughly half of the defense budget, the US taxpayers could own the oil industry and phase it out at the speed required to save the planet from the worst effects of global warming. Instead we're treated to the Big Oil CEO's defiance that they are not price gouging because prices are set by the world market. Does anyone question why prices have to be set by the world market? No. Obviously, the world market exists to serve the interests of the oil producers, not oil consumers. Maybe the US should get off the world market because we produce enough oil to meet all current consumer demands. So why do we even need the world market? The world market exists to serve the interests of the OPEC nations who won't even open their spigots in a time of crisis, and it exists to serve the interests of the western Big Oil corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell.

Americans would like to have one more blast of consumption rather than buckle down and do what's necessary to combat climate change, an effort that would be at least as great as the effort and sacrifice put forth to fight World War II. Billionaire's would rather blast off into space than use their money to fight climate change. Their lifestyles are major contributors to the emission of greenhouse gasses. They don't want to be told that they can't overconsume with numerous 27,000 square foot mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. That's the American Dream, or is it. It's soon going to turn into the American Nightmare but probably not for them. They have the resources to escape the worst effects of global warming. Instead the nightmare will be mostly visited on the least among us as well as randomly due to tornadoes, floods and fires.

Off the Top of My Head

Almost as Many Have Died During the Covid Pandemic as in All American Wars

by John Lawrence

Maybe we should have invested more in public health than we have in the military. Compared to the trillions spent on the military, only a pittance has been spent on public health, let alone on promoting peace in the world. 1.1 million have died in all American wars since the founding of the republic. About 927,000 and counting have died from the current pandemic even though a revolutionary mRNA vaccine is available. 675,000 died during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 sans vaccine. So many more people have died from pandemics in the US than have been killed in wars. Yet war and the preparations for war are pursued relentlessly while efforts for peace languish. This is not only dumb; it's sick. It goes to show that homo sapiens is one of the stupidest and least empathetic species that has ever evolved. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the human race is right on course fiddling while the earth burns due to climate change. We will continue to fiddle and equivocate playing one upsmanship with each other as the earth deteriorates into an uninhabitable planet. No wonder the billionaires are making plans to get off.

Of course the power structure doesn't really care what happens on planet earth after they die. They will miss by virtue of their own natural deaths the worst of it. They will have lived the American Dream while bequeathing to their grandchildren the American Nightmare. As we continue to pour billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are more concerned about the economy that we are about human survival and what sacrifices that will mean. In November, researchers at the Global Carbon Project estimated that global carbon-dioxide emissions from energy and industry rose 4.9 percent in 2021, after a 5.4 percent decline in 2020. China, India and the European Union all had major increases, suggesting that any climate effect from the pandemic was fleeting. So not even a worldwide pandemic can significantly alter the relentless pursuit of economic growth which produces mega tons of carbon dioxide. Residents of planet earth refuse to change their lifestyles and their aspirations for what they conceive to be a "better life."

In the US consumerism is force fed through advertising just like in France ducks are forced fed to produce foie gras. Facebook makes billions of dollars not selling a product but selling advertising. Amazon at least provides products and the service of delivering those products. The advertising industry is the equivalent of the forced feeding of ducks only the ducks are American consumers who would rather not change their lifestyles of accumulation even if it means that their grandchildren will die a miserable death on a burned out planet. Meanwhile, nations exacerbate tensions among each other and foment wars, the preparations for which cost trillions of dollars which, therefore, are not spent on climate mitigation.

Lifestyles not only of the rich but of the middle class would have to change if the earth is to survive climate change. The production of steel and concrete by current methods produce tons of carbon dioxide. The generation of electricity by coal and gas produces tons of carbon dioxide. Agriculture, mainly cow farts, produces tons of methane. As the earth warms sea levels rise, the Arctic thaws and even more methane is released. It's so anthropogenic! We would be better off going back to the horse and buggy days. The American fetish for progress has produced an ecological disaster. The American lifestyle is an environmental disaster. Meanwhile, the power structure in the US and elsewhere seems bound and determined to accelerate the process of environmental destruction while extreme weather events are passed off as "seen nothing like it but vowing to rebuild." That's the American can-do spirit!

Off the Top of My Head

Social Responsibility Was Not Written into the Constitution

by John Lawrence

The French demanded Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite in their revolutionary Constitution. Fraternite, social responsibility, was left out of the American Constitution. So now there are people who feel no social responsibility to get a vaccination so that they won't spread COVID to others, let alone protect themselves. A pandemic requires social cohesion, something that is unheard of in American society. Americans are extremely selfish and self-centered, something encouraged and exemplified by Republican Presidents like Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush and also by Ayn Rand and her advocates like Republican leader Paul Ryan and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Greenspan, who served 4 terms as Federal Reserve Chairman, was a devoted Ayn Rand fan. He even took a six foot high floral arrangement shaped as a dollar sign to her funeral.  Rand’s conception was to create an individualist morality. Rand took traditional Christian morality, which said it was good to act in the interest of others—not in your own selfish interest—and she flipped that. She said selfishness is a virtue, and the goal of life is to grow and develop as an individual, and that a moral social system supports the rights of the individual above all. One of her books was called "The Virtue of Selfishness."

Service to our fellow man has been redefined in military terms. You serve American society by joining the military and killing other people who are not Americans. There is no conception of serving American society by joining the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps or doing anything that helps the weakest and most vulnerable among us let alone to plant trees or do anything to forestall climate change and benefit the environment. This culture of militarism, as the only way to exhibit patriotism, is what led to the January 6th insurrection. Militarism promotes the waving of flags and jingoism of "we're number one." Not only is there no conception of service to our fellow Americans, there is no conception of service to our fellow man. There is only pride in domination over those who are not American and people who are suspect of being weak or not American like Barack Obama, for instance. Dominance and selfishness are considered to be paramount virtues. Ask Donald Trump. Being number 2 or 3 or whatever is seen as being weak. Being a loser is weakness personified.

Long before Ayn Rand developed her ideas, Friedrich Nietsche set out more or less the same philosophy. His was about "the emergence of the superman." Nietzsche’s idea of the superman and its religious implications, was an attack upon and a rejection of Christian religion. His attack on religious moral ideals, using the concept of the superman, sought to strip humanity/man of his religious nature. Nietzsche’s superman represents the highest principle of the development of humanity and the affirmation of man’s full potentialities. He posits the superman as a critique on Christian religion and the crisis of modernity. This is because, according to him, the Christian morality stifles the development, freedom and creativity of humanity/man, as well as making him dependent on faith. Consequently, he advocates for the total rejection and abolition of the Christian moral ideals in order to make way for the freedom of humanity/man and consequently the emergence of super-humanity. Both Hitler and Donald Trump (an Ayn Rand superfan) represented the superman that both Nietsche and Ayn Rand argued was the highest form of humanity. The January 6 insurrection illustrated how far some will go to place their superman in power. The antivaxxers represent how far some will go to maintain that they have no responsibility to their fellow man, only to themselves.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Biden's Goal of 50% Electric Vehicles by 2030 in Peril Because of American's Freedom of Choice

by John Lawrence

Fast forward to 2029 and we find ourselves in the situation that many Americans are insisting on purchasing gas fueled vehicles because of their freedom of choice. Even though the government has subsidized electric vehicles to the tune of $10,000 per vehicle, and electric vehicles outperform gas powered ones in every category, even though electric vehicles have more bells and whistles than the same identical gas powered one, Americans are insisting that their freedom of choice is more important than helping President Biden reach his goal of 50% electric vehicles on the road by 2030. Wolf Blitzer's son, Chip Blitzer  interviewed Joe Blow of Shrevesport, Louisiana. Blitzer: "Why do you want to purchase a gas powered vehicle when the electric one is cheaper and a better performer?" Blow: "My Daddy drove a Ford F-150 with an internal combustion engine which was the pride of America as did his Daddy before him. The internal combustion engine is what built this country. It's how we won every war we ever fought in. My Daddy was a roustabout in the oil fields and my family has a long history of fossil fuel products. You won't ever catch me in an electric vehicle as long as I have my freedom of choice."

President Biden is considering mandates to get gas powered cars and trucks off the road, but some southern Governors are balking at that. Governor P.T. Abernathy of Texas said this: "The Federal government is overstepping its bounds when it comes to telling us here in the south what kind of vehicles we can drive. I've always preferred a gas powered vehicle myself, and, as long as I'm Governor, I will let our citizens decide for themselves what kind of vehicle they want to drive. It's unAmerican to dictate to American citizens that they have to drive an electric vehicle. We also won't be following Federal government incentives to get people to move out of flood plains." Back in Shrevesport Mr. Blow had this to say. "I ain't moving out of my house even though it is in a flood plain. My Grandpappy built this house. We Blows have lived here for generations, and no Federal government is going to order me to move out of my house." It is notable that 2 years ago, FEMA gave Blow $350 K to rebuild his house after Hurricane Upsilon totally destroyed it. Yet Blow said at the time: "I've never seen anything like it before in my life, but I will rebuild. I'm not going anywhere. This is America."

We note that in blue states people are 90% compliant with Biden's goal. They are buying electric vehicles at a fast rate taking advantage of the generous government incentives in doing so. Red state Governors on the other hand are imploring their residents to support the oil and gas industry by buying gas powered vehicles making it less likely that Biden will reach his goal of 50% electric vehicles on the road by 2030. Despite the cleaner air that has come with more electric vehicles on the road not to mention helping in the effort to forestall and mitigate global warming, many in southern states primarily are insisting on their right to choose as Americans citizens. Ex-President Donald Trump said at a CPAC convention: "Global warming is a hoax. We have so many wonderful oil and gas resources in this country that we'll never have to import another barrel of oil. Yet these socialists like Biden want to cripple that industry destroying the livelihoods of red blooded Americans to feed their families." As a result of American hesitancy to go ahead and buy electric vehicles, Biden will probably not be able to reach his goal. One guy from Alabama said: "Have these electric vehicles even been FHA fully approved. I heard that they were just provisionally approved. When there is full FHA approval, then I might consider buying one. In the meantime I'll just stick with my F-150 with the American internal combustion engine, the engine that made America great. Don't tell anyone, but I take off that godforsaken catalytic converter every time I buy a new pickup. Internal combustion rules, baby! Let 'er rip!"

Off the Top of My Head

The Trouble With Belief Systems

by John Lawrence, March 28, 2021

Belief systems lead to cults. A cult can be defined as a group of people who all fervently believe the same things although there is no objective proof for any of their beliefs. People who believe Trump won the election are members of a cult. People who believe their religion is the only correct and true religion and everyone who does not accept their belief system is going to Hell are members of a cult. A lot of wars have been fought because members of one cult dehumanized members of another cult. The European wars of the 16th century were fought because Catholics and Protestants could not accept that there were people who did not have the same cult beliefs as they did. The 30 years war was a war between Protestants and Catholics. The Crusades were wars between Christians and Muslims. People who hold belief systems fervently cannot accept the fact that there are other people in the world who don't hold their same belief system.

There are some things that are unknowable, at least at this point in time, and they form fertile ground for some one or one to develop a belief system around. Charlatans and manipulators realize that there is money to be made by claiming to assuage peoples' anxieties. One of the biggest unknowables is what happens to us after we die. Another is is there a God or, if there is, is He a judgmental or a loving God? The Founding Fathers of the US, cognizant of the European wars of religion, were mainly Deists. They believed that God created the universe, but was not involved with it after that, the so-called "watchmaker God." Founders who fall into the category of Christian Deists include Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was more influenced by the reason-centred Enlightenment than either Adams or Washington. Jefferson also created his own version of the Bible. This Bible was focused only on Jesus, but none of his mystical works. It didn’t include major scenes like the resurrection or ascension to heaven, or miracles like turning water into wine or walking on water. Instead, Jefferson’s Bible focused on Jesus as a man of morals, a teacher whose truths were expressed without the help of miracles or the supernatural powers of God.

Because of our existential anxiety caused by not knowing what's going to happen to us after death or even in this life, belief systems have grown up and attracted adherents. Fervent belief systems are really cults as they exclude and dehumanize people with alternative beliefs. There is no objective proof, but people are willing to kill those who aren't members of their cult. This is from Britannica:

"Deists argued that human experience and rationality—rather than religious dogma and mystery—determine the validity of human beliefs. In his widely read The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine, the principal American exponent of Deism, called Christianity “a fable.” Paine, the protégé of Benjamin Franklin, denied “that the Almighty ever did communicate anything to man, by…speech,…language, or…vision.” Postulating a distant deity whom he called “Nature’s God” (a term also used in the Declaration of Independence), Paine declared in a “profession of faith”: I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and in endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.''"

The problem with the Trump "true believers" is that they have been sold a bill of goods by those who shamelessly have made money off of feeding this cult a bunch of lies. These people have been conditioned by means of their religion to have a certain set of beliefs which they are willing to fight over. These beliefs coincide with a way of life predicated on an American version of history and an American narrative in which America is a shining city on a hill and a beacon of veracity and truth to the rest of the world. They believe in an America also which is fundamentally white like it's always been in their minds, but that's not the reality any more. American history is not all that noble. Indians were robbed of their lands and Africans were brought here and used as slaves. After they were freed, supposedly, Jim Crow laws made sure that they remained second class citizens. So there is  clash of belief systems. There are those who think the great and noble sentiments expressed by our Founding Fathers should not apply to everyone equally and those who point out the hypocrisy of not doing so.

The problem really is with belief systems which turn into cults. The way forward is really the one expressed by Rodney King: "Can't we all just get along?" With deference to Mission Impossible: your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to make the world a better place for this and future generations without regard to belief systems or ideology. Your vaunted way of life, as perceived to have existed in the past, is irrelevant.

Three Major Threats to Life on Earth That We Must Address in 2021

January 6, 2021

by Noam Chomsky – Vijay Prashad

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Pulp Mills on a December night, Wauna, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Large parts of the world—outside of China and a few other countries—face a runaway virus, which has not been stopped because of criminal incompetence by governments. That these governments in wealthy countries cynically set aside the basic scientific protocols released by the World Health Organization and by scientific organizations reveals their malicious practice. Anything less than focused attention to managing the virus by testing, contact tracing, and isolation—and if this does not suffice, then imposing a temporary lockdown—is foolhardy. It is equally distressing that these richer countries have pursued a policy of “vaccine nationalism” by stockpiling vaccine candidates rather than a policy for the creation of a “people’s vaccine.” For the sake of humanity, it would be prudent to suspend intellectual property rules and develop a procedure to create universal vaccines for all people.

Although the pandemic is the principal issue on all of our minds, other major issues threaten the longevity of our species and of our planet. These include:

Nuclear Annihilation

In January 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, too close for comfort. The clock, created two years after the first atomic weapons were developed in 1945, is evaluated annually by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, who decide whether to move the minute hand or keep it in place. By the time they set the clock again, it may well be closer to annihilation. Already limited arms control treaties are being shredded as the major powers sit on close to 13,500 nuclear weapons (more than 90 percent of which are held by Russia and the United States alone). The yield of these weapons could easily make this planet even more uninhabitable. The United States Navy has already deployed low-yield tactical W76-2 nuclear warheads. Immediate moves toward nuclear disarmament must be forced onto the world’s agenda. Hiroshima Day, commemorated each year on August 6, must become a more robust day of contemplation and protest.

Climate Catastrophe

A scientific paper published in 2018 came with a startling headline: “Most atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century because of sea-level rise exacerbating wave-driven flooding.” The authors found that atolls from the Seychelles to the Marshall Islands are liable to vanish. A 2019 United Nations (UN) report estimated that 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. Add to this the catastrophic wildfires and the severe bleaching of the coral reefs and it is clear that we no longer need to linger over clichés about one thing or another being a canary in the coal mine of climate catastrophe; the danger is not in the future, but in the present. It is essential for major powers—who utterly fail to shift from fossil fuels—to commit to the “common but differentiated responsibilities” approach established at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. It is telling that countries such as Jamaica and Mongolia updated their climate plans to the UN before the end of 2020—as mandated by the Paris Agreement—even though these countries produce a tiny fraction of global carbon emissions. The funds that were committed to developing countries for their participation in the process have virtually dried up while external debt has ballooned. This shows a lack of basic seriousness from the “international community.”

Neoliberal Destruction of the Social Contract

Countries in North America and Europe have eviscerated their public function as the state has been turned over to the profiteers and civil society has been commodified by private foundations. This means that the avenues for social transformation in these parts of the world have been grotesquely hampered. Terrible social inequality is the result of the relative political weakness of the working class. It is this weakness that enables the billionaires to set policies that cause hunger rates to rise. Countries should not be judged by the words written in their constitutions but by their annual budgets; the U.S., for example, spends almost $1 trillion (if you add the estimated intelligence budget) on its war machine, while it spends a fraction of this on the public good (such as on health care, something evident during the pandemic). The foreign policies of Western countries seem to be well lubricated by arms deals: the United Arab Emirates and Morocco agreed to recognize Israel on the condition that they could purchase $23 billion and $1 billion worth of U.S.-made weapons, respectively. The rights of the Palestinians, the Sahrawi, and the Yemeni people did not factor into these deals. The use of illegal sanctions by the United States against 30 countries including Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela has become a normal part of life, even during the COVID-19 public health crisis. It is a failure of the political system when the populations in the capitalist bloc are unable to force their governments—which are in many ways democratic in name only—to take a global perspective regarding this emergency. Rising rates of hunger reveal that the struggle for survival is the horizon for billions of people on the planet (all this while China is able to eradicate absolute poverty and largely eliminate hunger).

Nuclear annihilation and extinction by climate catastrophe are twin threats to the planet. Meanwhile, for victims of the neoliberal assault that has plagued the past generation, the short-term problems of sustaining their mere existence displace fundamental questions about the fate of our children and grandchildren.

Global problems of this scale require global cooperation. Pressured by the Third World states in the 1960s, the major powers agreed to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968, although they rejected the deeply important Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order of 1974. The balance of forces available to drive such a class agenda on the international stage is no longer there; political dynamics in the countries of the West, in particular, but also in the larger states of the developing world (such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa) are necessary to change the character of the governments. A robust internationalism is necessary to pay adequate and immediate attention to the perils of extinction: extinction by nuclear war, by climate catastrophe, and by social collapse. The tasks ahead are daunting, and they cannot be deferred.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Noam Chomsky is a legendary linguist, philosopher, and political activist. He is the laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. His most recent book is Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.  

Off the Top of My Head

Redefining the American Dream

by John Lawrence

I've heard a lot about the American Dream from the Republican convention. Put simply, the American Dream is having more stuff than your parents had. It's the freedom to accumulate wealth unconditionally. That's their definition of freedom. If I hear the phrase 'hard work and determination' one more time, I'm going to puke. By the way they can retire the words 'kitchen table' from politics as well. Conservatives maintain that equality is about equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Supposedly everyone starts the race at the same starting line, but does everyone? Do black people who have suffered from the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and redlining start from the same starting line? Even in golf they give handicaps to equalize the chances for all players regardless of ability. The point is that never does everyone start from the same starting line.

Take my sister for example. She was born before they measured the oxygen level of the baby in utero. The doctor wasn't there, and the nurse kept telling my mother to hold the baby back. As a result my sister was born with severe brain damage and was stuck with the mental capacity of a one year old her entire life. She never learned to talk or take any responsibility for herself. She needed caregivers her entire life and those caregivers primarily were my mother and father. Lucky for her that at least she was born into a family that had the capacity to love and take care of her.

The American Dream as defined by Republicans is unsustainable. It is based on unlimited consumption which is killing our planet. We cannot continue to consume without limitation and have a healthy planet. The planet's resources are not unlimited. We cannot continue to consume fossil fuels without leading to a hell on earth. I think California wildfires and Hurricane Laura are proving that today. Unlimited fossil fuel production, as advocated by Republicans, is killing us. Taking away regulations that allow corporations to pollute our air and waterways freely is killing us while it maximizes profits. The Democratic version of the American Dream - a well paying job, a decent house in a decent neighborhood, medical care, educational opportunities and a dignified old age - is much more sustainable. Republicans cater to those among us that are favored by nature, that are favored by not having any physical or mental vulnerabilities, that are favored by access to capital, that are favored by living in neighborhoods having the best schools. Republicans are always pushing charter schools. That's because the funding for public schools comes from the tax base in the neighborhood where the school is located. if a school is in a poor neighborhood, the tax base is poor with the result that the school is poor. It's as simple as that. Change the way schools are funded so that schools in poor neighborhoods have the same resources as schools in rich neighborhoods, and that advantage for rich kids goes away. No need for privatized charter schools which, by the way, still want public money.

So where at the Republican convention were the real Republican constituents.Their real constituents are not truck drivers, first responders and nurses. Their real constituents are hedge fund managers, bankers and billionaires. Sure they give hypocritical lip service to the 'hard working middle class', but they are not about the middle class. Did Jamie Diamond, CEO of JPMorgan Chase and billionaire, speak? Did hedge fund manager of the Blackstone group, Stephen Schwarzman, worth over $118 billion, did he speak? No, the Republicans pandered to Joe SixPack and never mentioned the vast gap between the Lloyd Blankfeins (billionaire chairman of Goldman Sachs) and the Ray Dalios (Bridgewater Associates - salary $2 billion) and the rest of us. But these are the real constituents of the Republican Party. Of course they have their base of white supremicists as well. So where was the CEO of Lockheed Martin, Marillyn Hewson with a salary of $30 million? Where are the defense contractors who benefit from a bloated defense budget 3 times bigger than China's? Instead, they celebrated the fact that Trump added $54 billion to it, an amount almost as large as Russia's entire defense budget.

So what is a sustainable American Dream. It's one devoid of fossil fuels. It's one where there's no drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. It's one of renewable energy. It's one that recognizes the threat of global warming. It's one that recognizes the need for Medicare for All or equivalent that covers everyone. It's one that recognizes the need to rebuild American infrastructure. It's one that recognizes the need to raise the wages of essential workers to a living wage. It's one that needs to pay caregivers. It's one that recognizes the need to deal with economic inequality by taxing the rich and using the money to fund free education from pre-K through graduate school without students having to go into a lot of debt. It's one that recognizes the responsibility to deal with the 40% of the world's population in dire poverty, without even a functioning sanitation system, especially the 60 million refugees that the US is responsible for creating so that they too can have a Dream. In short it's one that recognizes the role of Americans not simply as individual wealth creators and accumulators for themselves as individuals, but one in which we all endeavor to make the world a habitable place for all human beings now and in the future.

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

The Monument

by John Lawrence, July 8, 2020

Perhaps replacing a statue of George Washington with a statue of Crispus Attucks, who was a black man and the first casualty of the Revolutionary War, would be an appropriate recognition of American history. Crispus Attucks (c.1723 – March 5, 1770) was an American stevedore of African and Native American descent, widely regarded as the first person killed in the Boston Massacre and thus the first American killed in the American Revolution. The Boston Massacre was a confrontation on March 5, 1770 in which British soldiers shot and killed several people while being harassed by a mob in Boston. Attucks was born in Framingham, Massachusetts. Town histories of Framingham written in 1847 and 1887 describe him as a slave of Deacon William Brown, though it is unclear whether Brown was his original owner. In 1750 Brown advertised for the return of a runaway slave named Crispas.

My own American history on one side of my family goes back to about 1650 when Harman Hendricks Rosenkrans arrived from Bergen, Norway. A couple generations later Col. John B Rosenkrans was able to acquire a 1000 acre plantation in the Walpack area of Sussex County, NJ, on which he had African American and Indian slaves. He fought in the French and American War and later in the Revolutionary War. There is a monument to him in Sussex County which consists of a big boulder on which is a metal plaque near the Old Mine Road. I have never been able to find it, but, if anyone wants to topple it because Rosenkrans was a slaveholder, it would be pretty hard to do. Rosenkrans' life is well documented and his role in American history is as well. The New Jersey Society of the Sons of the American Revolution would probably be upset if it were to be toppled, however.

My American ancestors have probably been in this country for 10 generations. That means that I have about 1000 direct American ancestors of whom only one was a slave holder to my knowledge. At least he was an equal opportunity slave holder keeping Native Americans and African Americans as well. I don't even know who most of my American ancestors even are. I must have thousands of cousins, all but a handful, I know nothing of. My Grandmother, Alice Clark, born Alice Rosenkrans, was in the direct line of Col. Rosenkrans so I would be too. So would be my Grandchildren who are of African American as well as European American descent. So the American situation is very complicated. The plot thickens.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation's third President, is a case in point. He had six children with his wife, Martha, but only two survived to adulthood. Martha Jefferson died a few months after giving birth in 1782, and Jefferson's daughters, and later his grandchildren, became the focus of his domestic life supposedly. Jefferson also fathered six children with his slave Sally Hemings.

According to Wikipedia:

Jefferson became a widower at age 39 in 1782. He never remarried and died in 1826. Sally Hemings was his much younger slave and a likely half-sister of his wife. She accompanied his daughter Maria to France, where they are believed to have started a sexual relationship, and returned with him to Monticello. Most historians now believe that Jefferson had a relationship with Sally Hemings that lasted nearly four decades, until his death, and that Jefferson fathered her six children.

Four of Hemings' children survived to adulthood. In the antebellum period, hers would have been called a "shadow family". Sally Hemings was also the child of a shadow family. Historians believe her father to be John Wayles, Jefferson's father-in-law, who as a widower had a 12-year liaison with his mulatto slave Betty Hemings and fathered six children with her. These children had three-quarters European, one-quarter African ancestry, and were, half-siblings to Jefferson's wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. Sally Hemings is the youngest child of this shadow family. Issac Jefferson described Sally as "mighty near white ... very handsome, long straight hair down her back."

Of the four Hemings children who survived to adulthood: William Beverley, Harriet, Madison and Eston Hemings—all but Madison Hemings eventually identified as white and lived as adults in white communities. Under the Virginia law of partus sequitur ventrem, because Sally Hemings was a slave, her children were also born enslaved. But the children were seven-eighths European, one-eighth African by ancestry. If free, they would have been considered legally white in Virginia of the time.

Oh what tangled webs we weave. Thankfully, the issue of slavery has finally been settled. DNA analysis proved that Jefferson had six children with Sally Hemings who was half black or, evidently much less than half. Jefferson probably has more descendants who have African American blood than those that don't. The same probably holds true for many other slaveholders. So America is a composite of many races and combinations of races.

Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." At the time of this writing it was more wishful thinking than anything else. Jefferson goes on: "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Jefferson said it best - whenever government is destructive of the ends of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, it is the Right of the People to alter it or abolish it and replace it with a government that is more conducive to their Safety and Happiness. Is the present American government conducive to the most Happiness for most of the people? I doubt it. The French Revolution enshrined "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite". As Americans we've left out entirely "Fraternite" or the notion that "we're all in this together." Instead we've enshrined the notion "every person for themself." Egalite also has been given a very twisted definition. Perhaps we should go back to the original writings of the French philosophes who inspired both revolutions.

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

During WW II, Cars and Gas Were Rationed. Would the American People Accept Such Sacrifices in the War on Global Warming?

by John Lawrence, March 10, 2020

Evidently not. Despite warnings that we have less than 10 years to do something before there is runaway global warming, nothing much has been done. Yet the coronavirus has set the world's consciousness on fire in just a few short weeks. Why hasn't global warming gotten the world so up in arms? During WW II everybody had a job; everybody worked, yet there were government mandated limits on consumption. All kinds of things were rationed especially cars and gas. Yet economic activity expanded due to ramping up the war effort. Today the economy is going into a tailspin because large crowds have been proscribed. All the money that has been added to GDP by music events and professional athletics has gone bye-bye. This is not necessarily a bad thing because people might be better off staying home and reading a good book rather than being out at a sporting event. I know. I know this is a very unpopular opinion.

The point is that, during WW II people had the basic necessities, and everyone was employed. They just couldn't have the icing on the cake until after the war when rationing was lifted. Then the economy boomed. Perhaps there is a lesson here for how to mobilize a society to get a handle on global warming.  In the few short weeks that government spokesmen have decried cruise ship and airplane travel, green house gas emissions (GHGs) have actually decreased. If the government proscribed these and other activities such as automobile travel (think gas rationing), GHGs would decrease even more rapidly. Then, if the government went on an investment spree in terms of renewable energy the way it did on planes and battleships during WWII, there would be full employment. People would just be limited temporarily until this war is won in how they could actually spend their money just like in WWII.

Then after a totally green economy is achieved fueled by green renewable energy, the barriers on spending money would be lifted. Could this even work? Some authors don't think so. William Greider writes in "Secrets of the Temple":

World War II was a model of the possible. In theory, if a national consensus of purpose developed, if people would accept temporary limits on their economic choices as well as regulatory controls on wages and prices, the nation could literally rebuild itself, almost overnight. With the right choices, America could practically double the productive capacity of its economy and advance innovation and dramatically multiply new wealth and incomes. These economic choices, however, were really political questions: who would take the sacrifices and who would take the rewards? Whose consumption would be restrained and whose production would be encouraged. All this consigned extraordinary powers to government, perhaps tolerable only in war. No one, including the most ardent Keynesian planners, has ever figured out how to recreate a comparable combination of creative sacrifices in peacetime or how to sell it to a free society.

And that, dear reader is the crux of the matter. How do you sell the necessary war time effort to combat global warming to a free society? Sure the coronavirus has had the salutary effect of decreasing cruise ship and airplane travel with the concomitant decrease in GHG emissions. At the same time the stock market has gone into a tailspin. If the same kind of effort were made in behalf of global warming, we could expect the stock market to go into the mother of all tailspins. Is it worth it or should we consign future generations to the fate of runaway global warming and an uninhabitable planet?

Abraham Maslow wrote a book, "Towards a Psychology of Being" in which he identified a pyramid of needs starting with D-needs. D-needs are the basic needs of food, air, water, housing and clothing. You might throw in medical care.Then, as you ascend the pyramid, higher order needs are revealed once the lower order needs are met. At the top he identified B-needs or self-actualization which might mean developing all your latent higher order capacities such as becoming a great musician. What seems to me to have happened though is that society has intervened in this process to impose superfluous needs on people. Let's call them S-needs. These needs have to do with all the materialistic consumption that a commercial society imposes or tries to impose on people through advertising so that Maslow's higher order needs are really short-circuited. That's why I say that staying home and reading a good book might be more beneficial in and of itself than attending  a professional sporting event in addition to protecting one from the coronavirus.

What an enlightened society would do to combat global warming is exactly what America did during WW II. D-needs were well satisfied due to a full employment society in which certain kinds of consumption were discouraged while making sure that everyone was fed, clothed, housed and had adequate medical treatment. Could in Greider's words a " national consensus of purpose develop" in which people felt it was more important to delay certain kinds of consumption in order to develop the green infrastructure needed to get global warming under control? The world needs America's leadership on this because America is largely responsible for the GHGs already in the atmosphere, and, if America will not have a sense of urgency, why should any other nation which is just starting to develop a consumer culture?

Will Americans Sacrifice to Save the Planet from Global Warming?

by John Lawrence, January 21, 2020

President Kennedy famously said,"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." That was in 1961. 59 years later we are faced with a problem - global warming - that can't be solved just by Americans taking action within America. We must now ask, "What can you do for your planet?" Global warming makes nationalistic boundaries irrelevant. We must now think of the planet as a whole and come up with global solutions. We are all related, and we are all connected whether we like it or not. We must give up old rivalries, animosities and lifestyles. Will Americans sacrifice their consumerist lifestyles to save the planet for future generations? Don't bet on it.

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter gave a speech asking for Americans to give up their consumerist lifestyles.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we have discovered that owning things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We have learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

Carter put solar panels on the White House. When Ronald Reagan was elected, he promptly took them down. Global warming was not on either of their radars in those days, but those symbolic acts characterize the two parties' attitudes towards global warming to this day. The Democrats believe the scientists and believe we must do something about global warming post haste. Republicans, and Trump in particular, are global warming deniers. Ronald Reagan delivered the following quote: "Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards for man-made sources." It goes to show his ignorance on the matter. He wanted Americans to have more material goods, not less. "They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where — because of our past excesses — it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don't believe that." His dreams were all involved with material accumulation, of course.

George W Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks was "go out and shop!" Time magazine wrote:

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush didn't call for sacrifice. He called for shopping. "Get down to Disney World in Florida," he said. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Taken on its own, this wasn't such a horrible sentiment. But Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich has made a convincing case that it was part of a broader pattern of encouraging financial irresponsibility. "Bush seems to have calculated — cynically but correctly — that prolonging the credit-fueled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as Commander in Chief from becoming more than a nuisance," Bacevich wrote in the Washington Post in October. Now we're paying the bill.

So the issue of global warming does call for sacrifice. It calls for sacrificing gas guzzlers and instead driving hybrid or full electric cars or taking public mass transpostation. It calls for eating less meat because the factory farm production of cows pollutes the planet compared to eating the same grains that are first run through a cow. It calls for a less consumerist lifestyle, reusing plastic bags and getting away from one use items. It calls for recycling as much waste as possible. It calls for cutting back on air travel and jet fuel pollution. It calls for working with people in the rest of the world, instead of trying to control them, for a common cause and common purpose. It means cutting back on the world's worst polluter - the US military.

All of the measures that need to be taken call for a less consumerist society instead of a using it once and throwing it away society. It calls for young people to join the Peace Corps, a green oriented Peace Corps, instead of a polluting military. It calls for solutions to the problem of waste production by young entrepreneurs. It calls for replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and doing this with a sense of urgency because we don't have much time left to get it right. The Green New Deal encompasses all these concerns. Ramping up this effort must be undertaken with the urgency manifested in the buildup for World War II. All of this will decrease economic activity as we've known it because less things will be bought and sold and more will be reused. We must replace a throw away society with a sustainable society for the future whatever sacrifices in profits and business activity must be made.

Off the Top of My Head

In America the Majority Rules and Devil Take the Hindmost

by John Lawrence

This is a partial rebuttal of Frank Thomas' article today. I agree with Frank totally, but I'm going to act as devil's advocate. Articles have been written about how 40% of Americans couldn't afford a $400. emergency without borrowing the money or selling something. I hasten to point out that that statistic implies that 60% of Americans could afford a $400. emergency and 60% represents a majority of Americans. America is a democracy not by, of and for the people as Frank says, but a majority in the sense that the majority rules and the winners take all. It doesn't matter that 40% don't have a roof over their heads or can't put food on the table if it comes to that. If 60% are relatively well off, Trump will win the next election.

Data from Mastercard SpendingPulse shows that U.S. retail sales grew by 3.4% this holiday season, with online shopping rising by 18.8% over 2018. If there is such great inequality in the US with the implication being that Americans are faring so poorly, how do you account for this? How come year upon year Americans are spending more money on Christmas? Somebody must have money to spend, and, since the US' GDP is 70% based on consumer spending, well, it seems that the majority of Americans has the money to spend. Sure not everyone is well off. 500,000 people are homeless, but Republicans don't care about a minority of people who can't share in the American dream. As long as 60% can, that represents a majority, and in American politics the majority rules.

This is what Democrats don't get. Americans don't care how wealthy Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are. They don't care that 3 Americans own as much wealth as the bottom half of Americans. They only care that the top half plus one (a majority) has the money to spend to live a decent consumer oriented life filled with the latest techno gadgets and other goodies. Do Americans care that some Americans go bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills? No, as long as they, the majority, don't have any such problems. If they come down with some horrible illness that bankrupts them, then all of a sudden they will care, but, until they do, they will be happily in the majority of Trump voters who think America is doing just fine.

However, there are a few choke points at which the majority of Americans will join the minority demanding change. The main two are the stock market and a major war. Roughly one half of Americans are invested in the stock market through their 401k plans. This means that their wealth and future wealth is dependent on the stock market. Steve Vernon, a researcher at the Stanford Center on Longevity, points out in a 2018 report: “This survey shows that roughly half of households have access to a work-based plan — and so that half is more likely to be ‘the haves’ and the people who don’t have a work-based plan are more likely to be ‘the have nots.’” Exactly. Half of Americans, a veritable majority, have done very well as the stock market has exploded going from 10, 428 in 2009 to 28, 538 in 2019. That represents a pretty good accumulation of wealth for a majority of Americans. Not as much as Jeff Bezos has, to be sure, but better perhaps than their parents had.

So.... what if the stock market crashed as it did in 2008 and as it has done many times before. All of a sudden the majority of Americans are affected by one sudden cataclysmic event. A major war could have the same effect, and with a nutcase at the helm, it's not a foregone conclusion that a major war won't happen, and, as Trump says, "It will be over very quickly." Maybe so, but that would probably facilitate a major upheaval of the global monetary system and a crash in the stock market. The global monetary system is already under much stress as sanctions have been used to weaponize the dollar. Dedollarization proceeds at a great pace, and at some point, this will crack the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Then all bets are off for increased Christmas sales.

There are other potential choke points that are on the horizon as well. Student loan debt is now at $1.5 trillion. This mainly affects young people as does the global warming problem. If enough young people see their future as excluding them from the American Dream, they will eventually rebel en masse as young people are rebelling all over the world. But so far the number of Americans affected by climate change - those who have lost their homes to wildfires or floods or seen their insurance coverage skyrocket or be denied altogether -  are very much in the minority. And student loan debt is being borne very stoically ... so far.

America is a majoritarian society. That's what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren don't get. It is also a "devil take the hindmost" society. According to Grammarist: "Devil take the hindmost is a phrase that describes a situation in which someone thinks only of himself and his own interests, leaving others to deal with their own fates. Hindmost is an adjective that describes the person who is the furthest from the front or the one who is in the back of a line or group. The idea behind the meaning of the saying devil take the hindmost is of a group of people being pursued by the devil. The people who take care of themselves and run away with no thought about the others who may be slower or lagging behind, will be safe. It is believed that devil take the hindmost was a popular proverb during the 1500s."

This is a perfect description of American culture. Far from "we are all in this together" as Frank suggests we should be, Americans are all out for themselves, and, as long, as the majority are buying more and more Christmas gifts, year upon year, the majority of Americans will have a surfeit of stuff and they won't care how rich the wealthy get compared to themselves nor will they care how many suffer from homelessness or go bankrupt from medical bills.

Off the Top of My Head

Gross Domestic Product is Not a Good Measure of Economic Health Any More

by John Lawrence, November 26, 2019

Trying to maximize GDP is what's destroying the environment and will kill planet earth from global warming. Capitalism is insistent on growing the economy. Wall Street insists on short term growth or your corporation will be downrated. The only valid criterion is stock market value and return to shareholders. This mentality supports pollution, resource depletion, greenhouse gas emissions and increasing inequality. What is needed is an economy which values the well being of all people and a respect for the health of the planet rather than the depletion thereof. Growth in and of itself is not what's needed; steady state sustainability is much more important in this stage of human evolution. The unlimited despoiling of the environment and production of unrecyclable and unremitting waste can no longer be acceptable.

GDP does NOT measure: 1. health, 2. infant mortality, 3. morbidity, 4. suicide rates, 5. crime, 6. poverty,
7. environmental health/decay and destruction of the natural environment, 8. infrastructure such as highways and bridges, 9. family breakdown, 10. loss of leisure time, 11. cost of commuting to work, 12. lack of civility in communities, 13. lack of concern for future generations, 14. income gap (women/men; poor/wealthy)

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) attempts to shift the prevailing definition of progress from economic growth to people's sense of quality of their lives. The GPI assigns value to the life-sustaining functions of households, communities and the natural environment so that the destruction of these, and their replacement with commoditized substitutes, no longer appears as growth and gain. Quality of life has deteriorated at an accelerating rate since 1970 - the GPI went down as the GDP went up in the US.

Insistence on "the American Way of Life" is insistence that things will remain the same even as extreme weather events become more and more common and even though many areas of the earth will become uninhabitable within a very short time. This will lead to mass migrations and more war as nations that are inhabitable fight to keep the migrants out. Consumption is 70% of GDP, and increased consumption is what is driving global warming. If the US and other mass consumption cultures cannot find a way to bring into being a sustainable economy which is environmentally viable, global warming which is directly tied to the pursuit of increased GDP will make the generation which will leave the earth within the next few years, namely the baby boomers, the last generation to enjoy "the American Way of Life."

Despite warnings from scientists and activists, global greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing according to a new UN report with the US and China being the chief culprits. "There is no sign of [greenhouse gas] emissions peaking in the next few years," the authors write. Every year that emissions continue to increase "means that deeper and faster cuts will be required" to keep Earth from warming more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

The American Dream Is Alive and Well—in China

by Ellen Brown

Posted on June 14, 2019 from Web of Debt blog

Home ownership has been called “the quintessential American dream.” Yet today less than 65% of American homes are owner occupied, and more than 50% of the equity in those homes is owned by the banks. Compare China, where, despite facing one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, a whopping 90% of families can afford to own their homes.

Over the last decade, American wages have stagnated and U.S. productivity has consistently been outpaced by China’s. The U.S. government has responded by engaging in a trade war and imposing stiff tariffs in order to penalize China for what the White House deems unfair trade practices. China’s industries are said to be propped up by the state and to have significantly lower labor costs, allowing them to dump cheap products on the U.S. market, causing prices to fall and forcing U.S. companies out of business. The message to middle America is that Chinese labor costs are low because their workers are being exploited in slave-like conditions at poverty-level wages.

But if that’s true, how is it that the great majority of Chinese families own homes? According to a March 2016 article in Forbes:

… 90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other liens. On top of this, north of 20% of urban households own more than one home.

Due to their communist legacy, what Chinese buyers get for their money is not actually ownership in perpetuity but a long-term leasehold, and the quality of the construction may be poor. But the question posed here is, how can Chinese families afford the price tag for these homes, in a country where the average income is only one-seventh that in the United States?

The Misleading Disparity Between U.S. and Chinese Incomes

Some commentators explain the phenomenon by pointing to cultural differences. The Chinese are inveterate savers, with household savings rates that are more than double those in the U.S.; and they devote as much as 74% of their money to housing. Under China’s earlier one-child policy, many families had only one heir, who tended to be male; and home ownership was a requirement to score a wife. Families would therefore pool their resources to make sure their sole heir was equipped for the competition. Homes would be purchased either with large down payments or without financing at all. Financing through banks at compound interest rates doubles the cost of a typical mortgage, so sidestepping the banks cuts the cost of housing in half.

Those factors alone, however, cannot explain the difference in home ownership rates between the two countries. The average middle-class U.S. family could not afford to buy a home outright for their oldest heir even if they did pool their money. Americans would be savers if they could, but they have other bills to pay. And therein lies a major difference between Chinese and American family wealth: In China, the cost of living is significantly lower. The Chinese government subsidizes not only its industries but its families—with educational, medical and transportation subsidies.

According to a 2017 HSBC fact sheet, 70% of Chinese millennials (ages 19 to 36) already own their own homes. American young people cannot afford to buy homes because they are saddled with student debt, a millstone that now averages $37,000 per student and will be carried an average of 20 years before it is paid off. A recent survey found that 80% of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck. Another found that 60% of U.S. millennials could not come up with $500 to cover their tax bills.

In China, by contrast, student debt is virtually nonexistent. Heavy government subsidies have made higher education cheap enough that students can work their way through college with a part-time job. Health care is also subsidized by the government, with a state-run health insurance program similar to Canada’s. The program doesn’t cover everything, but medical costs are still substantially lower than in the U.S. Public transportation, too, is quite affordable in China, and it is fast, efficient and ubiquitous.

The disparity in incomes between American and Chinese workers is misleading for other reasons. The “average” income includes the very rich along with the poor; in the U.S., the gap between those two classes is greater than in China. The oversize incomes at the top pull the average up.

Even worse, however, is the disparity in debt levels, which pulls disposable income down. A survey after the 2008-09 credit crisis found that household debt in the U.S. was 136% of household income, compared with only 17% for the Chinese.

Another notable difference is that 70% of Chinese family wealth comes not from salaries but from home ownership itself. Under communism, all real property was owned by the state. When Deng Xiaoping opened the market to private ownership, families had an opportunity to get a home on reasonable terms; and as new homes were built they traded up, building the family asset base.

Deng’s market liberalization also gave families an income boost by allowing them to become entrepreneurs. New family-owned businesses sprang up, aided by affordable loans. Cheap credit from state-owned banks subsidized state-affiliated industries as well.

“Quantitative Easing With Chinese Characteristics”

All this was done with the help of China’s federal government, which in recent decades has pumped massive amounts of economic stimulus into the economy. Unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, which went straight into big bank reserve accounts, the Chinese stimulus has generated new money for productive purposes, including local business development and infrastructure. Sometimes called “qualitative easing,” this “quantitative easing with Chinese characteristics” has meant more jobs, more GDP and more money available to spend, which in turn improves quality of life.

The Chinese government has done this without amassing a crippling federal debt or triggering runaway inflation. In the last 20 years, its M2 money supply has grown from just over 10 trillion yuan to 180 trillion yuan ($11.6T), a nearly 1800% increase. Yet the inflation rate of its Consumer Price Index (CPI) has remained low. In February of this year, it was just 1.5%. In May it rose to 2.7% due to an outbreak of swine fever, which drove pork prices up; but this was a response to shortages, not to an increase in the money supply. Radically increasing the money supply has not driven consumer prices up because GDP has increased at an even faster rate. Supply and demand have risen together, keeping consumer prices low.

Real estate prices, on the other hand, have skyrocketed 325% in the last two decades, fueled by a Chinese shadow banking system that is largely beyond regulatory control. Pundits warn that China’s housing is in an unsustainable bubble that will pop, but the Chinese housing market is still more stable than the U.S. subprime market before 2008, with its “no-doc no-down” loans. Chinese buyers typically put 40 to 50% down on their homes, and the demand for houses remains high. The central bank is also taking steps to cool the market, by targeting credit so that it is steered away from real estate and other existing assets and toward newly-produced goods and services.

That central bank intervention illustrates another difference between Chinese-style qualitative easing and Western-style QE. The People’s Bank of China is not trying to improve banking sector liquidity so that banks can make more loans. Chinese economists say they don’t need that form of QE. China’s banks are already lending, and the central bank has plenty of room to manipulate interest rates and control the money supply. China’s central bank is directing credit into the local economy because it doesn’t trust the private financial market to allocate credit where local markets need it. True to its name, the People’s Bank of China seems actually to be a people’s bank, geared to serving the economy and the public rather than just the banks themselves.

Time for More QE?

 In early April, President Trump said in one of his many criticisms of the U.S.  central bank that he thought the Fed should be doing more quantitative easing (expanding the money supply) rather than quantitative tightening (shrinking the money supply). Commentators were left scratching their heads, because the official U.S. unemployment rate is considered to be low. But more QE could be a good idea if it were done as Chinese-style qualitative easing. A form of monetary expansion that would allow Congress to relieve medical and educational costs, grant cheap credit to states to upgrade their roads and mass transit, and support local businesses could go a long way toward making American workers competitive with Chinese workers.

Unlike the U.S. government, the Chinese government supports its workers and its industries. Rather than penalizing China for that “unfair” trade practice, perhaps the U.S. government should try doing the same. China’s legacy is socialist, and after opening to international trade it has continued to serve the collective good, particularly of its workers. Meanwhile, the U.S. model has been regressing into feudalism, with workers driven into slave-like conditions through debt. In the 21st century, it is time to upgrade our economic model from one of feudal exploitation to a cooperative democracy that recognizes the needs, contributions and inalienable rights of all participants.

___________________________

This article was first published on Truthdig.org. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. Her latest book is Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age, published by the Democracy Collaborative. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

The Myth of the Rugged Individual

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

The American dream promises that anyone can make it if they work hard enough and play by the rules. Anyone can make it by pulling themselves up by their “bootstraps.” 

Baloney.

The truth is: In America today, your life chances depend largely on how you started – where you grew up and how much your parents earned.

Everything else – whether you attend college, your chances of landing a well-paying job, even your health – hinges on this start. 

So as inequality of income and wealth has widened – especially along the lines of race and gender – American children born into poverty have less chance of making it. While 90% of children born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents, today only half of all American adults earn more than their parents did. 

And children born to the top 10 percent of earners are typically on track to make three times more income as adults than the children of the bottom 10 percent.

The phrase “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” itself is rubbish. Its origins date back to an 18th-century fairy tale, and the phrase was originally intended as a metaphor for an impossible feat of strength. 

Other countries understand that the family you’re born into as well as the social safety nets and social springboards you have access to play large roles. 

Children born poor in Canada, Denmark, or the United Kingdom – nations without America’s degree of inequality, nations which provide strong social safety nets and public investments – have a greater chance of economic success than children born poor in America. 

Individuals in those countries are blamed less for their personal failures and credited less for personal successes. 

So, why is America still perpetuating the fallacy of the self-made individual? Because those in power want you to believe it. If everyone thinks they’re on their own, it’s easier for the powerful to dismantle unions, unravel safety nets, and slash taxes for the wealthy. 

It’s in their interest to keep the American Dream deeply rooted in our psyche – the assumption that you determine your destiny. So we don’t demand reforms that are necessary – paid family and medical leave, for example, or early childhood education, accessible childcare, and policies that lift every family out of poverty.

Let’s stop perpetuating this myth of the self-made individual. And let’s start rebuilding the American dream by creating opportunities for all, not just those who are already wealthy, privileged, and well-connected. 

Off the Top of My Head

Green New Deal and American Dream on Collision Path

by John Lawrence, June 3, 2019

The Green New Deal recognizes the fact that climate change is already impacting America and the world. Torrential rains, flooding, tornados, wildfires are destroying lives and real estate in staggering numbers. But it will only get worse based on the fact that we are emitting more greenhouse gasses than ever into the atmosphere. A Green New Deal can only hope that runaway climate change can be prevented, that some vestige of humanity and civilization can be preserved. The American Dream, on the other hand is that each generation should have more than the preceding one: more stuff, a higher standard of living (measured totally in materialistic terms), a bigger car, a better education (measured solely in terms of diplomas), a bigger house, more stuff.

The more stuff American Dream is contradictory to what needs to be done to ameliorate and mitigate climate change. Since we're all inhabitants of planet earth, it would seem that, with regards to climate change, we're all in this together. But no, say True Americans, the kind that drive around in pickup trucks with an American flag stuck in the truck bed, that's socialism. It's socialism if we are all in this together. Whatever happened to good old American self interest, short term profits and may the best man win? Whatever happened to hard work, accumulation of money and stuff and looking down on those who had less? All I need to do is to look out for Number One, Numero Uno, and all the rest will follow. Who was it who said seek ye first less materialism and all the rest would follow, or something like that.

Wall Street is only concerned with quarterly profits and not at all with the quarterly increase in greenhouse gasses flooding into the atmosphere. It seems that the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania might be the worst thing that ever happened to human civilization. Without oil, we would still be using horses and buggies which are far less polluting. American Progress has literally almost doomed the planet. Plastics, which are filling fish bellies and creating huge gyres of waste in the oceans, are probably the next worse human invention. Again progress through better living has run amuck. It seems like the good old Amish had it right. Plowing with horses is far less polluting than plowing with tractors. The industrialization of agriculture has only let to the almost universal use of Roundup, a proven carcinogen, to rid crops of weeds and improve yields, thus enhancing corporate agriculture's profits. Organics, which were universal before World War II because there was no glyphosate, are now a premium commodity as some farmers are fighting back against Monsanto's and Bayer's corporate domination of agriculture.

But some states and cities are embracing the Green New Deal. The Washington Post reported (The Energy 202: Green New Deal is alive and well in liberal cities and states https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/05/28/the-energy-202-green-new-deal-is-alive-and-well-in-liberal-cities-and-states/5cecc28b1ad2e52231e8e812/):

LOS ANGELES -- The Green New Deal may be floundering in Washington. But it is alive and well in left-leaning states and cities across the country.

From Maine to California, Democratic politicians have begun adopt the Green New Deal brand -- a progressive movement to dramatically tackle climate change over the next decade -- to describe their own contributions to address global warming.

Lawmakers in New York City are doing so when compelling landlords to cut climate-warming emissions from their skyscrapers. And Los Angeles leaders in this car-clogged, smog-choked town are doing it when pushing residents to drive electric vehicles.

All told, lawmakers in seven states have proposed various pieces of local legislation explicitly under the Green New Deal banner, according to the environmental group the Sierra Club, which is tracking the proposals.

So, too, have the Democratic mayors of the nation’s two biggest cities, Bill de Blasio of New York and Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, taken up the Green New Deal mantle to push their own climate proposals.

The popularity of the Green New Deal among young Democratic voters — even after its defeat in the GOP-controlled Senate in March — gives local lawmakers a clear way to cast state and municipal energy and transportation projects as part of a nationwide effort to halt the crisis of a changing climate.

In many cases, politicians are using the label to describe what they have already been doing to address global warming.

So even though we have an ignoramus for President of the United States, that doesn't mean that everyone in a position of power is one. But crucially, how many Americans are willing to give up the American Dream even though this will be the last generation, one way or the other, to have one. Will we reconstitute the planet and our lifestyles in recognition of the fact that "we are all in this together" or will we continue on the path of individual self-interest and feel a sense of fulfillment and completion when we die with more stuff than our neighbors?

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

“Oligarchy” means government of and by a few at the top, who exercise power for their own benefit. It comes from the Greek word oligarkhes, meaning “few to rule or command.”

Even a system that calls itself a democracy can become an oligarchy if power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few very wealthy people – a corporate and financial elite.

Their power and wealth increase over time as they make laws that favor themselves, manipulate financial markets to their advantage, and create or exploit economic monopolies that put even more wealth into their pockets.

Modern-day Russia is an oligarchy, where a handful of billionaires who control most major industries dominate politics and the economy.

What about the United States?

According to a study published in 2014 by Princeton Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern Professor Benjamin Page, although Americans enjoy many features of democratic governance, such as regular elections, and freedom of speech and association, American policy making has become dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans.

The typical American has no influence at all.

This is largely due to the increasing concentration of wealth. In a 2019 research paper, Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman determined that the richest 1 percent of Americans now own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. That’s up from 25 to 30 percent of the nation’s wealth in the 1980s.

The only country Zucman found with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is … Russia.

America has had an oligarchy before – in the first Gilded Age, which ran from the 1880s until the early 20th century. 

Teddy Roosevelt called that oligarchy the “malefactors of great wealth,” and fought them by breaking up large concentrations of economic power–the trusts–and instituting a progressive federal income tax.

His fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, further reduced their power by strictly regulating Wall Street, and encouraging the growth of labor unions. The oligarchy fought back but Roosevelt wouldn’t yield.

“Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob,” he thundered in 1936. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

But the American oligarchy has returned. We are now in a second Gilded Age. As the great jurist Louis Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

We must, once again, make the correct choice and reduce the economic and political power of the American oligarchy.

Off the Top of My Head

17 Million Americans Qualify for Italian Citizenship

by John Lawrence, May 22, 2019

There was an excellent show on CBS Sunday Morning last Sunday based in Florence, Italy in which one of the segments dealt with the fact that anyone of Italian descent in America or elsewhere can also claim Italian citizenship. It is called jus sanguinis, Latin for “right of blood,” which grants direct descendants citizenship to a country based on their ancestor's nationality. So most of the 17 million Italian Americans can also get dual citizenship in Italy. Having done that they have the right to live and work anywhere in the European Union! This means free medical care, free university and college tuition, visa free travel anywhere in the EU, the right to own property and get a job anywhere in the EU. And you don't have to give up your American citizenship. Such a deal!

The program went into depth about one American, a Phil Feretti, whose great grandfather moved from Italy to the US for a better life and now Phil has moved back to Italy for a better life. He sold his US real estate and bought a magnificent villa in Tuscany! Two sisters from Oregon also claimed their Italian citizenship by right of descent and visit often but have no plans to move there permanently. But who knows? If things descend into chaos here it may be a wise move to go there.

Some other countries also allow immigration if you can prove your ancestor was a citizen there. Such countries as France, Ireland, Australia, Hungary (where real estate is really cheap, fast developing, a good place for a summer home), Israel (if you're Jewish) and Argentina. In the US you are only a citizen if you're born on American soil unless you become a naturalized citizen. If your great grandfather was from Italy, for example, immigrated here and had children before he became a naturalized American citizen, his children and their children ad infinitum are considered to be Italian citizens.

As an Italian citizen, you are entitled to receive Italian healthcare which is world class and much more affordable when compared to healthcare in the States. Having Italian dual citizenship entitles you to rent and buy property hassle free. Here are some of the other advantages:

• The ability to work, reside and study in Italy and across the 27 EU member states (e.g. Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands etc.) without the need of a Visa. EU citizens are often prioritized over people from outside the EU for many professional and educational opportunities.

• Simplified and more cost-effective process to purchase properties in Italy.

• Tax-Free import of vehicles (car, trucks etc.) directly from the US to Italy

• You will have access to public medical care and high-quality public education as available to EU citizens.

• You will have the right to vote for the Italian Parliament representative in your region.

• You will be able to transfer Italian citizenship to all children under 18 years old automatically.

• You will be able to establish a firm identity with your Italian heritage.

As the US becomes the United State of Trumpistan, it is advisable to have an escape route from the madness and idiocy of the greatest empire the world has seen since the Roman Empire which is in the process of collapsing from overextension (800 military bases around the world) and hubris. Global warming has produced severe weather mainly in the nation's midsection with tornadoes, torrential rain and flooding on a daily basis. If I were Italian or of Italian descent, I wouldn't hesitate to trade all this for free medical care, no student loan debt, mozzerella and chianti. Unfortunately, most of my ancestors are from the UK and Germany where there is no jus sanguinis. I do have French ancestry, however, going back 11 generations. Paris, City of Light, here I come.

The Index of Systemic Trends

This week The Next System Project releases its first “Index of Systemic Trends,” a series of economic indicators that together make the case for systemic solutions that get at the roots of the nation’s most critical economic and social crises.

“While it is tempting to blame Donald Trump and the virulent form of right-wing extremism he represents for the nation’s ills, this is, unfortunately, an inadequate reading of our recent history—and a dangerous one at that,” reads the introduction to the index. “In many ways, the rise of Trump is actually a symptom of a much longer systemic crisis that has been building over the last several decades. This first-ever edition of The Next System Project’s Index of Systemic Trends is an effort to begin to quantify, track, and visualize this crisis.”

The index specifically tracks a set of economic and social indicators that reveal the chronic and systemic nature of economic and social inequities and our qualitative standing when compared to other major countries. Some highlights:

• Wealth Inequality: In 1970, the top 1 percent and the middle 40% of Americans had a similar share of wealth (around 28%). By 2015, the wealth share of the top 1 percent exceeded 37% while the share of the middle 40% was almost unchanged at 27%. The wealth share for the bottom 50% was also unchanged—at virtually zero.
• Racial wealth inequality: The median net worth of Black families had by 2016 had fallen to roughly half what it was in 1983. The median net worth of White families went from 1,600% higher than that of Black families in 1983 to 4,000% higher by 2016.
• Healthcare costs: Per person, health costs in the US are close to five times higher than they were in 1970 in constant dollars. Yet our residents fare worse, most notably in life expectancy, than those of any other high-income country.
• Criminal justice: While Canada, Mexico, and most European countries incarcerate fewer than 200 residents per 100,000 population, the US incarcerates 274 per 100,000 White residents and Black residents at a rate that is six times higher, 1,609 per 100,000. For Latinx, the rate is 857.
• Democracy: When measured against other major countries, the United States finished dead last in the Index of Economic Democracy, measuring workplace and individual rights, distribution of economic decision-making, transparency, and associational economic democracy.

“This index is by no means a comprehensive or empirical study,” the introduction concludes. “It is designed purely to be illustrative of what, we believe, is an important observation: that our current political-economic system is consistently failing to deliver improvement and or competitive results compared to other advanced economies across a variety of different measures; and that this is indicative of a systemic crisis and the need to move in the direction of a new system that can and will produce better outcomes.“

Off the Top of My Head

The Old American Dream VS the Green American Dream

by John Lawrence, May 20, 2019

The old American dream was that every generation had to do better than their parents. If your grandparents had one bathroom in the house, then your parents had to have two, and your generation had to have 3 and a half. If your grandparents had one car, your parents had to have two, and your generation had to have two plus a pickup truck to haul a trailer. If your grandparents worked on a farm, then you parents had to work in a factory or construction, and you had to have an office job sitting on your butt and not doing any physical work whatsoever. If your grandparents had an eighth grade education, then your parents had to graduate from high school, and you had to be the first in your family to go to college. It goes on and on - the old American dream.

The Green American Dream is literally to save the planet and its inhabitants from extinction by treading lightly on the planet's resources, by not consuming more than you need, to live well but sustainably, to have jobs that support the greening of America and the world. Instead of gas guzzling cars, you drive a hybrid or an all electric vehicle. You take public transportation as much as possible. You live well be eating organic foods, not foods loaded with pesticide and herbicide residues. Instead of the house progression from a living room, dining room and kitchen to the next generation's addition of a family room and the following generation's addition of a great room, you live in as many rooms as you really need which probably resembles your grandparents' house more than it does your parents'.

Instead of more and more consumption, you consume less, only what you really need. You are more concerned about clean water than about acquiring more material objects. Instead of driving a bigger more prestigious car than your parents, you drive a car that gets better gas mileage. Instead of ostentatious consumption, you try to consume less.

The present generation, the millenials, will probably consume as much as they want only because the banks will loan them the money to do so. The price they pay is that they will own nothing but debt. They start out with the college education that puts them $30K to $100 K in debt and go on from there. Free money just adds to their debt. They will be the first of their family to gain a college degree, and the first in their family to start out in life with a huge debt. My grandfather used to say, "Pay what you owe, then you will know what you own." Today's millenials will never own anything because they will be in debt their whole lives. They will probably be renters their whole lives unless the financial industry invents a new vehicle - they are very creative, you know - that allows them to get a mortgage even though they have student loan debt to begin with. Didn't we already do something like that that brought on the Great Recession of 2008?

The American economy is 70% consumption. In order to keep it at that level, the middle class will have to take on more and more debt. Or we could consume less but have a higher quality lifestyle with clean water, organic food, renewable energy and consumer products devoid of toxic substances. Probably it would be better to have more weeds than to have the parks and school grounds loaded with Monsanto's Roundup. We need to get off this consumption kick and think about what's good for America and the world and what's good for us as individuals. It's not the American dream that's been sold to us. Keeping that American dream will mean that global warming and climate change will make the next generation's lives a horrible mess.

Off the Top of My Head

The American Dream of Owning Your Own Home is Fast Fading

by John Lawrence, April 26, 2019

Single family homes are being bought up by hedge funds while young people entering the housing market have too much in student loan and credit card debt to afford to buy one. So they are in the position of renting from a hedge fund most of which are ruthlessly and relentlessly raising rents through the roof. Few if any college graduates these days will ever own their own homes unless they go into the FIRE sector of the economy: that's finance, insurance or real estate. The financialization of the economy has left little room for anyone else except celebrity athletes and movie stars to own real estate.

Sovereignman writes:

Single-family homes were one of the last bastions of investment freedom for the little guy.

Last week a huge merger was announced between Invitation Homes (owned by private equity giant Blackstone Group) and Starwood Waypoint Homes (owned by real estate giant Starwood Capital).

If the deal goes through, the combined entity would be the largest owner of single-family homes in the United States with a portfolio worth over $20 billion.

And this is only the latest merger in an ongoing trend.

Three years ago, for example, American Homes 4 Rent bought Beazer Pre-Owned Rental Homes, creating another enormous player. A few months later, Starwood Waypoint bought Colony American Homes.

And of course, Blackstone was one of the first institutional investors to start buying distressed homes, forking over around $10 billion on houses since the Great Financial Crisis.

At one point, Blackstone was reportedly spending $150 million a week on houses.

So is it any wonder that the middle class is disappearing? US Census Bureau statistics show that over the last decade there have been an increasing number of rental households and a decresing number of households which own their own homes. Sure we're approaching full employment, but most of the new jobs being created are for waitresses and bartenders. Wages are totally stagnant. They have about the same purchasing power as they did 40 years ago. Most wage gains have gone to the top tier of wage earners. Since 2000, usual weekly wages have risen 3% (in real terms) among workers in the lowest tenth of the earnings distribution and 4.3% among the lowest quarter. But among people in the top tenth of the distribution, real wages have risen a cumulative 15.7%, to $2,112 a week – nearly five times the usual weekly earnings of the bottom tenth ($426).

So it's clear what's happening. Foreclosed on homes and distressed properties are being scooped up by the likes of Blackstone Group. Or in other words - Wall Street. The very financial firms that caused the 2008 financial crisis which caused many people to lose their homes to foreclosure are now buying up those homes and turning them into rental properties. Then they raise the rent. Home prices and rental prices are increasing by the day. Those lucky enough to own their own homes are prospering. Everyone else is faced with the situation of paying higher and higher rents. The money being poured into the economy by the Federal Reserve, which goes mostly to the rich like those operating hedge funds, raises asset prices across the board. This does not help the average wage earner who is having his rent go up or is trying to buy his first home.

What’s the Real American Story?

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Donald Trump has perfected the art of telling a fake story about America. The only way to counter that is to tell the real story of America.

Trump’s story is by now familiar: he alone will rescue average Americans from powerful alien forces – immigrants, foreign traders, foreign politicians and their international agreements – that have undermined the wellbeing of Americans.

These forces have been successful largely because Democrats, liberals, “socialists,” cultural elites, the Washington establishment, the media and “deep state” bureaucrats have helped them, in order to enrich themselves and boost their power. Not surprisingly, according to Trump, these forces seek to remove him from office.

What makes Trump’s story powerful to some Americans despite its utter phoniness is that it echoes the four tales Americans have been telling ourselves since before the founding of the Republic.

To combat Trump’s fake story, we need a true story based on facts, logic and history. But in order for that true story to resonate with Americans, it must also echo the same four tales.

The first tale: The Triumphant Individual. 

It’s the little guy or gal who works hard, takes risks, believes in him or herself, and eventually gains wealth, fame and honor. The tale is epitomized in the life of Abe Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that “the value of life is to improve one’s condition.” The moral: with enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in America.

Trump wants us to believe he’s the Triumphant Individual. But in fact he’s a conman who inherited his wealth and then spent his career shafting his employees, contractors and creditors.

In truth, America has many potential Triumphant Individuals. But in order for them to do well in the new economy they depend on three things that Trump doesn’t want them to have: a good education, good medical care, and the right to join together to demand better pay and better working conditions.

The second tale: The Benevolent Community 

This is the story of neighbors and friends who pitch in for the common good. It goes back to John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity, delivered onboard a ship in Salem Harbor in 1630. Similar ideals of community were found among the abolitionists, suffragettes and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. The moral: we all do better by caring for one another.

Trump’s fake benevolent community is a nationalism that requires no sacrifice from anyone. But today’s real benevolent community necessitates all of us doing our parts for the common good. The most fortunate among us, for example, must pay their fair share of taxes so that everyone can have what’s needed to triumph. A rising tide of productivity and wealth will lift all Americans.

The third tale: The Mob at the Gates 

This is the story of threatening forces beyond our borders. Daniel Boone fought Indians, described then in racist terms as “savages.” Davy Crockett battled Mexicans. Much the same tale gave force to cold war tales during the 1950s of international communist plots to undermine American democracy. The moral: we must be vigilant against external threats.

As with the other tales, this one has an important element of truth. America battled Hitler and other fascists in the second world war. The Soviet danger was real.

But Trump wants Americans to believe that today’s Mob at the Gates consists of immigrants, foreign traders and democratically elected governments that have been our allies for decades or more.

Wrong. These days the real Mob at our gates are thugs like Vladimir Putin and other tyrants around the world who are antagonistic toward democratic institutions, intolerant of ethnic minorities, hostile toward the free press and eager to use government to benefit themselves and those who support them.

The fourth and final tale: The Rot at the Top. 

This one is about the malevolence of powerful elites – their corruption and irresponsibility, and tendency to conspire against the rest of us.

This tale has given force to the populist movements of American history, from William Jennings Bryan’s prairie populism of the 1890s through Bernie Sanders’ progressive populist campaign in 2016, as well as Trump’s authoritarian version.

Trump wants us to believe that today’s Rot at the Top are cultural elites, the media and “deep state” bureaucrats.

But the real Rot at the Top consists of concentrated wealth and power to a degree this nation hasn’t witnessed since the late 19th century. Billionaires, powerful corporations, and Wall Street have gained control over much of our economy and political system, padding their nests with special tax breaks and corporate welfare while holding down the wages of average workers.

In this, the rich have been helped by Republicans in Congress and the White House whose guiding ideology seems less capitalism than cronyism, as shown time and again through legislative and regulatory gifts to Big Pharma, Wall Street, Big Oil and Coal, Big Agriculture, and giant military contractors.

America’s true story shouldn’t end with Trump’s authoritarianism and nativism. 

An end that’s far truer to America’s ideals is a reinvigorated democracy. This will require a benevolent community free from the crony capitalists who have corrupted America.

That chapter is up to us.

The American Social Contract

by Robert Reich

Sunday, October 28, 2018

With divisions this deep, it can often feel like we can’t agree on anything

So, what do we share as Americans?

America does have a common set of norms about what makes a good society. These aren’t written down in the constitution.  They are unwritten standards that, taken as a whole,  define who we are and what we believe in.

Based on responses to polls,  a majority of us–Republicans, Democrats, and Independents– have consistently agreed to 5 simple principles. This is the American Social Contract.

First:  Everyone should have an equal chance to get ahead.

Second:  No one should be discriminated against because of race, religion, gender, or sexual preference.  

Third: No one who works full time should have to live in poverty.

Fourth: People should take responsibility for themselves and their families, but deserve help if they need it through no fault of their own.  

And fifth:  No one should have special privilege and power based on wealth or class.

These values are anchored in moral teachings and democratic ideals that often predate the founding of our republic.

We know we’ve veered far away from all these principles. But that doesn’t make us any less dedicated to them.

No matter how discouraging things may seem right now–regardless of the bigotry, cruelty, and greed that dominate our politics and corrupt our society–it’s important to remember the positive values we share and the social contract that binds us together.

To: Mr. Reich, What do you mean "through no fault of their own"? So people who have some faults don't deserve help?

Who Stole the American Dream

Wealth Concentrated in a Few Hands Not Compatible with Democracy

by John Lawrence

From YouTube

The book by the same name was written by Hedrick Smith. In it he quotes Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice and advisor to President Woodrow Wilson: "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." I guess America has made its choice: democracy concentrated in the hands of a few. A new class system is taking hold composed of two classes - the 1% of super wealthy and the 99% of what formerly was the middle class. Now the middle class has been turned into the debtor class. To get anywhere, most people think, you have to go into debt in order to get a college diploma. Meanwhile, you run up credit card debt in order to live. Then add to that car payment debt and you have a perfect storm for the creation of the new debtor class regardless of whether or not you get a job when you graduate college.

A growing number of people will never pay off their student loan debt even over the course of a life time. Instead it will come to haunt them when their social security payments are garnished after they turn 65 or 70. The income gap and the wealth gap are continuing apace. The internet has facilitated this as certain companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have established beachheads all over the world. The globalization of corporations has precluded local operations from getting started with the result that profits are shipped back to one corporate profit center instead of being distributed broadly.

What It's Like for the Middle Class to be Broke

Redefining the American Dream

by John Lawrence

The American Dream is the ideological underpinning of the middle class. Now that the middle class is disappearing, it no longer makes sense as historically defined. Thom Hartmann (Rebooting the American Dream) and Hedrick Smith (Who Stole the American Dream) have defined the American Dream as a good job at good wages plus benefits. They bemoan the fact that this has pretty much gone by the wayside in today's world. Well, it's time to get over it because the conditions that gave rise to middle class prosperity in America from 1945 to 1980 are not coming back.

The era in which the economic rewards from rising productivity were widely shared between workers and owners is over. Those good jobs resulted from the fact that unions put pressure on corporations. Private sector union membership reached a peak of about 35 percent of the labor force in the 1950s. Today union membership, especially in the private sector, has fallen off to less than 10%. The decline of the middle class mirrors the decline in union membership. Today in a globalized economy, corporations employ workers wherever in the world they can get them for cheapest.

During the heyday of the middle class, it was possible to own a house, a car, eat out once a week, take a vacation once a year, send a child to college without going into debt, have health care and a pension that would pay out monthly benefits for life - all in a one job family in which the wife could stay home with the children and make pies and cakes. Then Reagan was elected President in 1980 and the War on the Middle Class began. Taxes that had been progressive during the middle class era became regressive. Instead of the transfer of tax money from rich to poor, the opposite started to occur. According to Thom Hartmann this was the single biggest factor in impoverishing the middle class.

When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed - this huge change was done in less than 35 years.

The deunionization of America, a globalized work force and regressive taxation have all combined to decrease the middle class and undermine the American Dream. There is no use trying to get the conditions back that supported that dream. It ain't going to happen. However, it is possible to develop a new Weltanschauung or world view that doesn't have anything to do with trying to recreate the conditions that led to middle class prosperity in the past. This involves letting go of many of the assumptions that were productive in the past but today are completely dysfunctional.

One of these assumptions is that, if we prepare ourselves as students for a job, some benign employer will hire us. Under this assumption it's the employer's job to provide jobs for us, the employees. I call this employee consciousness wherein most people aspire to be employees, to work for somebody else. Today most employers have no responsibility whatsoever to their employees. Employees are hired "at will" which means they can get rid of you for no reason at all. So rather than get laid off at the age of 50 because some whippersnapper can do a better job than you can at half your pay rate, you're better off being self-employed from the start of your career. Create your own job. It'll be harder at first, but, as the years go by, you'll be much better off especially if you gear yourself from the very beginning to be your own boss and not delegate the job of bossing you to someone else.

Another assumption is that a college education is essential to a middle class lifestyle. No longer true. Today a college education is just a precursor to a lifetime of debt. Instead of starting off life debt free which was the case for most college students from World War II until Reagan's election, college students today start off life with a debt equal to a first mortgage. Better to start a career just out of high school and not waste four years in college for what amounts to a worthless piece of paper.

There are many jobs that can be done with just training acquired either at high school or during the high school years that end up paying more than those that require a college degree and which can be easily outsourced. Think local service type jobs rather than jobs with national or global pretensions. Plumbers, electricians and many other service jobs are more remunerative in the long run than jobs for which you need a college degree, and, instead of being laid off at the age of 50, you will have an asset - your business - which is salable at the age of 50.

The only good non-self-employed jobs are unionized jobs in the public sector. For instance New York City sanitation workers make around $90,000 a year. Becoming a garbage man is the most coveted job in the city. Over 90,000 people applied last year for the job of carting away NYC's garbage, but they only hire about 500 a year. It's actually harder to become a sanitation worker in New York City than it is to get into Harvard. Starting salary is about $34,000, but with overtime it averages about $47,000 the first year. After 5.5 years the salary jumps to an average of $89,000. This compares with an average salary for New York teachers which is $68,000.

Since sanitation workers also operate New York City's snow plows, there is ample opportunity for overtime pay. They also get 10% more for night shifts, double time for Sundays, 25 vacation days a year and unlimited sick leave. Sanitation workers in NYC have a very good health care plan and excellent pension benefits. And it's all because they have a very strong union. You can retire in 20 years. 71% of all government workers in New York state are unionized. That's the difference that unionization has made, and it explains the lack of wage growth in the deunionized private sector.

For those unwilling or unable to be self-employed or unable to win the lottery to become a NYC sanitation worker, consider a two year associate's degree from a community college which by the way President Obama wants to be free. Good luck with that. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. There's a wave of people with two year degrees in applied science earning as much or more in their first year after graduation than four year college graduates. According to collegemeasures.org, these two year degrees from a technical college are worth more in the job market than bachelor's degrees. In Texas the earnings difference between 2-year technical college graduates vs those with a bachelor's degree was on average $11,000. In Virginia it was $2000 and in Colorado it was $7000.

In Colorado the community college tuition is about $3600 per year, but the median wage for graduates in their first year of employment is $53,000, a significant cost/benefit advantage over four year colleges. Red Rock Community College near Denver has a water quality management program which almost guarantees graduates a good job since the City of Denver needs 1800 water quality workers in the next few years.

That portion of the American Dream that promised a lifetime pension after working for 30 years has been totally vitiated. The defined benefit pension which promised a fixed monthly amount for life has been replaced by the defined contribution pension or 401(k) in which the employee funds and manages his own retirement account. This might as well be called the undefined benefit pseudo pension as there is no guarantee that the amount of money in your account on retirement will last a lifetime. So what good is it if you find at the age of 85 that you've run out of money. We'll be seeing a lot of 85 year olds reduced to living on the streets since corporations have pulled the rug out from under the defined benefit plans. Now the employee, not the corporation, takes all the risk in the stock market.

401(k)s are do-it-yourself pensions. You invest your own money in the stock market in the hopes that your expertise in managing your portfolio will result in an adequate pension. Unfortunately, most employees have little expertise in that area. Hedrick Smith writes:

[The advent of 401(k)s] was a monumental transformation for the American middle class. "When the 401(k)s came in, there was a sea change, a huge shift in who was paying for retirement,"observed Brooks Hamilton. "In the old system, employers put up most of the money - 89%. The employees contributed 11%. Those figures are from the Department of Labor. Fast-forward to the 401(k) system and today, employees are paying more than half - 51% - and the companies, 49%. So there was a huge shift in costs from employers to employees - hundreds of billions of dollars."

The average employee has far less in his or her 401(k) than what will be needed over a lifetime especially if he or she lives into their 90s which is becoming increasingly common. The typical nest egg of those in their 60s with a 401(k) who are nearing retirement is around $79,000 according to The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. This is far less than required to live a middle class lifestyle for the average life span.

Hedrick Smith sums up:

Retirement specialists like Brooks Hamilton and Alice Munnell question whether, in this turbulent economy, the task of financing retirement is too fraught with risk and too complicated for most average Americans, especially the millions who are gun-shy about financial markets.

So one of the advantages of employeehood, a secure retirement, has been taken away. Rather than live off a fixed sum of money at retirement, you need to do what the rich do: live on the return from your investment not the investment itself. It's up to you to acquire your own wealth from which to pay yourself a monthly stipend from the return on that wealth. That's the only way it will last as long as you need it. If you have a fixed pot of money like that which the 401(k) provides and you live off of it, you will be consuming your own seed capital. On the other hand if you own a rental which pays you $1000 a month in rent, that goes on in perpetuity and you can will that asset to your heirs. In other words you will never run out of money. Most of those depending on 401(k)s have the middle class mindset that you live off your life savings. This mindset and assumption needs to be changed. They will run out of money at some point unless they die quickly after retirement.

It is better to acquire property development skills like carpentry, plumbing, electrical etc in high school so that you can add value to a piece of property and rent it out thus acquiring a life time cash flow. You can't add value to a stock portfolio and it is subject to the vagaries of the market including bubbles and subsequent crashes. That's where self-employment in the building trades is invaluable. You can build wealth by adding value. And all the learning tools are readily available in the library or on the internet. The ancillary benefit of learning one or more trades is that you can build wealth on the side in addition to earning a living.

Thom Hartmann and Hedrick Smith are good analysts but their solutions amount to wanting the Federal government to bring back the good old days by creating good jobs at good wages. Yeah, it would be nice to have the Federal government put up $2 trillion to repair or rebuild infrastructure. It's just not going to happen. The Federal government and a lot of state governments have been captured by rich billionaires and corporations that have more economic power than most countries and they don't want it to happen. It would be nice to tax the rich and transfer money to the poor. It's not going to happen. So despite the imprecations of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and other voices crying out in the wilderness, their solutions are just pipe dreams.

Wishing does not make it so. We're in a totally different environment than the one after World War II when veterans could go to college and buy houses with veterans' benefits. Today most jobs are being reduced to Wal-Mart type service jobs. But you can still make good money in a service job providing it's a self-employed service job and you're servicing the local economy.

Forget about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) jobs. A few short years after graduating from college, skills in those areas will be obsolete and corporations will let you go because you will be deadwood. They want recent college graduates. Cutting edge skill sets don't benefit America as some would suggest. They only benefit American corporations which have absolutely no loyalty to their employees or in fact to America. They are doing everything they can including moving their headquarters out of the US to avoid paying taxes. Instead of being concerned about global competition and America's winning, be concerned about the local economy and contributing to it while at the same time earning a living and creating wealth for yourself. If an enterprise requires a number of workers to make it viable, form it as a cooperative and share the profits.

 

 

 

 

Taking Exception to Exceptionalism

Published on Wednesday, September 18, 2013 by Moyers & Company    

  by  Bernard Weisberger

 

In the speech last week that put on hold his request to Congress to authorize the bombing of Syria’s chemical weapons sites, President Obama — no mean orator himself — faced a familiar orator’s problem. How would he end on a strong and upbeat note while announcing what was in fact a sensible retreat from his “red line” pledge dictated by clear and overwhelming evidence that both Congress and the public at large had no appetite for any more Middle Eastern interventions? How could he still defend America’s assertion of its role as the enforcer of the “civilized world’s” conscience even as he stepped back from the brink?

Other nations, of course, believe much the same thing, but not with the broad sweep of the claim of America, where we do things on a grander scale.

The words he chose nodded in both directions. “America is not the world’s policeman,” he acknowledged. “[I]t is beyond our means to right every wrong.” Then he added: “But when with modest effort and risk ” (something entirely impossible to guarantee) we can stop children from being gassed to death. . . I believe we should act.” But why us alone? That cued the final trumpet flourish. “That’s what makes America different,” said the president. “That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth. Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.” Pleased as I was with the outcome and its sequel so far, I couldn’t help thinking of George M. Cohan’s remark that “many a bum show is saved by the American flag.”

For there it was, the magic word, the popular core belief that we are the recipients of God’s special favor. Other nations, of course, believe much the same thing, but not with the broad sweep of the claim of America, where we do things on a grander scale. It is an essential truth, we say, that we are unique in history because prior to the modern age we had no history.

Our national origin myth is that the United States was born in a state of immaculate innocence. Voiced best in the nineteenth century by the popular historian (and loyal Jacksonian Democrat) George Bancroft it ran like this: The discovery of a “New World,” the Renaissance, the Reformation and the “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century were all overtures to the grand curtain raising on the birth of the United States. One of our christening gifts was a “virgin” continent sheltered by two oceans, ours to possess without obstruction except for the inconvenient presence of heathen savages without the power to resist modern weapons. The other, even more important, was a blank slate, scrubbed clean of the crimes, errors and follies, the wars and oppressions of the past. We could create, unhindered, whatever government we desired. We could invent a national character for ourselves in whatever form we wished.

What might that be? For the Puritan founder of Massachusetts, John Eliot, we were destined to be a “city on a hill,” the eyes of all mankind turned on us as, in his words, “a model of Christian charity.” In the sweeping imagination of Tom Paine, victory in the American Revolution, would give us the freedom to “begin the world anew.” Fourscore and seven years later, Lincoln announced that the Union’s survival in the Civil War was vital to the entire world, because it was an experiment in democracy whose failure would cause the very idea of popular government to perish from the earth.

In those forms, exceptionalism had a positive face. It inspired the signers of the Declaration of Independence to risk their lives, fortunes and sacred honor. It nerved nineteenth century reformers like abolitionists or women’s rights advocates to fight on to victory in the face of contempt, hostile laws and physical assaults. It gave trade unionists the courage to defy the bullets and billy clubs of repression in their struggle for the equal rights to which America’s founding documents entitled them. To progressives it furnished the patience to persist for years in legal and political battles to make real the Preamble to the Constitution’s oft-forgotten promise to “promote the general welfare.” And it shone again in the peaceful struggle of the modern civil rights movement to hold America to its promises.

But exceptionalism has another uglier mask. Its hidden core of arrogance has often turned it into a kind of nationalism-on-steroids that carries with it imperial swagger, the itch to crush dissent at home, and a defiant statement to the world that we’re free to ignore what Jefferson called “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Re-branded as “Manifest Destiny” it was used to justify unnecessary invasions of Canada and Mexico, the eventual establishment of colonies in the Pacific and a period as the de facto suzerain over the weak governments of the Latin American nations of this hemisphere.

Curiously, both the benign and the sinister interpretations — the Jekyll and Hyde versions, we might say — have something in common, too long and too commonly neglected by our mythmaking historians. Neither of them is true. We have never been as “original” as they claim.

Democracy was not invented here. Neither were capitalism or Protestantism, the distinguishing characteristics of the first British settlers in North America. Even as colonies we were part of a trans-Atlantic culture. Our books and arts, our faiths and our economic practices were imported mainly from Great Britain and Western Europe. The first simmers of revolt here rested on the colonists’ demand for “the rights of Englishmen” gained in the mother country by uprisings a century earlier that had beheaded one king and deposed another. The elite among our Patriot leaders were familiar with the works of the French philosophers who were busily undermining the intellectual foundations of their absolute monarchy. James Madison, often called “the father of the Constitution” for his heroic labors in the Convention, like many fellow members was familiar with the theories and performances of republics in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy and the Swiss confederation and Dutch republic of their own time. Knowledge like that guided their own choices among the political and practical deals they had to make as, in your own words, the great charter was “hammered, reasoned, shaped, argued, cajoled and compromised into being.”

As for creating a government on a blank slate free of crimes and errors? No way. By 1787 it already had a century and a half of slavery and the theft of Indian land inscribed on it.

That’s not to deny the radicalism of the American Revolution, or the early existence of new and especially American habits of speech and forms of art. Voting into existence a people’s government — even with a limited electorate at first — was a daring leap into unknown seas, bordered by powerful nations still ruled by hereditary absolute monarchs and aristocrats. We were as much a novelty as the new plants and animals that our frontier exploration parties kept bringing home — a process, it’s worth remembering, also going on in other newly “discovered” parts of the world.

But 1787 was two and a quarter centuries ago. The democratic ideal, if not the practice, has long perched its banners over most of the globe. Our own democracy is no longer a lusty infant, but one of the world’s oldest, plainly suffering plutocratic and imperial dysfunctions and in need of a thorough popular overhaul to reclaim its genuineness.

The version of exceptionalism now peddled by tea party fable-makers has already done our economy noticeable harm. It convinces too many. It turns upside down our supposed hospitality to innovation by attempts to seal us off from learning anything from other, younger democracies. Improvements in health care, education, energy conservation — name your cause — are dismissed out of hand as “socialism,” bent on destruction of “the American way.” That kind of head-in-the-sand obstructionism is what we used to deplore in what we called “backward” parts of the globe. And what a useful tool it is for keeping the rich beneficiaries of our current unequal status quo in the top-dog position!

The damage that “unique” America as Dr. Hyde, fortified by a super-sized military establishment, has done is huge. Where once we independent-minded Yankees scoffed at “heel-clicking Prussian militarism,” the media and political establishments of today brag of our “superb” armed forces, while reporters covering Pentagon press conferences, as well as congressional committee members, struggle to outdo each other in deference to the beribboned generals who appear before them.

The international consequences are even worse. At a time when we need the world’s friendship and cooperation, the exceptionalist mindset licenses administrations of both mainstream parties to override the sovereignty of other nations in the interests of our own safety. Think of drones aimed at terrorists (so identified in secret by us alone) in neutral Pakistan or “allied” Afghanistan that take the lives and homes of nearby or mistakenly targeted civilians. Mere “collateral damage” to us, we ignore the scope of their tragic suffering. Think of CIA kidnappings on the streets of foreign cities under the very noses of their own police forces. Think of the symbolic impact of our refusals to sign international treaties banning the use of land mines or child soldiers, or of the special exemptions we demand from prosecution by local law authorities of crimes committed against civilians by our military personnel in the countries where we have bases established. What kind of self-portrait are we painting?

True, almost all nations commit offenses against common decency and common sense in the mindless fervor of war. Our country is not the only sinner or possibly the worst. But “We’re Number One” hyper-patriotism is simply the collective self-admiration of empty minds. It’s not what the American Revolution was fought for. Not what Tom Paine and Lincoln had in mind. The Declaration of Independence only says that we were seeking “the separate and equal station among the nations of the earth” to which the laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitled us.

That’s why I believe that it’s time to let exceptionalism become a creed outworn. It has lingered too long for whatever good it has done. But won’t that bury its positive and creative side?

Not necessarily. We don’t need that particular prop in order to believe that as a nation we should hope to realize the ideals of justice, individual dignity, decency and mercy embodied somewhere in almost all the world’s religions and secular codes of law from ancient times–if not always achieved, at least as goals to aspire to. This would not be the “isolationism” with which critics of our imperial overreach are now being charged. Rather, the effort to design a new moral compass for international relations in a world whose peoples are now more interdependent than ever. One that does not need the “leadership” of a single super-power–not even the United States.

I have no naïve dreams of armies vanishing overnight. But the unchecked violence of our times must be somehow reduced before it destroys any hopes of a decent future for humanity. If the United States would take an active role as a partner in the process, rather than an armed dictator of terms from a lofty perch of morality, it would go far towards restoring the admiration the world long felt for us when our military establishment was tiny and our practice of democracy was robust. Think what fine speeches could be woven around that essential truth.

© 2013 Public Affairs Television, Inc.

      

Bernard A. Weisberger is a historian who has collaborated on several television series with journalist Bill Moyers, including A Walk Through the 20th Century and Report from Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention. They are now working on The Fighting Spirit: The People vs. The Gilded Age.

We the People, and the New American Civil War

by Robert Reich

Monday, November 5, 2012

The vitriol is worse than I ever recall. Worse than the Palin-induced smarm pf 2008. Worse than the swift-boat lies of 2004. Worse, even, than the anything-goes craziness of 2000 and its ensuing bitterness.

It’s almost a civil war. I know families in which close relatives are no longer speaking. A dating service says Democrats won’t even consider going out with Republicans, and vice-versa. My email and twitter feeds contain messages from strangers I wouldn’t share with my granddaughter.

What’s going on? Yes, we’re divided over issues like the size of government and whether women should have control over their bodies. But these aren’t exactly new debates. We’ve been disagreeing over the size and role of government since Thomas Jefferson squared off with Alexander Hamilton, and over abortion rights since before Roe v. Wade, almost forty years ago.

And we’ve had bigger disagreements in the past – over the Vietnam War, civil rights, communist witch hunts – that didn’t rip us apart like this.

Maybe it’s that we’re more separated now, geographically and online.

The town where I grew up in the 1950s was a GOP stronghold, but Henry Wallace, FDR’s left-wing vice president, had retired there quite happily. Our political disagreements then and there didn’t get in the way of our friendships. Or even our families — my father voted Republican and my mother was a Democrat. And we all watched Edward R. Murrow deliver the news, and then, later, Walter Cronkite. Both men were the ultimate arbiters of truth.

But now most of us exist in our own political bubbles, left and right. I live in Berkeley, California – a blue city in a blue state – and rarely stumble across anyone who isn’t a liberal Democrat (the biggest battles here are between the moderate left and the far-left). The TV has hundreds of channels so I can pick what I want to watch and who I want to hear. And everything I read online confirms everything I believe, thanks in part to Google’s convenient algorithms.

So when Americans get upset about politics these days we tend to stew in our own juices, without benefit of anyone we know well and with whom we disagree — and this makes it almost impossible for us to understand the other side.

That geographic split also means more Americans are represented in Congress by people whose political competition comes from primary challengers – right-wing Republicans in red states and districts, left-wing Democrats in blue states and districts. And this drives those who represent us even further apart.

But I think the degree of venom we’re experiencing has deeper roots.

The nation is becoming browner and blacker. Most children born in California are now minorities. In a few years America as a whole will be a majority of minorities. Meanwhile, women have been gaining economic power. Their median wage hasn’t yet caught up with men, but it’s getting close. And with more women getting college degrees than men, their pay will surely exceed male pay in a few years. At the same time, men without college degrees continue to lose economic ground. Adjusted for inflation, their median wage is lower than it was three decades ago.

In other words, white working-class men have been on the losing end of a huge demographic and economic shift. That’s made them a tinder-box of frustration and anger – eagerly ignited by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other pedlars of petulance, including an increasing number of Republicans who have gained political power by fanning the flames.

That hate-mongering and attendant scapegoating – of immigrants, blacks, gays, women seeking abortions, our government itself – has legitimized some vitriol and scapegoating on the left as well. I detest what the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Rupert Murdoch, and Paul Ryan are doing, and I hate their politics. But in this heated environment I sometimes have to remind myself I don’t hate them personally.

Not even this degree of divisiveness would have taken root had America preserved the social solidarity we had two generations ago. The Great Depression and World War II reminded us we were all in it together. We had to depend on each other in order to survive. That sense of mutual dependence transcended our disagreements. My father, a “Rockefeller” Republican, strongly supported civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid. I remember him saying “we’re all Americans, aren’t we?”

To be sure, we endured 9/11, we’ve gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we suffered the Great Recession. But these did not not bind us as we were bound together in the Great Depression and World War II. The horror of 9/11 did not touch all of us, and the only sacrifice George W. Bush asked was that we kept shopping. Today’s wars are fought by hired guns – young people who are paid to do the work most of the rest of us don’t want our own children to do. And the Great Recession split us rather than connected us; the rich grew richer, the rest of us, poorer and less secure.

So we come to the end of a bitter election feeling as if we’re two nations rather than one. The challenge – not only for our president and representatives in Washington but for all of us – is to rediscover the public good.

Restore the Basic Bargain

by Robert Reich

Monday, November 28, 2011

For most of the last century, the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling.

That basic bargain created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages.

Back in 1914, Henry Ford announced he was paying workers on his Model T assembly line $5 a day – three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal termed his action “an economic crime.”

But Ford knew it was a cunning business move. The higher wage turned Ford’s auto workers into customers who could afford to buy Model T’s. In two years Ford’s profits more than doubled.

That was then. Now, Ford Motor Company is paying its new hires half what it paid new employees a few years ago.

The basic bargain is over – not only at Ford but all over the American economy.

New data from the Commerce Department shows employee pay is now down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data in 1929.

Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929.

1929, by the way, was the year of the Great Crash that ushered in the Great Depression.

In the years leading up to the Great Crash, most employers forgot Henry Ford’s example. The wages of most American workers remained stagnant. The gains of economic growth went mainly into corporate profits and into the pockets of the very rich. American families maintained their standard of living by going deeper into debt. In 1929 the debt bubble popped.

Sound familiar? It should. The same thing happened in the years leading up to the crash of 2008.

The latest data on corporate profits and wages show we haven’t learned the essential lesson of the two big economic crashes of the last seventy-five years: When the economy becomes too lopsided – disproportionately benefitting corporate owners and top executives rather than average workers – it tips over.

In other words, we’re in trouble because the basic bargain has been broken.

Yet incredibly, some politicians think the best way to restart the nation’s job engine is to make corporations even more profitable and the rich even richer – reducing corporate taxes; cutting back on regulations protecting public health, worker safety, the environment, and small investors; and slashing taxes on the very rich.

These same politicians think average workers should have even less money in their pockets. They don’t want to extend the payroll tax cut or unemployment benefits. And they want to make it harder for workers to form unions.

These politicians have reality upside down.

Corporations don’t need more money. They have so much money right now they don’t even know what to do with all of it. They’re even buying back their own shares of stock. This is a bonanza for CEOs whose pay is tied to stock prices and it increases the wealth of other shareholders. But it doesn’t create a single new job and it doesn’t raise the wages of a single employee.

Nor do the wealthiest Americans need more money. The top 1 percent is already taking in more than 20 percent of total income — the highest since the 1920s.

American businesses, including small-business owners, have no incentive to create new jobs because consumers (whose spending accounts for about 70 percent of the American economy) aren’t spending enough. Consumers’ after-tax incomes dropped in the second and third quarters of the year, the first back-to-back drops since 2009.

The recent small pickup in consumer spending has come out of their savings. Obviously this can’t continue, and corporations know it. Consumer savings are already at their lowest level in four years.

Get it? Corporate profits are up right now largely because pay is down and companies aren’t hiring. But this is a losing game even for corporations over the long term. Without enough American consumers, their profitable days are numbered.

After all, there’s a limit to how much profit they can get out of cutting American payrolls or even selling abroad. European consumers are in no mood to buy. And most Asian economies, including China, are slowing.

We’re in a vicious cycle. The only way out of it is to put more money into the pockets of average Americans. That means extending the payroll tax cut. And extending unemployment benefits.

Don’t stop there. Create a WPA to get the long-term unemployed back to work. And a Civilian Conservation Corp to create jobs for young people.

Hire teachers for classrooms now overcrowded, and pay them enough to attract people who are talented as well as dedicated. Rebuild our pot-holed highways. Create a world-class infrastructure.

Pay for this by hiking taxes on millionaires.

A basic bargain was once at the heart of the American economy. It recognized that average workers are also consumers and that their paychecks keep the economy going.

We can’t have a healthy economy until that bargain is restored.

The Middle Class: Demonized by the New Left in the Sixties, Defended by Occupy Wall Street Radicals Today

by John Lawrence

What a difference 40 years makes! The New Left radicals of the sixties treated the middle class with about as much respect as Rush Limbaugh treats liberals. The middle class was put down, demeaned and vilified. Today the protest movement is all about defending the beleaguered middle class. The middle class and the treatment thereof is the axis on which turns the raison d'etre of the two movements. It's why the movement of the sixties failed and why the Occupy Wall Street Movement may very well succeed in radically restructuring the US government and economy.

First of all in the sixties the protest movement was basically a cultural rather than a political movement despite the attempts of the New Left to make it political. The protest was mainly an anti-war movement combined with cultural overtones. It was the Age of Aquariius. There was a big change coming because Bob Dylan and the Beatles told us there was. It was Blowin' in the Wind. If you didn't wear bell bottoms and grow your hair long you were not part of the movement. Magic was in the air. But when it came right down to it, the Beatles didn't want a revolution because after all they were making too much money. So was relatively speaking the middle class, Nixon's silent majority. They were pretty well off in the sixties and early seventies. They just wanted the US out of Vietnam so their sons wouldn't have to be drafted. Hardly anyone had a student loan. College was relatively free compared to today.

Where I went to school at the University of California San Diego in the late sixties, tuition was free. There was a $73. a quarter incidental fee, and I rented a room for $40. a month. Middle class wages came with benefits - a pension and health care. Wives didn't have to work outside the home to make mortgage payments. I bought my first home for less than what you pay for a mid range car today. There were no adjustable rate mortgages. Everybody had it pretty good. Is it any wonder that the vast middle class did not join the radicals in their attempt to foment a revolution? People were too well off. And the cultural aspects were easily co-opted by commercial interests. You want tie dye. Hey, we'll sell it to you. You want bell bottoms. You can find them at Macy's.

The put down of the middle class was mainly a put down of middle class mores. Things like staying a virgin until you were married, buying ticky tacky houses in tract developments, having to go to church on Sunday, participation in the Rotary club. People didn't want to buy their Grandfather's Oldsmobile. So capitalist society geared up to sell them something else. You want long hair. Hey there's the Broadway musical, Hair. Down to here. Down to there. The same old imperatives to sell, sell, sell - only updated for a new generation. The Students for a Democratic Society were isolated because what people really wanted was new mores to replace their parents' mores. They didn't want to do away with capitalism. Capitalism had been very, very good to them.

Today the situation is different. The middle class is under siege. Far from putting down the middle class, today's Left is trying to defend it. The right wing is reduced to trying to defend the very wealthy, the upper 1%, using their vast wealth for TV advertising and smoke and mirrors. The 99% have lost the prosperity of the sixties. The Occupy Wall Street Movement is aimed right at the heart of capitalism - Wall Street. College tuition at UCSD is over $13,000 today. Along with room and board, books and other expenses, the cost for a year of college education at UCSD is almost $30,000. A far cry from when I was paid to go there as a graduate student with a research assistantship and expenses were minimal. One of my classmates even took flying lessons with the money that was left over from his assistantship. No one went into debt to go to college. Student loans were unheard of. People could work their way through college as I did as an undergraduate on the co-op plan where I worked for a quarter and went to school for a quarter. People could work their way through college with a waitressing job at Howard Johnson's.

Foreclosures are running rampant. People are being forced out of their homes even though the banks don't have the proper documentation to prove ownership. People whose homes are underwater, meaning they owe more than their homes are worth, are stuck there not being able either to refinance or to sell. Their choice is to go on paying exhorbitant mortgage payments every month or to walk away to an uncertain fate and ruined credit. 50 million people have no health care. Jobs are hard to come by. Recent college graduates are lucky to get a job as a barrista at Starbucks. Teachers, firemen, librarians and policemen are being laid off in droves. Manufacturing has moved to China. The middle class is under attack. That is the difference between the demonization of the middle class in the sixties and the attempt to save the middle class that is happening today.

Ed Schultz who has a talk show on msnbc was the first person I know that made a point of defending the middle class, long before it became fashionable, on his previous radio talk show. Now everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Why? The upper 1% owns most of the wealth and makes most of the income, and they are accelerating their financial predominance. The bankers on Wall Street, having been bailed out by middle class taxpayers and the Fed to the tune of trillions of dollars, are giving themselves even larger bonuses today than they were before the financial crisis which they precipitated. Unions are under attack in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida and elsewhere where Republican governors and legislatures are in control of state governments. The American Dream has turned into the American Nightmare for masses of people. People are waking up to the fact that government has been taken over by the large corporations who pay politicians, all the Republicans and a number of Democrats, to do their bidding. 30,000 lobbyists swarm Capitol Hill. They are not there to protect the interests of the middle class. They are there to curry financial favors for the upper 1%. Their money floods TV with ads favoring their politicians and their interests. Money runs politics and the American government.

The American government is gridlocked and dysfunctional. Republican filibusters kill any legislation President Obama would like to get enacted to create jobs, forestall the student debt crisis, or help underwater home owners. So now he is trying to get something done by executive orders, but so far it's just frittering around the edges. He needs to make much bolder moves by executive order such as starting an infrastructure bank and reincarnating FDR's CCC and WPA. If the American divided government continues on its present path it will inevitably be replaced by a more functional political system such as a parliamentary system or some system that can't be gridlocked and obstructed to death. Republican intransigence is just making the need for a different system of government more obvious. And it's not about replacing the American government with socialism or communism. It's about replacing a democratic system that doesn't work or only works in the interests of the rich with another democratic system that works in the interests of the middle class. As far as an economic system, there is not a country in the world that has a purely socialistic or communistic system. Even China's economic system is a synthesis of communism and capitalism. So no one in his right mind is advocating replacing capitalism with pure socialism or pure communism. There are societies which have adopted the best features of a number of disparate systems to create societies that are democratic both politically and economically. Economic democracy, in which the middle class is predominant and not beholden to the big banks which sit at the beating heart of American capitalism, is indeed a real possibility. The Occupy Wall Street Movement will eventually have to demand radical changes in the American system in order even to accomplish its minimal goals. Bankruptcy protection for student loans, which was taken away by the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 will have to be reestablished, and that will be an arrow aimed at the heart of capitalism and in particular Wall Street. But what was changed six years ago can be changed back. It's not so set in stone. It's a fight worth fighting.

So the New Left radicals of the sixties were way ahead of their time in wanting a political and economic revolution. The vast middle class was too comfortable and well off to support such a major change. Cultural revolution was co-opted and amounted to nothing. Today, however, with more and more income and wealth flowing upward to the 1% leaving the 99% further and further in the dust, with a political system which is wholly owned by the wealthy, with poverty at record levels and more and more people falling out of the middle class, there is the possibility of a true political and economic revolution in the US which would take back democratic control in favor of the vast majority and create a fairer and ultimately more prosperous society.

Why We Shouldn’t be Selling the Right to Live in America

by Robert Reich

 Monday, October 24, 2011

America is having a fire sale. Why not sell wealthy foreigners the right to live here, too?

That’s the notion behind a bill introduced last week by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Democrat Senator Charles Schumer of New York: Stoke demand for American homes by allowing foreign nationals to buy them. In return, give foreigners the right to live here (although not work here).

The price? At least $500,000 cash. It could be one piece of real estate costing $500,000 or more, or several, of which one would have to be worth at least $250,000.

Presumably, this would help homeowners by boosting demand. “This is a way to create more demand without costing the federal government a nickel,” Schumer told the Wall Street Journal.

And it would help the Street. Rather than have the big banks carry all those non-performing mortgage loans on their books or be forced to write them down, we’ll just goose the housing market by selling off the right to live in America.

And the measure wouldn’t allow in the world’s riff-raff, because buyers would have to be rich enough to pay cash, and live here six months a year without working.

Realtors love it. Says Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage firm, “when property values sag and this is a desirable place to live, one of the simplest solutions is just to let more people in so they can buy the homes.”

In Seattle, where Kelman lives, housing prices have slumped – as they have all over America. But Vancouver, Canada – just 140 miles to the north – is enjoying a housing boom because Canada allows foreigners to buy their way into Canada, just as the Lee-Schumer bill would do here.

But wait a minute.

Rich foreigner buyers may be a boon to American homeowners looking to sell, because those homeowners can’t find Americans willing and able to fork over as much money as the sellers would like.

But what about American home buyers – many of them young, just entering the market – who would prefer low home prices that aren’t bid upward by rich foreigners? It’s not altogether obvious why we should favor American homeowners over American home buyers.

The visa-for-home swap proposal also comes at exactly the same time the nation is actively closing its doors to foreigners who aren’t wealthy. Is this what America is all about?

Policy makers have tightened eligibility for entering the country legally. Student visas are harder to obtain. Family members are waiting years to become resident aliens. Green cards are in short supply.

Meanwhile, many states are doing whatever they can to make immigrants – mostly poor, but legal as well as illegal – feel unwelcome. For example, Alabama and Arizona allow police to demand “papers, please” from anyone they suspect may be undocumented (read: anyone who looks Hispanic). Alabama requires public schools to demand documentation from parents of all children in K-12 programs.

The nation is expelling record numbers of undocumented workers. Over the last year (from October 1, 2010 to October 31, 2011), almost 400,000 people were deported – the largest number in the history of the Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. Annual deportations have increased 400 percent since 1996.

Some of these people committed criminal acts in the United States but a significant number simply overstayed their visas. Others had been in America for decades, working and raising their families here. Some had even been here legally but had no opportunity to defend themselves. A recent report by my colleagues at the Berkeley Law School notes that many immigrants “are pushed rapidly through the system without appropriate checks or opportunities to challenge their detention and/or deportation.”

If the Schumer-Lee bill becomes law, the easiest way for a foreigner to live in America will be to plunk down $500,000 for a piece of property.

Maybe we should rewrite Emma Lazarus’s words on the Statue of Liberty:

Give us your richest, fattest cats,

Your highest net-worth, seeking pleasure domes,

Your wealthy heirs and pampered brats.

Send these, with a half-million to buy our homes,

And gild our fading door mats.

Gloom Grips Consumers, and It May Be Home Prices

from the New York Times

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Published: October 18, 2011

ORLANDO, Fla. — Ernest Markey lost his stone-cutting business in 2009. He then sold his home for half a million dollars less than its value at the peak of the housing bubble and moved with his wife, Marie, to a smaller home in a less affluent suburb. They gave up two new cars and bought one. Used.

The Markeys have since patched together a semblance of their old life, opening a new stone-cutting shop. But they do not expect that they will ever recover financially from the loss of equity in their old home.

“For two years I kept thinking that things would get better,” Mr. Markey, 51, said as he stood in his empty store on a recent weekday. “Now I think the future doesn’t look so good.”

The United States has a confidence problem: a nation long defined by irrational exuberance has turned gloomy about tomorrow. Consumers are holding back, businesses are suffering and the economy is barely growing.

There are good reasons for gloom — incomes have declined, many people cannot find jobs, few trust the government to make things better — but as Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, noted earlier this year, those problems are not sufficient to explain the depth of the funk.

That has led a growing number of economists to argue that the collapse of housing prices, a defining feature of this downturn, is also a critical and underappreciated impediment to recovery. Americans have lost a vast amount of wealth, and they have lost faith in housing as an investment. They lack money, and they lack the confidence that they will have more money tomorrow.

Many say they believe that the bust has permanently changed their financial trajectory.

“People don’t expect their home to regain value, and that’s really led to a change in consumer attitudes about the economy that we’ve just never seen before,” said Richard Curtin, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan who directs its Survey of Consumers. The latest data from the survey, released Friday by Thomson Reuters, shows that expectations for economic growth have fallen to the lowest level since May 1980.

In Orlando, a city that trades in upbeat fantasies, the housing crash has been particularly painful. The total value of area homes has fallen below the total mortgage debt on those homes, according to the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic. In the parlance of the real estate world, Orlando is underwater, a distinction matched by Las Vegas.

“I don’t know that it’s going to get better. We just have to get used to it,” said Sherry DeWeese, whose home in Ocoee, a northwestern suburb of Orlando, is worth less than she paid for it 13 years ago — and about a third of its value at the peak of the market. “It was nothing to buy whatever we wanted. Now we just think about what we really need.”

Economists have only recently devoted serious study to how a decline in housing prices affects consumer spending, not least because this is the first decline in the average price of an American home since the Great Depression. A 2007 review of existing research by the Congressional Budget Office reported that people reduce spending by $20 to $70 a year for every $1,000 decline in the value of their home.

This “wealth effect” is significantly larger for changes in home equity than in the value of other investments, such as stocks, apparently because people regard changes in housing prices as more likely to endure.

A recent paper by Karl E. Case, an economics professor at Wellesley College, and two co-authors estimated the decline in home prices from 2005 to 2009 caused consumer spending to be $240 billion lower in 2010 than it otherwise would have been. That figure is equal to about 1.7 percent of annual economic activity, enough to be the difference between the mediocre recent growth and healthy growth. And it does not include all the other effects of the housing crash, including the low level of new home construction, that are also weighing on the economy.

Roy Pugsley, who owns a pool supply store in Winter Garden, another suburb here, said that he made 2,500 fewer sales during the first eight months of 2011 compared with the same period in 2007. That translates to one less person walking through the doors to buy chemicals or toys or spare parts in each hour that the store is open.

Mr. Pugsley said business actually increased in the early days of the recession; customers had told him they were spending more time at home. But now people buy only what they need for maintenance. “People realized that it wasn’t going to get any better, and they stopped spending on their pools, too,” he said.

At Milcarsky’s Appliance Center in the adjacent town of Longwood, business now comes from people remodeling their own homes rather than builders, and customers are picking cheaper models, said Doug Morey, a sales manager.

“People who might have bought that” — he taps a stove with chunky burners, designed to look like it belongs in a restaurant kitchen — “are double-thinking it. Everyone has had to cut back.”

That means Milcarsky’s has cut back too. The company, which employed 26 people three years ago, now has about a dozen workers, and they are making less in salary and commissions.

“I might like to think that I’m middle class, but I’m not. I’m not anymore,” said Rae-Anne Crotty, a customer service manager at the store. She now shops for groceries at discount stores, she said, and buys gifts for her children at Christmas but not on their birthdays.

It remains the prevailing view of economic policy makers that economic activity will eventually return to the same trajectory as before the recession. Mr. Bernanke and others have said that they see no evidence of any permanent change in the economy. Previous bouts of economic pessimism, as in the early 1980s and early 1990s, went away once growth picked up.

But many people in the Orlando area do not share this confidence, at least not when it comes to their own prospects. Instead, like the Markeys, they are settling into lives of less prosperity.

The couple moved to Orlando 12 years ago from central Massachusetts in search of opportunities. The business Mr. Markey created, Stone Giant, grew to include two factories and 60 employees, and it installed granite countertops in up to 15 new kitchens every day.

His new company, Winter Park Granite, now installs two kitchens on the average day. He has eight employees but cannot afford health insurance for them or himself. The family income last year was less than a third of the $175,000 that he and his wife made in 2007, their last good year.

And he sees little room for growth. He has stopped spending money on advertising.

“We’re never going to get that big again,” he said. “I was someone employing people and taking people to the good life. Now I’m just trying to survive.”

President Obama: "I'm a Warrior for the Middle Class."

by John Lawrence

In the rhetoric wars, President Obama has finally thrown down the gauntlet to the Republicans. In response to their accusations of class warfare, Obama has effectively said, Damn right it's class warfare, and I'm on the side of the middle class. He's starting to call out Republicans by name. A while back he never could bring himself to even mention the word - Republican. He would say something like "our friends in Congress." Congress is not homogeneous. Not all Congressmen and women have the same values. It's time to call out "Republicans in Congress" as the real bastards. For the most part Democrats in Congress want to do the right thing and get the country moving again. That's why all these polls that give "Congress" an approval rating of 12% are ridiculous. It's not a "one size fits all" Congress. There are good guys in Congress, and then there are Republicans whose job seems to be to shoot down any initiative that might have a chance of improving the economy. Pollsters take note.

Obama's big mistake was listening to Larry Summers and other Wall Street types in the first place. The whole prognosis was to bend over backwards to help Wall Street on the assumption that getting Wall Street to loan money was all that was necessary to get the economy rolling again. Things would automatically get better once Wall Street returned to profitability. WRONG!! Obama should have been on the side of the middle class from the get-go. He should have challenged their rhetoric in the first place. When they called the rich "job creators" he should have pointed out how many AMERICAN jobs they destroyed by moving them overseas. Finally, he has lit a lightbulb in the minds of the American people that all tax breaks are not the same. There's tax breaks for the rich and then there's tax breaks for the middle class. You can do one without doing the other. Duhhh!

This notion that all you have to do is give more tax breaks to the rich in order to get them to use the $2 trillion they're sitting on to go out and hire more people is patently ridiculous. They will never hire more people unless it's in their interests and the interests of their bottom line to hire more people. They're not going to hire more people because the government gives them a financial incentive to hire more people. Labor is one of their biggest expenses, and they're not nice guys who will give someone, whom they don't need, a paycheck. When will people wake up and realize that a lot of people are never going to be hired by private corporations because they just don't need them. Machines are replacing people at a faster and faster rate. That makes labor "redundant" so to speak. Automation, robotization and computerization are proceeding at a rapid pace. Productivity is going up while the need for labor goes down. Capital improvements not human labor are providing the productivity gains. That is the story since the computer revolution of the 1990s. This might be a good thing if ownership of the means of production were spread more widely. Then everyone could have more leisure time and an adequate income with which to enjoy their leisure time. The work week could be cut to 20 hours. Instead ownership and hence prodfits are concentrated among a very small portion of the population who are doing quite well, thank you, while the vast majority of American citizens are experiencing falling wages or are being bumped out of the middle class and into poverty.

Obama needs to channel his inner FDR. FDR didn't see the solution to the Great Depression as catering to Wall Street. No, in fact he railed against the "economic royalists." He saw the solution as the direct creation of jobs BY THE GOVERNMENT! The WPA and the CCC were up and running in no time and provided much needed income to the middle class. The people who were employed in those programs built most of the American infrastructure that is crumbling and in need of replacement today. Obama needs to find the money - albeit without the help of the REPUBLICAN Congress which will begrudge him even one penny - somewhere to fund a jobs program. A fully funded Americorps would do the job. He needs to make Americorps, not the military, the employer of last resort.

America is shooting itself in the foot by having its REPUBLICAN politicians always threatening to shut down the government and by not using government effectively to build infrastructure and provide jobs. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is not standing still. Despite Dick Cheney's attempt to leverage the Iraq War into a boon for US oil companies, who did the first oil contract go to? China. China has been quietly buying up the world's natural resources without having fired a shot or spent any money on war. The US, on the other hand, has effectively bankrupted itself fighting futile wars promoted largely by the military-industrial complex which has made billions by promoting war. Lockheed Martin lobbyists swarm over Washington buying off Congressmen to vote for worthless projects like the F-22 and racking up huge cost overruns. It's an overextended empire comprising over 1000 military bases in every corner of the globe. Now Leon Panetta is saying that cutting the military budget would add 1% to the unemployment rate. Sure because the military is the US' employment program of last resort. But most of the money doesn't go to the rank and file. It goes to defense contractors who siphon off enormous profits. So for a fraction of what we spend on the military, those unemployed by a cut in the defense budget could be reemployed in civilian pursuits such as rebuilding infrastructure and in such a way that the lion's share of the expenditures go directly to workers and not to corporate profits.

The rest of the world is passing us by. While America's infrastructure decays, China is building high speed rail. The four largest Chinese banks are state owned while Wall Street and European banks continue to teeter on the edge of a meltdown. Has western capitalism reached its limits? Is state ownership of the large banks the way to go? Wall Street lobbyists continue to demand less regulation which is what got them into trouble in the first place while Chinese banks at the highest level have to answer to their government. It doesn't seem to augur a diminution of wealth creation because now western countries are going to China to help bail them out. The Chinese government, instead of being deeply in debt like most western countries, is sitting on $2 trillion in a sovereign wealth fund.  The Chinese people aren't doing too badly either. In the US and Europe wealth is being created primarily for the upper 2%. China seems to be enjoying widespread wealth creation as Chinese tourists and students travel to the far corners of the world for pleasure or edification.

In short it will take more than rhetoric for America to not become the world's backwater. It will take more than rhetoric for America not to become a nation of consumers without production, a nation of debtors without jobs, a nation of chumps at the mercy of TV advertisers. Maybe the occupation of Wall Street is the first step of a major revision of the American Dream.

MoveOn Creates “Contract for America” to Demand “Jobs Not Cuts”

by Frank Gormlie on August 9, 2011 · 0 comments from the OB Rag

in Civil Rights, Economy, Labor, Organizing, Politics, San Diego

From Julianne Escobedo Shepherd’s post / AlterNet / August 9, 2011

MoveOn has created a new petition to protest the debt deal and apparent fact that barely anyone in Congress cares about job creation. From a press release:

 In the wake of the debt deal that does nothing to create jobs, and fails to make corporations and the rich pay their fair share, MoveOn.org and Rebuild the Dream today announced the new Contract for the American Dream. The Contract, born out of the new American Dream Movement, is a progressive economic vision crafted by 125,000 Americans who came together online and in their communities, and put forth their ideas to get the economy back on track. Members of the American Dream Movement will take the Contract directly to Congress during the August recess to demand “Jobs Not Cuts,” beginning with hundreds of actions around the country on August 10th.

 

1. Invest in America’s Infrastructure

2. Create 21st-Century Energy Jobs

 3. Invest in Public Education

 4. Offer Medicare for All

 5. Make Work Pay

  6. Secure Social Security

 7. Return to Fairer Tax Rates

 8. End the Wars and Invest at Home

 9. Tax Wall Street Speculation

 10. Strengthen Democracy

View the full Contract here: http://contract.rebuildthedream.com/   Also, see below.

 
MoveOn rally outside Cong. Hunter's office, August 2, 2011. Photo by Grok Surf.

There are 3 actions in San Diego County tomorrow, Wed., August 10th, at local Congressional offices. See here.  There are events at Bilbray’s, Hunter’s, and Susan Davis’ offices. Go to link for times and locales.

View a video of the Contract here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7L3xpElK0Y

View a New York Times ad to run this week on the Contract here: http://s3.moveon.org/pdfs/moveoncontractad.pdf

The Times ad is worth reading—it lays out several solutions for both job creation and repairing the economy—though the August 10th actions seem to be more imperative than the petition, per se (see: London).

Here’s the Contract for the American Dream:

[ See below for the full text of the Contract and then click here to sign your name to it.]

MoveOn crowd outside Hunter's office, Aug. 2, 2011. Grok Surf.

 ”I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream.”  –Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963 March on Washington

We, the American people, promise to defend and advance a simple ideal: liberty and justice… for all. Americans who are willing to work hard and play by the rules should be able to find a decent job, get a good home in a strong community, retire with dignity and give their kids a better life. Every one of us—rich, poor or in-between, regardless of skin color or birthplace, no matter their sexual orientation or gender—has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is our covenant, our compact, our contract with one another. It is a promise we can fulfill—but only by working together.

Today, the American Dream is under threat. Our veterans are coming home to few jobs and little hope on the home front. Our young people are graduating off a cliff, burdened by heavy debt, into the worst job market in half a century. The big banks that American taxpayers bailed out won’t cut homeowners a break. Our firefighters, nurses, cops and teachers—America’s everyday heroes—are being thrown out onto the street. We believe:

• AMERICA IS NOT BROKE. America is rich—still the wealthiest nation ever. But too many at the top are grabbing the gains. No person or corporation should be allowed to take from America while giving little or nothing back. The super-rich who got tax breaks and bailouts should now pay full taxes—and help create jobs here, not overseas. Those who do well in America should do well by America.

• AMERICANS NEED JOBS, NOT CUTS. Many of our best workers are sitting idle, while the work of rebuilding America goes undone. Together, we must rebuild our country, reinvest in our people and jump-start the industries of the future. Millions of jobless Americans would love the opportunity to become working, tax-paying members of their communities again. We have a jobs crisis, not a deficit crisis.

To produce this Contract for the American Dream, 131,203 Americans came together online and in their communities. We wrote and rated 25,904 ideas. Together, we identified the 10 most critical steps to get our economy back on track and restore the American Dream:

1.  INVEST IN AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE. Rebuild our crumbling bridges, dams, levees, ports, water and sewer lines, railways, roads and public transit. We must invest in high-speed Internet and a modern, energy-saving electric grid. These investments will create good jobs and rebuild America. To help finance these projects, we need national and state infrastructure banks. 
2. CREATE 21ST-CENTURY ENERGY JOBS. We should invest in American businesses that can power our country with innovative technologies like wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal systems, hybrid and electric cars, and next-generation batteries. And we should put Americans to work making our homes and buildings energy efficient. We can create good, green jobs in America, address the climate crisis, and build the clean energy economy.
3. INVEST IN PUBLIC EDUCATION. We should provide universal access to early childhood education, make school funding equitable, invest in high-quality teachers, and build safe, well-equipped school buildings for our students. A high-quality education system, from universal preschool to vocational training and affordable higher education, is critical for our future and can create badly needed jobs now. 
4. OFFER MEDICARE FOR ALL. We should expand Medicare so it’s available to all Americans, and reform it to provide even more cost-effective, quality care. The Affordable Care Act is a good start and we must implement it—but it’s not enough. We can save trillions of dollars by joining every other industrialized country—paying much less for health care while getting the same or better results. 
5. MAKE WORK PAY. Americans have a right to fair minimum and living wages, to organize and collectively bargain, to enjoy equal opportunity and to earn equal pay for equal work. Corporate assaults on these rights bring down wages and benefits for all of us. They must be outlawed.
6. SECURE SOCIAL SECURITY. Keep Social Security sound, and strengthen the retirement, disability, and survivors’ protections Americans earn through their hard work. Pay for it by removing the cap on the Social Security tax, so that upper-income people pay into Social Security on all they make, just like the rest of us.
7. RETURN TO FAIRER TAX RATES. End, once and for all, the Bush-era tax giveaways for the rich, which the rest of us—or our kids—must pay eventually. Also, we must outlaw corporate tax havens and tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas. Lastly, with millionaires and billionaires taking a growing share of our country’s wealth, we should add new tax brackets for those making more than $1 million each year.
8. END THE WARS AND INVEST AT HOME. Our troops have done everything that’s been asked of them, and it’s time to bring them home to good jobs here. We’re sending $3 billion each week overseas that we should be investing to rebuild America.
9. TAX WALL STREET SPECULATION. A tiny fee of 1/20th of 1% on each Wall Street trade would raise tens of billions of dollars annually with little impact on actual investment. This would reduce speculation, “flash trading,” and outrageous bankers’ bonuses—and we’d have a lot more money to spend on Main Street job creation.
10. STRENGTHEN DEMOCRACY. We need clean, fair elections—where no one’s right to vote can be taken away, and where money doesn’t buy you your own member of Congress. We must ban anonymous political influence, slam shut the lobbyists’ revolving door in D.C. and publicly finance elections. Immigrants who want to join in our democracy deserve a clear path to citizenship. We must stop giving corporations the rights of people when it comes to our elections. And we must ensure our judiciary’s respect for the Constitution. Together, we will reclaim our democracy to get our country back on track.

America Was Made For You and Me!

 

George Carlin on the American Dream

 

The Commons Moment is Now

Published on Monday, January 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

How a small, dedicated group of people can transform the world—really

by Jay Walljasper

Social change is not something easily diagrammed on a chart. Sweeping transformations that rearrange the workings of an entire culture begin imperceptibly, quietly but steadily entering people’s minds until one day it seems the ideas were there all along. Even in our age of instantaneous information—when a scrap of information can zoom around the globe in mere seconds, people’s world views still evolve quite gradually.

Learning from the Right

This is exactly how the paradigm of corporate power came to rule the world. First articulated in large part by an obscure circle of Austrian economists, it surfaced in the United States during the 1950s as a curious political sideshow promoted by figures such as novelist Ayn Rand and her protégé Alan Greenspan.

The notion of the market as the bedrock of all social policy entered mainstream debate during the Goldwater campaign in 1964, which appeared to mark both its debut and its demise. Despite Republicans’ spectacular defeat in elections that fall—which extended from the White House all the way to local races—small bands of pro-market partisans refused to accept the unpopularity of their theories. Instead, they boldly launched a new movement that would eventually turn American life upside down.

Bankrolled by wealthy backers who understood that modern politics is a battle of ideas, market champions shed their image as fusty reactionaries swimming against the tide of progress and gradually refashioned themselves as visionaries charting a bold course for the future.

Their ranks swelled throughout the late 1970s as an unlikely combination of libertarian dreamers, big-business opportunists, and anxious defenders of traditional values signed up for the cause. The successive elections of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the United States, and François Mitterrand in France confirmed market fundamentalists’ global ascendancy. Thatcher and Reagan, each in her and his own distinct way, became effective advocates for the idea that the market should be the chief organizing principle of human endeavor. Mitterrand, on the other hand, was a dedicated socialist but soon discovered that the growing influence of international capital rendered him powerless to carry out promises of his 1981 election campaign. This was final confirmation that we had entered a new age of corporate domination.

Ever since then, our world has been shaped by these forces. Alan Greenspan became the most influential economic policy maker in recent history during eighteen years as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. And the market paradigm is now seen by many — a lot of whom did not begin as right-wingers — as an indisputable truth on the same level as the Ten Commandments or the laws of physics.

Today, it feels as though everything is for sale to the highest bidder—from the names of sports stadiums to DNA sequences that make human life possible. Since the 1980s, reform movements of the left and center successfully resisted certain extreme elements of the radical right agenda, but many Americans still believe a free-market blueprint for the future is inevitable. Progress, once viewed as the gradual expansion of social equity and opportunity, is now widely viewed as the continual expansion of economic privatization and unchecked corporate power.

Introducing the Commons Paradigm

There are emerging signs that market fundamentalism has passed its peak as the defining idea of our era. In the United States, the first glimmer of hope was when the Bush administration’s plan to partially privatize Social Security funds in the stock market gained little traction in Congress and public opinion. Painful financial upheavals around the globe revealed the glaring weaknesses of the current economic model for all to see, leaving some market true believers scrambling to embrace new policies. Yet old ideologies don’t quietly fade, especially when they enjoy sizable support in the corporate world. We’ve seen a fierce backlash against Barack Obama’s admittedly modest departures from rigid market thinking.

At the same time, a group of activists, thinkers, and concerned citizens around the world who are rallying support for the idea of a commons-based society. At this point, they’re a scrappy bunch—many with backgrounds in various social movements, community causes, and Internet initiatives—not so different from the dedicated market advocates of the 1950s, except in where they place their hopes. These commoners, as they call themselves, see possibilities for large numbers of people of diverse ideological stripes coming together to chart a new, more cooperative direction for modern society.

The volatile political mood of our era bears some resemblance to the late 1970s when liberalism was losing its footing and conservative policy makers refashioned their old political rhetoric, based on social exclusion and apologies for capitalism, into a shiny new philosophy: “the market.” Pre- viously the thrust of right-wing thought had been focused on what they were against (civil rights, labor unions, social programs, et cetera), but by claiming the market as their mission, they were able to emphasize instead what they were for. The success of that rebranding has led to many of the problems we now grapple with today.

A New Political Dawn?

In the same way, commons-based thinking could eventually shift the balance of politics in the United States and the world. Yet unlike market fundamentalism, the commons is not just old wine in new bottles; it marks a substantive new dimension in political and social thinking.

A commons-based society holds considerable appeal for progressives after a long period in which the bulk of their political work has been in reaction to initiatives from the right. Activists across many social movements, now aware that an expansive political agenda will succeed better than narrow identity politics and single-issue crusades, are starting to experiment with the language and ideas of the commons. This line of thinking also makes sense to some traditional conservatives who regret the wanton destruction of our social and environmental assets carried out in the name of a free-market revolution. In the truest sense of the word, the commons is a conservative as well as progressive virtue because it aims to conserve and nurture all those things necessary for sustaining a healthy society.

Growing numbers of citizens—including many who never before questioned the status quo—now seem willing to explore new ideas that once would have seemed radical. Millions of Americans are now making shifts in their personal lives such as buying organic foods, using alternative medicine, collaborating online, and searching for something beyond consumerism that offers a sense of meaning in their lives. They may not yet be sprinkling their conversations with the word commons, but they are looking for changes in their lives.

Now is the time to introduce a decisive shift in worldview. People everywhere are yearning for a world that is safer, saner, more sustainable and satisfying. There’s a rising sense of possibility that even with our daunting economic and environmental problems, there are opportunities to make some fundamental improvements. Everyone deserves decent health care. The health of the planet should take precedence over the profits of a few. Clean water, adequate food, education, access to information, and economic opportunity ought to be available to all people. In other words, a commons-based society. Let’s transform that hope into constructive action. 

This excerpt originally appeared in All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons by Jay Walljasper, © 2010 Jay Walljasper, published by The New Press, reprinted here with permission.

Jay Walljasper is the editor and chief author of All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. He is editor of OnTheCommons.org and author of The Great Neighborhood Book, writes widely about cities, community, sustainability and travel. On The Commons is a commons movement strategy center.

© 2010 Jay Walljasper, published by The New Press, reprinted here with permission.

The Fly in Obama's Ointment on Jobs

by John Lawrence

President Obama is waxing ebullient on the jobs front. He's partnered up with GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, and they are both proclaiming that the US will again be a robust manufacturing and exporting nation. They have rejected the model for the US as a mainly consuming and service oriented nation. That's all to the good. But Obama seems to have placed too much faith in the corporate CEOs. He seems to think they're going to stop outsourcing, and, out of the goodness of their hearts, they're going to start creating jobs here at home. But the official US government still has in place laws and policies - and in particular tax policies - that actually encourage outsourcing. Nancy Pelosi, when the Democrats controlled the House, said after passing a bill which would have reined in outsourcing: "In this legislation, which is job creating, it closes the loophole which has allowed businesses to ship jobs overseas.  Can you believe that we have a tax policy that enables outsourcing?  So if you have one thing to say about this bill to your constituents, you can say that today, you voted to close the loophole to ship U.S. jobs overseas and giving businesses a tax break to do so. It is not right. It will be corrected today.” This was in May, 2010. Of course, this bill never made it into law because it was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate. Sorry, Nancy.

Closing the loophole that has allowed businesses to ship jobs overseas? Well, sorry to say that loophole was never closed! President Obama though wants us to believe that, regardless of that loophole being closed, CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt are going to be nice guys and create local manufacturing jobs here in the US even though it is going to lower their profit margins, even though the loopholes for shipping jobs overseas are still open! Is he being naive? And then there is this from Robert Reich:

General Electric and other companies are signing up for deals with China involving energy and aviation manufacturing. But much of this will be done in China. GE’s joint venture with Aviation Industries of China, to develop new integrated avionics systems (which presumably will find their way into Boeing planes) will be based in Shanghai.

Will the real GE please stand up? Corporations are required by law to maximize their profits. This means that they will lower their expenses by getting the cheapest labor wherever they can get it. And American labor is relatively expensive compared to Chinese labor. So Obama is skating on thin ice. His bravado overlooks the underpinnings of law that give American corporations huge incentives for creating jobs overseas and outsourcing American jobs. Sure, GE wants to sell to the Chinese. But this doesn't mean that those products will be exported from the US. In the last ten years 42,000 American factories have closed. Millions of jobs have been lost. And now Mr. Nice Guy, Jeffrey Immelt of GE, is going to forego maximizing profits and his salary and his duty to shareholders in order to do a favor for President Obama and create some jobs in the US? What game is he playing? Mr. President, where are the legal underpinnings that would make sure that this will happen? You have a Congress that won't even close loopholes that would encourage job creation in the US. Do you have the feeling you're teetering on the brink? You said you've moved us back from the abyss. But have you? The abyss still looms because now for sure with a Republican controlled House, no loopholes that encourage and enable outsourcing will ever be closed unless and until Democrats control both Houses and the filibuster rules have been changed. Mr. President, you are whistling Dixie, in the dark, and past the graveyard too!

As President Obama touts the jobs being created at GE's Schenectady plant we have this dated January 14, 2011: "Solar Panel Maker Moves Jobs to China":

BEIJING — Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States. But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

It looks like the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing. It seems like not only does China have cheaper labor, but they have more government support for American companies that want to build plants and create jobs there! The US on the other hand has no industrial policy, no set of incentives in order to have companies, domestic or foreign, build more plants in the US. And there are no unions to speak of that would fight for the rights of American workers. America, for all intents and purposes, has been deunionized starting with Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers which effectively put their PATCO union out of business.

In "19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Make You Weep", Michael Snyder says:

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe.  All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing.  It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II.  But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America.  Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period.The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us. The United States has become bloated and spoiled, and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was. Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?

The US is embarked on its own destruction thanks to the "small government" mantra of the Republican controlled Congress. Small government means no industrial policy except by lobbyists seeking special favors for their particular corporate sponsors. It means that US government policy will favor US business but not necessarily US workers. Unless and until the US can adopt policies which favor job creation in the US, US workers will be left out in the cold. And President Obama's soaring rhetoric about cooperation with CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt will be just that: rhetoric.

The Myth of 'American Exceptionalism' Implodes

Published on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Until the 1970s, US capitalism shared its spoils with American workers. But since 2008, it has made them pay for its failures

by Richard Wolff

One aspect of "American exceptionalism" was always economic. US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citizens felt "middle class". A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labour supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the 1970s.

Then everything changed. Real wages stopped rising, as US capitalists redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad, while replacing millions of workers in the US with computers. The US women's liberation moved millions of US adult women to seek paid employment. US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labour.

US employers took advantage of the changed situation: they stopped raising wages. When basic labour scarcity became labour excess, not only real wages, but eventually benefits, too, would stop rising. Over the last 30 years, the vast majority of US workers have, in fact, gotten poorer, when you sum up flat real wages, reduced benefits (pensions, medical insurance, etc), reduced public services and raised tax burdens. In economic terms, American "exceptionalism" began to die in the 1970s.

The rich, however, have got much richer since the 1970s, as every measure of US income and wealth inequality attests. The explanation is simple: while workers' average real wages stayed flat, their productivity rose (the goods and services that an average hour's labour provided to employers). More and better machines (including computers), better education, and harder and faster labour effort raised productivity since the 1970s. While workers delivered more and more value to employers, those employers paid workers no more. The employers reaped all the benefits of rising productivity: rising profits, rising salaries and bonuses to managers, rising dividends to shareholders, and rising payments to the professionals who serve employers (lawyers, architects, consultants, etc).

Since the 1970s, most US workers postponed facing up to what capitalism had come to mean for them. They sent more family members to do more hours of paid labour, and they borrowed huge amounts. By exhausting themselves, stressing family life to the breaking point in many households, and by taking on unsustainable levels of debt, the US working class delayed the end of American exceptionalism - until the global crisis hit in 2007. By then, their buying power could no longer grow: rising unemployment kept wages flat, no more hours of work, nor more borrowing, were possible. Reckoning time had arrived. A US capitalism built on expanding mass consumption lost its foundation.

The richest 10-15% - those cashing in on employers' good fortune from no longer-rising wages - helped bring on the crisis by speculating wildly and unsuccessfully in all sorts of new financial instruments (asset-backed securities, credit default swaps, etc). The richest also contributed to the crisis by using their money to shift US politics to the right, rendering government regulation and oversight inadequate to anticipate or moderate the crisis or even to react properly once it hit.

Indeed, the rich have so far been able to use the crisis to widen still further the gulf separating themselves from the rest, to finally bury American exceptionalism. First, they utilised both parties' dependence on their financial support to make sure there would be no mass federal hiring programme for the unemployed (as FDR used between 1934 and 1940). The absence of such a programme guaranteed that real wages would not rise and, with job benefits, would likely fall - as they indeed have done. Second, the rich made sure that the prime focus of government response to the crisis would benefit banks, large corporations and the stock markets. These have more or less "recovered".

Third, the current drive for government budget austerity - especially focused on the 50 states and the thousands of municipalities - forces the mass of people to pick up the costs for the government's unjustly imbalanced response to the crisis. The trillions spent to save the banks and selected other corporations (AIG, GM, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc) were mostly borrowed because the government dared not tax the corporations and the richest citizens to raise the needed rescue funds. Indeed, a good part of what the government borrowed came precisely from those funds left in the hands of corporations and the rich, because they had not been taxed to overcome the crisis. With sharply enlarged debts, all levels of government face the pressure of needing to take too much from current tax revenues to pay interest on debts, leaving too little to sustain public services. So, they demand the people pay more taxes and suffer reduced public services, so that government can reduce its debt burden.

For example, California's new governor proposes to continue for five more years the massive, broad-based tax increases begun during the crisis and also to cut state services for the poor (reduced Medicaid funding) and the middle class(reduced budgets for community colleges, state colleges, and the university system). The governor admits that California's budget faces sky-high interest costs and reduced federal government assistance just when the crisis increases demands for public services. The governor does not admit his fear to tax the state's huge corporate and private individual wealth. So, he announces an "austerity programme", as if no alternative existed. Indeed, a major support for austerity comes from the large corporations and wealthiest Californians, who hold the state's bonds and want reassurances that the interest on those bonds will be paid.

California's austerity programme parallels similar programmes in many other states, in thousands of municipalities, and at the federal level (for example, social security). Together, they reinforce falling real wages, falling benefits, falling government services and rising taxes. In the US, capitalism has stopped "delivering the goods", as it so long boasted. The reality of ever-deeper economic division clashes with expectations built up when wages rose over the century before the 1970s. US capitalism now brings long-term painful decline for its working class, the end of "American exceptionalism" and rising social, cultural and political tensions.

Richard Wolff gives his monthly talk on global capitalism at the Brecht Forum in New York on 18 January; for more information about Professor Wolff's lectures, podcasts and media appearance, visit his website

© 2011 Guardian News and Media

Richard D Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a visiting professor in the graduate programme in international affairs of the New School University, New York City. Richard also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. His most recent book is Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (2009)

Serfing USA: Corporate America is Robbing American Workers

Published on Thursday, December 30, 2010 by ThisCan'tBeHappening.net

by Dave Lindorff

Along with the staggering theft in broad daylight of Americans' assets that has occurred in the course of the ongoing financial crisis, as taxpayers funded multi-trillion bank bailouts and banks stole homes through foreclosures with the help of fraudulent paperwork, American companies have also been picking the pockets of workers more directly.

This second round of paycheck theft has come in the form of stolen productivity gains.

Historically, the relatively high and rising standard of living of American workers--both blue and white-collar--which once gave the US one of the highest standards of living in the world, has come courtesy of rising productivity, which has allowed US companies to produce more goods with less labor, and to then pass some of the enhanced profits on to workers in the form of higher wages, without having to raise prices. That has been important because, when higher wages are financed by higher prices, it tends to be a kind of zero-sum game: higher wages cancelled out by inflation.

But beginning in 2000, the old system already creaky, broke down. (It must be noted that this system was never the result of the capitalists' largesse, but rather was because of a tighter labor market and, critically, a powerful labor movement.)

The corporate onslaught against trade unions and against the minimum wage, which began with the Nixon administration in 1968, combined with so-called "free-trade" deals that allowed US companies to shift production overseas and then to freely import the products of their overseas production facilities back for sale to Americans at home, by weakening the power of workers to demand higher wages, has led to a situation where companies can just pocket all the profits from productivity gains, leaving wages stagnant, or even driving them down.

The recession that began in late 2007 has only made matters worse, giving owners and managers to opportunity to really hammer employees. With real unemployment and underemployment now running at close to 20%, employees are in no position to press for higher wages, even as those who are still working are putting in extra effort to keep their jobs, thus pushing productivity gains even higher.

The figures speak for themselves.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity gains during the 1990-1999 decade averaged just 2.1% per year. The prior decade, from 1980-1989, the average productivity gain was 1.5% per year. But between 2000 and 2009, when the economy suffered two recessions, the average annual productivity gain has been 2.9%, almost 50% higher than the prior decade, and almost double the rate in the 1980s.

During this same period, however, wages have actually declined. According to the BLS, wages in 2010 rose 0.1%, but inflation, running at an official (and grossly under-measured) 1%, more than ate that up. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, for the whole decade from 2000 through 2009, wages actually sank for most people. In 2000, the median weekly wage for a high school graduate was $629. By the end of 2009, high school graduates were earning a median weekly wage, in inflation-adjusted dollars, of just $626--three dollars a week less than a decade earlier. A college degree didn't change things, either. In 2000, the median weekly wage for a college grad was $1030, but that had fallen to $1025 by the end of 2009.

Remember, all during that decade, companies were seeing productivity gains averaging almost 3% per year. If 50% of that gain in productivity annually had gone to workers, as might have been typical back 30 years ago when unions were stronger and before Congress gave away the store by signing onto the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Act and similar trade agreements, that high school grad would have been earning $729 a week in inflation-adjusted dollars by 2009, while the college grad would have been earning $1,195.

Of course as a whole, Americans have been doing even worse, because these are just the mean wages of people who are working full weeks. In fact, many companies have been laying off workers, and making the remaining workers, desperate to hang on to their jobs, work harder to produce the same amount of product, meaning that besides not getting any pay increase, they are producing much more profit for the boss. Many workers who are still hanging onto their jobs are actually working fewer hours, and thus are taking home smaller paychecks, all of which goes into that higher productivity figure for output per worker the government is reporting.

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal recently reported glowingly that US production of goods and services had returned to its 2007 pre-recession level, but this is with unemployment running at an official rate of 9.8 percent, and an actual rate of about 19 percent.

What we're witnessing is a massive national "speed-up" which is enriching the owners of capital, while the workers are getting stiffed. It is the payoff to the ruling class for decades of hammering of trade unions, and also of trade unions cutting deals with the Democratic Party, which in turn has refused to defend workers' interests. Look at the sell-out of Labor during the first two years of the Obama administration. The union movement's one big issue--restoring some measure of fairness to the Labor Relations Act, so that it would be at least possible to organize unions and to win contracts and improved wages and working conditions--was dropped without even a fight by the Obama administration and the leadership of the House and Senate. The government, fully in the hands of Democrats, has also continued to sign trade agreements, most recently with Korea, that further shift jobs overseas, thus further weakening the position of workers here at home.

A cynic might speculate that this is also why the Democrats have refused for over three years now to come up with any real public jobs program despite the desperate straits of tens of millions of jobless people who have been without work for more than a year. The Democrats, in thrall to corporate interests, would on the evidence much rather spend $50 billion on a program of extended unemployment benefits that leaves those millions of people hungry for any real job, than spend that same sum on providing them with government jobs, as that would actually reduce unemployment and increase the bargaining power of all workers vis-a-vis employers.

Meanwhile, the national corporate media, itself viciously anti-union, continue to skew news coverage to portray unions as corrupt and greedy, so that the 90 percent of American workers who are not in a union don't even realize that any pay gains or benefits they get are because employers are trying to avoid unionization of their workforce.

Unless Americans wake up soon to how this process is impoverishing us all, we will see this shifting income and wealth to the top strata of the population continue until most of us are little more than modern-day serfs.

A start would be for people to at least recognize that this stagnation and decline in incomes we're witnessing is not some natural phenomenon. It is, no less than the fat salaries, perks and bonuses paid by corporate managers to themselves, simply another manifestation of corporate greed gone wild.

© 2010 ThisCan'tBeHappening.net

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is author of Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains (BantamBooks, 1992), and his latest book "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). All his work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane

A look at our empire in decline through the eyes of the European media.

by Democrats Ramshield, December 26, 2010

from Alternet

 
As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective.

The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.

The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties:

Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred."

The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work.

Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)

Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out

Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families.

In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust.

In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story:

American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx.

It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media.

For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.

Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite.

Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac

A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized.

Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare?

 

It Might Be Time to Rebrand It the South American Dream

by Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post, December 22, 2010

Sao Paulo, Brazil - Yesterday, I wrote about the main takeaway from my ongoing trip to South America -- how Chile and Brazil, the two countries I'm visiting, have, on key issues like defeating poverty, transcended the tired division between left and right the United States seems hopelessly mired in.

After my time in Chile, I flew to Brazil, which is in the midst of an economic expansion -- the Brazilian Boom. It's a boom made all the more remarkable because Brazil's problems were long thought to be intractable: high inflation, high crime rate, high income inequality, high birth rate. As the old joke went, "Brazil is the country of the future -- and it always will be." Well, the future has finally arrived.

The turnaround started with the 2002 election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a left-wing, former union activist. When he assumed office, the country's elite feared a Brazilian version of Hugo Chavez. But he showed himself to be less of an ideologue and more of a pragmatist. "I'm not left or right," he said. "I'm a metal worker." Now, as he prepares to leave office next month, he'll be departing with a popularity rating of 80.5 percent.

During his time in office, the number of Brazilians living in poverty has fallen from 49 million to just under 29 million. And although Brazil still has one of the world's greatest income disparities, the country is on the verge of reaching its lowest income inequality level on record.

According to a study coordinated by Marcelo Neri, who heads the Center for Social Policies at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, between 2001 and 2009, the per capita income of the richest 10 percent of Brazilians grew 1.5 percent per year while the income of the poorest 10 percent grew 6.8 percent. "The most surprising aspect of the data," Neri told me when we had dinner Sunday night, "is that the historically most deprived groups, including blacks and those living in the northern parts of Brazil, have experienced the highest income growth."

Among the other greatest hits presided over by Lula: Wages have gone up more than 5 percent during his two terms; unemployment was cut in half; young people are staying in school longer; the inflation rate went from 12.5 percent a year to 5.6 percent; exports have more than tripled; and Brazil now has the eighth-largest economy in the world and is on track to grow 7.5 percent this year.

"The numbers are strong," Nelson Barbosa, Brazil's incoming executive secretary of the finance ministry, told me at lunch on Tuesday, "but we should judge the success of economic policies not only by the numbers, but by the impact they have on the everyday lives of the people."

Posted: December 22, 2010 08:28 PM in Huffington Post

 

I got a small taste of that impact today when I visited one of the schools that is part of the Guri Project, a largely government-funded program created to teach music to mostly underprivileged children. I went to a performance 40 children had put together. Speaking to them afterwards, I was moved to hear so many of them talk about how the program -- and the connection to music -- had changed their lives. Some discovered discipline. Some tapped into a newfound passion for music. Some talked about how the program had helped keep them away from risky situations in dangerous neighborhoods. One girl teared up, telling me how the students had become like a family to each other. "Many of these kids," one of the music teachers told me, "have traded guns for musical instruments. And teachers have replaced drug dealers as their role models."

One of the most successful poverty-fighting programs has been the "Bolsa Família," or "Family Allowance" initiative. Under this program, poor families are given direct cash stipends (through the use of debit cards) if they continue to meet certain requirements, like sending their children to school and making sure they get vaccinations and regular medical check-ups. More than 12 million households are currently enrolled.

The program, which Lula expanded when he took office, was almost universally embraced by candidates across the political spectrum in the last election. And it has been exported to several countries -- including the US, where it is the model for "Opportunity NYC" in New York.

As in Chile, much of Brazil's economic improvement is attributable to the government creating conditions that make it possible for the private sector to thrive. As Marcelo Neri told me: "We have maintained a balance -- combining an aggressive public commitment to addressing social issues with financial responsibility and a respect for what the private sector can do."

Franklin Martins, the outgoing minister for social communication, reiterated this. "One of Lula's major successes," he told me, "was to make certain issues, like poverty fighting, part of a shared national agenda -- accepted as such by both major political parties. These included a commitment to a sound currency, and a commitment to the kind of economic growth that would enable us to fulfill our goal of increasing social inclusion. This obligation to helping our poor is no longer limited to one particular party." Indeed, during the last campaign, the conservative candidate vying to succeed Lula called for a 13th month of the "Family Allowance" initiative -- in effect, trying to out-Lula Lula's own party.

Over dinner at Arminio Fraga's home in Rio, with his wife and two children (both of whom are studying for their PhDs in New York), the commitment to reducing poverty and its attendant suffering emerged as an accepted objective both by Arminio, who was the governor of Brazil's central bank during the conservative administration that preceded Lula's, and his wife, Lucyna, who has been working tirelessly for Friends of Renascer ("Rebirth"), an NGO that helps provide access to health care to underprivileged children. "When Arminio was governor of the bank," Lucyna told me, "we had the first fundraiser for Renascer here at the house." That may not be noteworthy in America, but in Brazil, where philanthropy has not traditionally been a big part of the culture, it was -- putting the spotlight on the lives of the millions who have not been on the radar screen of the country's elites.

Which is why I particularly wanted to meet Milu Villela, the largest shareholder in Itaú Bank, the second largest bank in Brazil, who has been a pioneer in promoting philanthropy and volunteerism -- especially among Brazil's young people. "Since 1995," she told me, "volunteering has been my life. I've created a center for volunteers and reached out to hundreds of companies and individuals in Brazil asking them to give back -- whether it's to the arts, to education, or to the environment. We have a long way to go."

Among all the changes in Brazil, the most transformative is the number of people entering the middle class. Between 2003 and 2009, 29 million people took that step up the socioeconomic ladder, and more than half of the population is now considered middle class. As a study entitled "The New Brazilian Middle Class" puts it: "Brazil is becoming a nation of consumers, buying cars, computers, and houses with cash or on credit." Indeed, there are 1,000 new cars on the road every day in Sao Paulo alone (the downside of this robust consumerism: the traffic in this city is horrible. The strained infrastructure has not caught up with the economic boom). As a result of the economic good times, Brazilians have an exceptionally optimistic outlook on their future.

Indeed, in many ways Brazil has become like a photo negative of America. Brazilians are increasingly living the American Dream of upward mobility, while nearly two-thirds of Americans no longer believe their children will live better lives than they did. "You talk to families here," Arminio Fraga told me, "and there is a real sense of pride about how much better their children are doing than they are. You hear things like, 'I don't have a computer, but my daughter does.'"

Maybe we need to rebrand it the South American Dream.

So even as the U.S. remains mired in its stale left vs. right battle, countries like Chile and Brazil are recognizing that they cannot achieve economic growth and political stability without helping move millions from poverty into the middle class.

My South American journey has given a global dimension to my long-held belief that left vs. right is a hopelessly 20th-century framing. The 21st-century divide is shaping up to be North vs. South -- with our side digging in on the wrong side of history.

Posted: December 22, 2010 08:28 PM in Huffington Post

 

Posted: December 22, 2010 08:28 PM in Huffington Post

Posted: December 22, 2010 08:28 PM

Who Stole the American Dream?

 

24/7 Consumerism is Killing Us

Published on Friday, November 26, 2010 by Riverhead Local (New York)

by Denise Civiletti

County Executive Steve Levy wants to force stores to shut down between noon and 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day and has proposed a law forcing them to close or face penalties of up to $1,500. (See story.)

I think he's right.

There are no days off any more, and it's making us sick as a society. I don't mean physically ill (though there's likely a connection there, too); I'm talking about every other kind of wellness: spiritual, emotional and - yes - even moral health and well-being.

Americans have no sabbath. No rest. No forced down-time.

We are a hyper, wired-in, materialistic, people who collectively work 24/7 nearly 365 days a year - all in the pursuit of "things," which have become our gods.

Who benefits from this craziness? We don't. We suffer. We don't spend time with our families, of both the immediate and extended variety. We don't spend time reading, writing, reflecting, taking walks or just resting. All the things that a SABBATH is all about.

When we had a sabbath - enforced by law - we did all of those things. The stores shut down and so did we. And it was good.

The seven-day shopping week turned us into full-time consumers.

It was inevitable that we would eventually be shopping on "holidays" and the spiritual, emotional and moral barriers to stores being open for business on holidays came tumbling down.

Personally I think it stinks that store clerks are forced to work at their low-wage jobs on days - and I mean morning, noon and even night -like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's - and Easter, and Veterans Day, and... you know what? Every Sunday, too.

We need to reclaim our sabbath. Because the only people benefitting from our crazy consumerism culture are the huge corporations that exploit people around the globe to enrich their executives and shareholders - from the minimum-wage cashier at one of the big box stores on Route 58 to the pennies-an-hour worker at a sweat shop in Sri Lanka.

The no-holds-barred corporate culture of greed has Americans securely in its grip. We've fallen for the nonsense that we "can't live without" this, that or the other thing. So we'll work two or three jobs, seven days a week, to get the money to buy those things - or to pay the double-digit interest on our credit card debt after we charge things we don't have the money to buy. And we'll go shopping on whatever days we do get off from work, including Sundays and holidays formerly spent with loved ones. We'll even go shopping in the middle of the night, for crying out loud. All in pursuit of "things" and a "special, limited-offer unbelievable deal." Hurry in! Don't wait!

Steve Levy's proposal is bound to spark controversy. I'm sure the free-market folks are gonna hate it. But he's right to want to stop the insanity, even if only for an afternoon.

You know what? We all have the power to stop the insanity - if we can only resist the marketing blitz, the gotta-have-it philosophy of American life. In my opinion, resistance starts with turning off the TV, which numbs the mind and offers up programming mostly as a vehicle for advertisements that want to convince us we've just gotta-have-it. All the other crap is just that.

Levy's proposal, even though a baby step in the right direction, is a bold one. And, in my opinion, a good one.

Just say no to consumerism. Reclaim your sabbath. Now get away from this computer and go have some face time with someone you love.

 

© 2010 Riverhead Local

Denise Civiletti wrote this for the Riverhead Local newspaper in New York.

How to Restore the American Dream

By Fareed Zakaria Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010, from Time Magazine

The American dream for me, growing up in India in the 1970s, looked something like the opening credits of Dallas. The blockbuster TV series began with a kaleidoscope of big, brassy, sexy images — tracts of open land, shiny skyscrapers, fancy cars, cowboy businessmen and the very dreamy Victoria Principal. We watched bootlegged copies of the show, passed around on old Betamax cassettes. America (certainly the CBS soap-opera version of America) seemed dazzling and larger than life, especially set against the stagnant backdrop of India in the 1970s. Everyone I knew was fascinated by the U.S., whether they admitted it or not. Politicians who denounced the country by day would go home in the evenings and plot to send their kids to college in "the States."

Of course, the 1970s were actually tough times in America — stagflation, malaise, the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate — but they were brutal in the rest of the world. Hyperinflation racked most third-world countries; coups and martial law were familiar occurrences, even affecting staunchly democratic India, where emergency rule was enforced from 1975 to 1977. Set against this atmosphere of despair, the U.S. looked like a shining city on a hill.

A few years later, when I got to America on a college scholarship, I realized that the real American Dream was somewhat different from Dallas. I visited college friends in their hometowns and was struck by the spacious suburban houses and the gleaming appliances — even when their parents had simple, modest jobs. The modern American Dream, for me, was this general prosperity and well-being for the average person. European civilization had produced the great cathedrals of the world. America had the two-car garage. And this middle-class contentment created a country of optimists. Compared with the fatalism and socialist lethargy that was pervasive in India those days, Americans had a sunny attitude toward life that was utterly refreshing.

But when I travel from America to India these days, as I did recently, it's as if the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future. After centuries of stagnation, their economy is on the move, fueling animal spirits and ambition. The whole country feels as if it has been unlocked. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the mood is sour. Americans are glum, dispirited and angry. The middle class, in particular, feels under assault. In a Newsweek poll in September, 63% of Americans said they did not think they would be able to maintain their current standard of living. Perhaps most troubling, Americans are strikingly fatalistic about their prospects. The can-do country is convinced that it can't.

Americans have good reasons to worry. We have just gone through the worst recession since the Great Depression. The light at the end of the tunnel is dim at best. Sixteen months into the recovery, the unemployment rate is higher than it was in the depths of all but one of the postwar recessions. And as government spending is being pared back, the economy is showing new signs of weakness.

Some experts say that in every recession Americans get gloomy and then recover with the economy. This slump is worse than most; so is the mood. Once demand returns, they say, jobs will come back and, with them, optimism. But Americans are far more apprehensive than usual, and their worries seem to go beyond the short-term debate over stimulus vs. deficit reduction. They fear that we are in the midst of not a cyclical downturn but a structural shift, one that poses huge new challenges to the average American job, pressures the average American wage and endangers the average American Dream. The middle class, many Americans have come to believe, is being hollowed out. I think they are right.

Going Global
For a picture of the global economy, look at America's great corporations, which are thriving. IBM, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel and Caterpillar are all doing well. And they share a strategy that is becoming standard for success. First, technology has produced massive efficiencies over the past decade. Jack Welch explained the process succinctly on CNBC last September. "Technology has changed the game in jobs," he said. "We had technology bumping around for years in the '80s and '90s, and [we were] trying to make it work. And now it's working ... You couple the habits [of efficiency] from a deep recession [with] an exponential increase in technology, and you're not going to see jobs for a long, long time." Welch gave as an example a company owned by the private-equity firm with which he is affiliated. In 2007 the business had 26,000 employees and generated $12 billion in revenue. It will return to those revenue numbers by 2013 but with only 14,000 employees. "Companies have learned to do more with less," Welch said.

Next, companies have truly gone global. The companies on the S&P 500 generate 46% of their profits outside the U.S., and for many of the biggest American names, the proportion is much higher. You might think of Coca-Cola as the quintessentially American company. In fact it is a vast global enterprise, operating in 206 countries. "We have a factory in Ramallah that employs 2,000 people. We have a factory in Afghanistan. We have factories everywhere," explains Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coke. Nearly 80% of Coca-Cola's revenue comes from outside the U.S., and an even greater percentage of its employees are in foreign countries. "We are a global company that happens to be headquartered in Atlanta," says Kent.

America's great corporations access global markets, easy credit, new technologies and high-quality labor at a low price. Many have had to cut jobs at home, where demand is weak, and have added them in the emerging markets that are booming. They are not "outsourcing" jobs. That word makes little sense anymore. They simply invest in growth areas and cut back in places where the economy is weak. None of them will ever give up on the American market — it is too large, too profitable and too central to their businesses — but the marginal dollar is more likely to be invested abroad than in the U.S.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2026776,00.html?xid=huffpo-direct#ixzz14m89BgYY