California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Republican Presidents Have Been Mainly Responsible for Increases in the National Debt

by John Lawrence

The Reagan, George W Bush and Trump tax cuts are responsible for most of the US national debt. During the Trump administration, the debt increased by roughly $7.8 trillion, and The George W. Bush administration  enacted sweeping tax cuts that will have cost more than $8 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. The nation’s fiscal pictured changed in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan enacted the largest tax cut in U.S. history, reducing revenues by the equivalent of $19 trillion over a decade in today’s terms. Although Congress raised taxes in many of the subsequent years of the Reagan administration to claw back close to half the revenue loss, the equivalent of $10 trillion of the president’s 1981 tax cut remained. Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) that it’ll weigh down the economy for years.

A series of massive, permanent tax cuts have created large federal budget primary shortfalls and continue to exert upward pressure on the debt ratio. In other words, the current fiscal gap—the growing debt as a percentage of the economy—stems from legislation that cut taxes, disproportionately for the very rich. While it is true that the Great Recession and legislation to fight it, along with the costs of responding to the health and economic effects of COVID-19, pushed the level of debt higher, these costs were temporary and did not change the trajectory of the debt ratio. If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

Therefore, taxes on the rich should increase while spending on the poor and middle class should also increase. Americans want both: social programs and reduced taxes. However, the gross inequality that exists between rich and poor begs the question: why raise taxes on everyone? Shouldn't the rich have their taxes increased while the poor and lower middle class have their taxes reduced? Of course, that 's the ideal solution. However, Republicans represent the interests of the rich so they would never agree to this proposal. They will continue to argue for increasing taxes on the poor while cutting spending that mostly benefits the poor and lower middle class. That's the American situation, writ large, folks. That's all you need to know to understand American politics. It's a struggle between rich and poor. The rich think they deserve all their money even if it runs to billions of dollars while the poor are only trying to get a foothold in the American Dream. The rich think the poor deserve their lot in life because they didn't work hard enough to overcome their poverty. The rich also believe in a meritocracy where they themselves are the winners who made all the right moves and worked the hardest. What's wrong with this picture?

Read "The Tyranny of Merit" by Michael Sandel.

The $3.5 Trillion Bill Corporate America is Terrified Of

by Robert Reich

Monday, September 13, 2021

Right now, Democrats are working to pass a $3.5 trillion package that will provide long overdue help for working Americans.

The final bill hasn’t yet been determined, so we don’t know the exact dollar amounts for all its policies. We’ll probably find that out in late September or early October. For now, the Democrats’ budget resolution frames what’s in the bill.  

First, on families:

The bill would make permanent key benefits for working families, including the expanded child tax credit in the pandemic relief plan that sends families up to $300 per child each month but is now set to expire in December, and is estimated to cut child poverty by half. 

It would also establish universal child care, for which low- and middle-income households would pay no more than 7 percent of their incomes. 

And provide a national program of paid leave — worth up to $4,000 a month — for workers who take time off because they are ill or caring for a relative.

Next, on education:

The bill would reduce educational inequality by establishing universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, benefiting an estimated 5 million children, and providing tuition-free community college – essentially expanding free public education from 12 years to 16 years. 

It will also invest in historically Black colleges and universities and increase the maximum amount of Pell grants for students from lower-income families. 

On health care:

The bill expands Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing benefits and lowers the eligibility age. It also expands Medicaid to cover people living in the 12 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid, and makes critical investments to improve healthcare for people of color. 

The big question is how far it will go to reduce prescription drug prices by, for example, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. That could reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and free up more money for other parts of the bill. But Big Pharma is dead-set against this.

Big corporations and the rich picking up the tab:

In another step toward fairness, all of these are to be financed by higher taxes on the rich and big corporations. 

The bill would also increase the Internal Revenue Service’s funding so the agency can properly audit wealthy tax cheats, who fail to report about a fifth of their income every year, thereby costing the government $105 billion annually. 

In addition, the bill tackles the climate crisis, which also especially burdens lower-income Americans: 

There are a range of solutions – subsidizing the use of solar, wind, nuclear and other forms of clean energy while financially penalizing the use of dirty energy like coal; helping families pay for electric cars and energy-efficient homes. 

The bill might include something known as a carbon border adjustment tax — a tax on imports whose production was carbon-intensive, like many from China.

The bill would also establish a Civilian Climate Corps, and invest in communities that bear the brunt of the climate crisis.

And the bill helps American workers:

It will hopefully contain much of the PRO Act, the toughest labor law reform in a generation. 

Finally, the bill includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
This is all about making America fairer. 

Remember: we won’t know the exact details of the bill for at least a month, but these are the main areas that it will focus on. The big challenge will be ensuring Senate Democrats remain united to get it passed. All of us will need to fight like hell.

Don’t listen to spending hawks who claim it’s too expensive or too radical. For far too long, our government has ignored the needs of everyday Americans, catering instead to the demands of corporations and the super-rich. No more. 

It’s time to get this landmark bill passed and build a fairer America.

Off the Top of My Head

America to End Forever War in Afghanistan Thanks to Joe Biden

by John Lawrence, April 15, 2021

So far Biden is making all the right moves, and I'm sure he has more up his sleeve. He's playing 3 dimensional chess while the Republicans haven't even learned to play checkers yet. The military-industrial complex is crying, "Oh, no," because they justify the huge expenditures on them by the need for continuance of forever wars. They are aghast at the prospect that their trillion dollar annual budget will be inevitably reduced. It has become obvious that the biggest threat to the US is not international terrorism but domestic terrorism. The FBI and the National Guard will deal with that very nicely; they don't need the Pentagon. The FBI is doing a remarkable job cleaning up the terrorists who took part in the January 6 bungled coup attempt. Over 400 arrests and counting so far. The idiots self videoed their own arrest warrants.

The US spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined. As an added service they also train the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and the Three Percenters. The military-industrial complex has done a lot to militarize the consciousnesses of young Americans, especially young non-college bound Americans. College graduates, especially in engineering, often end up, like I did, in the military-industrial complex working for companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and General Dynamics. As a country we have been spending our money in all the wrong places, but the military-industrial complex wants to hang on to its prerogatives. When I was an employee of General Dynamics many years ago, they encouraged you to vote Republican. Otherwise their budgets might be cut and there might be a RIF (Reduction in Force). When the military-industrial complex is cut down to size, right sized as they say, the Republican party will lose its raison d'être, its justification, because that's all in reality that it stands for - large defense budgets and tax cuts for the wealthy.

If we really want to compete with China, then we should cut our defense budget down to the size of China's and spend our money in more constructive ways like China is doing like building infrastructure with its Belt and Road initiative. The only infrastructure the US has been doing in foreign countries has been the building of military bases of which there are approximately 800 in practically every country in the world. Meanwhile, China has one military base in a foreign country - in Djibouti! If the US wants to compete with China, it will take a page out of China's book and build infrastructure not military bases. China and the US need to cooperate on problems facing the whole earth like global warming. It's no consolation to win the competitive war while the home we all live in goes up in flames or drowns as the case may be.

Republicans want Biden to tell them how he's going to pay for all his ambitious social programs? Let's see. Let me count the ways. Taxes on the rich - that's a good one. Reduce the size of the military-industrial complex budget. Even better. Military contractors, among others, provide the campaign donations for the Republican party as long as the guys they are providing the financial jet fuel for are hardliners for a "strong" defense. Well now, maybe they should stand up for transferring the money to the FBI so they can deal with domestic terrorism instead of a useless military engaged in forever wars which are only killing civilians, destroying real estate and creating refugees. The world doesn't need an America which thinks it has the self-appointed job of being the world's policeman or moral arbiter. There is something in the Bible about taking the beam out of our own eye before telling our neighbor to take the mote out of theirs.

The US bloated military is wasting our money while militarizing the consciousness of our young men many of whom think their patriotism justifies invading and laying waste to our Capitol. Lawmakers were shocked, shocked to find out that the invaders of the People's House were present and former members of the military and police forces! Patriots! This is what happens when you define patriotism in military terms. The true patriots are the doctors and nurses, supermarket workers, delivery drivers, meat packers and others who put their lives at risk to help us get through this pandemic. True patriotism consists of reducing our military-industrial complex and defense budget to a reasonable size comparative with other countries and the real threats in the world while building up our infrastructure assets and social safety net programs as every other advanced country has already done. Joe Biden is on the road to doing this. May he prosper and prevail. And God bless our doctors and nurses.

Off the Top of My Head

If Women Ruled the World, We'd Probably All Be Better Off

by John Lawrence, July 24, 2020

Number 1. There would be much less war. War is a man's game. It's testosterone fueled. Men want the glory heaped on them for having been in a war. Number 2. Since women have historically had the role of caregivers, they would probably have much more empathy for the poor and vulnerable especially poor and vulnerable children. They wouldn't be so obsessed with having a powerful war machine under their control. The President of the United States never wants to look weak, and, as Commander-in-Chief, revels in the power under his command. That's why he always wants to increase the defense budget. Even Trump, who campaigned on getting the US out of futile wars, can't resist the urge to have even more military power at his disposal and is spending more on the military budget. A woman as President would probably not feel the need not to look weak. Her priorities might be more oriented towards curing the ills affecting humankind which are related to poverty, health and education.

There has never been a period in human history in which there has not been a war or the threat of war. World War 1 was started for no good reason whatsoever. It makes no sense that the assassination of a minor Serbian official could have caused the devastation involved in the First World War. It was so bad that the First World War was called the War to End All Wars. President Woodrow Wilson called it "the war to make the world safe for democracy." English soldiers wanted to cover themselves with glory and then be home in time for Christmas. Instead many of them died miserable deaths in muddy trenches breathing mustard gas. The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I, was around 40 million. There were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths included 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians. European civilization before WW 1 was very advanced. All that was destroyed essentially by male testosterone and pride.

Despite the best intentions of Wilson and others that there would never be another war especially one that caused the devastation of WW 1, just a few years later we had World War 2. Wilson established the League of Nations, a precursor of the United Nations, a noble effort which, however, did nothing to prevent World War 2. The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organization whose mission was to maintain world peace. It didn't. President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as the leading architect of the League. Despite Wilson's leadership, the United States never joined the League. So much for diplomacy, negotiation and arbitration. War has been primarily conducted by males whose testosterone directed anger, lack of empathy and quest for glory have led them in the direction of war. Peace after all is boring.

Now even in the midst of a pandemic which affects the whole world, you might think it would be a moment when the whole world comes together. Instead Trump and his chief warmonger, Mike Pompeo, are trying to weaponize the coronavirus and start a cold war with China who the US has decided is its chief rival. Instead of cooperation, Pompeo has decided a better policy is to exacerbate tensions with China as much as possible. CNBC reported:

Top officials of the World Health Organization on Thursday slammed “unacceptable” comments made by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who alleged that China had co-opted the WHO.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the claims made Tuesday in London by Pompeo that China had “co-opted international institutions like the World Health Organization” were untrue and a distraction from the global coronavirus pandemic response.

“The comments are untrue and unacceptable and without any foundation for that matter,” Tedros said at a news briefing from the United Nations agency’s Gevena headquarters on Thursday. “WHO will not be distracted by these comments and we don’t want the international community also to be distracted.”

Tedros has repeatedly defended the WHO against criticism of its response to the coronavirus. U.S. President Donald Trump and others have alleged the U.N. health agency has a favorable relationship with China, where the virus emerged at the end  of 2019. Tedros reiterated comments on Thursday that the politicization of the pandemic is one of the greatest threats to the global response.

Pompeo wants his cold war with China because this is the only way he knows to do diplomacy as, supposedly, America's top diplomat. He's not a diplomat. A diplomat would not try to deliberately provoke another country. Now the US has turned its attention from Russia to China as America's main bogieman. They do not even try to be peace makers or negotiators. Conciliation and cooperation are not words in their vocabulary. Maybe Pompeo has his eyes on a lucrative job in the military-industrial complex after he is out of his job as Secretary of State. So his interest is in justifying America's immense defense budget by starting a cold war which might even become a hot war. But a hot war is not even necessary to justify outsize defense budgets. A cold war will do very nicely, thank you very much.

Meanwhile many Americans are on the verge of homelessness. They will swell the ranks of the 500,000 who are already homeless. While Congress argues over the next bailout package, people are losing their jobs, their businesses, their health care and their homes. A bailout package could pay people's mortgages, rents and employee salaries for the rest of the year until, hopefully, a vaccine is discovered. That way the most economic damage could be averted. But it will probably be a paltry cash sum that will do little to protect the great majority of Americans.

What Stephanie Kelton points out in her book, Deficits Don't Matter, is that, well, they don't matter so a bailout 100 times the size of the projected bailout would not be a problem and would never have to be repaid since the US dollar is a sovereign currency. US debt can just be disappeared on the Fed's balance sheet. So both conservatives and liberals can rejoice. There's no reason not to have massive tax cuts as well as massive increases to the Health and Human Services budget. Wow, finally a cause for celebration. We can have it both ways. Now if Americans can only realize this and climb aboard the gravy train. There are some restrictions, however, as Ms. Kelton points out.

The biggest question that people asked Bernie Sanders with his ambitious social programs like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal is "How ya going to pay for it?" Stephanie Kelton has the answer and now Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex is getting on board. Ocasio-Cortez also said that Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that the government doesn't need to balance the budget and that budget surpluses actually hurt the economy, "absolutely" needed to be "a larger part of our conversation."

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

Racist Economics

by John Lawrence, June 8, 2020

Is it racism when the schools in predominantly black neighborhoods are worse than schools in predominantly white neighborhoods? Schools in many parts of the country are funded with local property taxes. It stands to reason that property values in poor neighborhoods are less than property values in rich neighborhoods, and, therefore, property tax revenues and hence school funding is less. So the worse schools are found in poor "predominantly black" neighborhoods. A word you hear often these days is "predominantly". Nothing is totally black and white, but, when black people are affected in a way that is greater than their percentage of the population, one could say it is a "predominantly black" situation. When police arrest black people at a greater rate than they do white people, we could say that the police are a racist institution.

It has been said that the only mistake that the looters at the current protests made was that they didn't form a hedge fund first before they started looting. Martin Luther King said, “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” Republicans have breathed a sigh of relief that so far the Black Lives Matter movement has had little to say about poverty, economic inequality, militarism and materialism. Some though are getting to the heart of the problems in our society that affect us all but affect black people "disproportionately."

Writing in the New Yorker Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor said:

The [1992] uprising in L.A. shared with the rebellions of the nineteen-sixties an igniting spark of police abuse, widespread violence, and the fury of the rebels. But, in the nineteen-sixties, the flush economy and the still-intact notion of the social contract meant that President Lyndon B. Johnson could attempt to drown the civil-rights movement and the Black Power radicalization with enormous social spending and government-program expansion, including the passage of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, which produced the first government-backed, low-income homeownership opportunities directed at African-Americans.

By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, the economy was in recession and the social contract had been ripped to shreds. The rebellions of the nineteen-sixties and the enormous social spending intended to bring them under control were wielded by the right to generate a backlash against the expanded welfare state. Political conservatives argued that the market, not government intervention, could create efficiencies and innovation in the delivery of public services. This rhetoric was coupled with virulent racist characterizations of African-Americans, who relied disproportionately on welfare programs. Ronald Reagan mastered the art of color-blind racism in the post-civil-rights era with his invocations of “welfare queens.” Not only did these distortions pave the way for undermining the welfare state, they reinforced racist delusions about the state of black America that legitimized deprivation and marginalization.

The 1990s saw Democrats agreeing with Republicans that problems in the black community were largely caused by overly generous social programs. President Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it." Senator Joe Biden jumped right on board the push to reduce welfare programs by saying, "“the culture of welfare must be replaced with the culture of work. The culture of dependence must be replaced with the culture of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. And the culture of permanence must no longer be a way of life.” Biden championed the 1994 “crime bill” that pledged to put a hundred thousand more police on the street, called for mandatory prison sentences for certain crimes, increased funding for policing and prisons, and expanded the use of the death penalty. By the 1980s Ronald Reagan decried "welfare queens."

Taylor continues:

So, though Biden desperately wants us to believe that he is a harbinger of change, his long record of public service says otherwise. He has claimed that Barack Obama’s selection of him as his running mate was a kind of absolution for Biden’s dealings in the Democrats’ race-baiting politics of the nineteen-nineties. But, from the excesses of the criminal-justice system and the absence of a welfare state to the inequality rooted in an unbridled, rapacious market economy, Biden has shaped much of the world that this generation has inherited and is revolting against.

More important, the ideas honed in the nineteen-eighties and nineties continue to beat at the center of Biden’s political agenda. His campaign advisers include Larry Summers, who, as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, was an enthusiastic supporter of deregulation, and, as Obama’s chief economic adviser during the recession, endorsed the Wall Street bailout while allowing millions of Americans to default on their mortgages.

Biden was chiefly responsible for the 2005 bill that took away bankruptcy protection from student load debtors (presumably disproportionately black). Credit card companies, many of whom are headquartered in Biden's state of Delaware, have been major Biden campaign contributors. Biden was known as the Senator from MBNA. Biden should just turn over the Democratic nomination to Bernie Sanders who has been on the right side of issues which are now coming to the forefront in American life.

Taylor continues:

In 1968, King, in the weeks before he was assassinated, said, “In a sense, I guess you could say, we are engaged in the class struggle.” He was speaking to the costs of the programs that would be necessary to lift black people out of poverty and inequality, which were, in and of themselves, emblems of racist subjugation. Ending segregation in the South, then, was cheap compared with the huge costs necessary to end the kinds of discrimination that kept blacks locked out of the advantages of U.S. society, from well-paying jobs to well-resourced schools, good housing, and a comfortable retirement. The price of the ticket is quite steep, but, if we are to have a real conversation about how we change America, it must begin with an honest assessment of the scope of the deprivation involved. Racist and corrupt policing is the tip of the iceberg.

We have to make space for new politics, new ideas, new formations, and new people. The election of Biden may stop the misery of another Trump term, but it won’t stop the underlying issues that have brought about more than a hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths or continuous protests against police abuse and violence. Will the federal government intervene to stop the looming crisis of evictions that will disproportionately impact black women? Will it use its power and authority to punish police, and to empty prisons and jails, which not only bring about social death but are now also sites of rampant COVID-19 infection? Will it end the war on food stamps and allow African-Americans and other residents of this country to eat in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Will it finance the health-care needs of tens of millions of African-Americans who have become susceptible to the worst effects of the coronavirus, and are dying as a result? Will it provide the resources to depleted public schools, allowing black children the opportunity to learn in peace? Will it redistribute the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to rebuild devastated working-class communities? Will there be free day care and transportation?

In short we need good paying union jobs (Green New Deal) that will deal with the issue of climate change (Green New Deal), forgiveness of student loan debt (the least Biden can do since he was largely responsible for creating the situation), Medicare for All (since hospitals in black neighborhoods compare unfavorably with those in white neighborhoods), public housing (to end homelessness and guarantee everyone the right to have a roof over their head). If we want to solve the problem of institutional racism in this country, we need to address the fundamental problems of economic inequality. Where do we get the money? Not only by defunding the police which claim the lion's share of local budgets, but by demilitarizing the bloated military-industrial complex and taxing the rich at 1955 levels (91%). The Federal Reserve can always take a few more trillion on its balance sheet; it has taken trillions on its balance sheet already and given the money to the big banks. How about Quantitative Easing for the people? Economic inequality is a problem which affects black people disproportionately (there's that word again), but the solution of which will contribute to the benefit of white people as well.

Off the Top of My Head

In the Age of Pandemic Has War Become a Luxury?

by John Lawrence, April 12, 2020

Saudi Arabia and Yemen have declared a cease fire. Sailors are becoming infected on aircraft carriers. War planning requires groupings of military people. So has war become a luxury we can no longer afford? Are we really "all in this together"? Does the pandemic require cooperation among all nations since the pandemic doesn't respect national borders? Will the pandemic, when it's over, have changed the way human beings conduct their affairs in the world or will we get back to business as usual. If the pandemic engenders cooperation instead of rivalry among the nations of the world, does this mean that we will all be socialists or communists? Does it even matter?

If the pandemic makes us realize that war is a useless exercise with few benefits, will the US military-industrial complex be defunded. Will the money then go to health care workers, to Peace Corps and AmeriCorps workers who will attempt to bring clean water and modern sanitary systems to developing countries? Will there be a push to create more sanitary conditions in the world so that pandemics don't get started? Plagues and pandemics before have motivated people to build modern sanitary systems in places like London and New York in the 19th century where urban populations in close proximity created the conditions of cholera and bubonic plague. Is homelessness a social situation we can no longer afford?

Will the meaning of 'essential services' become normalized in the economy post corinavirus? What then will be considered essential and what could we live without? As long as there is no vaccine for coronavirus, new cases will continue to crop up even after the economy has "reopened." The flu epidemic of 1918 lasted 10 months and had several spikes. We can expect more spikes in the current pandemic until there are widespread vaccinations available. So what is essential? Sports events? Cruises? Rock concerts? Movie theaters? Now with Netflix and Amazon prime we can watch movies at home. Any movie we want to see. I'm catching up on all the great movies I've missed over the years. Last night I watched "To Catch a Thief" with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Free on Amazon Prime. The fidelity  both video and audio was excellent on my smart TV. I have no need to go to a movie theater where I can't control the volume. Hint: they are too loud.

Perhaps now we can grasp the concept that cooperation among peoples and nations is more important than manufactured rivalries over some nation's form of government. Perhaps now we can grasp the concept that diplomacy is more important, getting along is more important and winning isn't everything. Maybe now public health and human rights can be seen as more important than having everyone pull themselves up only by their own bootstraps. Maybe we can get on with the business of cooperating to combat the real enemy - climate change and even future pandemics. Maybe we will bring the US infrastructure into the modern world with a Green New Deal. Maybe we can finally grow up and have a consensus about what is really important, what really matters. Maybe doctors, nurses, caregivers, and social workers will come to be seen as more important that Wall Street brokers, the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps as more important than the War Corps. As Governor Cuomo says, "Love will conquer all." Happy Easter.

How Corporate Welfare Hurts You

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

You often hear Trump and Republicans in Congress railing against so-called “welfare programs” – by which they mean programs that provide health care or safety nets to ordinary Americans. 

But you almost never hear them complaining about another form of welfare that lines the pockets of wealthy corporations. We must end corporate welfare. Now.

There are several ways corporations get rich on the taxpayer’s dime. The most obvious comes through subsidies or tax breaks for certain businesses or industries.

Consider the fossil fuel industry, one of the most profitable and privileged sectors of the economy. Every year, oil companies get to deduct millions of dollars from their tax bills for the cost of new wells, oil exploration, and other drilling and mining expenses.

It’s been estimated that repealing these special tax breaks would save taxpayers $39 billion over 10 years.

Other examples of corporate welfare include billions in government subsidies for agricultural conglomerates, pharmaceutical makers, tech giants and defense contractors. 

Other industries don’t get these benefits. Meanwhile, most families don’t even benefit from tax credits and deductions for childcare.

State and local governments are also handing out corporate welfare, often with no strings attached. In 2013, for example, the state of Washington approved a record $8.7 billion handout to Boeing in order “to maintain and grow its workforce within the state.“ What did Boeing do? In the following years, it laid off more than 12,000 workers in the state.

State and local tax breaks for corporations are estimated to cost local schools almost $2 billion a year in lost tax revenue. 

It’s argued they create jobs, yet nationwide, not a single new job is created. At most, the jobs are merely moved from state to state.

How do corporations get this corporate welfare? Follow the money. They spend hundreds of millions on lobbying and campaign contributions.

An even more insidious example of corporate welfare occurs when corporations don’t pay their workers a living wage. As a result, those workers often have to rely on programs like Medicaid, public housing, food stamps and other safety nets.

Which means you and I and other taxpayers end up subsidizing these low wages so those corporations can enjoy even higher profits for their executives and wealthy investors.

For example, every year, Americans spend an estimated $153 billion in taxes and on programs to subsidize McDonald’s and Walmart’s low-wage workers.

Here’s the bottom-line: When corporations get special handouts from the government, it costs the rest of us. We have to pay more in taxes to make up for these hidden tax breaks, subsidies, and loopholes. In turn, there’s less money for good schools and roads, Medicare and national defense, and everything else we need.

So the next time you hear conservatives railing against welfare handouts for the poor, remind them that we should really be cutting corporate welfare – unnecessary and unwarranted aid for dependent corporations.

How San Diego's P100 Program Screwed Diego and Anna

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

San Diego's P100 program involves intrusive, invasive home searches by law enforcement officials from the DA's office for everyone that applies for welfare benefits. These searches are unannounced and the potential welfare beneficiary must be at home whenever the investigator chooses to come or else they will be denied benefits. This makes it difficult for someone who has even a part time job. When the investigator comes, as we reported last time, he will look for any evidence that the applicant has lied on her application. That could be a pair of work boots in a single mother's closet or a pair of sexy panties in her underwear drawer, evidence of a boyfriend who could help her pay bills.

Some of these situations approach the Kafkaesque as stifling bureaucracy is combined with clueless non sequiturs on the part of the DA's office to produce epidemic frustration and humiliation for poor people applying for a modest amount of help. Such was the case for a Latino couple, Diego and Anna Alvarez, who jumped through seemingly impossible hoops while trying to get a little help. The following is freely adapted from Matt Taibbi's book, The Divide.

Anna and Diego met at the gym in early 2011 and fell in love. At first they were doing quite well. They were both working - Anna at Carl's Jr and Diego at Panda Express. "I was making pretty decent money there," Diego said. "We were doing OK." "We were able to pay our rent," Anna said. Then Panda Express downsized, Diego lost his job and at about the same time Anna got pregnant. She was not going to be able to keep her job on the night shift at Carl's Jr which required a two hour bus ride each way. In late 2011 they made the decision to go on benefits to help them at least through the birth of the baby.

Trying to get help at the welfare office is a little like trying to get a ticket to a Rolling Stones concert in the 1970s. You have to camp out in front long before they open for business. Then you go in, take a number and wait ... and wait ... and wait. You sit there all day long while people scream and yell around you. You bring your kids and their lunches. You have to be careful taking them to the bathroom to be sure you don't miss your number when they call it.

"It's worse in the afternoon," says Anna. "The kids get hungry and they start screaming and acting out." If you're lucky, you get your meeting the same day. Otherwise, you have to come back. If you get approved, they tell you to go home and wait for the P100 inspector to come and search your house. You have no idea when he will arrive, but you better be home when he comes; otherwise you won't get any benefits.

The couple handled their vigil in shifts. Usually Anna stayed home while Diego went out to his new job at Little Caesar's. The inspector showed up 6 days later. Despite the fact that Diego and Anna were doing everything right, they still ran into immense problems.

Diego had immigration status because his mother had been the victim of domestic violence. The Violence Against Women Act of 1994, signed into law by Bill Clinton, gave temporary immigration status to victims of domestic violence. Diego had had his U visa since 2006 and had qualified to receive his own benefits as an adult for two years but he only applied for food stamps. Anna, however, applied for the full CalWORKs package. CalWORKs is a welfare program that gives cash aid and services to eligible needy California families. They went into the Market Street Family Resource Center (FRC) in December 2011, and at first everything seemed fine. "The woman was really nice," Anna said. "We had no problems at all. She told us we qualified."

The rules surrounding who qualifies for benefits are opaque and seemingly incomprehensible. In Diego's and Anna's case they could not have an income of more than $714 a month and still have qualified for CalWORKs. Everything stated on the application form better be correct - no mistakes tolerated - or else they could be jailed for 3 years for lying about cash aid and up to 20 years for lying with regard to food stamps.

You're then asked 19 questions such as "How much income does everyone, including children, get or will get this month?" That means everyone in your household. God forbid there are any relatives also experiencing hard times that might be eating any of your food. If you're on any kind of public assistance you have to fill out a form every quarter and attest to questions like "Who do you live with?", whether or not you have a car, where you work, how much you make and so on. If any of this doesn't jibe with what the state knows or thinks it knows, you might be headed down the road to a fraud case.

As the New Year rolled around Diego and Anna started thinking that they would get through their present situation OK, and they started thinking about the time when they would be able to get off the benefits. Diego was working again at Little Caesar's. Anna was getting $246. monthly in cash benefits from CalWORKs and they both were getting food stamps.

Then they got a letter in the mail.

Almost immediately after receiving their first month's benefits, Anna got a letter stating that, upon further review, the state had ruled that Diego was not eligible for benefits. Therefore, Anna - not Diego! - now owed the state $148. to compensate for the month of food stamps that Diego had "improperly" received. Even though the state was wrong and Diego did qualify for food stamps, that didn't matter. They were told to pay back the money or else the money would be withheld from their paychecks. And then more notices began coming in. One informed them that Diego had earned more than $700. in January.

In fact Diego had gotten only one paycheck from Little Caesar's and it was for a total of $36! In late January they went to the FRC to try and straighten things out. This was one of ten different trips they would make there in a short period of time. In the course of that meeting something strange happened. Diego saw that the caseworker had his photo ID on file. When he asked for a copy of that document, the caseworker exploded. He got up, threw a pair of scissors down on the desk and stomped out. Not surprisingly, nothing got resolved at that meeting.

Although the couple tried to enjoy the last month before their baby was born, the notices kept coming. By March there would be more than 20 of them, mostly harping about the food stamp money. Then two weeks before their son Jonah was born, they got a bombshell in the mail. Anna said: "It said I had received an overpayment. They said I had received $516. in cash aid. But I'd actually received only $246. I had the stubs to prove it and everything."

As a result of this "overpayment", Anna was now permanently denied benefits. Both young people were pushed off the rolls due to errors made by the state. The total amount of "overpayment" was now perilously close to the $400. figure which is considered the minimum threshold for the state to press a fraud case. As it was, the Alvarezes were going to be out at least that much money in taxes which would be taken out of future paychecks earned by either Diego or Anna.

According to the state, Diego and Anna had committed fraud at least three times: (1) when Diego received benefits without qualifying for them (which he actually did); (2) when Diego lied about his January earnings (which he didn't); (3) when Anna overcollected in cash aid (which she didn't) without paying the money back.

After all this Anna and Diego were in a stressed out state of panic. They could be charged with a crime at any time, and once so charged chances are they would be convicted and sent to jail. In addition to having an uphill climb just to keep food on the table, she and her husband were in a situation where one wrong move, one wrong number on some form, one slip of the tongue, one computer error and they would be in legal jeopardy forever. "It is literally dangerous to be poor," said Joni Halpern, a San Diego lawyer who has spent the last decade defending people on public assistance.

The young couple's only hope was to get some volunteer lawyer to help them sort things out before their situation turned into a criminal case. And it had to be sorted out post haste because once prosecutors file in a case like this, it's over. "Welfare recipients are so unsympathetic that public defenders don't even bother trying to fight the cases," said Hilda Chan, a young lawyer who works with the poor in San Diego.

The frustrating thing is that, every time Anna and Diego tried to get their case resolved, they found themselves dealing with a different case worker. They had to start all over again and explain everything from the beginning which they wouldn't have had to do if they were assigned to the same caseworker each time. Like Kafka in a room with many doors where every door leads to the same room all over again, this young couple had been put in a box for which there was no exit door. There was no way out.

They might think they're talking to a social worker, someone who is there to help them, and find out later that they were actually talking to a fraud investigator, someone who is trying to put them in jail. In San Diego welfare caseworkers and fraud investigators working for the DA's office work out of the same building. San Diego has satellite DA's offices in the welfare office. In fact there are so many welfare workers that have migrated to law enforcement that they have their own union and their own lobbyists. In California it is called the California Welfare Fraud Investigators Association. It has lobbied for more welfare fraud prosecution and investigation much in the same way that lobbyists for the private prison industry lobby for more criminal prosecutions.

This results in huge numbers of fraud cases - not for banksters, who, despite their many fraudulent activities, have gotten away scot free, but for the poorest of the poor. Counties like San Diego file upwards of 40 or 50 cases a month. At the end of 2007 there were more than 52,000 welfare fraud investigations pending in California. DAs love these cases because they almost never lose.

In cases like Anna's and Diego's a numerical glitch can turn into a criminal charge, and people really do end up in jail. It could be that a casewoker at a FRC sees an applicant leaving in a nice car or a P100 investigator sees a nice pair of Victoria's Secret panties in a dresser drawer or a neighbor calls in with a tip in exchange for a cash award. "No one can snitch you off like your ex or your ex's girlfriend or your neighbor or your landlord," says one former California district attorney whose county in the late 1990s processed more than a hundred fraud cases a month.

Despite the outcome of the case Sanchez v County of San Diego which, as reported last time, the welfare recipients lost, we find the minority on the court in disagreement:

I find the majority's analysis troubling in several respects. To begin, the majority admittedly draws a “fine line” between searches to determine eligibility and those aimed at investigating fraud. In practice, the distinction is one without a difference. In verifying eligibility, fraud investigators - as their job title suggests - necessarily are investigating potential fraud through their enforcement of welfare laws and regulations. Indeed ... the investigators testified that as peace officers they have a duty to - and do - look for and report evidence of crimes. Thus, we do not, as the majority suggests, deal here with a visitation that “serves to discourage misrepresentation or fraud” as a mere “byproduct of that visit,” as was the case in Wyman [a precedent case]. At the same time, the majority overlooks a key distinction between the New York home visits and those carried out by the County of San Diego, namely, that the Project 100% home visits have only a minimal, if any, rehabilitative function. The record reveals that the program is operated exclusively by the District Attorney's Public Assistance Fraud Division, which is the County's Special Investigative Unit (SIU), as an “early fraud prevention and detection program;” the County's welfare agency does not exercise any supervisory responsibility over the program. Thus, whereas in Wyman the home visits were conducted by social workers who had “profound responsibility” for the aid recipient, here the visits are conducted by agents of the district attorney charged only with verifying welfare eligibility and detecting fraud using investigative techniques. Unlike in Wyman, these fraud investigators do not interview the applicant inside the home to discuss “any changes in [the applicant's] situation that might affect her eligibility [or] the amount of [her] assistance, and [whether] there are any social services which the Department of Social Services can provide to the family.” Quite the contrary, the County's fraud investigators are trained not to give advice to applicants because their focus is “highly limited” to legal compliance. According to the defendants themselves, the program's objective is not to assist the needy, but to “increase welfare fraud prevention efforts and to increase program integrity.” Thus, that the fraud investigators are not exclusively engaged in a criminal investigation does not alter an important purpose of the home visits, which is to investigate and detect welfare fraud.

Finally, it is far from clear that Project 100% forbids “snooping,” ... When walking through the welfare applicant's home, a fraud investigator may request to look at the contents of bedrooms, closets, kitchens, bathrooms, medicine cabinets and drawers in search of evidence of ineligibility or fraud. The majority reasons that because consent is required, the investigator's activity “cannot fairly be characterized as ‘snooping.’ ” But obtaining consent to snoop cannot change the nature of the ensuing conduct - snooping - any more than obtaining consent to search changes the nature of the search that follows. The question is whether looking in medicine cabinets, laundry baskets, closets and drawers for evidence of welfare fraud - even with consent - constitutes snooping. I doubt my colleagues in the majority would disagree that an IRS auditor's asking to look in such places within their own homes to verify the number of dependents living at home would constitute snooping.

The majority concludes that the Project 100% home visits, even if considered searches, were reasonable under both the Supreme Court's decision in Wyman and its subsequent line of “special needs” cases. Respectfully, I disagree. Neither Wyman nor the special needs doctrine renders constitutional the entry and inspection of homes under Project 100% by agents of the district attorney without warrants, probable cause or individualized suspicion of ineligibility or fraud.

Project 100% clearly makes the price of welfare assistance the waiver of both federal and state constitutional rights, with consent being coerced by the threat of denial of benefits. This is precisely the sort of conditioning of benefits that California's unconstitutional conditions doctrine forbids.

Finally, I tried to find the outcome or resolution of the case involving Diego and Anna. I emailed Matt Taibbi and got no response. However, Hilda Chan, a young lawyer who works with the poor in San Diego, responded. She was quoted in the book as saying, "Welfare recipients are so unsympathetic that public defenders don't even bother trying to fight the cases." Here's the email exchange I had with her:

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 2:12 PM, John Lawrence <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi Hilda,

 

I’m a reporter for the San Diego Free Press. I am doing a series of articles based on Matt Taibbi’s book, “The Divide.” The first one – “San Diego’s P100 Program Targets the Poor and Vulnerable While Letting the Rich and Powerful Off the Hook” – appears here. I am trying to find out the resolution of the case involving Diego and Anna Alvaraz chronicled in the book. Matt Taibbi doesn’t tell what happened in their case. The editors want to know the resolution before publishing the next article.

 

Any help you could give me will be appreciated.

 

Thank you.

John Lawrence

 

Hilda wrote back:

 

Hi John,

 

Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately I haven't had contact with Diego and Anna since Matt interviewed them 2-3 years ago. 

 

Please let me know if I can help in any other way.

 

Hilda

 

The Practical Choice: Not American Capitalism or “Welfare State Socialism” but an Economy That’s Working for a Few or Many

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, May 20, 2014                

For years Americans have assumed that our hard-charging capitalism  is better than the soft-hearted version found in Canada and Europe. American capitalism might be a bit crueler but it generates faster growth and higher living standards overall. Canada’s and Europe’s “welfare-state socialism” is doomed.  

It was a questionable assumption to begin with, relying to some extent on our collective amnesia about the first three decades after World War II, when tax rates on top incomes in the U.S. never fell below 70 percent, a larger portion of our economy was invested in education than before or since, over a third of our private-sector workers were unionized, we came up with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, and built the biggest infrastructure project in history, known as the interstate highway system.

But then came America’s big U-turn, when we deregulated, de-unionized, lowered taxes on the top, ended welfare, and stopped investing as much of the economy in education and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Canada and Europe continued on as before. Soviet communism went bust, and many of us assumed European and Canadian “socialism” would as well.

That’s why recent data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database  is so shocking.

The fact is, we’re falling behind. While median per capita income in the United States has stagnated since 2000, it’s up significantly in Canada and Northern Europe. Their typical worker’s income is now higher than ours, and their disposable income – after taxes – higher still.

It’s difficult to make exact comparisons of income across national borders because real purchasing power is hard to measure. But even if we assume Canadians and the citizens of several European nations have simply drawn even with the American middle class, they’re doing better in many other ways.

Most of them get free health care and subsidized child care. And if they lose their jobs, they get far more generous unemployment benefits than we do. (In fact, right now 75 percent of jobless Americans lack any unemployment benefits.)

If you think we make up for it by working less and getting paid more on an hourly basis, think again. There, at least three weeks paid vacation as the norm, along with paid sick leave, and paid parental leave.

We’re working an average of 4.6 percent more hours more than the typical Canadian worker, 21 percent more than the typical French worker, and a whopping 28 percent more than your typical German worker, according to data compiled by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

But at least Americans are more satisfied, aren’t we? Not really. According to opinion surveys and interviews, Canadians and Northern Europeans are.

They also live longer, their rate of infant mortality is lower, and women in these countries are far less likely to die as result of complications in pregnancy or childbirth.

But at least we’re the land of more equal opportunity, right? Wrong. Their poor kids have a better chance of getting ahead. While 42 percent of American kids born into poor families remain poor through their adult lives, only 30 percent of Britain’s poor kids remain impoverished – and even smaller percentages in other rich countries.

Yes, the American economy continues to grow faster than the economies of Canada and Europe. But faster growth hasn’t translated into higher living standards for most Americans.

Almost all our economic gains have been going to the top – into corporate profits and the stock market (more than a third of whose value is owned by the richest 1 percent). And into executive pay (European CEOs take home far less than their American counterparts).

America’s rich also pay much lower taxes than do the rich in Canada and Europe.

But surely Europe can’t go on like this. You hear it all the time: They can no longer afford their welfare state.

That depends on what’s meant by “welfare state.” If high-quality education is included, we’d do well to emulate them. Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries in literacy and numeracy. That spells trouble for the U.S. economy in the future.

They’re also doing more workforce training, and doing it better, than we are. The result is more skilled workers.  

Universal health care is another part of their “welfare state” that saves them money because healthier workers are more productive.

So let’s put ideology aside. The practical choice isn’t between capitalism and “welfare-state socialism.” It’s between a system that’s working for a few at the top, or one that’s working for just about everyone. Which would you prefer?

What the World Needs Now? - More Cooperation or More Competition?

by John Lawrence

When I was a graduate student at UCSD in the midst of the anti-war movement, protesting the war in Vietnam, I went to the library and pondered what would make the world a better place, what could I do to contribute something that might make war less likely and peace time activity more likely. I concluded that more cooperation was needed. More ways to resolve conflicts big and small. For example, democratic voting systems resolve conflicts in such a way that solutions are found that are acceptable to all parties for the most part. I took it for granted that institutions that provided for more cooperation and less competition were more desirable. I thought that this was what the Enlightenment was all about. My heroes were the Enlightenment superstars: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, John Locke.

As I sat there and went through the stacks, I discovered another field and another set of superstars. Social choice has a long history going back to the French Enlightenment philosophers, the Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-Charles de Borda, and even further back than that. One of the 19th century superstars in this field was none other than the Rev. C. L. Dodgson otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland. These guys came up with voting systems which are essential to democracy and are essential to the whole notion of cooperation and conflict resolution. The most recent work in this field was by Kenneth Arrow who published a book Social Choice and Individual Values in the 1950s which attempted to generalize conflict resolution in society in both the political and economic spheres. Arrow concluded that this was impossible and came up with his famous Impossibility Theorem which was a generalization using sophisticated mathematics of the paradox of voting that was known to Condorcet hundreds of years ago. Therefore, Arrow concluded democracy was impossible and any economic system other than capitalism was impossible too. Hmmm, I thought, this is obviously a cop-out because some political and economic systems are more desirable than others and Arrow has done nothing except to throw cold water on any framework that could consider these. I took it as my self-assigned task to prove that Arrow was wrong, that social choice is possible. My work can be found on the website Social Choice and Beyond.

My latest work is "Politonomics: A Meta-Theory Encompassing Political and Economic Decision Making." This is from the Abstract:

In “Social Choice and Individual Values,” Kenneth Arrow said , “In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions.” This paper resolves that dichotomy by developing a meta-theory from which can be derived methods for both political and economic decision making. This theory overcomes Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem in which he postulates that social choice is impossible and compensates for strategic voting, an undesirable aspect of decision making according to Gibbard and Satterthwaite. Thus the politonomics meta-theory spawns both political and economic systems which are indeed possible and which cannot be gamed. In a typical voting system the outcome of an election among several candidates results in one realized outcome – the winner of the election - which applies to all voters. In a typical economic system, a consumer may choose among a variety of possible baskets of consumer items and work programs with the result that multiple realized outcomes are possible with a unique or quasi-unique outcome for each worker/consumer. As the number of possible realized outcomes of a political-economic decision making process increases, the process becomes more economic and less political in nature and vice versa. We show that as the number of possible realized outcomes increases, voter/consumer/worker satisfaction or utility increases both individually and collectively.

I never considered, as I sat there pondering, that there would be people who would argue that what the world needed was not more cooperation but more competition, but, as I sit here today, I realize that the whole conservative right wing is in favor of just that. They want not more cooperation in either the political or economic realm but more competition believing that only winners should prevail and human progress is only possible when you give free reign to those among us who are the most talented, intelligent and ambitious. They believe that competition will result in the strongest among us winning just as Nietzsche believed that a good war hallows every cause. Their ethic is that the naturally gifted elite should prevail, and they are not concerned about what happens to the rest of us or of who is trampled in the process. This is also the philosophy of Ayn Rand as espoused in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

The debate today about increasing inequality in the world has to do with the prevalent conservative belief that only the strong should survive and be promoted and that freedom should preclude equality as a value. The rich should get more tax breaks because they are the true instigators of human progress and should be catered to at every turn. Perhaps a few crumbs will trickle down to the rest of us. This kind of thinking is counter to the Enlightenment and is fast returning us to a neo-Dark Age. No more is human progress to be measured in reduction of poverty and extension of basic services like health care to everyone. It is to be measured in terms of the great advances to human civilization like iPads, iPods and iPhones. People who are capable of coming up with these advances should be cut every break and none of the billions of dollars they make should be transferred by government to the least of these among us like the homeless, the poverty-stricken and the destitute because, well, they are the least among us, not the best among us who should be given every break.

Nevertheless, I remain in the camp of those who think that more cooperation in the political and economic spheres will do more for human progress than more competititon. I also have spent about 40 years in my spare time trying to prove that Arrow was wrong, that social choice is not impossible and that democracy in both the political and economic spheres is not only possible but desirable. This has a lot to do with voting systems, democratic institutions and constitutions but also with cooperative economic systems in which freedom is seen not as the freedom to make money at other people's expense (the losers in the competitive struggle) but the freedom to work as much or as little as one chooses and in accordance with one's preferences as much as possible. Freedom from work is for many people just as desirable a goal as the freedom to make billions of dollars, and wealthy people who don't have to work would be the first to tell you that. Economic democracy in my view is more desirable than cutthroat capitalism, and can be practiced not only at the national level, but at the enterprise level in the form of co-ops like the Mondragon Corporation.

Marx's famous definition of the "good society" was "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This of course was perverted in defining communism as a society where all the wealth created by those who had a lot of talent and ability as well as a strong work ethic combined with those who had not so much in those categories would be thrown into a pot and then divided up in equal portions and handed out by the government. Such need not be the case in achieving the "good society." The "needs" part is pretty basic and could probably be accomplished with abouit 10% of the wealth that exists in the world today. Most people can provide for their own needs - no transfer necessary. There are some who cannot and to transfer a small part of the wealth of the wealthy to provide for their basic needs seems to me to be no more than humane. That still leaves the vast amount of wealth in the hands of the wealthy. In other words if you total up how much it would cost to provide for all the basic needs of everyone in the world and tote up how much wealth there exists in the world, it would take a fraction of all that wealth to provide the basic needs for everyone who cannot provide for their basic needs themselves who turn out to be mainly children, seniors and handicapped (whether physically or mentally) people.

A recent documentary by German TV station Deutsche Welle pointed out that half the world's production of food is wasted because super markets only want perfect vegetables and ones with slight blemishes are thrown out even though they are perfectly edible. Shelves need to be fully stocked with bread right up till closing hours even though any bread left over at the end of day will be thrown out as "day old." All the food that is thrown out by advanced nations is enough to feed all the world's hungry three times over although no governments or other institutions, much less the supermarkets themselves, seem to be interested in organizing that effort. This is what I mean by the fact that the basic needs of all the world's people could be satisfied without subtracting much if anything from the world's wealthy although a lot of them would admit they do not need incomes of millions of dollars a day like the Fortune 400 billionaires have.

Another documentary noted that Finnish school children have the highest test scores in the world despite the fact that they have one of the world's shortest school days with 15 minutes intermissions between classes during which time they are encouraged to go outdoors and play. All grades have large amounts of music, art and self-defined projects. They don't teach to the test. They are concerned with the development of each student as an overall human being not just as some super competitive cog in a nationally competitive machine. The Chinese on the other hand have the opposite approach demanding that children learn by rote methods and extra hours in school and at study. The Finnish schools are all public and everyone is accepted into every class. There are no advanced classes or tracking of students into lesser classes if they are not among the elite intellectually. Everyone is thrown in together; yet they have the best outcomes of any country in the world on standardized international tests. Egalitariansim seems to gain the best results.

An egalitarian ethic in which the concern is for the development of the whole human being rather than a promotion of just those who have superior abilities in accordance with a competitive ethic seems to me to be the most humanitarian way to treat both children and adults. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights already provides for most of the "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" ethic. It calls for free health care which most advanced socierties, with the exception of the United States, already provide. It calls for free education and other public institutions and covers most basic human needs including food and shelter.

Here are Articles 25 and 26:

Article 25.

• (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
• (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

• (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
• (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
• (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

All the basic needs of everyone on the planet could be provided for without subtracting much of the wealth of the rich since most people can provide for at least their basic needs without any transfer of wealth whatsover being necessary. Interestingly, the US among other nations does provide food security for the poor through its food stamps program. And of course seniors are provided for through Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, programs which conservative free marketers are anxious to change or eliminate.

I am with the Enlightenment thinkers especially the English utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who thought about the happiness of society as a whole and concluded that everyone counted, not only the ones with exceptional talent, ability and other admirable qualities. A society should be judged by how it treats "the least of these my brethren" which is the core and essence of Jesus' teachings but, sad to say, not the core and essence of Christianity as it exists in the world today. Perhaps we should start thinking about an alternative constitution for the US which has the world's oldest constitution (236 years old!) while being the world's youngest advanced nation. Other societies including most European societies while being older than the US have newer constitutions. As far-sighted as the Founding Fathers were, a new and updated constitution incorporating not only political but also economic rights along the lines of the UN Declaration of Human Rights would do much to right the wrongs and shortcomings of present day America and the world.

Welfare for Millionaires

Nov 14, 2011 12:00 AM EST from Newsweek

by Daniel Stone and Laura Colarusso

A startling new report reveals the billions in government dollars that benefit America’s wealthiest citizens.

Class warfare is a politically charged term these days, from the Wall Street protests to the Capitol Hill negotiations over curtailing the nation’s debt. But a new congressional analysis, obtained by Newsweek, may fuel populist outrage by showing the extent of government subsidies that go to the wealthiest people in America.

From unemployment payments to subsidies and tax breaks on luxury items like vacation homes and yachts, Americans earning more than $1 million collect more than $30 billion in government largesse each year, according to the report assembled by Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who is so often at odds with members of both parties that colleagues call him “Dr. No.” The Internal Revenue Service provided the data showing how much money was going to the much-referenced top 1 percent.In all, millionaires receive hefty help from Uncle Sam. The $30 billion in handouts, to put it in perspective, amounts to twice as much as the government spends on NASA, and three times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. On the other hand, it would only cover the cost of fighting about three months in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, eliminating them would help make a small dent in the $1.5 trillion congressional leaders are trying to find by Thanksgiving.

Jon Bon Jovi, the millionaire rock star cited in the report, took federal dollars to raise honeybees on his property. Together billionaire moguls David Rockefeller and Ted Turner have also accepted more than half a million dollars in farm payments. Basketball legend Scottie Pippen took $210,520 in agriculture subsidies while making his fortune playing for the Chicago Bulls. To make matters worse, the government disclosed to Coburn that some recipients of farm subsidies got it by mistake. Tax records show that more than three fourths of high earners collecting farming money list their primary residence in a city—land unsuitable for farming.

Top earners, surprisingly, also get significant amounts of unemployment insurance and disaster payments. Since 2004, people with seven-figure salaries have accepted more than $9 billion in Social Security. A small band of GOP senators, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, have proposed “means testing” to shrink Social Security payments for people who probably don’t need them.

The biggest money comes—or goes, rather—through unpaid taxes. More than 1,500 millionaires paid no income tax last year, according to federal records, mainly due to tax loopholes and savvy accountants. Tax breaks taken by millionaires on things like mortgage interest ($27.7 billion), rental expenses ($64.2 billion) and electric vehicles ($12.5 million) keep cash from entering the federal coffers.

Part-time actor Dave Glennon dressed as a corporate executive at Occupy L.A. , Robyn Beck / AFP-Getty Images

“The country is sucking wind right now,” Coburn says. “We end up subsidizing the very wealthy and not helping the ones who really need the help.” The Oklahoman is one of few Republicans who support tax increases as part of a plan to reduce the deficit. Meanwhile, antitax activist Grover Norquist, a frequent nemesis for Coburn, says the whole system is too complex, and too unfair, and that lawmakers need to get rid of loopholes and to lower rates across the board.

Many federal programs maintain broad appeal, especially in such a volatile economy. Agricultural subsidies help farmers handle large swings in commodity prices.

But Coburn’s report is certain to generate arguments on the other side about tax fairness. Why, some might wonder, shouldn’t people who feed the government get to reap its benefits? Millionaires “pay a lot into the system,” says Joseph Thorndike, head of the Tax History Project, a Washington analysis group. “The government comes to the rescue of people in bad moments, and it should do that blindly.”

Yet the crux of the argument—that millionaires are using the social safety net as a luxury hammock—fuels an ongoing campaign by the White House to raise some taxes on top earners. “Republicans need to stop supporting tax breaks for the richest Americans so we can use some of that money to create jobs and reduce the deficit,” says White House spokesperson Amy Brundage. Or as Obama likes to put it, folks like him can afford to give more and take less.

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 Daniel Stone is Newsweek's White House correspondent. He also covers national energy and environmental policy.

Laura Colarusso is a reporter at The Daily Beast. She previously worked as a senior news editor at Talking Points Memo. She has also written for The Boston Globe, The Star-Ledger (Newark), AOL, and New Jersey Monthly Magazine.

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Welfare as They Know It

Published on Saturday, August 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Lizzy Ratner

Fifteen years ago, on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton perched at a podium in the White House Rose Garden and signed the bill that would become known as welfare reform. Flanked by three former welfare recipients and looking glazed and smooth as a donut, he swept aside six decades of social welfare policy with a single triangulating stroke of his pen, reversing a course that had been set by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the New Deal. In the process, he handed the law’s right-wing backers their first emboldening victory in a far bigger, dirtier, and still raging campaign to unravel the government safety net.

“Today we are ending welfare as we know it,” Clinton declared, the words “A New Beginning” emblazoned on the podium beneath him in case anyone missed the point. From that moment on, needy families would face a strict five-year lifetime limit for welfare assistance. They would have to comply with stringent work requirements. Handouts would be replaced by a hand up, self-destruction would yield to self-sufficiency, and dependency would give way to the starchy respectability of personal responsibility.

Or, as Clinton promised, “Today we are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.”

Exactly fifteen years later, a handful of welfare recipients gathered in Harlem, just a few blocks from Clinton’s post-presidency redoubt, to describe exactly what Bubba’s “second chance” has meant for them. They had been brought together by Community Voices Heard, a grassroots group of low-income people forged out of the fires of welfare reform, and their stories crisscrossed the spectrum of welfare experiences. They were several women and one man, they were white, black, and Latina, they were young and they were older – and their verdict was as swift and final as a guillotine.

“It’s a failure. It’s a total failure,” said Melissa McClure, a reedy-voiced 50-something with a Louise Brooks bob who successfully managed gift stores before falling on hard times and applying for welfare in early 2007.

“If I had a worst nightmare, this would be it,” said Ketny Jean-Francois, a Haitian-born single mother who spent four years in the welfare meat-grinder before managing to land a spot in a nursing program – against welfare reform rules – and then a job.

The lone man of the group, Bill, a single 49-year-old with a host of physical and psychological ailments, struggled to find the words before spitting out, “It’s definitely not achieving the goals of helping out,” he said. “The official line is, ‘If you’re not working, we want to see you working. If you have children, we want to help you so you [don’t] come back.’ But if that’s really the goal – no.”

Failure. Nightmare. Not achieving its goals. None of these descriptions are part of the official line peddled by welfare reform’s sponsors and backers. If you hear anything these days, it’s how dramatically welfare caseloads have dropped in the last 15 years – 57 percent! – and how salutary it’s been for the country. “We renewed the American spirit by emphasizing personal responsibility in place of generational dependency on government,” boated E. Clay Shaw Jr., former Republican congressman and drafter of 1996’s welfare reform law, in a recent Politico editorial. Indeed, far from questioning the law’s fundamental merits and efficacy, many Republicans (and a few Democrats) have taken to complaining that the law hasn’t gone far enough, that its implementation has been too lax and its lessons not fully adequately exported. “The job is not finished,” Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and Ways and Means Committee Chairman, said in a statement. “[O]ther programs can and should be reformed to follow suit.”

And yet, to listen to the people who know welfare reform best, to the “Reformed,” the reality of the 1996 law is not only a far cry from the compassionate conservative triumph it’s trumpeted to be, it’s a crucible for the failures of the stingy, starve-the-beast, punish-the-poor philosophy so in vogue among the Tea Bag brigades.

A hand up? More like a slap down, say those who’ve been through the system. The famously-touted welfare-to-work programs are little more than exercises in make-work and are often exploitative to boot. Childcare remains persistently scarce. Job training is poor to non-existent. And on the increasingly rare occasions when people do find jobs, these jobs are often low-wage gigs that fail to hoist them out of poverty.

Meanwhile, life on welfare has become shorter, harsher, and more strapped. Cash grants have stagnated or even fallen in a number of states, with the median benefit for a family of three now clocking in at $429 a month, just 28 percent of the federal poverty level, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Time limits have also gotten shorter. And while caseloads have certainly plummeted, it’s fairly clear that a hefty portion of this drop can be attributed to steep new barriers to entry – and time limits, of course. How else to explain the fact that at the height of the Great Recession only 28 percent of Americans living in poverty received welfare assistance while 75 percent got welfare help in 1995? In 13 states, welfare rolls actually declined during the recession, according to an Urban Institute report.

All of which suggests that for all the braying triumphalism, our nation’s great welfare reform experiment is little more than an elaborate shell game, a confidence trick in which poor people get shuffled this way and that while their lives remain essentially unchanged. Or get harder.

Take the case of Bill, the lone man at the Community Voices Heard gathering, who wore a charm bracelet of Catholic saints around his wrist and asked to keep his last name on the down-low since most of his family doesn’t know his situation. Bill is a college graduate who spent years working in and around the computer world until the recession conspired with a greedy landlord to take most of his income (he made only $6000 in 2008) and then his home. Eviction was followed by homelessness. Eventually he landed on Public Assistance, which immediately put him to work in New York’s notorious workfare program.

The city’s workfare program is the twisted, and nationally celebrated, brainchild of former New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and a small cadre of conservative think tank gurus. It requires public assistance recipients to spend 35 hours a week doing a mix of job search and work activities – or face losing part or all of their benefits. These work activities, grouped under the condescending title of the Work Experience Program (WEP), include jobs like sweeping streets, cleaning parks, doing security, filing – low-skilled, formerly union jobs for which the WEP workers are not paid, per se, because they are actually working off their benefits. Hence the comparisons to indentured servitude. Alternatives like education and training courses are generally forbidden, and exemptions for disabilities or disease are difficult to obtain. The reason: a “work-first” ethic so unrelenting that Giuliani’s most notorious welfare commissioner, Jason Turner, famously explained, “It’s work that sets you free.” (Apparently he skipped the chapter in his high school history book about the Holocaust.)

“Work-first,” however, has not set many welfare recipients free. It certainly didn’t help bill.

Bill is a man of many ailments, something that is apparent to the casual observer almost upon meeting him. Smart and sensitive, he is beset by the tics and torments of a man with serious depressive and anxiety disorders. He also underwent major surgery for a tear in his stomach in 2010. But within weeks of the operation, unable to bend, lift, or twist and suffering from pain and panic attacks, he was required to go back to his welfare-mandated job search and work activities. All so he could continue to receive $45 a month in cash assistance.

“It’s like trying to trip a handicapped person,” said Bill, who was recently judged disabled enough to qualify for Social Security Disability insurance and Supplemental Security Income – though not before suffering a year in the workfare trenches. “But I have to stress that there are so many people that are in a much, much worse situation, and they’re making them [work].… I saw guys nodding off in wheelchairs!”

Such stories reverberate throughout the archives of welfare reform, but even the stories that aren’t so patently bad aren’t so pretty either. Everyone has something to tell. For Ketny Jean-Francois, for instance, it was working a WEP assignment for the sanitation department in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, a swath of asphalt and misery famous for its brisk drug and prostitution trades. Each day she would head to her assignment picking up condoms, needles, and “doodoo” (as she delicately put it) in the protective company of one of her male co-workers, but that only seemed to encourage the Johns, who would invariably stop her “guard” to ask her going rate.

As for Cheina Goncalec, a petite 27-year-old with two young kids who moved to New York in search of work, her story revolved around her stint as a security guard at a West Harlem community center, a WEP experience that consisted of fending off the occasional cursing, threatening gym-goer without any self-defense training whatsoever. But that was just icing. There was the constant abuse by welfare agency workers. And the arbitrary closing of her case. And the welfare agency’s refusal to let her substitute education or training for WEP, even though “the only way to get out of welfare is getting a good job,” she said. And there was the fact that after a year-and-a-half spent doing “job search” and WEP, she was no closer to finding a permanent job – or climbing out of poverty.

Given such snags in a program widely touted as one of the jewels of welfare reform – so “successful” that it’s been used as a model for the creation of workfare programs in places as far-flung as Israel and London – it would seem like it might be long past time to re-evaluate. There are certainly plenty of smart ideas. And since the welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is set to be reauthorized in September, this would be the perfect time to debate, tweak, even radically reshape it.

Perhaps the most desperately-needed change is a philosophical one, a shift in purpose and focus from welfare reform as an experiment in punitive behavior modification and deterrence to welfare as a genuine anti-poverty program. From this, everything else would follow: welfare caseworkers caring and experienced enough to help applicants get the services they need (beginning with access to welfare) rather than deterring them; higher cash grants which would allow recipients to live rather than simply subsist; access to quality child care; programs and alternatives for people with barriers to employment; training programs that are tiered to meet recipients where they’re at – and prepare them for quality jobs; and above all, subsidized employment programs that would train and then place recipients in bona fide, living-wage paying jobs.

“During the Great Depression, they put people to work doing what they knew to do,” said Melissa McClure, offering an example of the kind of jobs program she’d like to see. “All that and you were paid, and it was promoting you into a better position.”

And yet, what are the chances? The government couldn’t – or, more accurately, wouldn’t – even maintain the TANF Emergency Fund, which provided subsidized jobs to some 240,000 unemployed people and was one of the few effective jobs programs created during the Great Recession; instead, it let its funding expire last September. And with Congress divided between slack do-nothings and rabid ideologues (the worst really are full of passionate intensity), the fight over “reform” has moved from the fringes of a fraying society to the center, from the question of entitlements to the poor to entitlements more broadly.

Welfare reform, it turns out, was just the warm-up. It was a test-case and a prophecy, “a new beginning” after all. And as the first hard yank on the threads holding together the country’s safety net – its social contract to provide for the needy – it should have been a clarion warning. Welfare reform was an attack on all of us.

Lizzy Ratner is a journalist in New York City. She is co-editor of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (Nation Books). From 1998 to 2000, she was a welfare rights advocate in New York City.