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I just love the way some people express themselves in addition to really agreeing with their premises. This essay embraces the ideals and solutions (calculated logically from those ideals) shared by Robert Reich, Dean Baker and Dennis Kucinich concerning the financial decisions that the people of the U.S. must make (and soon). These are men with a depth of understanding and empathy with those who have been left by the wayside by the political philosophy that has run this country into the ground for the last 30 years. They understand that the fraudulent much-touted issue of the huge deficit needing immediate correction is the agenda of the 1%. They are also such decent men that they never shout "Bullshit!" at the asses who spout it constantly.
The Rebirth of Social Darwinism
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.
They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.
They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.
They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.
It was an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise, but few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom. Robber barons like the financier Jay Gould, the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, controlled much of American industry; the gap between rich and poor had turned into a chasm; urban slums festered; women couldn’t vote and black Americans were subject to Jim Crow; and the lackeys of rich literally deposited sacks of money on desks of pliant legislators.
Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin to America and twisted him into a theory to fit the times.
Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner’s writings but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the 19th century.
To Sumner and his followers, life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive – and through this struggle societies became stronger over time. A correlate of this principle was that government should do little or nothing to help those in need because that would interfere with natural selection.
Listen to today’s Republican debates and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. “Civilization has a simple choice,” Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It’s either “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest,” or “not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.”
Sound familiar?
Newt Gingrich not only echoes Sumner’s thoughts but mimics Sumner’s reputed arrogance. Gingrich says we must reward “entrepreneurs” (by which he means anyone who has made a pile of money) and warns us not to “coddle” people in need. He opposes extending unemployment insurance because, he says, ”I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing.”
Sumner, likewise, warned against handouts to people he termed “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”
Mitt Romney doesn’t want the government to do much of anything about unemployment. And he’s dead set against raising taxes on millionaires, relying on the standard Republican rationale millionaires create jobs.
Here’s Sumner, more than a century ago: “Millionaires are the product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done… It is because they are thus selected that wealth aggregates under their hands – both their own and that intrusted to them … They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society.” Although they live in luxury, “the bargain is a good one for society.”
Other Republican hopefuls also fit Sumner’s mold. Ron Paul, who favors repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan, was asked at a Republican debate in September what medical response he’d recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma. Paul’s response: “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.” The Republican crowd cheered.
In other words, if the young man died for lack of health insurance, he was responsible. Survival of the fittest.
Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest.” It was, he insisted “the working out of a law of nature and of God.”
Social Darwinism also undermined all efforts at the time to build a nation of broadly-based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.
Not until the twentieth century did America reject Social Darwinism. We created the large middle class that became the core of our economy and democracy. We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward through no fault of their own. We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods – public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health – that made us all better off.
In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on his or her own in a competitive contest for survival.
But make no mistake: If one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, and if regressive Republicans take over the House or Senate, or both, Social Darwinism is back.
Time to Retake Politics from the One Percent in Both Political Parties
Dean Baker
The country is still celebrating the inability of the supercommittee to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it is important to move on from this victory to retake control of the political debate from the 1 percent.
As it stands, the 1 percent are insisting that the country genuflect over the non-problem of the budget deficit, at a time when tens of millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed, millions of people are facing the loss of their homes and tens of millions of baby boomers are approaching retirement with little other than their Social Security to support them.
The deficit is the agenda of the 1 percent. There is no reason that the rest of us should be concerned about budget deficits when the rest of the country is struggling with the economic disaster created by the greed and incompetence of the 1 percent.
This is not a statement of morality, it is a statement based on economic reality. Budget deficits can be a problem when an economy is near full employment and the deficit can be pulling resources away from private investment, thereby slowing growth. However it is not a problem with large numbers of unemployed workers and vast amounts of excess capacity.
This is what the financial markets are telling us every day as interest rates on long-term government bonds hover near 2.0 percent. If deficits were really crimping the economy we would be seeing interest rates of 6 or 7 percent, or even higher.
The deficit hawks do not have an economic case to support their argument, just money and influence.
In the longer term the deficit hawks can point to projections of outsized deficits, which they invariably attribute to Social Security and Medicare. The first part of this story is completely untrue.
Under the law, Social Security is financed from its designated tax. It therefore cannot contribute to the deficit unless Congress changes the law. (The payroll tax credit in 2011, which was replaced with general revenue, is an exception to this rule.)
According to the most recent projections from the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security benefits will be fully funded through the year 2038. After that date, if Congress does nothing to increase revenue, then the program would pay a bit more than 80 percent of scheduled benefits. (This would still be about 10 percent more than current retirees receive since benefits are projected to rise by approximately 1 percent a year.)
The real story of the soaring long-term deficits is exploding Medicare costs, which are in turn driven by our broken health care system. We already pay more than twice as much per person for our health care as the average for other wealthy countries, with little to show in the way of outcomes. This gap is projected to continue to grow in the years ahead.
To anyone who looks at the facts, the obvious answer to our deficit problem is fixing the health care system. This is difficult to do given the enormous political power of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, highly paid medical specialists and the other members of the 1 percent who profit from the waste in the system as it exists now.
If we can’t immediately change the system then why not take advantage of the gains from trade? If we change rules to make it possible for Medicare beneficiaries to buy into the health care systems in other countries or make it easier for patients to have medical procedures done at far lower cost elsewhere, it should be an enormous win-win offering gains that could be in the trillions of dollars.
And what free-market fundamentalist can argue against the principle of giving people a choice?
In fact, conservatives and self-described free traders run screaming from the idea of opening medical care to trade. They want trade that will lower the wages of auto workers and textile workers by putting them in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world; they hate trade when it threatens to reduce the income of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry and others in the 1 percent.
It’s time to expose the lies for what they are. The 1 percent has rigged the deck over the last three decades to accomplish the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. These are not people who care about budget deficits or free trade or free markets. They care about making themselves richer at the expense of everyone else.
They have been fighting this class war for 30 years. It is long past time that the rest of us started fighting back.
Kucinich: Federal Reserve Has Captured Control of our Government
Tens of thousands of documents obtained by Bloomberg under the Freedom of Information Act showed that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion in profits thanks to the low-interest loans. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley accounted for $4.8 billion of that total.
“Remember the great debate we had here over the 700 billion in TARP funds?” he said on the House floor Tuesday. “There was no debate over the 7.7 trillion the Fed gave the banks.”
“Did Congress have a clue?” he continued. “There is another game going on way over our heads, and our constituents are struggling while the banks with the help of the Feds have captured control of our government.”
“Now the rating services are threatening us, if we don’t come up with a deal they’ll downgrade U.S. debt. Could the threat to our national sovereignty be any clearer?”
Kucinich has proposed legislation, called the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act, that would incorporate the Federal Reserve within the United States Treasury and thereby make it accountable to Congress.
Watch video below:
Please read it all if you can stomach it.
11 - 29 - 2011
How many examples of greed and corruption must you see before you act?
The Terrorism Industrial Complex a.k.a. "Top Secret America" may sound like tin foil hat conspiracy to some, but many of you will remember it as the name of an extensive investigation by the Washington Post, whose editors' intro says: "[This] is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks... When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked - with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it."
Short of storming the Beltway, the American people may never learn just how much of their money has been pillaged, plundered and simply wasted in the name of "national security" since 9/11, but our research suggests it could easily be an amount that exceeds not only the billions in bailout bucks given to the Banksters since 2008 but the trillions paid to the War Profiteers since 2001. In fact, just as the money being squandered on militarily useless F-22 and F-35 fighter jets will probably exceed our $1.3 trillion federal deficit (see our previous reports), the often untraceable trillions poured into the post-9/11 "too big to fail", "war on terrorism", "homeland security" and "black ops" troughs by our corporate-owned politicians and well-lobbied bureaucrats might easily approximate our $15 trillion national debt.
One of the hundreds of "security contractors" feeding at those troughs is SAIC - formerly Science Applications International Corporation. Headquartered in McLean VA, SAIC is "a Fortune 500 scientific, engineering, and technology applications company working in national security, energy and the environment, critical infrastructure, and health". The company's 46,000+ employees serve the Department of Defense (DoD), the intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal government agencies. SAIC had revenue of $11.1 billion for its fiscal year 2010.
Since 1995 SAIC has contributed over $3.8 million to political campaigns, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with Barack Obama and John McCain being the top recipients. That amount is eclipsed by the more than $24 million they've invested in lobbying since 1997. And over that same period, SAIC's penalties for federal contractor misconduct have far exceeded their pay-to-play payola: SAIC paid a $24.9 million settlement for rigging bids on General Services Administration (GSA) contracts, $5 million to the Air Force for false claims and defective pricing, and all told over $32 million for a dozen different instances of government fraud, ethics and other violations. Of course, all their penalties and payola combined is chump change compared to the more than $63 billion in defense, security and other federal contracts SAIC has bagged over the past ten years.
Apparently its all forgive and forget at the GSA, because just last week they awarded SAIC a $5 billion telecom systems contract - forgiving their history of bid-rigging, and forgetting that the City of New York recently demanded a $600 million refund on the botched and corruption-riddled "CityTime" system that SAIC installed for them.
SAIC will also be getting at least a $90 million bite out of the $4 billion or so that's been budgeted to relocate the Department of Homeland Security to what was once St. Elizabeths Hospital, an insane asylum. Conceived in the Mad Hatter days of Bush-Cheney, the megabucks DHS relocation boondoggle is yet another fiscal insanity that has continued unaffected by any imagined wave of "Change" in 2008. SAIC's piece is to implement a "secure and scalable" IT infrastructure.
. . . False flag op or not, there can be no debate that since 11 September 2001 trillions of taxpayer dollars have been spent to beat the boogeymen, real or contrived. Has it been worth it? Do you think Americans are "safer" today than we were ten years ago? If so, has any security gained been worth the cost, and the personal privacy and freedoms lost?
Of course, you're paying for that stomach already.
There is a bit of good news however. Seems that young people are discovering the actual world of work: doing well by doing good.
Amid fears of high youth unemployment creating a “lost generation,” there is suddenly a bright spot: Apparently, fewer young people are going to work in the industry that destroyed our economy.
That’s the word from the New York Times, which reports that since 2008, “the number of investment bank and brokerage firm employees between the ages 20 and 34 fell by 25 percent,” as banks have laid off young people and slowed college recruiting.
For young Wall Streeters, this is a bummer. But for society as a whole, it’s cause for celebration because it may finally allow America to counter the destructive Gordon Gekko-ization of youth culture.
Recall that in recent years, up to a third of kids at elite universities have entered finance-related jobs. Such a mass shift in career preferences is, to put it mildly, alarming. A country whose best and brightest begin avoiding occupations that add value to society (doctors, engineers, etc.) in favor of vapid get-rich-quick gigs is a country that has stopped investing in itself and started mortgaging its future.
In light of that, Wall Street’s youth layoffs raise a bigger question: Why have so many more kids been pursuing careers in finance?
Part of it is greed, as a 2010 Higher Education Research Institute report found a record-high three-quarters of freshmen said being “very well-off financially” was their top objective. Not surprisingly, many graduate with speculation and usury in their plans.
Such a mind-set, though, hasn’t emerged in a vacuum — it tracks two larger greed-driven trends.
The first is a change in the American Dream from a middle-class aspiration to an “MTV Cribs”-style fantasy. In that shift, we began portraying Wall Street fat cats as idols — the Great Men to be worshiped in our media and consulted by presidents. Taking cues from the larger culture, kids have naturally tried to follow in the idols’ footsteps.
Simultaneously, the American economy changed from producing tangible assets to now more often generating paper profits for bankers. The numbers, as recounted from economist Simon Johnson, tell that tale: “From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits … last decade, it reached 41 percent.”
This metamorphosis was no force of nature — it was the result of bank-owned politicians deregulating and subsidizing the finance industry, turning it into a monster swallowing an outsize share of national wealth. That, in turn, prompted an employment shift, which included young people.
“When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing,” author Thomas Geoghegan wrote in Harper’s magazine. “We set up the incentives to keep our best and brightest out of Detroit … (They) went off to work at AIG.”
Those incentives highlight the final part of the youth story: need.
Today, the average undergraduate matriculates with $25,000 in student debt. That burden compels kids to base career moves on where they can get the richest the quickest so as to pay off their loans. In an economy that has privileged finance, that often means heading to Wall Street.
Now, though, that career path may be closed — and even if it’s only temporarily closed, the reprieve is significant.
Read the entire articles!
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