Posts
If you believe that the Congresspeople who make the laws governing the 99% don't have much idea of how they (we) live, you would be correct. In a world of
six-figure salaries . . . (they) inhabit a world exempt from parking tickets, where gym membership is free and health care is second-to-none, where you only have to work two, maybe three days a week, and get 32 fully-reimbursed road trips home a year, travel to foreign lands, discounts in Capitol Hill tax-free shops and restaurants, free reserved parking at Washington National Airport, free fresh-cut flowers from the Botanic Gardens, and free assistance in the preparation of income taxes" these people "neither represent nor serve the American people. They have instead appointed themselves our masters.
All paid for by the grateful taxpayers they spit on.
From my buddy Coyote Prime:
Thus we now find ourselves at a point where, for the first time in history, Congress is dominated by a majority of millionaires who are, on average, 14 times wealthier than the average American.
Making matters worse, as the Center for Responsive Politics reports, “at a time when lawmakers are debating issues like unemployment benefits, food stamps and the minimum wage, which affect people with far fewer resources, as well as considering an overhaul of the tax code,” our so-called representatives are completely out of touch with the daily struggles of most Americans--those who live from paycheck to paycheck and are caught in the exhausting struggle to survive on a day-to-day basis.
Indeed, although America is supposed to be a representative republic, these people-- who earn six-figure salaries and inhabit a world exempt from parking tickets, where gym membership is free and health care is second-to-none, where you only have to work two, maybe three days a week and get 32 fully reimbursed road trips home a year, travel to foreign lands, discounts in Capitol Hill tax-free shops and restaurants, free reserved parking at Washington National Airport, free fresh-cut flowers from the Botanic Gardens, and free assistance in the preparation of income taxes--neither represent nor serve the American people. They have instead appointed themselves our masters.
. . . there are the laws constructed for the elite, which allow bankers who crash the economy to walk free. They’re the laws which allow police officers to avoid prosecution when they shoot unarmed citizens, strip search non-violent criminals, or taser pregnant women on the side of the road, or pepper spray peaceful protestors. These are the laws of the new age we are entering, an age of neo-feudalism, in which corporate-state rulers dominate the rest of us, where the elite create the laws which can result in a person being jailed for possessing a small amount of marijuana while bankers that launder money for drug cartels walk free. In other words, we have moved into an age where we are the slaves and they are the rulers.
And no one doubts this publicly anymore.
Except the people in power.
Monday, January 13, 2014
“Government of the Rich, by the Rich and for the Rich"
It’s Time for ‘Militant Nonviolent Resistance’”By John W. Whitehead
“Everywhere, “time is winding up,” in the words of one of our spirituals, “corruption in the land, people take a stand, time is winding up.”—Martin Luther King Jr.
We now live in a two-tiered system of governance. There are two sets of laws: one set for the government and its corporate allies, and another set for you and me. The laws which apply to the majority of the population allow the government to do things like sending SWAT teams crashing through your door in the middle of the night, rectally probing you during a roadside stop, or listening in on your phone calls and reading all of your email messages, confiscating your property, or indefinitely detaining you in a military holding cell. These are the laws which are executed every single day against a population which has up until now been blissfully ignorant of the radical shift taking place in American government.
Then there are the laws constructed for the elite, which allow bankers who crash the economy to walk free. They’re the laws which allow police officers to avoid prosecution when they shoot unarmed citizens, strip search non-violent criminals, or taser pregnant women on the side of the road, or pepper spray peaceful protestors. These are the laws of the new age we are entering, an age of neo-feudalism, in which corporate-state rulers dominate the rest of us, where the elite create the laws which can result in a person being jailed for possessing a small amount of marijuana while bankers that launder money for drug cartels walk free. In other words, we have moved into an age where we are the slaves and they are the rulers.
Unfortunately, this two-tiered system of government has been a long time coming. As I detail in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the march toward an imperial presidency, to congressional intransigence and impotence, to a corporate takeover of the mechanisms of government, and the division of America into haves and have nots has been building for years.
Thus we now find ourselves at a point where, for the first time in history, Congress is dominated by a majority of millionaires who are, on average, 14 times wealthier than the average American. Making matters worse, as the Center for Responsive Politics reports, “at a time when lawmakers are debating issues like unemployment benefits, food stamps and the minimum wage, which affect people with far fewer resources, as well as considering an overhaul of the tax code,” our so-called representatives are completely out of touch with the daily struggles of most Americans--those who live from paycheck to paycheck and are caught in the exhausting struggle to survive on a day-to-day basis.
Indeed, although America is supposed to be a representative republic, these people-- who earn six-figure salaries and inhabit a world exempt from parking tickets, where gym membership is free and health care is second-to-none, where you only have to work two, maybe three days a week and get 32 fully reimbursed road trips home a year, travel to foreign lands, discounts in Capitol Hill tax-free shops and restaurants, free reserved parking at Washington National Airport, free fresh-cut flowers from the Botanic Gardens, and free assistance in the preparation of income taxes--neither represent nor serve the American people. They have instead appointed themselves our masters.
While Congress should be America's representative body, too many of its members bear little resemblance to those they have been elected to represent. As Dan Eggen reports for The Washington Post: "The new figures underscore a long-standing trend of wealth accumulation in Congress, which is populated overwhelmingly with millionaires and near-millionaires who often own multiple homes and other assets out of reach for most of the voters they represent."
Many of our politicians live like kings. Chauffeured around in limousines, flying in private jets and eating gourmet meals, all paid for by the American taxpayer, they are far removed from those they are supposed to represent. Such a luxurious lifestyle makes it difficult to identify with the "little guy"--the roofers, plumbers and blue-collar workers who live from paycheck to paycheck and keep the country running with their hard-earned dollars and the sweat of their brows.
The unfortunate but simple fact is that the rich sit perched at the top of the government. As Joseph Stiglitz writes for Vanity Fair: "Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift--through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price--it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work."
Sadly, electoral politics have been so thoroughly corrupted by corporate money that there is little chance, even for a well-meaning person, to affect any real change through Congress. Whether it be the Oval Office or the halls of Congress, the road to the ballot box is an expensive one, and only the wealthy, or those supported by the wealthy, are even able to get to the starting line.
Just consider the 2012 presidential election cycle. Both parties spent $1 billion each attempting to get their candidate elected to the presidency. This money came from rich donors and corporate sponsors, intent on getting their candidate in office. Once in office, these already privileged wealthy bureaucrats enter into a life of even greater privilege, unfortunately at the expense of the American taxpayer. It doesn't even seem to matter whether they're Democrats or Republicans--they all take full advantage of what one news report described as "a mountain of perks that most Fortune 500 companies couldn't begin to rival."
Even President Obama's closest advisers are millionaires, including those on his 15-member cabinet. It is not unusual for some of them to own vacation homes, such as Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, who owns a "summer home worth more than a million dollars."
And then there are the lobbyists, the source of much corruption and exchanging of money in Washington. With an estimated 26 lobbyists per congressman, it should come as no surprise that once elected, even those with the best of intentions seem to find it hard to resist the lure of lobbyist dollars, of which there are plenty to go around.
This lobbying is in turn buoyed by a congressional lifestyle which demands that our representatives spend the majority of their time fund raising for campaigns, rather than responding to the needs of their constituents. In November 2012, the Democratic House leadership offered a model daily schedule to newly elected Democrats which suggests a ten-hour day, five hours of which are dominated by “call time” and “strategic outreach,” including fund raisers and correspondence with potential donors. Three or four hours are for actually doing the job they were elected to do, such as attending committee meetings, voting on legislation, and interacting with constituents.
When half of one’s time is devoted to asking for money from rich individuals and special interests, there is no way that he can respond to the problems which pervade the country. Even well-meaning Congressmen face a Catch-22 where they are pushed to fundraise to secure their seats, but then once in office, it is basically impossible for them to do their jobs. The full ramifications of this are laid out by Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC):
Any member who follows that schedule will be completely controlled by their staff, handed statements that their staff prepared, speaking from talking points they get emailed from leadership... It really does affect how members of Congress behave if the most important thing they think about is fundraising. You end up being nice to people that probably somebody needs to be questioning skeptically… You won’t ask tough questions in hearings that might displease potential contributors, won’t support amendments that might anger them, will tend to vote the way contributors want you to vote.
What we are faced with is a government by oligarchy--in other words, one that is of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. Yet the Constitution's Preamble states that it is "we the people" who are supposed to be running things. If our so-called "representative government" is to survive, we must first wrest control of our government from the wealthy elite who run it. That is a problem with no easy solutions, and voting is the least of what we should be doing.
"What they don't want," noted comedian George Carlin, is "a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests."
A population of citizens capable of critical thinking? That's a good place to start, and it's a sure-fire way to jumpstart a revolution. As Abraham Lincoln said, "Wise men established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began."
Inspiring words, but what do they really mean for those of us laboring under the weight of an overreaching, militarized, corrupt government that grows increasingly so with each passing day?
How can we change this state of affairs? The government is too big, too powerful, and its overlords too entrenched to willingly give up any of its power or wealth. The wisest option is to employ the tactics of past protest movements such as the Bonus Army, the Civil Rights Movement, and the 1960s anti-war movement, all of which used sleep-ins, sit-ins and marches to oppose government policies, counter injustice and bring about meaningful change.
For example, in May of 1932, more than 43,000 people, dubbed the Bonus Army — World War I veterans and their families — marched on Washington. Out of work, destitute and with families to feed, more than 10,000 veterans set up tent cities in the nation's capital and refused to leave until the government agreed to pay the bonuses they had been promised as a reward for their services.
The Senate voted against paying them immediately, but the protesters didn't budge. Congress adjourned for the summer, and still the protesters remained encamped. Finally, on July 28, under orders from President Herbert Hoover, the military descended with tanks and cavalry, beating some protesters senseless and setting their makeshift camps on fire. Still, the protesters returned the following year, and eventually their efforts not only succeeded in securing payment of the bonuses but contributed to the passage of the G.I. Bill of Rights.
Similarly, the Civil Rights Movement mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to strike at the core of an unjust and discriminatory society. Likewise, while the 1960s anti-war movement began with a few thousand perceived radicals, it ended with hundreds of thousands of protesters, spanning all walks of life, demanding the end of American military aggression abroad.
What these movements had was a coherent message, the mass mobilization of a large cross section of American society, what Martin Luther King Jr. called a philosophy of “militant nonviolent resistance” and an eventual convergence on the nation’s seat of power—Washington, DC—the staging ground for the corporate coup, where the shady deals are cut, where lobbyists and politicians meet, and where corporate interests are considered above all else.
It is no coincidence that just prior to his assassination in April 1968, King was plotting “to build a shantytown in Washington, patterned after the bonus marches of the thirties, to dramatize how many people have to live in slums in our nation.”
King’s advice still rings true: “We need to put pressure on Congress to get things done. We will do this with First Amendment activity. If Congress is unresponsive, we’ll have to escalate in order to keep the issue alive and before it. This action may take on disruptive dimensions, but not violent in the sense of destroying life or property: it will be militant nonviolence.”
The balance of power that was once a hallmark of our republic no longer exists. James Madison’s warning that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny” has, regrettably come to pass.
Clearly, it’s time for a mass movement dedicated to change through “militant nonviolence.” If not, the shadow of tyranny that now hangs over us will eventually destroy every last semblance of freedom. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor,” Martin Luther King Jr. warned in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “It must be demanded by the oppressed.”
Posted by CoyotePrime
Not!
13 Jan 2014Here's RJ's long-awaited data:
Bonus Watch ’14: Everyone
By Bess Levin
Pay predictions for Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, RBS, UBS.
- Credit Suisse’s investment bank for 2013: $388k average
- Deutsche Bank’s corporate banking and securities business for 2013: $315k average
- Goldman Sachs for 2013: $427k average
- JPMorgan’s corporate and investment bank for 2013: $221k average
- RBS’s investment bank for 2013: $179k average
- UBS’s investment bank for 2013: $388k average
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Change in Payroll Jobs Vs Change in Employed Differs by Nearly 3 Million Since July
. . . while covering the Employment Situation Summary from the BLS on Sunday, we neglected to take an in depth look at the unadjusted employment data from which the widely reported seasonally adjusted numbers are derived; as you should all know, the summary employment report that's released on the first Friday of most months is actually two reports generated from two surveys; the first, the Current Employment Statistics (CES), which is more commonly known as the establishment survey, is a monthly polling of roughly 145,000 businesses and government agencies, or roughly 26% of all US employers, conducted by the BLS which gives us a reasonably close estimate (+/- 90,000) of how many jobs they've added each month, how many hours were worked, and how much the workers were paid . . . the second report, the Current Population Survey (CPS), more commonly known as the household survey, is a telephone poll of roughly 60,000 households typically representing 110,000 working age individuals conducted by the census bureau for the labor department, which despite being quite detailed as to the reasons each individual's employment status, is subject to sampling and other errors that result in an 90% confidence level of +/- 300,000 in the monthly change in the number unemployed, and +/- 0.2% in the unemployment rate . . . . queries to either businesses or individuals for both of these reports focus on employment conditions as of the week that includes the 12th day of the previous month, but that's where the similarity ends; the establishment survey only covers those workers who are on a business or government payroll, so it doesn't among the employed farmers or farm workers; it also doesn't include the self employed or individual proprietors, while the household survey includes all of these as employed, and in fact anyone over the age of 16 who is reported as working for pay even one hour during the reference week, ie, even a teenager who's mowing lawns for neighbors . . .
now, after the employment data is collected by both of those surveys, the BLS runs each of them through a program which compares that month's data to the changes for the same months from each survey over the past several years and adjusts the results for seasonal factors, holidays, and other unusual factors, and ultimately generates the press release and summary using only that adjusted data; the reason this is done is so we can compare one month to another on a similar basis, without unusual factors such as the beginning and end of the school year or holiday hiring that would create large and not very meaningful changes in employment...so there is no mention of the original actual employment numbers or other data in the report as released, every statement in the summary fairly much assumes that readers know it's been seasonally adjusted, and only a few of the tables at the end of the summary include unadjusted data....thus, when it's reported by the business press and most economic blogs, none of the actual raw employment data from which the report is generated is even mentioned...
in a similar manner, we ourselves typically report just the adjusted data and only mention the raw, unadjusted data from the two surveys in passing, when it seems that it might be useful for some perspective...it was in so doing that we first noticed a major discrepancy between the number of new payroll jobs indicated by employer responses, and the number of employed as reported by households when covering the August report, which we headlined as a seasonal adjustment discrepancy, because the seasonal adjustment subtracted more than 200,000 jobs from the establishment survey and added nearly 500,000 to the household survey in August...what happened in the August report was that the unadjusted data from the establishment survey indicated payrolls jobs increased by 378,000 from 135,583,000 in July to 135,961,000 (it’s since been slightly revised) while the not seasonally adjusted household data indicated that the count of the employed dropped 604,000, from 145,113,000 in July to 144,509,000, and the seasonal adjustments brought them into approximate alignment....even though we thought this to be an aberration, after consulting with several economists, we felt confident that the August misalignment would subsequently reverse itself in the next month or two, and the two surveys would be brought back into sync...however, the September report compounded the discrepancy, as it again showed a payroll job gain of of 612,000, which was lowered by the seasonal adjustment to 148,000, while the unadjusted household survey count of 142,000 employed was little changed by the seasonal adjustment...the October report was even more alarming, in that there was a difference of 1,162,000 jobs in the seasonal adjustments between the the two surveys; the establishment survey seasonal adjustment subtracted 682,000 payroll jobs, while the household survey seasonal adjustment added 480,000 to the count of employed...thus, after three months we found that the unadjusted payroll job count went up by 1,963,000, while the unadjusted count of the employed went down by 967,000, only to have them brought into approximate alignment by the seasonal adjustments...still, because that data was affected by the shutdown, we expected this to subsequently correct, but as of the November and December reports it has not to any degree...so this post is to update where the two unadjusted surveys stand as of the end of December, taking the minor revisions of previous months since into account…we’ll start by looking at the recent data as it’s available from FRED:
first, we have the unadjusted non-farm payrolls as reported by employers for each month from July through December (000's):
2013-07 135577
2013-08 136002
2013-09 136612
2013-10 137523
2013-11 137999
2013-12 137753
then, we have the raw unadjusted count of employed extrapolated from those who reported they were employed in the household surveys over the same time frame (000's):
2013-07 145113
2013-08 144509
2013-09 144651
2013-10 144144
2013-11 144775
2013-12 144423
it’s clear from the above that from July to December, the unadjusted count of the employed from the household survey fell by 690,000, from 145,113,000 in July, to 144,423,000 in December...over the same time frame, the unadjusted non-farm payrolls rose by 2,176,000, from 135,577,000 in July to 137,753,000 in December... for a visualization of what has been happening, we are including below a FRED graph which shows the historical track of the jobs or employed count from two surveys, before seasonal adjustments, since the beginning of the last decade…in blue, we have the unadjusted count of those self-reporting as employed from the household survey, with the count in thousands of employed on the graph’s right margin; in red, we have the unadjusted count of payroll jobs as reported by employers taking part in the establishment survey, with that count on the left margin, such that the two tracks tend to overlap…there’s obviously a lot of noise in the unadjusted data series; what we want to focus on is the last five monthly changes, where we see the payroll jobs in red moving almost straight up until December, while the count of the employed in blue has been trending downward; notice the red line is relatively well above the blue one for the first time in years ... ominously, the two other times that there was such a large increase in payroll jobs that was not accompanied by an equal increase in the number of employed were in 2008, and 2000-01, just preceding the recessions which are shown as grey bars on this graph . . . we are not suggesting that this predicts a recession, however; we're just noting that it’s inconceivable for these two lines, which are in effect measurements of the same function of employment, to continue moving in diiferent directions indefinitely . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment