Freedom lovers' quarrel
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
Remember the freedom loving Libyans who rose up to overthrow Muhamar Gadhafi, the ones President Obama ordered the U.S. military to support, without a vote from Congress?
Remember how upset Congress was at this further encroachment of the president on its authority?
The whole business no longer is news. What a surprise.
But it did get a blurb the other day. One of the freedom-loving rebels shot and killed the freedom-loving “military chief” of their rebellion. Another of the freedom-loving Libyan rebels from their “special forces” held a press conference to blame the crime on someone in the “faction” known as the Feb. 17 Martyrs’ Brigade.
Still paying attention? Or does this sound a lot like every other place in the Muslim world into which the U.S. sticks its nose?
The wire service news report explained, “The Feb. 17 Martyrs Brigade is a group made up of hundreds of civilians who took up arms to join the rebellion. Their fighters participate in the front-line battles with Gadhafi’s forces, but also act as a semi-official internal security force for the opposition. Some of its leadership comes from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an Islamic militant group that waged a campaign of violence against Gadhafi’s regime in the 1990s.”
Clearer? Maybe not, because one spokesman of the rebels blamed “gunmen” for the murder, implying an unfortunate, but uncoordinated wartime casualty; while a spokesman for the rebel military said the murdered commander had been “summoned” to a meeting and was killed en route, suggesting a set up.
This is bad news for freedom- loving Libyans, but possibly good news for the non-freedom loving supporters for Mr. Gadhafi. Many who attended the funeral of the deceased rebel were reported to be shouting that they wanted Gadhafi back.
But a lot of Libyans may know less of these events than you. The day the story broke, NATO forces bombed the broadcast facilities of the government (non-freedom loving), so that other non-freedom loving Libyans would not get the good news, or freedom loving Libyans the bad news.
Sorting out the freedom lovers from the non-freedom lovers is more of a challenge in Libya than it was in Egypt and other parts of the “Arab Spring” uprising, which continues with considerable loss of life in Syria and other places.
That may be because in Egypt and elsewhere, unarmed citizens took to the streets in their capitol cities to oppose their governments, whereas in Libya, armed, uniformed and trained fighters no one had heard of came out of the dessert to attack, first oil facilities, and then set up a bank.
Why oil facilities? Why a bank? Who are these freedom- loving Libyans with interests in oil and banking?
One explanation is that Gadhafi has kept control of the country’s oil industry, and has even allowed the Chinese to get into it — but not the U.S.
Oh, dear.
Another explanation, widely circulated in Africa but not much heard in the U.S., is that Gadhafi was using the revenue to set up development and infrastructure banks in Africa, offering low-cost financing and cutting in on the action of U.S. and European banks.
Oh dear, oh dear.
And freedom fighters emerged.
But freedom is never cheap, as American presidents like to point out when they get bogged down in expensive wars, and the freedom-loving Libyans needed cash. Fortunately, it was available.
The bank accounts that held the billions Gadhafi planned to put into African banks and development were frozen by Mr. Obama. (With the help of course of the international banking cartel. It’s one thing to bypass Congress, and quite another to bypass the banks). And the freedom loving Libyans were recently given $30 billion of those now unfrozen funds to play with.
Which may explain why they are now killing each other.
And freedom-loving Libyans and their freedom-loving American and NATO sponsors are left to hope they sort out which freedom-loving Libyans control the money, so they can get on to the really important business of who controls the oil and the banking.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
HOODWINKED !!
Another campaign of misdirection
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
For the second time in three years, the American people are being hoodwinked by a non-stop campaign of misdirection.
The previous campaign took place when Wall Street melted down in 2008. The barons were desperate. President Bush rode to the rescue. And then something totally unforeseen happened. The American people got so angry at the fraud, the Congress actually said “No!” to Wall Street.
In a panic, Wall Street mobilized the corporate dominated media, the VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE, talking heads and an army of lobbyists to scare the daylights out of the American people. Day after day, night after night the almost hysterical message went out: failure to bail out Wall Street will destroy the American economy and the lives of tens of millions.
Specifically, credit will dry up, businesses will lay off workers or close, there will be no loans for anything – homes, business, farmers, a new car or a college education – unemployment will skyrocket.
“The sky is falling!!”
After pretending to think about it, the presidential candidates of both parties got on board and the Congress caved. Wall Street got the cash.
And the sky fell on the American economy.
Credit dried up, the economy crashed and a tidal wave of home foreclosures and unemployment swept away about $7 trillion of the wealth of ordinary Americans. But Wall Street was saved.
The administration, the Congress and Federal Reserve were working for Wall Street, and not your street.
And they still are.
The American people are again being told their house is on fire, told it can’t all be saved, told some rooms must be sacrificed to the awful flames of deficit and debt.
Failure to act “boldly” will mean “The end of American economic supremacy,” warned one widely read columnist. (About a decade too late). No time to think! Quick, decide!
And Americans have decided. In every poll I have seen, Americans overwhelmingly want taxes raised on the wealthiest, wars ended, corporate tax loopholes closed, corporate subsidies ended and spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security maintained, if not increased.
But instead, the President and Congress are positioning themselves to do the opposite; abetted as always by the corporate media, the VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE, talking heads and the army of lobbyists they hope to join after their “public service.”
Never mind that the deficit was caused by the Bush tax cuts and the cost of two wars, and could be erased completely by 2016 simply by letting those tax cuts expire.
Never mind that the U.S. military budget is mindlessly out of control, larger than almost every other nation on earth combined, with a reported 1,000 U.S. military bases spread around the world to defend Americans against no known military threat.
Never mind that the debt has been far higher in the past, as a share of the Gross National Product, and the nation survived, and in fact prospered.
Never mind that small business people, still unable to get loans, are turning to their credit cards for the money to keep their doors open – and paying legally criminal interest rates to Wall Street for that credit, thanks to a Congress that over-rode state usury laws.
Americans are being sold another lie, told that what must be done to save the nation and build a prosperous future is to gut the spending that feeds, clothes, houses, educates, provides health care and sustains the lives of tens of millions, many of whom are already in very dire straits.
As one reader of this column observed, “It used to be only the mafia that shot at your knees. Now it’s our politicians.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and others argue that the American people are morally obligated to “do the right thing,” accept that they have it coming, and have no one to blame but themselves after decades of profligate, selfish spending.
But the truth is that corporate America collapsed manufacturing and off-shored millions of good paying jobs, and continues to, in a race to the bottom for the lowest wages and least regulation anywhere in the world, and has depressed wages in the U.S. for decades.
The truth is that millions of American parents keep their children’s heads above water only by working two or more jobs, if they can find a job.
The truth is that Wall Street introduced and aggressively marketed massive and expensive consumer credit to mask the reality and maintain an illusion of prosperity.
And make billions in profits.
The truth is that wealth in the United States has been concentrated in the hands of a few in ways not seen in almost one hundred years.
The truth is the nation is going backwards.
Friedman’s argument is a pseudo- economist’s equivalent of the rapist’s defense, and equally vile: the victim is the culprit
“She really wanted it, your honor. She made me do it.”
The governing, corporate elite of the United States are now almost completely without shame and the knowledge of justice. The broad majority of the American people are almost completely without representation in the federal government.
There must be an alternative to the Wall Street, Washington and Federal Reserve government of the United States. The states, local communities and new leaders must step forward.
Before the Statue of Liberty swims back to France – for shame.
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
For the second time in three years, the American people are being hoodwinked by a non-stop campaign of misdirection.
The previous campaign took place when Wall Street melted down in 2008. The barons were desperate. President Bush rode to the rescue. And then something totally unforeseen happened. The American people got so angry at the fraud, the Congress actually said “No!” to Wall Street.
In a panic, Wall Street mobilized the corporate dominated media, the VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE, talking heads and an army of lobbyists to scare the daylights out of the American people. Day after day, night after night the almost hysterical message went out: failure to bail out Wall Street will destroy the American economy and the lives of tens of millions.
Specifically, credit will dry up, businesses will lay off workers or close, there will be no loans for anything – homes, business, farmers, a new car or a college education – unemployment will skyrocket.
“The sky is falling!!”
After pretending to think about it, the presidential candidates of both parties got on board and the Congress caved. Wall Street got the cash.
And the sky fell on the American economy.
Credit dried up, the economy crashed and a tidal wave of home foreclosures and unemployment swept away about $7 trillion of the wealth of ordinary Americans. But Wall Street was saved.
The administration, the Congress and Federal Reserve were working for Wall Street, and not your street.
And they still are.
The American people are again being told their house is on fire, told it can’t all be saved, told some rooms must be sacrificed to the awful flames of deficit and debt.
Failure to act “boldly” will mean “The end of American economic supremacy,” warned one widely read columnist. (About a decade too late). No time to think! Quick, decide!
And Americans have decided. In every poll I have seen, Americans overwhelmingly want taxes raised on the wealthiest, wars ended, corporate tax loopholes closed, corporate subsidies ended and spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security maintained, if not increased.
But instead, the President and Congress are positioning themselves to do the opposite; abetted as always by the corporate media, the VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE, talking heads and the army of lobbyists they hope to join after their “public service.”
Never mind that the deficit was caused by the Bush tax cuts and the cost of two wars, and could be erased completely by 2016 simply by letting those tax cuts expire.
Never mind that the U.S. military budget is mindlessly out of control, larger than almost every other nation on earth combined, with a reported 1,000 U.S. military bases spread around the world to defend Americans against no known military threat.
Never mind that the debt has been far higher in the past, as a share of the Gross National Product, and the nation survived, and in fact prospered.
Never mind that small business people, still unable to get loans, are turning to their credit cards for the money to keep their doors open – and paying legally criminal interest rates to Wall Street for that credit, thanks to a Congress that over-rode state usury laws.
Americans are being sold another lie, told that what must be done to save the nation and build a prosperous future is to gut the spending that feeds, clothes, houses, educates, provides health care and sustains the lives of tens of millions, many of whom are already in very dire straits.
As one reader of this column observed, “It used to be only the mafia that shot at your knees. Now it’s our politicians.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and others argue that the American people are morally obligated to “do the right thing,” accept that they have it coming, and have no one to blame but themselves after decades of profligate, selfish spending.
But the truth is that corporate America collapsed manufacturing and off-shored millions of good paying jobs, and continues to, in a race to the bottom for the lowest wages and least regulation anywhere in the world, and has depressed wages in the U.S. for decades.
The truth is that millions of American parents keep their children’s heads above water only by working two or more jobs, if they can find a job.
The truth is that Wall Street introduced and aggressively marketed massive and expensive consumer credit to mask the reality and maintain an illusion of prosperity.
And make billions in profits.
The truth is that wealth in the United States has been concentrated in the hands of a few in ways not seen in almost one hundred years.
The truth is the nation is going backwards.
Friedman’s argument is a pseudo- economist’s equivalent of the rapist’s defense, and equally vile: the victim is the culprit
“She really wanted it, your honor. She made me do it.”
The governing, corporate elite of the United States are now almost completely without shame and the knowledge of justice. The broad majority of the American people are almost completely without representation in the federal government.
There must be an alternative to the Wall Street, Washington and Federal Reserve government of the United States. The states, local communities and new leaders must step forward.
Before the Statue of Liberty swims back to France – for shame.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Liberals' Lament
President Obama's remaining liberal supporters are in agony.
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
One by one Mr. Obama has abandoned the hopeful promises of his 2008 campaign, and has emerged as the champion of established wealth, Wall Street and war, and the global club of parasites in pinstripes.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was compelled to note that with his proposals to go after what remains of middle class security, Mr. Obama sounds no different than the Darwinian predators in the GOP.
First, Vice President Biden, the administration’s “regular Joe,” was dispatched to give cover to “negotiations” that proposed budget cuts of between $1.5 trillion and $1.7 trillion over 10 years.
Hit hardest were Pell Grants for college students, (while tuition goes through the roof), food stamps (while one in four American children already depends on them), transportation funding (while roads and bridges crumble) and pensions for federal employees.
Not members of Congress, of course.
Then the president put Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block.
Medicaid helps mostly those with no resources, a number that is rising with a vengeance. The administration has proposed to cut as much as $100 billion over the next 10 years, mostly by reducing funding to the states, cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program and imposing restrictions on the states’ ability to tax hospitals and other health-care providers.
Corporate profit will be protected.
This will further squeeze the states and cut off health care for hundreds of thousands, and over the next 10 years millions, many of them the same children who increasingly lack a decent or sufficient diet. Nice.
Medicare is targeted for the biggest cuts, reportedly $353 billion over 10 years: cuts in prevention, medical education and public health programs. The future. Reimbursements will be slashed for hospitals that run up losses by treating patients who cannot afford to pay.
Charity and compassion must be discouraged.
The cuts in Medicare, combined with another administration proposal to raise the eligibility from age 65 to 67 will take a toll: An already large and growing number of older Americans will find themselves choosing between eating, getting a prescription, paying rent and paying their doctor.
Finally, Mr. Obama proposes cuts in Social Security, now, even though the fund is sound for another 20 years.
Two-thirds of the nation’s elderly rely on Social Security for most of their income, and for one-third, Social Security accounts for 90 percent of their income.
Wall Street has wiped out the investments, savings and home equity of millions, and Social Security is a life line for millions who worked all their lives but now have little left to carry them through old age.
But after months of bogus fear mongering over the debt and deficit as cover, Mr. Obama apparently concluded it was safe to turn his back on those struggling millions.
The change the White has proposed is an accounting devise designed to understate inflation and justify declining monthly support as people age. As noted by the actuaries of Social Security, the longer you receive benefits, the smaller they will be. Retire at 65, and by 85 the benefit level would be cut $1,000 a year; by age 95, $1,400 a year.
In Mr. Obama’s America, the longer you live the worse it will get.
Not for everyone, of course.
While wages for most Americans have remained flat for decades, the wealthiest saw their income double under Mr. Clinton, and triple again under Mr. Bush.
Americans have begun to wake up to the staggering transfer of wealth into the hands of a few, and with elections approaching the president and many in his party now say they want to raise the taxes of the richest.
Don’t hold your breath. Mr. Obama and too many members of Congress now depend heavily on the people who can pony up $75,000 per election in campaign contributions. So they will talk about taxing those Americans, but never put it to a vote without an off-set to give it back somewhere else.
Krugman offered up some pop psychology to explain Mr. Obama’s failure to stand up to the shameless monopoly of prosperity in America and protect the many millions now struggling.
“Mr. Obama is clearly still clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend America’s partisan differences.”
Translated: He’s just too nice and a little too naive for the job.
Earth to Paul Krugman.
Mr. Obama and the GOP are equally in the pocket of the nation’s established wealth, the latter set up to make the former look good in an increasingly grotesque parody of representative government.
Mr. Obama will be re-elected in a set piece against a GOP candidate pushed to the right of Ebenezer Scrooge. And while it is possible that champions will emerge in the next Congress to join the few brave souls now there who want to mount a resistance to the destruction of the American middle class, it is unlikely.
Reapportionment will make the safe seats safer, and campaign contributions, an army of lobbyists and the prospect of lucrative post-office sinecures will keep many, if not most members in line.
If there is to be a restoration of the prosperity of the American middle class and some hope for those who aspire to a better future for every American, leaders must be found outside Washington.
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
One by one Mr. Obama has abandoned the hopeful promises of his 2008 campaign, and has emerged as the champion of established wealth, Wall Street and war, and the global club of parasites in pinstripes.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was compelled to note that with his proposals to go after what remains of middle class security, Mr. Obama sounds no different than the Darwinian predators in the GOP.
First, Vice President Biden, the administration’s “regular Joe,” was dispatched to give cover to “negotiations” that proposed budget cuts of between $1.5 trillion and $1.7 trillion over 10 years.
Hit hardest were Pell Grants for college students, (while tuition goes through the roof), food stamps (while one in four American children already depends on them), transportation funding (while roads and bridges crumble) and pensions for federal employees.
Not members of Congress, of course.
Then the president put Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block.
Medicaid helps mostly those with no resources, a number that is rising with a vengeance. The administration has proposed to cut as much as $100 billion over the next 10 years, mostly by reducing funding to the states, cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program and imposing restrictions on the states’ ability to tax hospitals and other health-care providers.
Corporate profit will be protected.
This will further squeeze the states and cut off health care for hundreds of thousands, and over the next 10 years millions, many of them the same children who increasingly lack a decent or sufficient diet. Nice.
Medicare is targeted for the biggest cuts, reportedly $353 billion over 10 years: cuts in prevention, medical education and public health programs. The future. Reimbursements will be slashed for hospitals that run up losses by treating patients who cannot afford to pay.
Charity and compassion must be discouraged.
The cuts in Medicare, combined with another administration proposal to raise the eligibility from age 65 to 67 will take a toll: An already large and growing number of older Americans will find themselves choosing between eating, getting a prescription, paying rent and paying their doctor.
Finally, Mr. Obama proposes cuts in Social Security, now, even though the fund is sound for another 20 years.
Two-thirds of the nation’s elderly rely on Social Security for most of their income, and for one-third, Social Security accounts for 90 percent of their income.
Wall Street has wiped out the investments, savings and home equity of millions, and Social Security is a life line for millions who worked all their lives but now have little left to carry them through old age.
But after months of bogus fear mongering over the debt and deficit as cover, Mr. Obama apparently concluded it was safe to turn his back on those struggling millions.
The change the White has proposed is an accounting devise designed to understate inflation and justify declining monthly support as people age. As noted by the actuaries of Social Security, the longer you receive benefits, the smaller they will be. Retire at 65, and by 85 the benefit level would be cut $1,000 a year; by age 95, $1,400 a year.
In Mr. Obama’s America, the longer you live the worse it will get.
Not for everyone, of course.
While wages for most Americans have remained flat for decades, the wealthiest saw their income double under Mr. Clinton, and triple again under Mr. Bush.
Americans have begun to wake up to the staggering transfer of wealth into the hands of a few, and with elections approaching the president and many in his party now say they want to raise the taxes of the richest.
Don’t hold your breath. Mr. Obama and too many members of Congress now depend heavily on the people who can pony up $75,000 per election in campaign contributions. So they will talk about taxing those Americans, but never put it to a vote without an off-set to give it back somewhere else.
Krugman offered up some pop psychology to explain Mr. Obama’s failure to stand up to the shameless monopoly of prosperity in America and protect the many millions now struggling.
“Mr. Obama is clearly still clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend America’s partisan differences.”
Translated: He’s just too nice and a little too naive for the job.
Earth to Paul Krugman.
Mr. Obama and the GOP are equally in the pocket of the nation’s established wealth, the latter set up to make the former look good in an increasingly grotesque parody of representative government.
Mr. Obama will be re-elected in a set piece against a GOP candidate pushed to the right of Ebenezer Scrooge. And while it is possible that champions will emerge in the next Congress to join the few brave souls now there who want to mount a resistance to the destruction of the American middle class, it is unlikely.
Reapportionment will make the safe seats safer, and campaign contributions, an army of lobbyists and the prospect of lucrative post-office sinecures will keep many, if not most members in line.
If there is to be a restoration of the prosperity of the American middle class and some hope for those who aspire to a better future for every American, leaders must be found outside Washington.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Rome of the Caesars or England of the Tudors
“Let Freedom Ring”
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
I have a Fourth of July tradition. On the day, I read the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and thanks to the internet, I listen to Martin Luther King’s speech on the Mall in Washington.
The first two still give me goosebumps. The third stirs strong emotion.
The speech is named by its great refrain, “I have a dream.” But in that speech there is another refrain, and I have always thought that perhaps Dr. King thought that was the one that would be remembered. He gave the dream a name: freedom.
“Let freedom ring,” he said.
You have to hear it. Dr. King was a marvelous orator, and the changes in the cadence, timber and tone of his voice as he said those words over and over –“Let freedom ring!” – can make you hear the bell.
It rang clearly, defiantly for Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. “All men are created equal… they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
That declaration is the bedrock of democracy, although some of these ideas were already current in Europe, a part of Enlightenment thought, though not declared so boldly. (But the “pursuit of happiness” was pure American, Ben Franklin's inspired edit.) But there was more.
“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”
That was news. The purpose of government is to secure the rights of the people, and the only legitimate government was republican, empowered by the people.
Lincoln understood how world changing that idea was, if it survived, if a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal… can long endure.”
Well, by the grace of God and the sacrifice of generations it did endure, and prospered, and the bell rang loud and clear for more than another century.
But this July 4th the sound is muted and far off.
It must be hard to hear indeed for tens of millions of Americans who lost their jobs, homes and futures, and for whom the American dream has become the American ordeal.
And it must be almost impossible to hear for millions around the world, for whom the sight of an American soldier was once and not so long ago a cause for joy, but is now too often occasion for alarm, fear and even loathing.
And for Americans who cherish the Constitution, the sound can only be a sad echo of former things.
Constitutional protections like habeas corpus, which prohibit government from holding people indefinitely without presenting charges, and others which prohibit government from denying citizens the “due process and equal protection of the law” have been thrown out the window.
The Military Tribunals Commissions Act of 2006 allows anyone alleged to be an “unlawful enemy combatant” to be sentenced to death on the basis of secret and hearsay evidence.
American citizens may be similarly murdered based on a “finding” of some faceless “national security” bureaucrat: no judge, evidence or jury.
This is Rome of the Caesars or England of the Tudors.
The fourth amendment, which protected Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure” and guaranteed the privacy of their persons, homes and papers has been trashed.
Federal agents are now authorized to search anywhere, anytime for virtually any reason, as they do to track protesters (so much for free speech) or the cub scout who was groped or the aged and dying grandmother who was forced to strip and surrender her adult diaper in an airport.
“Warrant? Probable cause? What’s that?”
The driver in all this is the collapse of what was meant to be the “Peoples House” and the repository of representative and therefore republican government: the Congress of the United States. It was long ago hijacked along with the political parties.
Energy companies that make zillions are hauled before the Congress, asked why the people’s taxes ought to further subsidize their fantastic profits and then – nothing happens.
The robber barons who looted the wealth of a nation are similarly beaten up in public shows of righteous indignation, patently perjure themselves in attempts to avoid the truth of their fraud and then – nothing happens.
The Peoples House can no longer pass a budget, take responsibility for the spending it approved, assert its authority to make war or defend the rights of the people.
Small wonder that the presidency has taken on increasingly authoritarian powers. Nature abhors a vacuum. The Capitol being effectively vacant, the president has moved in.
The major change in American government over the course of the past forty years has been the elevation of profit to sacred status, and the subversion of the democratic and republican government of the Founders, Lincoln and King, as presidents and Congresses worship at profit’s altar.
If there is to be a “new birth of freedom” in America, if freedom is to ring again and Americans are once again to enjoy equally their God given rights, then corporate profit and power must be reined in.
Let freedom ring.
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
I have a Fourth of July tradition. On the day, I read the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and thanks to the internet, I listen to Martin Luther King’s speech on the Mall in Washington.
The first two still give me goosebumps. The third stirs strong emotion.
The speech is named by its great refrain, “I have a dream.” But in that speech there is another refrain, and I have always thought that perhaps Dr. King thought that was the one that would be remembered. He gave the dream a name: freedom.
“Let freedom ring,” he said.
You have to hear it. Dr. King was a marvelous orator, and the changes in the cadence, timber and tone of his voice as he said those words over and over –“Let freedom ring!” – can make you hear the bell.
It rang clearly, defiantly for Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. “All men are created equal… they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
That declaration is the bedrock of democracy, although some of these ideas were already current in Europe, a part of Enlightenment thought, though not declared so boldly. (But the “pursuit of happiness” was pure American, Ben Franklin's inspired edit.) But there was more.
“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”
That was news. The purpose of government is to secure the rights of the people, and the only legitimate government was republican, empowered by the people.
Lincoln understood how world changing that idea was, if it survived, if a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal… can long endure.”
Well, by the grace of God and the sacrifice of generations it did endure, and prospered, and the bell rang loud and clear for more than another century.
But this July 4th the sound is muted and far off.
It must be hard to hear indeed for tens of millions of Americans who lost their jobs, homes and futures, and for whom the American dream has become the American ordeal.
And it must be almost impossible to hear for millions around the world, for whom the sight of an American soldier was once and not so long ago a cause for joy, but is now too often occasion for alarm, fear and even loathing.
And for Americans who cherish the Constitution, the sound can only be a sad echo of former things.
Constitutional protections like habeas corpus, which prohibit government from holding people indefinitely without presenting charges, and others which prohibit government from denying citizens the “due process and equal protection of the law” have been thrown out the window.
The Military Tribunals Commissions Act of 2006 allows anyone alleged to be an “unlawful enemy combatant” to be sentenced to death on the basis of secret and hearsay evidence.
American citizens may be similarly murdered based on a “finding” of some faceless “national security” bureaucrat: no judge, evidence or jury.
This is Rome of the Caesars or England of the Tudors.
The fourth amendment, which protected Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure” and guaranteed the privacy of their persons, homes and papers has been trashed.
Federal agents are now authorized to search anywhere, anytime for virtually any reason, as they do to track protesters (so much for free speech) or the cub scout who was groped or the aged and dying grandmother who was forced to strip and surrender her adult diaper in an airport.
“Warrant? Probable cause? What’s that?”
The driver in all this is the collapse of what was meant to be the “Peoples House” and the repository of representative and therefore republican government: the Congress of the United States. It was long ago hijacked along with the political parties.
Energy companies that make zillions are hauled before the Congress, asked why the people’s taxes ought to further subsidize their fantastic profits and then – nothing happens.
The robber barons who looted the wealth of a nation are similarly beaten up in public shows of righteous indignation, patently perjure themselves in attempts to avoid the truth of their fraud and then – nothing happens.
The Peoples House can no longer pass a budget, take responsibility for the spending it approved, assert its authority to make war or defend the rights of the people.
Small wonder that the presidency has taken on increasingly authoritarian powers. Nature abhors a vacuum. The Capitol being effectively vacant, the president has moved in.
The major change in American government over the course of the past forty years has been the elevation of profit to sacred status, and the subversion of the democratic and republican government of the Founders, Lincoln and King, as presidents and Congresses worship at profit’s altar.
If there is to be a “new birth of freedom” in America, if freedom is to ring again and Americans are once again to enjoy equally their God given rights, then corporate profit and power must be reined in.
Let freedom ring.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Skinner Box
Steady diet of panic and fear pits Americans against each other
By: MIKE KRAUSS
Bucks County Courier Times
In a college course on psychology I studied behaviorism — the understanding that animals can learn, can be “conditioned” to make predictable responses to repeated stimulus and circumstances.
In one experiment, we placed laboratory rats in a small cage called a Skinner Box, named after one of the pioneers in the discipline, and observed the “bar press” response.
At one end of the cage was a bar on a hinge. When a rat eventually leaned on it, it was pressed down and released a food pellet into a tray. The rat ate it. The smarter rats made the connection quickly — do this and eat — but eventually even the dumb ones figured it out.
Then we put the same rats in another cage with a bar at both ends. One released a food pellet when pressed and the other did not, and we discovered the really smart rats.
We would later learn that people can be similarly conditioned to make predictable responses. This understanding is the basis of all modern advertising, and most politics.
For example, if a politician makes the right response when voting on legislation or directing policy, there may be a reward for that behavior; or in scientific terms, a stimulus to repeat that behavior. But some rewards are better than others, and some politicians learn very quickly indeed.
But voters can also be conditioned to pull the right lever. Say the word “jobs” or “values” after a politician’s name in a million dollar’s worth of 30-second spots over six weeks, and people start to associate them; even though the politician has no plan to create jobs and may well be devoid of values.
There was another experiment. We put a lot of rats in a big cage, and gradually reduced the food supply. The competition for the dwindling resource got ugly.
This is behavior that Americans have observed many times among people in the news from very poor, Third World countries and in some disasters. Now, we can see it daily in the United States.
As ever more of the wealth and resources of the United States are concentrated in fewer hands, and as food, housing, health care and other vital resources are withdrawn, the competition for what remains is getting ugly and Americans are set one against the other.
In some communities, teachers and unions seem to be the villain as Americans confront dwindling available resources and fight to hold on to what they have left.
Teachers, it is argued, have it too good — salaries, health care and retirement that are better than those of others. And in some communities that is true. But leaving aside for the moment that teachers did not steal these benefits, but rather secured then in contract negotiations to which there was another party — a democratically elected school board — it is interesting to note how some voters have been conditioned to make a particular response.
Instead of fighting for better wages, health care and retirement for themselves and everybody else, many seem only to want to pull down the teachers.
This is all the more remarkable because, while the rats in the Skinner Box could not know or understand that someone was manipulating the food supply, most American adults are capable of understanding that someone is manipulating and controlling the wealth and resources that could be shared to lift every American up, and there is no need to pull anyone down.
The American people are being conditioned to make these responses, no less than rats in a Skinner Box.
But people are more complicated than rats, and while physical stimulation and reinforcement can be useful, these methods are generally illegal (except at places like Guantanamo) and those who wish to produce desired political behavior must resort to emotional stimulation. Fear is the No. 1 tool.
So Americans are fed a steady diet of fear — terrorists (now that the Commies are gone), global financial collapse, and life threatening debt and deficits to persuade them that improving the lives of all is just not an option, and bringing down others is the only way for you — personally — to have any security in this evidently insecure world.
I mean, your job could go tomorrow. Did we mention that?
It is all so bogus. There is money all over the place in the United States, and rather than make scapegoats of teachers, or anyone else, adult Americans should be able to look at 10 years of ruinously expensive wars, decades of massive subsidies to a few favored industries, off-shored jobs, fantastic corporate wealth, the looting of the Treasury by a relative handful of Wall Street banksters, and politicians conditioned by legalized bribes to make all that possible — and figure it out.
And perhaps Americans are now figuring it out. There was a recent election in the county where this newspaper is published — education and income well above the mean in America. Nobody came. Turnout was the lowest ever recorded.
It may be that those who control the wealth of America have succeeded too well, and the American people have been conditioned by endless experience to understand, finally, that there is no connection between voting and their welfare.
I wonder what comes next?
By: MIKE KRAUSS
Bucks County Courier Times
In a college course on psychology I studied behaviorism — the understanding that animals can learn, can be “conditioned” to make predictable responses to repeated stimulus and circumstances.
In one experiment, we placed laboratory rats in a small cage called a Skinner Box, named after one of the pioneers in the discipline, and observed the “bar press” response.
At one end of the cage was a bar on a hinge. When a rat eventually leaned on it, it was pressed down and released a food pellet into a tray. The rat ate it. The smarter rats made the connection quickly — do this and eat — but eventually even the dumb ones figured it out.
Then we put the same rats in another cage with a bar at both ends. One released a food pellet when pressed and the other did not, and we discovered the really smart rats.
We would later learn that people can be similarly conditioned to make predictable responses. This understanding is the basis of all modern advertising, and most politics.
For example, if a politician makes the right response when voting on legislation or directing policy, there may be a reward for that behavior; or in scientific terms, a stimulus to repeat that behavior. But some rewards are better than others, and some politicians learn very quickly indeed.
But voters can also be conditioned to pull the right lever. Say the word “jobs” or “values” after a politician’s name in a million dollar’s worth of 30-second spots over six weeks, and people start to associate them; even though the politician has no plan to create jobs and may well be devoid of values.
There was another experiment. We put a lot of rats in a big cage, and gradually reduced the food supply. The competition for the dwindling resource got ugly.
This is behavior that Americans have observed many times among people in the news from very poor, Third World countries and in some disasters. Now, we can see it daily in the United States.
As ever more of the wealth and resources of the United States are concentrated in fewer hands, and as food, housing, health care and other vital resources are withdrawn, the competition for what remains is getting ugly and Americans are set one against the other.
In some communities, teachers and unions seem to be the villain as Americans confront dwindling available resources and fight to hold on to what they have left.
Teachers, it is argued, have it too good — salaries, health care and retirement that are better than those of others. And in some communities that is true. But leaving aside for the moment that teachers did not steal these benefits, but rather secured then in contract negotiations to which there was another party — a democratically elected school board — it is interesting to note how some voters have been conditioned to make a particular response.
Instead of fighting for better wages, health care and retirement for themselves and everybody else, many seem only to want to pull down the teachers.
This is all the more remarkable because, while the rats in the Skinner Box could not know or understand that someone was manipulating the food supply, most American adults are capable of understanding that someone is manipulating and controlling the wealth and resources that could be shared to lift every American up, and there is no need to pull anyone down.
The American people are being conditioned to make these responses, no less than rats in a Skinner Box.
But people are more complicated than rats, and while physical stimulation and reinforcement can be useful, these methods are generally illegal (except at places like Guantanamo) and those who wish to produce desired political behavior must resort to emotional stimulation. Fear is the No. 1 tool.
So Americans are fed a steady diet of fear — terrorists (now that the Commies are gone), global financial collapse, and life threatening debt and deficits to persuade them that improving the lives of all is just not an option, and bringing down others is the only way for you — personally — to have any security in this evidently insecure world.
I mean, your job could go tomorrow. Did we mention that?
It is all so bogus. There is money all over the place in the United States, and rather than make scapegoats of teachers, or anyone else, adult Americans should be able to look at 10 years of ruinously expensive wars, decades of massive subsidies to a few favored industries, off-shored jobs, fantastic corporate wealth, the looting of the Treasury by a relative handful of Wall Street banksters, and politicians conditioned by legalized bribes to make all that possible — and figure it out.
And perhaps Americans are now figuring it out. There was a recent election in the county where this newspaper is published — education and income well above the mean in America. Nobody came. Turnout was the lowest ever recorded.
It may be that those who control the wealth of America have succeeded too well, and the American people have been conditioned by endless experience to understand, finally, that there is no connection between voting and their welfare.
I wonder what comes next?
Sunday, May 29, 2011
After the crash
The pauperisation of middle-class America
"With the crisis now in its fifth year, it's plain that the rich and powerful have restructured society toward ever-greater inequality."
From the Guardian, Friday 27 May 2011
By Richard Wolff
The current global crisis of capitalism began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid 2007. Therefore, welcome to Year Five. This inventory of where things stand may begin with the good news: the major banks, the stock market and corporate profits have largely or completely "recovered" from the lows they reached early in 2009. The US dollar has fallen sharply against many currencies of countries with which the US trades, and that has enabled US exports to rebound from their crisis lows.
However, the bad news is what prevails notwithstanding the political and media hype about "recovery". The most widely cited unemployment rate remains at 9% for workers without jobs but looking. If instead, we use the more indicative U-6 unemployment statistic of the US labour department's bureau of labour statistics, then the rate is 15.9%. The latter rate counts also those who want full-time but can only find part-time work and those who want work but have given up looking. One in six members of the US labour force brings home little or no money, burdening family and friends, using up savings, cutting back on spending, etc.
At the same time, the housing market remains deeply depressed as 1.5-2m home foreclosures are scheduled for 2011, separating more millions from their homes. After a short upturn, housing prices nationally have resumed their fall: one of those feared "double dips" downward is thus already under way in the economically vital housing market.
The combination of high unemployment and high home foreclosures assures a deeply depressed economy. The mass of US citizens cannot work more hours – the US already is No 1 in the world in the average number of hours of paid labour done per year per worker. The mass of US citizens cannot borrow much more because of debt levels already teetering on the edge of unsustainability for most consumers. Real wages are going nowhere because of high unemployment enabling employers everywhere to refuse significant wage increases. Job-related benefits (pensions, medical insurance, holidays, etc) are being pared back.
There is thus no discernible basis for a substantial recovery for the mass of Americans. The US economy, like so many others, is caught in serious stagnation, a situation flowing partly from the economic crisis that began in 2007 and partly from the way in which most governments responded to that crisis. Thus US businesses and investors increasingly look elsewhere to make money.
Rapidly rising consumption is not foreseeable in the US, but it is already happening where production is booming: China, India, Brazil, Russia, parts of Europe (especially Germany). Growth-oriented activity is leaving the US economy, where it used to be so concentrated. The US was already becoming less important as a production centre as profit-driven major US corporations shifted manufacturing jobs to cheaper workers overseas, especially in China. In recent decades, those corporations' export of jobs expanded to include more and more white-collar and skilled work outsourced to India and elsewhere. Now, US corporations are also spending their money on office, advertising, legal, lobbying and other budgets increasingly where the expanding markets are – and not inside the US.
Republicans are now celebrating "American exceptionalism", the unique greatness of living conditions in the US. Yet again, their politics stress vanishing social conditions whose disappearance frightens Americans who counted on them. In reality, the US is fast becoming more and more like so many countries where a rich, cosmopolitan elite occupies major cities with a vast hinterland of people struggling to make ends meet. The vaunted US "middle class" – so celebrated after the second world war even as it slowly shrank – is now fast evaporating, as the economic crisis and the government's "austerity" response both favour the top 10% of the population at the expense of everyone else.
The US budget for fiscal year 2011 is scheduled to spend $ 3.5tn while taking in $2tn in taxes. It is borrowing the other $1.5tn – the deficit – and thereby adding to the US national debt (already over $14tn, roughly the same as the annual output, or GDP, of the US). Such massive borrowing is what got Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and other countries into their current massive crises.
The "great budget debate" between Republicans and Democrats over the first few months of 2011 haggled over $60bn in cuts versus $30bn with the final compromise of $38bn. That $38bn cannot and will not make any significant difference to a 2011 deficit of $1,500bn (that is, $1.5tn).
Obviously, both Republicans and Democrats are agreed to do nothing more that quibble over insignificant margins of so huge a deficit. Meanwhile, they perform live political theatre about their "deep concern about deficits and debts" for a bemused, bored and ever-more alienated public.
Neither party can shake off its utter dependence now on corporate and rich citizens' monies for all their financial sustenance. Therefore, neither party imagines, let alone explores, alternatives to massive deficits and debts. After all, government deficits and debts mean: first, the government is not taxing corporations and the rich; and second, the government is, instead, borrowing from them and paying them interest. So, the two parties quibble over how much to cut which government jobs and public services.
Yet, the tax burdens of US corporations and the richest citizens (what they actually pay) are significantly lower than in most other advanced industrial economies. Indeed, they are far lower than they were inside the US a few years ago. In the mid 1940s, the corporate income tax brought Washington 50% more than the individual income tax. Today, the corporate income tax brings the federal government 25% of what is taken from individuals. In the 1950s and 1960s, the top individual income tax rate in the United States (the rate paid by the richest citizens on all their income over about $100,000) was 91%.
Today, that rate is 35%, a staggering cut in the taxes on the richest Americans, far larger than the cuts in anyone else's tax rates. Half or more of today's federal deficits would be gone if we simply taxed the richest US citizens at the rates in effect in the 1950s and 1960s. If we also taxed corporations in relation to individuals as we did in the 1940s, the entire deficit would vanish.
In summary, shifting the burden of federal taxation from corporations to individuals and from the richest individuals to the rest of us contributed to massive deficits and debts. Instead of correcting and reversing that unjust shift, Republicans and Democrats plan, instead, to deal with deficits and debts by cutting Medicaid and Medicare and threatening social security.
A revealing historical incident can introduce our conclusion about the capitalist crisis as it enters Year Five. In May 2011, as gasoline prices rose to between $4 and $5 per gallon, a US Senate committee run by Democrats summoned the heads of major oil companies to testify. The senators asked why the federal government should continue to provide them with special tax loopholes and direct subsidies of $4bn per year when their companies were earning record high profits. The Democrats had offered a meek plan to merely cut those loopholes and subsidies from $4bn to $2bn per year. After the hearings, the US Senate voted not to cut the loopholes and subsidies at all.
The largest corporations and richest citizens long ago learned that if you want to sustain an extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income, you need an equally unequal distribution of political power. Those corporations use their profits to pay huge salaries and bonuses to their executives, to pay big dividends to their major shareholders, and to "contribute" to politics. The corporations, their top executives and the major shareholders whom they enrich all regularly finance the political campaigns and politicians that perform that sustaining function. An increasingly unequal capitalist economy pays for the increasingly undemocratic politics it needs.
Any serious effort to change the basic situation, functions and direction of government policy must change the answer our society now gives to this basic question: who gets and disposes of the profits of producing goods and services in the US economy? So long as the answer remains corporations' boards of directors and major shareholders (the status quo), current trends will continue until bigger economic collapses bring the system to self-destruction. Then we will have graduated from a crisis with banks "too big to fail" to a crisis that is itself "too big to overcome."
A changed system – perhaps called "economic democracy" – in which the workers themselves collectively operate their enterprises would immediately redirect enterprise profits in different ways, with very different social consequences. For example, according the bureau of labour statistics, during 2010, the pay for average workers rose 2% while the pay for CEOs rose 23%. Workers who collectively directed their own enterprises would distribute pay increases very differently and far less unequally. Likewise, to take another example, self-directing workers would allocate their enterprises' profits to the government (that is, pay taxes) but demand in return the sorts of mass-focused social programmes that the current CEOs and boards of directors want government to cut. Democratic enterprises would have to work out collaborations and agreements with democratically run residential units (cities, states, etc) where their decisions impact one another.
This short article is hardly the place to work out the details of so changed an economic system. That is, after all, the task of democratic economic and political institutions to do together, once the change has been discussed, adopted and set in motion.
Throughout the cold war decades, and even after the USSR dissolved in 1989, we remained, as a nation, afraid openly to discuss and debate a basic economic issue. Does our economic system, capitalism, serve our needs sufficiently; does it need basic changes; or might a change to another economic system be best? Instead of a debate over alternative answers to such questions, we permitted little beyond self-congratulatory cheerleading for capitalism. Seriously questioning capitalism, let alone challenging it, remained taboo, an activity to keep repressed. That repression encouraged an unquestioned and unchecked US capitalism to become ever more unequal, delivering more "bads" than "goods" to ever larger majorities of people. This unsustainable situation is being strained to breaking point by the crisis that now enters Year Five
"With the crisis now in its fifth year, it's plain that the rich and powerful have restructured society toward ever-greater inequality."
From the Guardian, Friday 27 May 2011
By Richard Wolff
The current global crisis of capitalism began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid 2007. Therefore, welcome to Year Five. This inventory of where things stand may begin with the good news: the major banks, the stock market and corporate profits have largely or completely "recovered" from the lows they reached early in 2009. The US dollar has fallen sharply against many currencies of countries with which the US trades, and that has enabled US exports to rebound from their crisis lows.
However, the bad news is what prevails notwithstanding the political and media hype about "recovery". The most widely cited unemployment rate remains at 9% for workers without jobs but looking. If instead, we use the more indicative U-6 unemployment statistic of the US labour department's bureau of labour statistics, then the rate is 15.9%. The latter rate counts also those who want full-time but can only find part-time work and those who want work but have given up looking. One in six members of the US labour force brings home little or no money, burdening family and friends, using up savings, cutting back on spending, etc.
At the same time, the housing market remains deeply depressed as 1.5-2m home foreclosures are scheduled for 2011, separating more millions from their homes. After a short upturn, housing prices nationally have resumed their fall: one of those feared "double dips" downward is thus already under way in the economically vital housing market.
The combination of high unemployment and high home foreclosures assures a deeply depressed economy. The mass of US citizens cannot work more hours – the US already is No 1 in the world in the average number of hours of paid labour done per year per worker. The mass of US citizens cannot borrow much more because of debt levels already teetering on the edge of unsustainability for most consumers. Real wages are going nowhere because of high unemployment enabling employers everywhere to refuse significant wage increases. Job-related benefits (pensions, medical insurance, holidays, etc) are being pared back.
There is thus no discernible basis for a substantial recovery for the mass of Americans. The US economy, like so many others, is caught in serious stagnation, a situation flowing partly from the economic crisis that began in 2007 and partly from the way in which most governments responded to that crisis. Thus US businesses and investors increasingly look elsewhere to make money.
Rapidly rising consumption is not foreseeable in the US, but it is already happening where production is booming: China, India, Brazil, Russia, parts of Europe (especially Germany). Growth-oriented activity is leaving the US economy, where it used to be so concentrated. The US was already becoming less important as a production centre as profit-driven major US corporations shifted manufacturing jobs to cheaper workers overseas, especially in China. In recent decades, those corporations' export of jobs expanded to include more and more white-collar and skilled work outsourced to India and elsewhere. Now, US corporations are also spending their money on office, advertising, legal, lobbying and other budgets increasingly where the expanding markets are – and not inside the US.
Republicans are now celebrating "American exceptionalism", the unique greatness of living conditions in the US. Yet again, their politics stress vanishing social conditions whose disappearance frightens Americans who counted on them. In reality, the US is fast becoming more and more like so many countries where a rich, cosmopolitan elite occupies major cities with a vast hinterland of people struggling to make ends meet. The vaunted US "middle class" – so celebrated after the second world war even as it slowly shrank – is now fast evaporating, as the economic crisis and the government's "austerity" response both favour the top 10% of the population at the expense of everyone else.
The US budget for fiscal year 2011 is scheduled to spend $ 3.5tn while taking in $2tn in taxes. It is borrowing the other $1.5tn – the deficit – and thereby adding to the US national debt (already over $14tn, roughly the same as the annual output, or GDP, of the US). Such massive borrowing is what got Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and other countries into their current massive crises.
The "great budget debate" between Republicans and Democrats over the first few months of 2011 haggled over $60bn in cuts versus $30bn with the final compromise of $38bn. That $38bn cannot and will not make any significant difference to a 2011 deficit of $1,500bn (that is, $1.5tn).
Obviously, both Republicans and Democrats are agreed to do nothing more that quibble over insignificant margins of so huge a deficit. Meanwhile, they perform live political theatre about their "deep concern about deficits and debts" for a bemused, bored and ever-more alienated public.
Neither party can shake off its utter dependence now on corporate and rich citizens' monies for all their financial sustenance. Therefore, neither party imagines, let alone explores, alternatives to massive deficits and debts. After all, government deficits and debts mean: first, the government is not taxing corporations and the rich; and second, the government is, instead, borrowing from them and paying them interest. So, the two parties quibble over how much to cut which government jobs and public services.
Yet, the tax burdens of US corporations and the richest citizens (what they actually pay) are significantly lower than in most other advanced industrial economies. Indeed, they are far lower than they were inside the US a few years ago. In the mid 1940s, the corporate income tax brought Washington 50% more than the individual income tax. Today, the corporate income tax brings the federal government 25% of what is taken from individuals. In the 1950s and 1960s, the top individual income tax rate in the United States (the rate paid by the richest citizens on all their income over about $100,000) was 91%.
Today, that rate is 35%, a staggering cut in the taxes on the richest Americans, far larger than the cuts in anyone else's tax rates. Half or more of today's federal deficits would be gone if we simply taxed the richest US citizens at the rates in effect in the 1950s and 1960s. If we also taxed corporations in relation to individuals as we did in the 1940s, the entire deficit would vanish.
In summary, shifting the burden of federal taxation from corporations to individuals and from the richest individuals to the rest of us contributed to massive deficits and debts. Instead of correcting and reversing that unjust shift, Republicans and Democrats plan, instead, to deal with deficits and debts by cutting Medicaid and Medicare and threatening social security.
A revealing historical incident can introduce our conclusion about the capitalist crisis as it enters Year Five. In May 2011, as gasoline prices rose to between $4 and $5 per gallon, a US Senate committee run by Democrats summoned the heads of major oil companies to testify. The senators asked why the federal government should continue to provide them with special tax loopholes and direct subsidies of $4bn per year when their companies were earning record high profits. The Democrats had offered a meek plan to merely cut those loopholes and subsidies from $4bn to $2bn per year. After the hearings, the US Senate voted not to cut the loopholes and subsidies at all.
The largest corporations and richest citizens long ago learned that if you want to sustain an extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income, you need an equally unequal distribution of political power. Those corporations use their profits to pay huge salaries and bonuses to their executives, to pay big dividends to their major shareholders, and to "contribute" to politics. The corporations, their top executives and the major shareholders whom they enrich all regularly finance the political campaigns and politicians that perform that sustaining function. An increasingly unequal capitalist economy pays for the increasingly undemocratic politics it needs.
Any serious effort to change the basic situation, functions and direction of government policy must change the answer our society now gives to this basic question: who gets and disposes of the profits of producing goods and services in the US economy? So long as the answer remains corporations' boards of directors and major shareholders (the status quo), current trends will continue until bigger economic collapses bring the system to self-destruction. Then we will have graduated from a crisis with banks "too big to fail" to a crisis that is itself "too big to overcome."
A changed system – perhaps called "economic democracy" – in which the workers themselves collectively operate their enterprises would immediately redirect enterprise profits in different ways, with very different social consequences. For example, according the bureau of labour statistics, during 2010, the pay for average workers rose 2% while the pay for CEOs rose 23%. Workers who collectively directed their own enterprises would distribute pay increases very differently and far less unequally. Likewise, to take another example, self-directing workers would allocate their enterprises' profits to the government (that is, pay taxes) but demand in return the sorts of mass-focused social programmes that the current CEOs and boards of directors want government to cut. Democratic enterprises would have to work out collaborations and agreements with democratically run residential units (cities, states, etc) where their decisions impact one another.
This short article is hardly the place to work out the details of so changed an economic system. That is, after all, the task of democratic economic and political institutions to do together, once the change has been discussed, adopted and set in motion.
Throughout the cold war decades, and even after the USSR dissolved in 1989, we remained, as a nation, afraid openly to discuss and debate a basic economic issue. Does our economic system, capitalism, serve our needs sufficiently; does it need basic changes; or might a change to another economic system be best? Instead of a debate over alternative answers to such questions, we permitted little beyond self-congratulatory cheerleading for capitalism. Seriously questioning capitalism, let alone challenging it, remained taboo, an activity to keep repressed. That repression encouraged an unquestioned and unchecked US capitalism to become ever more unequal, delivering more "bads" than "goods" to ever larger majorities of people. This unsustainable situation is being strained to breaking point by the crisis that now enters Year Five
Thursday, May 19, 2011
It's all about banking
The Second American Revolution
From the Bucks County Courier Times
May 17, 2011
More than 80 years ago, Wall Street triggered the Great Depression and cast millions into poverty and despair. The capacity of the states and local governments to deal with the catastrophe was overwhelmed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the federal government in ways never before seen or imagined to rescue the American people.
Today, Americans are living through a Second Great Depression, again brought on by Wall Street. Tens of millions endure great hardship and deprivation. There is no rescue in sight from what one observer rightly called "a slow moving social catastrophe."
Now, Washington is powerless to help. It is dominated by corporate interests and the institutions of a federal establishment grown so grotesquely large they can no longer act, but only feed themselves.
But far from Washington a Second American Revolution may be underway, as states from Maine to California move to fill the vacuum left by a federal establishment that can no longer make any credible claim to represent the broad majority of the American people.
The seeds of this revolution were planted in North Dakota, in a long ago and little remarked act of independent and forward looking Americans. It was all about banking.
A few years after the creation of the Federal Reserve gave Wall Street effective control of banking, money and credit in the rest of the nation, North Dakota established a public bank, independent of the Fed, to insure a steady source of liquidity and credit for the state's farmers, businesses and families.
It has been an engine of prosperity. Last month the Bank of North Dakota (BND) reported a $2.6 billion loan portfolio of credit and liquidity injected into the state's economy and people, in partnership with community banks. The bank also reported another year of record profits - $62 million. These profits belong to the bank's only shareholder, the people of North Dakota, and were produced without taxation.
That in a state with a population of only 670,000.
The bank has also acted as a "rainy day" fund for the state, and when a North Dakota town suffered a massive flood and fire, the BND provided emergency credit lines to the city.
Having a less expensive and readily available credit line with the state's own bank reduces the need for municipal and county rainy-day funds that are a waste of capital; often invested in out-of-state banks, and often at very modest interest.
And the BND purchases municipal bonds and can fund infrastructure projects, offering dramatic reductions in the costs of debt service.
Again this year, almost alone among the states, North Dakota boasts a healthy surplus, low unemployment, a booming economy and a strong banking industry, aided in no small measure by something most Americans have never heard of: a publicly owned state bank.
As states and cities slash spending on even vital services and beggar the future, the Federal Reserve declared that it cannot help with their budget problems, although it advanced almost $12.3 trillion in liquidity and short-term loans to bail out Wall Street - an amount 64 times the $191 billion required to balance the budgets of all 50 states.
It didn't matter in North Dakota.
On May 2, Treasury Secretary Geithner announced that the Treasury would stop issuing special securities that help state and local governments pay for their debt.
It won't matter in North Dakota.
Faced with the endemic failure of the federal establishment and the dire needs of the people, legislators in more than a dozen states have embraced the example of North Dakota, and fired the first shots in what may become the Second American Revolution, introducing legislation to form state-owned banks or to study their feasibility.
The Center for State Innovation performed detailed analyses for two of those states, Washington and Oregon. Their conclusion was that a publicly owned bank on the model of the Bank of North Dakota would have a substantial positive impact on employment, new lending, and government revenue in those states.
State and even municipal level public banks have the potential to direct trillions of dollars of credit and hundreds of billions in revenue into locally directed economic expansion, creating jobs and building up prosperity - without raising taxes and without the helpful hand of federal bureaucrats.
Hyperbole? Wishful thinking? Consider California. The state has the eighth largest economy in the world, and it has a debt burden to match. But as large as California's liabilities are, they are exceeded by its assets: immense revenues, investments, pensions and other funds which are sufficient to capitalize a bank to rival any in the world.
Following the BND model and adhering to the reserve requirements that the "too big to fail banks" ignored or evaded before they failed, a public bank in California could be formed with $12 billion in capital and $148 billion in deposits, which in turn could generate $133 billion in credit for the state. Such a proposal is circulating now among California legislators and policy makers.
No other state can match California's ability to capitalize a public bank. But in the aggregate, the potential impacts of only a dozen state banks are revolutionary. A river of credit, investment and revenue, locally generated and locally directed, bypassing Washington, Wall Street and the Fed.
Now as before, it's all about banking.
From the Bucks County Courier Times
May 17, 2011
More than 80 years ago, Wall Street triggered the Great Depression and cast millions into poverty and despair. The capacity of the states and local governments to deal with the catastrophe was overwhelmed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the federal government in ways never before seen or imagined to rescue the American people.
Today, Americans are living through a Second Great Depression, again brought on by Wall Street. Tens of millions endure great hardship and deprivation. There is no rescue in sight from what one observer rightly called "a slow moving social catastrophe."
Now, Washington is powerless to help. It is dominated by corporate interests and the institutions of a federal establishment grown so grotesquely large they can no longer act, but only feed themselves.
But far from Washington a Second American Revolution may be underway, as states from Maine to California move to fill the vacuum left by a federal establishment that can no longer make any credible claim to represent the broad majority of the American people.
The seeds of this revolution were planted in North Dakota, in a long ago and little remarked act of independent and forward looking Americans. It was all about banking.
A few years after the creation of the Federal Reserve gave Wall Street effective control of banking, money and credit in the rest of the nation, North Dakota established a public bank, independent of the Fed, to insure a steady source of liquidity and credit for the state's farmers, businesses and families.
It has been an engine of prosperity. Last month the Bank of North Dakota (BND) reported a $2.6 billion loan portfolio of credit and liquidity injected into the state's economy and people, in partnership with community banks. The bank also reported another year of record profits - $62 million. These profits belong to the bank's only shareholder, the people of North Dakota, and were produced without taxation.
That in a state with a population of only 670,000.
The bank has also acted as a "rainy day" fund for the state, and when a North Dakota town suffered a massive flood and fire, the BND provided emergency credit lines to the city.
Having a less expensive and readily available credit line with the state's own bank reduces the need for municipal and county rainy-day funds that are a waste of capital; often invested in out-of-state banks, and often at very modest interest.
And the BND purchases municipal bonds and can fund infrastructure projects, offering dramatic reductions in the costs of debt service.
Again this year, almost alone among the states, North Dakota boasts a healthy surplus, low unemployment, a booming economy and a strong banking industry, aided in no small measure by something most Americans have never heard of: a publicly owned state bank.
As states and cities slash spending on even vital services and beggar the future, the Federal Reserve declared that it cannot help with their budget problems, although it advanced almost $12.3 trillion in liquidity and short-term loans to bail out Wall Street - an amount 64 times the $191 billion required to balance the budgets of all 50 states.
It didn't matter in North Dakota.
On May 2, Treasury Secretary Geithner announced that the Treasury would stop issuing special securities that help state and local governments pay for their debt.
It won't matter in North Dakota.
Faced with the endemic failure of the federal establishment and the dire needs of the people, legislators in more than a dozen states have embraced the example of North Dakota, and fired the first shots in what may become the Second American Revolution, introducing legislation to form state-owned banks or to study their feasibility.
The Center for State Innovation performed detailed analyses for two of those states, Washington and Oregon. Their conclusion was that a publicly owned bank on the model of the Bank of North Dakota would have a substantial positive impact on employment, new lending, and government revenue in those states.
State and even municipal level public banks have the potential to direct trillions of dollars of credit and hundreds of billions in revenue into locally directed economic expansion, creating jobs and building up prosperity - without raising taxes and without the helpful hand of federal bureaucrats.
Hyperbole? Wishful thinking? Consider California. The state has the eighth largest economy in the world, and it has a debt burden to match. But as large as California's liabilities are, they are exceeded by its assets: immense revenues, investments, pensions and other funds which are sufficient to capitalize a bank to rival any in the world.
Following the BND model and adhering to the reserve requirements that the "too big to fail banks" ignored or evaded before they failed, a public bank in California could be formed with $12 billion in capital and $148 billion in deposits, which in turn could generate $133 billion in credit for the state. Such a proposal is circulating now among California legislators and policy makers.
No other state can match California's ability to capitalize a public bank. But in the aggregate, the potential impacts of only a dozen state banks are revolutionary. A river of credit, investment and revenue, locally generated and locally directed, bypassing Washington, Wall Street and the Fed.
Now as before, it's all about banking.
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