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Occupy Our Homes Saves Another Family From Foreclosure | The Nation

13 Jun

Occupy Our Homes, a movement to protect families from foreclosures and evictions, has enjoyed a recent string of successes. In February, the group helped Helen Bailey, the 78-year-old former civil rights activist who was threatened with foreclosure by J.P. Morgan Chase while the company trumpeted its efforts to uphold Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, to stay in her home following a successful campaign by Occupy Nashville.

The group also aided a Detroit husband and wife who spent months worrying they could be evicted from their home of twenty-two years. The couple received news they would be permitted to stay after an aggressive campaign that was led by members of Moratorium Now, Occupy Detroit and Homes Before Banks and included the family’s supporters blocking the contractor from placing a dumpster.

Additionally, Occupy Atlanta prevented the eviction of a family when two dozen protesters encamped on the family’s lawn, and Occupy Our Homes delayed another foreclosure in Rochester, as did Occupy Cleveland in November.

And more.

via Occupy Our Homes Saves Another Family From Foreclosure | The Nation.

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America’s stalled economy – Salon.com

13 Jun

The major reason this recovery has been so anemic is not Europe’s debt crisis. It’s not Japan’s tsumami. It’s not Wall Street’s continuing excesses. It’s not, as right-wing economists tell us, because taxes are too high on corporations and the rich, and safety nets are too generous to the needy. It’s not even, as some liberals contend, because the Obama administration hasn’t spent enough on a temporary Keynesian stimulus.

The answer is in front of our faces. It’s because American consumers, whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity, don’t have the dough to buy enough to boost the economy – and they can no longer borrow like they could before the crash of 2008.

via America’s stalled economy – Salon.com.

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Bernie Sanders on the ‘Aggressiveness Among the Ruling Class’ | The Nation

12 Jun

“There is,” the senator says, “an aggressiveness out there among the ruling class of this country, among the billionaires who are saying: ‘You know what? Ya, we got a whole lot now, but we want even more. And we don’t give a damn about the middle class. We don’t care about working families. We want it all. And now we can buy it.’ ”

Referring to Wisconsin as a “testing ground” for the no-limits campaign spending that has been ushered in by the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, Sanders said, “I have a deep concern that what we saw in Wisconsin can happen in any state throughout this country and in the presidential election.”

“I think that people do not fully understand the disaster that Citizens United was,” Sanders said of the 5–4 US Supreme Court decision in radio conversation with Ed Schultz. “What that did is open the floodgates so that billionaires like the Koch brothers and others are now prepared to spend unbelievable sums of money to elect extreme right-wing candidates.”

via Bernie Sanders on the ‘Aggressiveness Among the Ruling Class’ | The Nation.

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Middle-class catastrophe – U.S. Economy – Salon.com

12 Jun

Bottom line — Americans got hammered by the crash. The median net worth of the American family fell by 38 percent between 2007 and 2010, from an average of $126,400 to $77,3000. Median income fell by 7.7 percent. It was the worst decline in both categories since the survey started in 1989.

The distribution of the losses tells us that the middle class took the brunt of the damage, in terms of both net worth and income. But there are some interesting statistical oddities. For the lowest-income quintile of the American public, income actually rose by about 4 percent. Meanwhile, the top 10 percent of Americans saw their net worth tick up slightly.

The housing bust explains the divergence. Middle-class Americans tend to have most of their wealth invested in their homes. The nationwide collapse in housing prices clobbered home equity, but the poor and the rich were mostly insulated from the damage. The fact that income rose, slightly, for the poorest Americans is still a bit of a mystery.

via Middle-class catastrophe – U.S. Economy – Salon.com.

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Why Elites Fail | The Nation

8 Jun

A pure functioning meritocracy would produce a society with growing inequality, but that inequality would come along with a correlated increase in social mobility. As the educational system and business world got better and better at finding inherent merit wherever it lay, you would see the bright kids of the poor boosted to the upper echelons of society, with the untalented progeny of the best and brightest relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid where they belong.

But the Iron Law of Meritocracy makes a different prediction: that societies ordered around the meritocratic ideal will produce inequality without the attendant mobility. Indeed, over time, a society will become more unequal and less mobile as those who ascend its heights create means of preserving and defending their privilege and find ways to pass it on across generations. And this, as it turns out, is a pretty spot-on description of the trajectory of the American economy since the mid-1970s.

via Why Elites Fail | The Nation.

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United States of inequality – Inequality – Salon.com

5 Jun

As we wait for the results of the Wisconsin recall election, a refresher course on what the struggle over the future direction of the United States is really about might be in order. Fortunately (or depressingly) the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality has put together a new package of easy-to-digest “educational materials on trends in inequality” that pound the message home. The gist: the United States is becoming more unequal every which way you can imagine.

Between 2009 and 2011, the press release for the project notes, “media mentions of the phrase ‘income inequality’ increased by over 250 percent.” But changing trends in income distribution are only one part of the vast distortions rippling through American society. The slides now available for perusal at http://www.inequality.com are divided into 14 categories: debt, education, employment, family, gender, health, immigration, income, mobility, politics, poverty, race, violent crime, and wealth.

The most obvious insight gleanable from the charts is that class background matters. If you are poor, you are more likely to be in debt and have health problems, and less likely to get a quality education or have your priorities reflected in politics. Of course, that’s always been true, not just in the U.S., but everywhere.

via United States of inequality – Inequality – Salon.com.

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A Practical or Coalition Strategy for “Truth and Traditions” Party as Paleocon Greens

5 Jun

By Charlie Keil

There is NO split in the Republican Party unless there is a real T for Truth Party that old-fashioned, paleo-conservatives can vote for happily with confidence and in good conserving conscience. By Traditions, plural, we mean the diversity of eco-moralities that once upon a time (pick your pre-industrial era) kept all of us in some kind of balance with “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” If there is no real TnT Party most of those Ron Paul teaparty voters stay trapped inside the Republican Party at election time. You can guess who will win big in 2012, a divided but ‘big tent’ Republican Party. Same party that elected colorful women to governorships in New Mexico and North Carolina. Continue reading →

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Don’t Buy the Spin: How Cutting the Pentagon’s Budget Could Boost the Economy | The Nation

13 May

However, the crucial question is not how many jobs are created by spending, for example, $1 billion on the military. Rather, it is whether spending that $1 billion creates more or fewer jobs when compared with spending $1 billion on alternative public purposes, such as education, healthcare and the green economy—or having consumers spend that same amount of money in any way they choose.

In fact, compared with these alternative uses, spending on the military is a poor source of job creation. As we see in the graph (right), $1 billion in spending on the military will generate about 11,200 jobs within the US economy. That same $1 billion would create 16,800 jobs through clean energy investments, 17,200 jobs within the healthcare sector or 26,700 jobs through support of education. That is, investments in clean energy, healthcare and education will produce between 50 and 140 percent more jobs than if the same money were spent by the Pentagon. Just giving the money to households to consume as they choose would generate 15,100 jobs, 35 percent more than military spending.

via Don’t Buy the Spin: How Cutting the Pentagon’s Budget Could Boost the Economy | The Nation.

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The Human Cost of Ideology – NYTimes.com

11 May

For more than a year, House Republicans have energetically worked to demolish vital social programs that have made this country both stronger and fairer over the last half-century. At the same time, they have insisted on preserving bloated military spending and unjustifiably low tax rates for the rich. That effort reached a nadir on Thursday when the House voted to prevent $55 billion in automatic cuts imposed on the Pentagon as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, choosing instead to make all those cuts, and much more, from domestic programs.

If this bill were enacted, estimates suggest that nearly two million Americans would lose food stamps and 44 million others would find them reduced. The bill would eliminate a program that allows disabled older people to live at home and out of institutions. It cuts money that helps low-income families buy health insurance. At the same time, the House bill actually adds more than $8 billion to the Pentagon budget.

via The Human Cost of Ideology – NYTimes.com.

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WAll Street’s infrastructure racket, Rahm Emanuel

10 May

From Salon, on the corpstate at its best, Chicago-style:

Here is how the “infrastructure trust” works: the city pays for upgrades to its roads, rail or schools with dollars pooled by Emanuel’s friends from the banking and investment world. Meanwhile, the city retains “ownership” of the infrastructure, though this comes at the cost of having to ensure a revenue stream for the fund. Emanuel’s favorite example is his $225 million pet project to green-retrofit some of the city’s older buildings. The savings on energy usage stemming from the renovations are then extracted and used to pay off investors. Of course, the city could also sell municipal bonds to raise necessary funds, and then use the savings in energy costs to pay the loan back at a much lower cost to taxpayers. But then Emanuel’s friends (and campaign donors) would not be the richer for it.

While the mayor bills his plan as “bold” and “innovative,” the reality could not be further from the truth. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been around for decades in various forms and their track record is replete with delays, cost overruns and prolonged legal battles. What’s more, the beneficiaries of these investment mechanisms are the same rapacious Morgan Stanleys and Goldman Sachs that gave us the mortgage-backed securities scandal and the ensuing recession. Using the economic malaise they created as cause, they have ratcheted up their advocacy of PPPs as a means of helping cash-starved public entities finance capital-intensive projects.

The upshot is that they are holding us hostage all over again. They are using infrastructure built over decades with public monies as collateral to extract profit off of the back of taxpayers. A cursory look at some past projects of this nature demonstrates that PPPs are often inefficient, overly costly and inherently unjust.

Examples: the London Underground, Orange County’s privatized HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lane, and an expressway from San Diego to Mexico.

 

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