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Panetta Weighs Military Cuts Once Thought Out of Bounds – NYTimes.com

6 Nov

Mr. Panetta, a former White House budget chief, acknowledged in an interview that he faced deep political pressures as he weighed cuts to Pentagon spending, which has doubled to $700 billion a year since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He said that meeting deficit-reduction targets might require another round of base closings, which could be highly contentious as members of Congress routinely fight to protect military deployments and jobs in their communities.

via Panetta Weighs Military Cuts Once Thought Out of Bounds – NYTimes.com.

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Gates offers G20 a lesson in philanthropy – The Globe and Mail

6 Nov

It’s nice the Bill Gates is devoting all this time and money to good works. But that doesn’t mean that he can’t also be a self-important arrogant dorkwad!

To confront the concerns of protesters who call themselves “the 99 per cent,” the G20 decided to invite a member of the 0.000000001 per cent.

Mr. Gates laughed at this comparison, but had little time for the new inequality protests.

“Good old Occupy Wall Street! I will certainly be glad to print up signs for them if they want to hold them up saying ‘More bed nets!’, ‘More vaccines!’, ‘More agricultural research!’ ” Mr. Gates said. “I’ve never met any of these people … but I haven’t seen them holding any banners speaking up on behalf of the world’s poorest.”

Mr. Gates was invited because he has a reputation for getting things done: His foundation played a key role in getting the African AIDS crisis under control, and was the key actor behind the successful development of vaccines against meningitis and malaria.

via Gates offers G20 a lesson in philanthropy – The Globe and Mail.

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Elites Who Back the Wall St. Protesters – NYTimes.com

6 Nov

Yet when I interviewed the two of them in a wide-ranging public conversation last week, hosted by the Center for International Governance Innovation, a independent, nonpartisan Canadian research organization, they sounded an awful lot like the people camped out in Zuccotti Park in New York.

Neither Mr. Zedillo [former President of Mexico] nor Mr. Martin [former Canadian prime minister] had sympathy for the complaint that Occupy Wall Street lacked a clear agenda. As Mr. Zedillo put it: “These criticisms — ‘Oh, they don’t have an agenda, they only pose problems and provide no solutions’ — well, they are citizens and they have earned the right to express a very serious, real problem.”

The truth, the two statesmen agreed, was that the protesters were articulating a real, important and global concern.

via Elites Who Back the Wall St. Protesters – NYTimes.com.

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Forgive student debt, fight the recession – Student Loan Debt – Salon.com

5 Nov

As someone who has student loan debt myself, it occurred to me that if I were suddenly relieved of my obligation to repay the approximately $500 in student loan payments that I dutifully make each and every month without fail, I’d have an extra $500 per month, every month, to spend on ailing sectors of the economy. Think of it as a trickle-up approach to economic stimulus.

via Forgive student debt, fight the recession – Student Loan Debt – Salon.com.

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Oligarchy, American Style – NYTimes.com

5 Nov

The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.

If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.

Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives.

via Oligarchy, American Style – NYTimes.com.

Occupy Wall Street: America HAS a Ruling Class

5 Nov

The OWS movement recognizes that America is divided into a ruling class and a class of servants.

Yes, America DOES have a ruling class. It’s not a hereditary ruling class, like the old European aristocracies. It’s permeable. One can enter it from below, and one can be thrust out of it too.

Of course the existence of this ruling class contradicts official doctrine, which says that American is ruled by the people and for the people. Members of this ruling class, therefore, will deny its existence. Certainly, the politician members MUST deny it.

Just what these rulers say among themselves, at the Bohemian Grove, in board meetings of for-profit corporations (e.g. General Motors, Goldman Sachs) and not-for-profit (e.g. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ford Foundation), in private clubs of various kinds, that’s a different matter. On that, I suspect, some are frank about being among The Rulers while others persist they are still of the people.

Nor do non-member Americans recognize the existence of this ruling class. Well, some of us do, some of us don’t. It’d be interesting to see whether recognition of the ruling class is stringing among non-voters than among voters. After all, if you do see that there’s a ruling class, what’s the point of voting? You vote doesn’t matter. At the same time, one might vote out of identification with and affirmation of that very same ruling class. After all, maybe you too will be tapped to enter into the sacred halls of the ruling class.

All of which is to say that, while a ruling class exists, though not a classical ruling class, class consciousness is weak, on both sides of the divide.

Outing the Class Divide

And THAT’s the biggest service that is being performed by Occupy Wall Street: identifying the class divide in America. The 1%, that’s the ruling class. The rest, no matter how many things otherwise divide us, we are the 99%. Continue reading →

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Will 2012 shake up the world economy? – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com

4 Nov

The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth and political power in the top 1 percent.

The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

via Will 2012 shake up the world economy? – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.

America’s corporate tax obscenity – Taxes – Salon.com

3 Nov

The authors discovered that the average effective tax rate — what the companies really paid after government subsidies, tax breaks and various tax dodges were taken into account — was only 18.5 percent, less than half the statutory rate. Fully a quarter of the 280 companies paid under 10 percent.

Remember that fact, the next time someone tries to tell you that American corporations pay the highest income taxes in the free world. The only number that counts is the “effective tax rate.” One of the interesting tidbits provided by the authors is that in many cases, the tax rate on foreign income for many of these companies is actually higher than the effective U.S. rate.

via America’s corporate tax obscenity – Taxes – Salon.com.

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A declaration of independence — from Wall Street – American Spring – Salon.com

2 Nov

The same principle can work for investment. Ian Galloway, a senior associate specializing in community development at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, envisions a compelling future.

“I can imagine a world not too far down the road,” says Galloway, “where you can walk down the street and pass a blighted piece of property, take a photo of it with your smartphone, click your CDFI [Community Development Financial Institution] app and have that photo geo-coded and sent to the local CDFI with your 25-dollar investment in the predevelopment loan that would cause that property to be redeveloped.”

via A declaration of independence — from Wall Street – American Spring – Salon.com.

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Why the protesters are going to win | the new economics foundation

2 Nov

… there is something else even more important. It is the potent idea that the protesters represent the 99%.

This is what has changed, and it is a political shift as important as anything over the past generation or more.

We have been brought up to believe that the right represents the middle classes and the left represents the working classes. It is now clear that neither right nor left in conventional politics represent the interests of either. . . .

Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair rose to power with the support of the middle classes. But the middle classes in the UK, while they may not support the protests, are no longer prepared to put up with the financial status quo.

via David Boyle – Why the protesters are going to win | the new economics foundation.

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