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Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

15 Aug

Warren Buffet shoujld know; he’s one  of the richest of the super-rich.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

via Stop Coddling the Super-Rich – NYTimes.com.

Can the Middle Class Be Saved? – Magazine – The Atlantic

11 Aug

Don Peck, in the Atlantic.

Plutonomy, an economy in which the economy activity of the top 1% of the income stream.

In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.” In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around, they wouldn’t keep on climbing.

The Great Recession has been a Great Sorter, shifting people out of the middle class:

It’s hard to miss just how unevenly the Great Recession has affected different classes of people in different places. From 2009 to 2010, wages were essentially flat nationwide—but they grew by 11.9 percent in Manhattan and 8.7 percent in Silicon Valley. In the Washington, D.C., and San Jose (Silicon Valley) metro areas—both primary habitats for America’s meritocratic winners—job postings in February of this year were almost as numerous as job candidates. In Miami and Detroit, by contrast, for every job posting, six people were unemployed. In March, the national unemployment rate was 12 percent for people with only a high-school diploma, 4.5 percent for college grads, and 2 percent for those with a professional degree.

Housing crashed hardest in the exurbs and in more-affordable, once fast-growing areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and much of Florida—all meccas for aspiring middle-class families with limited savings and education. The professional class, clustered most densely in the closer suburbs of expensive but resilient cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Chicago, has lost little in comparison.

More excerpts below the fold. Continue reading →

Open Letter to a Mutant Ninja Senator

11 Aug

From Charlie Keil:

"In his January 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama also called for
 building a new generous of safe, clean nuclear power plants as a vital component
 of his national clean energy program."
             from Sen. Joe Lieberman's letter to me of April 29th, 2011

wonder how 'generous' came to replace 'generation'
at the center of this lie-packed satanic sentence
what "Union" could we possibly be talking about
what "safe" when any one person
           can mortar a nukeplant into powdered poison
           can put a garden hose siphon into the fuel pool
           can fall asleep at the switch or twist x instead of y
           can have sex with a bored co-worker          
                       while the core melts down          
                       or the aging pipes leak more and more
            count the human errors that could occur
            much more probable than earthquakes
 what "clean"
            list the half-lives that cut our lives in half
            the daily eco-devastation of overheated waters
            again the dirty list is long
 what "vital" when death dealing radiation          
                       lasts for thousands upon thousands of years
            "energy" in this form is pure ENTROPY
            destroying the speciation before our eyes
 only the complete failure of the US schools
            can account for this letter
                                  this death sentence

Cornel West & Tavis Smiley on Obama: “Many of Us Are Exploring Other Possibilities in Coming Election”

10 Aug

Lookin” for Mr. TnT!

AMY GOODMAN: What are you exploring exactly? Are you talking about another candidate running for president?

CORNEL WEST: It would be a Bernie Sanders-like figure who is fundamentally committed to the legacy of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dorothy Day, putting poor and working people at the center.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say Bernie Sanders-type, is Bernie Sanders considering running for president?

CORNEL WEST: Unfortunately, I don’t think so.

TAVIS SMILEY: He said he’s not.

CORNEL WEST: I wish he was, because he’s my kind of brother. But someone like that who’s got backbone and courage.

via Cornel West & Tavis Smiley on Obama: “Many of Us Are Exploring Other Possibilities in Coming Election”.

New Exposé Tracks ALEC-Private Prison Industry Effort to Replace Unionized Workers with Prison Labor

10 Aug

Follow the link below  transcript and video.

Many of the toughest sentencing laws responsible for the explosion of the U.S. prison population were drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helps corporations write model legislation. Now a new exposé reveals ALEC has paved the way for states and corporations to replace unionized workers with prison labor. We speak with Mike Elk, contributing labor reporter at The Nation magazine. He says ALEC and private prison companies “put a mass amount of people in jail, and then they created a situation where they could exploit that.” Elk notes that in 2005 more than 14 million pounds of beef infected with rat feces processed by inmates were not recalled, in order to avoid drawing attention to how many products are made by prison labor.

via New Exposé Tracks ALEC-Private Prison Industry Effort to Replace Unionized Workers with Prison Labor.

Another Bailout Joins the Goofball Economy

10 Aug

How dare a credit rating agency that got it so wrong, and should itself be investigated for malfeasance in the creation of the banking meltdown, dictate public policy? For S&P to insist on massive government cuts that would only increase joblessness is like a burglar shifting blame for his crimes to the poor quality of locks.

This from a credit rating agency that, as NYT columnist Joe Nocera points out, “has consistently fallen short.” S&P judged Enron to be an exemplary company until shortly before the corporation imploded, and it gave its triple-A seal of approval to the toxic securitized mortgage debt that caused the great recession. There are serious problems with the US economy, but they are not the ones that Standard & Poor’s outlined when it sent the stock market into a tizzy.

via Another Bailout Joins the Goofball Economy | The Nation.

Guerilla SK8 Park in Jersey City, Part 2

9 Aug

Part 1 here

Where were we? Ah, the SK8park has been destroyed as preparation for construction that never happened, presumably because of the 2008 financial melt down that’s still just oozing along and seems like it’s going to raise the cost of crossing the Hudson, but . . . back to the story.

The park’s patrons were not happy:

shoot-me

“Someone shoot me,” it says, “used to be the fucking coolest place.” Then, a few days later, another sign appeared:

city hall meeting.jpg

Could’a knocked me over with an aerosol blast. Who in City Hall, I asked myself, gives a crap about these kids and their illegal but hard-won park? I was curious, and went to the meeting. Four skaters, one councilman, Steve Fulop, and me, that was the meeting. Fulop asked the skaters if they could get more skaters to come to a rescheduled meeting. They said they could. Fulop scheduled another meeting for Monday 19 November. I told the councilman that I would donate photos of the site Jersey City’s library so that there would be a permanent record of the park, which I did a week or so later. Continue reading →

Anger in Japan Over Withheld Radiation Forecasts – NYTimes.com

9 Aug

Such is the way of governments, no? A protective lie here, another there, and pretty soon even the bureaucrats and politicians forget they are insulating themselves from the world through  lies.

“From the 12th to the 15th we were in a location with one of the highest levels of radiation,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of Namie, which is about five miles from the nuclear plant. He and thousands from Namie now live in temporary housing in another town, Nihonmatsu. “We are extremely worried about internal exposure to radiation.”

The withholding of information, he said, was akin to “murder.”

In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry.

via Anger in Japan Over Withheld Radiation Forecasts – NYTimes.com.

Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com

9 Aug

And in those rare cases where rating agencies have downgraded countries that, like America now, still had the confidence of investors, they have consistently been wrong. Consider, in particular, the case of Japan, which S.& P. downgraded back in 2002. Well, nine years later Japan is still able to borrow freely and cheaply. As of Friday, in fact, the interest rate on Japanese 10-year bonds was just 1 percent.

So there is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems. …

No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

via Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com.

What Happened to Obama’s Passion?

8 Aug

Obama fought the bullies, and the bullies won:

When Dr. King spoke of the great arc [of history]  bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.

IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.

via What Happened to Obama’s Passion? – NYTimes.com.

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