Why Screwing Unions Screws the Entire Middle Class Illustration: Jason Schneider Read more: The 10 richest members of Congress, CEO pay vs. American worker pay, and more infographics on the new gilded era. IN 2008, A LIBERAL Democrat was elected president. Or so it seemed. The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Click here for more infographics on America's plutocracy.It doesn't take a multivariate correlation to conclude that these two things are tightly related: If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they've enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. How did we get here? The strength of unions in postwar America benefited nonunion workers, too. It wasn't always this way.
The 1 Percent Solution - Jim Tankersley “I told you about Mexico,” he says, meaning the villa in Cabo San Lucas. “Did I tell you about the fly-fishing ranch?” Meaning the 170 acres in Montana. Yes, he did. Hanauer is 52 and worth several hundred million dollars. (RELATED: TED's Curator Responds) In 2011, Hanauer says he paid an effective federal tax rate of 11 percent. Like a lot of self-made rich guys, Hanauer has developed a theory on how to fix the ailing economy. The disqualifying notion at the center of Hanauer’s talk was that the innovators and businessmen are not, in fact, “job creators”—that the fate of the economy rests instead in the hands of the middle class. “We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years,” Hanauer said at the TED conference. Emerging research from high-powered experts across the ideological spectrum backs that economic inversion. Widening income inequality helped drive us into the Great Recession and is holding back our recovery. Economists don’t even broadly agree on who is in the middle class.
How John Roberts Orchestrated Citizens United When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law prohibited corporations from running television commercials for or against Presidential candidates for thirty days before primaries. Chief Justice John G. That day, it was David Souter, who was just a few weeks away from announcing his departure from the Court. The Justices settled into their usual positions. Then Antonin Scalia spoke up. He had long detested campaign-spending restrictions, frequently voting to invalidate such statutes as violations of the First Amendment. “So you’re making a statutory argument now?” “I’m making a—” Olson began. “You’re saying this isn’t covered by it,” Scalia continued. That’s right, Olson responded. Instead, the oral arguments were about to take the case—and the law—in an entirely new direction. “Today.” “Mr.
This Is What Revolution Looks Like - Chris Hedges' Columns This Is What Revolution Looks Like Posted on Nov 15, 2011 By Chris Hedges Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. Get back into your cages, they are telling us. The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. New and Improved Comments If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page.
"The Price of Inequality" by Joseph E. Stiglitz Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – America likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity, and others view it in much the same light. But, while we can all think of examples of Americans who rose to the top on their own, what really matters are the statistics: to what extent do an individual’s life chances depend on the income and education of his or her parents? Nowadays, these numbers show that the American dream is a myth. There is less equality of opportunity in the United States today than there is in Europe – or, indeed, in any advanced industrial country for which there are data. This is one of the reasons that America has the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced countries – and its gap with the rest has been widening. Likewise, part of the wealth of those in finance comes from exploiting the poor, through predatory lending and abusive credit-card practices. But growing inequality is not inevitable.
The Growing Unemployed: A Case of Benign Neglect The high unemployment rate ought to be a national emergency. There are millions of people in need of jobs. The lost income as a result of the recession totals hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and the longer the problem persists, the more permanent the damage becomes. Why doesn’t the unemployment problem get more attention? Why have other worries such as inflation and debt reduction dominated the conversation instead? As I noted at the end of my last column, the increased concentration of political power at the top of the income distribution provides much of the explanation. Consider the Federal Reserve. RELATED: White Working Class: Angry, Cynical and Losing Faith Similar questions can be asked about fiscal policy. There was, of course, a stimulus program at the beginning of Obama’s presidency, but it was much too small and relied far more on tax cuts than most people realize. Forget it. But Democrats aren’t completely off the hook either.
Top Three Conclusions From Wisconsin Recall Election On May 24, 2012, Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, gave an innocuous interview to a visiting journalist from Turkey. “There are a lot of good people who would love to see peace, if only the hatred that exists were to vanish,” he said. What Senator Kyl could not have known is that the “journalist” with whom he was speaking was actually part of a religious organization whose leader has spent time in jail amid accusations of extortion, forced sex, and bizarre, cult-like behavior. The apparent duping of Senator Kyl, along with several other Republican members of Congress, is but the latest the story of Harun Yahya (“Aaron John”), which refers both to the Turkish Islamist-turned-creationist Adnan Oktar, and the controversial organization which he heads. As exhaustively researched in a 2013 dissertation by the Norwegian scholar Anne Ross Solberg, The Mahdi Wears Armani (PDF), Oktar has been a master of reinvention for decades. Remarkably, this episode was only a temporary setback. Rep.
Joseph Stiglitz: “A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around” | Politics What this transition meant, however, is that jobs and livelihoods on the farm were being destroyed. Because of accelerating productivity, output was increasing faster than demand, and prices fell sharply. It was this, more than anything else, that led to rapidly declining incomes. Farmers then (like workers now) borrowed heavily to sustain living standards and production. Because neither the farmers nor their bankers anticipated the steepness of the price declines, a credit crunch quickly ensued. Farmers simply couldn’t pay back what they owed. The cities weren’t spared—far from it. The value of assets (such as homes) often declines when incomes do. Given the magnitude of the decline in farm income, it’s no wonder that the New Deal itself could not bring the country out of crisis. The Agriculture Adjustment Act, F.D.R.’s farm program, which was designed to raise prices by cutting back on production, may have eased the situation somewhat, at the margins.
Thomas Jefferson Feared an Aristocracy of Corporations | The Nat Share Thomas Jefferson's name gets thrown around quite a bit these days by the Tea Partisans, which is a good thing. A populist movement of the right or the left that neglected Jefferson, the most radical of the first presidents, would be a sorry affair indeed. Jefferson's distrust of concentrated and consolidated power was such that he left a legacy for any and every dissenter against the state. But Jefferson did not stop there. He was, as well, a relentless critic of the monopolizing of economic power by banks, corporations and those who put their faith in what the third president referred to as "the selfish spirit of commerce (that) knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain. Jefferson might not have wanted a lot of government, but he wanted enough government to assert the sovereignty of citizens over corporations. The better angels among the founders would be aghast. The framers of the American experiment were imperfect men, to be sure.