SOLUTIONS: The Rich MUST Pay Much Higher Taxes

Posted on Wednesday, March 2, 2011 by meganwilson

How Democrats Can Become Relevant Again (And Rescue the Nation While They’re At It)

By Robert Reich
HUFFINGTON POST

Republicans offered Democrats two more weeks before the doomsday shut-down. Democrats countered with four. Republicans held their ground. Democrats agreed to two.

This is what passes for compromise in our nation’s capital.

Democrats have become irrelevant. If they want to be relevant again they have to connect the dots: The explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of public services for the middle class and the poor.

It is not a complicated story. Begin with what’s happened to the typical American, whose wages have been stagnant for thirty years. Today’s typical 30-year-old male (if he has a job) is earning the same as a 30-year-old male earned three decades ago, adjusted for for inflation. (Although women are doing better than they did 30 years ago, their wages still trail men’s.)
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Must See: Inside Job

Posted on Monday, February 28, 2011 by meganwilson

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Will banksters get away with it?

Posted on Sunday, February 27, 2011 by meganwilson




As economist James Galbraith testified to Congress: “…the study of financial fraud received little attention. Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are few specialists and very few students. Economists have soft-pedaled the role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble. They continue to do so now.”


By Danny Schechter
Al Jazeera

Hats off to Matt Taibbi for staying on the Wall Street crime beat, asking in his most recent report in Rolling Stone: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”

“Financial crooks,” he argues, “brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.”

True enough, but that’s only part of the story. The Daily Kos called his investigation a “depressing read” perhaps because it suggests that the Obama Administration is not doing what it should to reign in financial crime. Many of the lawyers he calls on to act come from big corporate law firms and buy into their worldview.

Kos should be more depressed by the failure of the progressive community to focus on these issues, and not pressing the government to do the right thing.

There is much more to this story. It’s also more about institutions than individuals, more about a captured system that enables and covers up crime and, then, deflects attention away from the deeper problem.
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It’s the Inequality, Stupid

Posted on Friday, February 25, 2011 by meganwilson

By Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot
Mother Jones

A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.

Note: The 2007 data (the most current) doesn’t reflect the impact of the housing market crash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of Americans had 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1%, in contrast, had just 10%. The housing crisis has no doubt further swelled the share of total net worth held by the superrich.

The superrich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades’ gains.

A Harvard business prof and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States. Most thought that it’s more balanced than it actually is. Asked to choose their ideal distribution of wealth, 92% picked one that was even more equitable.

Why Washington is closer to Wall Street than Main Street.


For a healthy few, it’s getting better all the time.


How much income have you given up for the top 1 percent?


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Introducing The ‘American Dream’ Movement

Posted on Tuesday, February 22, 2011 by meganwilson


Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/donnabellasangels/3364865064/

By Van Jones
HUFFINGTON POST

In the past 24 months, those of us who longed for positive change have gone from hope to heartbreak. But hope is returning to America — at last — thanks largely to the courageous stand of the heroes and heroines of Wisconsin.

Reinvigorated by the idealism and fighting spirit on display right now in America’s heartland, the movement for “hope and change” has a rare, second chance. It can renew itself and become again a national force with which to be reckoned.

Over the next hours and days, all who love this country need to do everything possible to spread the “spirit of Madison” to all 50 states. This does not mean we need to occupy 50 state capitol buildings; things elsewhere are not yet that dire. But this weekend, the best of America should rally on the steps of every statehouse in the union.

Moveon.org and others have issued just this kind of call to action; everyone should prioritize responding and turning out in large numbers.

On Saturday, the powers-that-be (in both parties) should see a rainbow force coming together: organized workers, business leaders, veterans, students and youth, faith leaders, civil rights fighters, women’s rights champions, immigrant rights defenders, LGBTQ stalwarts, environmentalists, academics, artists, celebrities, community activists, elected officials and more — all standing up for what’s right.

Take Movement to a Higher Plane: Defending the American Dream

And we should announce that our renewed movement is more than just a mobilization to back unions or oppose illegitimate power grabs (as important as those agenda items are). Something more vital is at stake: our country needs a national movement to defend the American Dream itself. And the fight in Wisconsin creates the opportunity to build one.

After all, it is the American Dream that the GOP’s “slash and burn” agenda is killing off. We need a movement dedicated to renewing the idea that hard work pays in our country; that you can make it if you try; that America remains a land committed to dignity, justice and opportunity for all. Right now, this very idea is on the GOP chopping block. And we must rescue it now — or risk losing it forever.

America will not make it through this crisis healthy and whole if — at the first sign of trouble — we are willing to throw away millions of our everyday heroes. Our teachers, police officers, firefighters, nurses and others make our communities and country strong. Their daily work is essential to the smooth functioning and long-term success of our nation. An attack on them is an attack on the backbone of America.

Nobody objects to politicians cutting budgetary fat. But the GOP program everywhere is so reckless that it would actually cut muscle, bone and marrow, too. This approach is both shortsighted and immoral. We should rise up against it — in our millions.
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Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?

Posted on Monday, February 21, 2011 by meganwilson

By Robert Reich
HUFFINGTON POST

Last year, America’s top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains — at 15 percent — due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.

If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of 300,000 teachers. Who is more valuable to our society — thirteen hedge-fund managers or 300,000 teachers? Let’s make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class — pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to shrink the pie even further with additional tax cuts for the rich — making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.

The strategy has three parts.
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Retiring Boomers Find 401(k) Plans Fall Short

Posted on Saturday, February 19, 2011 by meganwilson

By E.S. Browning
The Wall Street Journal

They were a gold mine for money-management firms. In 30 years, the 401(k) went from a small program to a multi-trillion-dollar industry supporting thousands of financial planners and money managers.

The 401(k) generation is beginning to retire, and it isn’t a pretty sight.

The retirement savings plans that many baby boomers thought would see them through old age are falling short in many cases.

The median household headed by a person aged 60 to 62 with a 401(k) account has less than one-quarter of what is needed in that account to maintain its standard of living in retirement, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve and analyzed by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College for The Wall Street Journal. Even counting Social Security and any pensions or other savings, most 401(k) participants appear to have insufficient savings. Data from other sources also show big gaps between savings and what people need, and the financial crisis has made things worse.

This analysis uses estimates of 401(k) balances from the end of 2010 and of salaries from 2009. It assumes people need 85% of their working income after they retire in order to maintain their standard of living, a common yardstick.

Facing shortfalls, many people are postponing retirement, moving to cheaper housing, buying less-expensive food, cutting back on travel, taking bigger risks with their investments and making other sacrifices they never imagined.

“Inevitably, we find that, for the average person, there is not enough there,” says financial adviser Paul Merritt of NTrust Wealth Management in Virginia Beach, Va., who has found himself advising many retirement-age people with too little savings. “The discussion turns out to be: What kind of part-time work do you want to do after you retire?”

He has clients contemplating part-time work into their 70s, he says.
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Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill Protest

Posted on Saturday, February 19, 2011 by meganwilson

Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

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14 Senators – a song by Ken Lonnquist (written 2-18-2011)

Posted on Saturday, February 19, 2011 by meganwilson

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Gambling On Hunger: Amid A Food Crisis, Why Do Republicans Want To Keep Regulators At Bay?

Posted on Thursday, February 17, 2011 by meganwilson

By Zach Carter and Ryan Grim
HUFFINGTON POST

Big price spikes are good for traders holding onto wheat or oil contracts, allowing them to stuff more money into their wallets while families struggling to make ends meet thousands of miles away suddenly find that it’s become too expensive to feed themselves.

WASHINGTON — Since July, the price of corn has jumped 62 percent. Wheat has climbed by two-thirds, and soybeans are 38 percent more expensive. For many of the world’s poorest citizens, the costs of both basic necessities and things that make life bearable are climbing out of reach: sugar has jumped by 81 percent, tea by 42 percent and arabica coffee by more than a quarter. Soybean oil has risen by half and fuel, overall, is a quarter more expensive than it was this summer.

In Tunisia, protesters’ demands for lower food prices helped spark a revolution. In Egypt, the government’s most significant concession to the uprising — before President Hosni Mubarak stepped down — was to offer major increases in food subsidies. On Feb. 3, the Bahrain government responded to protests with generous food subsidies, before adopting a violent strategy against demonstrators. Demonstrators have gathered in Algeria, Morocco and Yemen to protest food prices, as well.

There’s no question that people in the Middle East and northern Africa are hungry for freedom. But people are also simply hungry. “We’re in an era where the world and nations ignore the food issue at their peril,” Josette Sheeran, the head of the World Food Program, told Bloomberg in a prescient January interview.

The current crop of deposed heads of state may have Wall Street to thank for their forced retirement. While the causes of helter-skelter commodity prices are complex — natural disasters such as floods and droughts can play a big role, as can interest-rate shifts engineered by central bankers around the globe — rapid-fire trading and speculation on the Street can magnify the problem.

In an era when vast pools of capital shift in and out of markets for basics like food and oil with the a few computer keystrokes, trading can cause prices to see-saw in ways that are sometimes harrowing and hard to control.
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