Three Interesting Videos: Two by Mark Fiore and one by ClassWar Films

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Mark Fiore videos

Declaration of Thingamajig

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CorporateLand

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From Information Clearinghouse:

Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine


Transcript
Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine

Nightmare and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity there is no awakening.

Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of this era.

For two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, good will, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry.

America began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of its native people. Once solidly established, it grafted enslavement of another race onto that base.

With those two pillars of state firmly in place it declared itself an independent nation in a document that nobly proclaimed the equality of all mankind.

In that act of monumental hypocrisy America’s myth had its beginning.
* * *
A Constitution was written that came to be regarded as American Holy Writ. Its central purposes were to defend private property and suppress mass democracy. It has fulfilled both those mandates beyond the wildest dreams of its creators.

Once the existing oligarchy was secure in law and native people largely exterminated, the ruling class increased its wealth and power fantastically in the 19th century, using the government as its enabler, exploiting to the limit the device of chartered corporations.

With its phenomenal money power, the financial elite began to use the military to expand its sway beyond the continent. Regions, territories, islands, and whole countries were annexed, invaded, and possessed outright, their peoples crushed, suppressed, and ruled.

Because ordinary Americans, like any people, need to believe that whatever the ruling elite undertakes in their nation’s name must be essentially benevolent, noble in purpose and justified in fact, the myth had to be radically modified for imperial expansion.

The foundational story was that Americans had come to a howling wilderness teeming with godless savages and, through invincible strength of character and purity of purpose, had tamed the land and honorably earned the right to possess their bountiful home.

In the era of extra-territorial expansion that version was polished to justify and ennoble imperialism. The new corollary was that America could not ignore colonialist brutality but was obliged, by the Manifest Destiny that led us to civilize our own continent, to carry our mission into barbaric darkness wherever tyranny created abuse and suffering.

A national myth that absolutely binds the loyalty of a people to its government must be a subtle and powerful elixir that elevates and aggrandizes that people’s self-regard. National policy will then appear to be an extension of its superior citizenry’s inchoate will, and the basis for a justified arrogance toward the lesser world.

The simple, powerful myth of America’s altruistic and heroic benevolence, shaped and maintained by the financial/political power elite, infused Americans with a deep and outrageously hubristic sense of racial superiority that, mobilized behind various imperial enterprises, has given all such adventures the character of a quasi-religious crusade. In this way insatiable imperialism acquires the apparent moral perfection of a syllogism.
* * *
With WWII, the world was reconfigured. American Capitalism emerged supreme from the horror that had virtually wrecked its capitalist partners. The Soviet Union, though, having absorbed by far the greatest devastation from Nazi Germany, had astonishingly risen above its ruin to become the leading challenger to America as a world power.

This challenge was not competitive, it was systemic: Soviet Communism was a direct threat to American hegemony in that it categorically refuted the philosophical basis of Predatory Capitalism. Grounded in Marx and Lenin, it attacked Capitalism’s inherent evils, monstrous inequities and flagrant injustices that, exacerbated by speculation, exploitation and fraud, would destroy it. And it promoted world revolution to that end.

This face-off of giants in the Cold War necessitated further refinement of the American myth. Now, instead of simply intervening in situations where despotism or tyranny required America to forcefully implant our just and ethical democracy, America had to become the shield and bulwark of the sacred capitalist system in which “free enterprise” was magically and increasingly identified with democracy and equally to be defended.

This version prevailed through many surrogate confrontations around the globe in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction and survived even the debacle of Vietnam, lasting until the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the propaganda stream became ever more intense and pervasive. On radio and television Americans were subjected to an unrelenting barrage of hyper-patriotism in which American moral superiority was a given, and America’s self-touted courage, generosity and decency were its unchallengeable proofs.

The implosion of the Soviet Union left America, in its own terminology, the “Sole Superpower in a Unipolar World”. This, however, did not result in diminution of the myth. The practical effect of having no doomsday enemy--China couldn’t plausibly be cast in that role then--was to supercharge it by increasing its element of pure, hubristic ego. America was no longer just called upon to defend the “Free World” from monstrous heresy; it was now, by virtue of its universally acknowledged, beatific “exceptionalism”, required to oversee and police it in the interests, and for the benefit, of lesser nations.
* * *
“Power corrupts”, said Lord Mahan, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

When the only rival and counterweight to American power disintegrated there was a sense within the American power elite that the opportunity existed, for the first time in history, for one country to absolutely dominate and effectively control the entire world.

This consensus was expressed in a policy statement composed by a cadre of major right-wing political players representing massive corporate capitalist interests called the Project for a New American Century. This triumphalist manifesto laid out a plan for absolute American access and control of essential resources and raw materials worldwide, to be guaranteed by the military which would enforce Full Spectrum Dominance.

The American Myth, which had seemed to have lost momentum and its animating principle in the totally unexpected so-called Cold War “victory”, was now re-energized with a less defensive and reactive essence, and given the glowing radiance and patina of a true and, for the first time, self-professed and articulated, imperial mission.

The attack on the Towers, an unimaginable provocation, was the trigger mechanism for the explosive launch of the effort to impose that imperial model in practice on the world.
* * *
It has been without question the most spectacular failure in the history of American misadventure. After a decade marked by the waste of trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives, the stunning bankruptcy of our internally burglarized nation, and a consequent recession more fundamentally damaging than the Great One, Imperial America has nothing to show for the botched folly of its arrogant overreach but unequivocal disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, with no end of madness in sight.

An impartial observer would have to say that the hypnotic hold of the American Myth on the loyalty of the people has led only to disgrace and disaster, and set a direct course to inevitable imperial decline and ruin. That would be inarguable on any rational basis, but it entirely mistakes the motive for, and the purpose of, the myth. The American Myth was never intended to serve the interests either of our country or of our people: it was created solely to buttress, shield, and exalt the ruling financial class. It has done that with astonishing and unbroken success that staggers the imagination from our earliest days.

The massive looting of Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan war funding to enrich the Corporate Tyranny—for that is what it has become—is on an unique scale of its own, without anything remotely comparable to its flagrant obscenity in the whole long history of war.

Neither the Pentagon nor any branch of the U.S. government can give any accounting whatever of the many billions of tax-generated dollars that have vanished, evaporated. There is no doubt but that beyond the outrageously inflated, no-bid contracts handed to giant corporate favorites with their preposterous guaranteed profits, much of the money was simply stolen in bulk by, through, or in spite of the military, and distributed among thieves and accomplices, some of it on huge pallets… for convenience, presumably.
* * *
While this wholesale robbery was going on under the oversight of the military abroad, the Corporate Tyranny had evolved a whole set of impenetrably complex devices for the generation of money without any economically productive source or result at home.

The sole driving force and purpose of Capitalism is the realization of profit. According to that calculus, reducing production costs increases profit margin. This leads to the obvious conclusion that as production costs near zero, profit is maximized.

There is no provision for social good in Capitalist theory. Corporations, created to optimize business opportunity through efficient specialization, were originally required to operate for public benefit but that provision was quickly finessed and forgotten.

American law courts have always favored corporate concentrations of wealth since they, like the Congress, exist to serve the moneyed interests. The American Myth was created to provide cover for the financial oligarchy to exploit the country and the citizenry, and the judiciary has consistently cooperated in ruling for corporations against the people.

Indeed, without ever considering the question in law, the Supreme Court long ago endowed corporations with “personhood”, that is with all rights of human beings under our Constitution. The way this travesty occurred--the slipshod by-product of an obliquely related case--shows that the court preferred to incorporate this perversion of the plain intent of the 14th amendment as an unexamined assumption rather than risk an eventual test which would unquestionably have created violent public outrage.
Given the collusion of Congress and the courts in securing legal invulnerability for the Corporate Tyranny and the principle that the only duty of corporations is maximization of profit, it was not surprising that megabanks, huge brokerage houses, giant insurance conglomerates, gilded hedge funds and the credit agencies pretending to certify their work, all engaged in massive and systemic fraud and deception for just that purpose. The result was the crash of ’08, the recession, and the stunning and unprecedented rescue and bailout of the biggest banks, investment houses, and insurance and credit conglomerates with taxpayer dollars. So much for the hallowed Invisible Hand of the Free Market…
* * *
The last decades have seen two related megatrends in American geopolitical mechanics, both with dire effects on the power of the American Myth. First, what belief the world at large had in it has been shattered by a catastrophic series of imbecile and irretrievable military failures and disasters, which has caused erosion of its efficacy at home. Second, in response to this, the State has made increasingly crude efforts to boost the Myth’s waning power by the imposition of totalitarian methods of surveillance, intimidation and coercion on the American people to a degree unprecedented in scope and scale.

The whole clanking, medieval apparatus of Homeland Security that has sprouted like an enormous poison fungus since 9/11 with its brutal police state mindset; the odious Patriot Act with its flagrant subversions of the Bill of Rights; the endless, fantasy-based terror-peddling of the prostitute corporate media with its clowns and harpies churning irrational fear and anger in the uninformed: all this grim, repressive endeavor is a concerted attempt to distract Americans from the real causes of their injury, abuse, and oppression.

And yet, even with the American Myth now totally and irreparably blown full of holes and exposed demonstrably for the tissue of lies, deceptions and frauds that it has always been, it somehow keeps its phenomenal hold on the great mass of the American people. The tragic reality is that, for the majority, their own identities have been so deeply and thoroughly infused with the myth that to disbelieve it is to disbelieve in themselves.
* * *
So the American Myth is dead, and yet it lives on in its deadness, horribly masking our crapshot economy, our bankrupt debtors prison of a society, our Ghost Dance charade of kabuki democracy, while typhoons of impending social, economic and ecological disaster build their enormous, lightning-charged thunderheads above the dark future before us.

And what is it that the dead Myth still imperfectly obscures for Americans? What is outside and beyond the opaque wall of faltering, failing dishonesty and deception? What is the horror that the shoddy, tattered Myth has so long and so effectively concealed?

It is the world that has suffered unrelieved exploitation by the violence of our imperialist mania. It is the many wrecked and pillaged economies financially looted by our imposed predatory capitalist austerity regimes. It is the teeming hundreds of millions of starved, deprived and dying children sacrificed to Wall Street commodities gaming. It is the multitudes of humble, innocent, ignorant people, barely surviving in absolutist and dictatorial regimes propped up in their barbaric cruelty by our military while our banks siphon off the profits left after arming their brutal police and armies and bribing their ruling Kings, Sheikhs or Generals. It is the millions of dead and maimed in the raped populations of simple tribal people whom our indiscriminately murderous juggernaut has left in its bloody wake in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is the appalling legacy of hate and repulsion, disdain and fear, that America has earned with its appalling hegemonist villainy in every corner of the world.

And at home, what is it we Americans have been so complicit in hiding from ourselves in our devotion to the perverse legend that has come to inhabit our souls like a succubus?

It is the millions of us with no work and no hope in middle age whose jobs and homes have been devoured by the heartless fraud machine of Wall Street. It is the trashed and demolished weedlots of our major cities eroding in crumbling, fire-gutted ruin. It is the many towns and cities with industries shut down and factories deserted or dismantled and shipped overseas. It is our decaying, disintegrating public schools, our bankrupt states and counties, our overtaxed, antiquated public transportation systems, our obsolete, dissolving infrastructure, our bloated, irrational prisons complex, our punishing and inadequate health care disaster, and over it all, the repressive mechanism of our police state, armed and empowered, ready for use against the American people themselves.
* * *
This is where we are. The great question now is whether we as a nation can awaken from this long historic nightmare and face the terrifying and exhilarating prospect of living in the full light of reality without the false props and dishonest constructs of a hoodwinked, herded and dishonored people or, whether we have internalized the falsity and disease to such an extent that it has become an organic, overmastering form of insanity?

In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, offended to his soul by the injustice of the American government’s invasion of Mexico, protested it and went to jail for his convictions. Later, in his essay On Civil Disobedience, he said this:

“If injustice is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

To attempt to break the hold of the American Myth will be a titanic, daunting challenge. To even begin to openly rebel against the might of the National Security State will require the courage to face much more than official disapproval and denunciation. Imperial America will not respond to even the most peaceful and orderly protest with anything less than hard police repression and the level of punishment will rise in relation to the scope and seriousness of the action undertaken.

Small protests will have no effect and will be meaningless. Organized mass events, when they occur, will draw the whole fiercely and brutally motivated National Security State apparatus down upon themselves. Americans, excepting those of our underclass who have felt it, have no experience with violent police or military repression. Those who commit peaceful civil disobedience, a first and innocent tactic of serious protest, will swiftly find out to their cost how it works. In a National Security State that has excised and eradicated all defensive laws and regulations intended to prevent abuse of the public, whatever the State does is legal. To such a pass have we in America come as a result of our long historic indoctrination in serving our financial elite, our Ruling Class.

To achieve any redemption for Americans, to make possible any more just, humane and life-honoring society, will require complete abandonment of the system of Predatory Capitalism. If offers no prospect of reform or improvement and we have all been witness to the idiocy of the so-called “democratic process” in action for generations now.

America is nearing the greatest crisis point in its history and the terrific cataclysm, when it happens, will determine the future our country is to have. If we cannot, in dominating numbers, rise to reject the heartless, mindless, soulless machine of Imperial Predatory Capitalism, we will be condemned to a fascistic command and control horror in which human beings are mere possessions of the State, units of production or service, and then perhaps not even that, as excess population in that brave, new world nay be eliminated.

That end is not inevitable. We are not lost. We are not even defeated because to this moment we have not engaged. We have not honored our responsibility as human beings. We have not risen to defend our humanity. We have let ourselves be ruled.

All around the world the thunder of vast and immeasurable discontent can be heard and felt. In Egypt and Spain, Jordan and Greece, Iraq and Sudan, Afghanistan and Ireland, Latin America, the Far East and Africa, the legitimate anger of humanity is expressing itself against the dead and killing hand of Predatory Capitalism and its agencies of violence. And here, in America, so long trapped and encapsulated, frozen like a fly in amber in a false religion of state idolatry, the anger is deep, widespread, and growing.

It is up to those who know and care to lead. As Thomas Paine said, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Nothing is guaranteed us. That can’t matter. We cannot be concerned with odds or outcomes. We cannot let the Machine of Injustice grind on. We must oppose it with all the moral force we own. We must act with quiet courage to confront a vicious tyrannical system that is destroying the earth, its life, and its people. We must put our lives on the line to oppose it.

The Nightmare Machine of rapacious exploitation has overthrown humanity’s decency and reason and its bloody inhuman treason flourishes over us. This must be ended.

Let your life be a friction now to stop the Machine.

See also - The Century of the Self - How politicians and business learned to create and manipulate mass-consumer society.

Swimming Against the Rural Western Mainstream in a World of Misconceptions

[Edited 10/21/11]
In This Edition:

- Lengthy Comments on Herald Op-Ed: "Sharing the protesters' anger, but worrying about my 401(k)"

- Additional Links on #Occupy Wall Street

- Iris Dement--Wasteland Of The Free
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Comments on Herald Op-Ed: "Sharing the protesters' anger, but worrying about my 401(k)"

When, as an adult, I was able to explore the rural west, I was struck by its conservatism, as represented by the large majorities of registered Republicans and voting patterns in western rural counties. Millard County, Utah, where I once owned property and spent several months of each year, was a real shock, given that votes for Republican Presidential candidates hovered around 90%. When I moved to Grant, and then Baker County here in Oregon, similar feelings of minority political status surfaced, even though the political distribution was less lopsided and extreme than was the case in rural Utah. Only in these rural western counties had I experienced small town businesses putting pressure on local papers to tow a particular political line, and, at least in one case where the local businesses publicly spoke about removing their advertising, and thus the life-supporting revenue needed by the paper, if editorials or op-ed appeared with which they disagreed.

In the case of the small town commercial media, dependent on subscribers, and most importantly, on advertising revenue, one may reasonably suspect that when the opinions rendered by the local paper most often reflect the political makeup of the community, that it is the the local politics, especially those of the business interests that provide advertising revenue, that drives the opinions and articles rendered. On the other hand, one might also reasonably assume that people who pass the hiring filter at the local paper may reflect the political opinions of the publisher or owners who reflect the major political forces in the community. (After all, it is unlikely that a news outlet in business to make money is going to hire a howling progressive to run a paper in a conservative community.) Either way, it works out well for the commercial interest of the media outlet, with the only problem being that media likes to present themselves as the great objective voice that readers and viewers can trust, fair and balanced, as they say.

If anyone is aware of the local political demography here in Baker County, besides the County Clerk and political party heads, it is Jason Jacoby, editor of the Baker City Herald. He wrote a delightfully detailed article a while back (The urban-rural divide in Baker County; and eating crow on Dudley) that carefully described those demographics. His investigation revealed that:

- 46 percent of of all Baker County voters are registered Republicans.
- 28 percent of all Baker County voters are registered Democrats
- the rest, about 26 percent, are not affiliated with either party
- Within Baker City, "41.9 percent are registered Republicans, and 30.5 percent Democrats."

More telling perhaps, is, as Jayson says:

"Voter registration isn’t a foolproof way to gauge the political preferences of a populace, of course.

In the 2008 presidential election, for instance, Baker County voters went for Republican John McCain in a relatively big way — 64 percent."

So it is a bit complicated, but none-the-less, quite "conservative." Nothing, however, like rural Utah.

My take on all of this is that there isn't much difference between Republicans and Democrats in Baker County. Both parties here are really rather conservative, as they are nationwide. That's why some call them the two wings of the business party (or is that the war party?)

(I must admit, that I am particularly alone as a member of the Progressive Party aligned with the likes of Ralph Nader--do they still exist? Haven't heard much from them lately.)

Trust of media, of course, as opposed to trust of partisan bloggers like myself, depends on objective journalists, who try to stick to the facts, and check on whether those "facts" are actually facts. Otherwise, we would be left with demagogues, who report any notion, or recent email, as fact, and twist their falsehoods as they want, in order to please themselves and the political persuasion of their audience. Worse than self-admitted partisan bloggers perhaps.

Recall that Dan Rather, long-time anchor of CBS News was fired for reporting "facts" that may have actually been true:

"The documents [presented by 60 minutes in early 2009] suggested that Mr. Bush disobeyed an order to appear for a physical exam, and that friends of the Bush family tried to "sugar coat" his Guard service.

After a stubborn 12-day defense of the story, CBS News conceded that it could not confirm the authenticity of the documents and asked former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press President Louis Boccardi to conduct an independent investigation into the matter.

Their findings were contained in a 224-page report made public on Monday. While the panel said it was not prepared to brand the Killian documents as an outright forgery, it raised serious questions about their authenticity and the way CBS News handled them."

Was Dan Rather fired for reporting the "facts" or for reporting questionable facts? Apparently there is at least a selective standard applied to the "facts" that commercial media journalists report, as opposed to those reported by "crazy" bloggers ("crazy blogger"--Dave Miller-"Think Out Loud"/OPB/NPR).

All of which brings me to a recent Jason Jacoby Op-Ed in the "Baker City Herald", which mocks the Occupy Wall Street movement "Sharing the protesters' anger, but worrying about my 401(k)."

In a county as conservative and ours, I have no doubt that it was well received by most.

About the Occupy Wall Street protests, Jayson, in his admirably sarcastic and flowery prose, says:

"Well, I kind of understand.
The economy stinks.

And Wall Street is the symbolic, and malodorous, heart of the putrefying American financial system."

and that:

"(. . . the presence of sign-waving hordes is as predictable as autumn rain puddles.)

What’s not clear to me, though, is which actions we’re supposed to take against the omnipotent cabal that controls America — the so-called 1-percenters — that will confer any tangible benefit on everyone else.

And by “we” I mean the voters.

Forgive my childlike innocence, but I still believe the best way to fix any mess in the halls of power is with the ballot, generally speaking a more potent slip of paper than the most cleverly phrased protest sign."

"Childlike innocence" indeed, and from such a bright guy! This full half page (The Herald will give you 350 word to express your opinion.) of mocking misrepresentations, with its barely veiled contempt for Americans practicing their rights to protest policies that have left them in dire straits, was printed on the Friday (10/14/11) before last weekend's unprecedented worldwide protests against the prevailing global financial system involving "1,500 cities, including 100 cities in the United States—all in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement that launched one month ago in New York City." See Democracy Now!

I understand why, after the outrageous Obama fraud, and many fruitless protests over the years, one might question whether these protests will go anywhere, but given their depth and breadth across this nation and the world, I wouldn't characterize them to be exactly "as predictable as autumn rain puddles."

What actions are we, Jayson says, "supposed to take?"

Hint--Something more than badgering cynicism and demagoguery.

Something more than inferring that the most important social movement in recent American history is insignificant.

Something more than saying that one is worried about their 401(k), which Wall Street no doubt trashed a few years ago anyway, along with the 401(k) s of millions of other Americans.

(See: Retirement Dreams Disappear With 401(k)s March 23, 2010

"(CBS) The effects of the current economic crisis have touched everyone. Even if you still have a good job and a paid up mortgage, chances are your monthly 401(k) statement will remind you that you've lost a good chunk of your savings.

Trillions of dollars have evaporated from those accounts that have become the prime source of retirement funds for a majority of American workers, affecting their psyche and their future. If you are still young enough, there's time to rebuild and recover, but if you are in your 50s, 60s or beyond the consequences can be dire, and its drawing attention to the shortcomings of a retirement system that has jeopardized the financial security of tens of millions of people."

Something more than the cynical or naive true believer notion that "'we' ,,, "the voters" can fix the problem with a vote" in a system controlled by big money and the political elite.

Something more than blind faith in a system that in recent decades has failed the majority of Americans time and time again--from the union busting, consequent wage depression, and deregulation of the Reagan administration, to the long-term flooding of the labor market via mass immigration policies, to the savings and loan fiasco, to the high-tech bubble, and on to the really monstrous and predictable collapse of the housing bubble. Boom and bust, over and over. It is a system that burns up decent hard-working Americans in one crisis and phony war after another, and then largely ignores them. Looks like the people are getting a little tired of it and are willing to start doing something about it, which of course scares the bejesus out of the comfortable, who came through these upheavals unscathed for the most part.

As Richard Wolff (Professor of Economics Emeritus, U. of Mass., Amherst) said recently ("Letters and Politics,"):

"If you lived with a [loved one] who was as unstable as Capitalism, you would long ago have moved out, or demanded that [the] other person get some professional help! But you live in an economic system that is unspeakably unstable, and you accept it."

The Herald Op-Ed speaks about the 1 percent, but doesn't tell us much about them. The one percent are but a symbol, used by #Occupy Wall Street, to represent the social and economic inequality in this country. The inequality in wealth and opportunity between the top one percent and those in the middle and below is so enormous that, once understood, crystallizes in general discontent, now represented by a movement that is about much more than the one percent.

According to Henry Giroux, (Got Class Warfare? Occupy Wall Street Now!):

"The richest 1 percent in the 1970s only took in about "8-9 percent of American total annual income," whereas today they take in 23.5 percent.(9) Furthermore, as University of California-Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez states in his study of inequality, 10 percent of Americans as of 2007 have taken in 49.7 percent of all wages, "higher than any other year since 1917."(10)"

No big deal to the presently comfortable I guess.

The Herald piece goes on to say that:

"Even if we seize a significant portion of the 1 percent’s allegedly ill-gotten gains, I don’t see how, if we spread this considerable sum among the 99 percent in anything resembling an equal formula, that anybody’s going to end up with much more than a couple payments on the mortgage."

Perhaps, but the claim is really just a straw man distraction from the real motivations and intent of the #Occupy Wall Street movement, which is not simply about taking the money of the 1 percent and sending checks to the 99%.

Right now I don't have those figures, and the article doesn't provide a citation for them either, just some speculation. What is missing from the Op-Ed's analysis, is any understanding that Occupy Wall Street's 1% is simply symbolic of our country's gross inequality in income distribution, and all that it entails. Inferring that Occupy Wall Street is busy devising a scheme to seize and divvy up the 1 percent’s booty so as to send out checks to the 99% is a gross mischaracterization and distraction from what they are really about, which in part is to create a more participatory and meaningful democracy where greed, fraud, and inequality are minimized, starting with Wall Street.

For the sake of argument though, here is a figure from Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research, concerning the effects on the typical family of the upward income distribution to the top 5%:

If Our Children Don't Do Better Than Us, It Will Be Because the Top 1 Percent Took It All

Monday, 17 October 2011 05:46

Robert Samuelson warns that our children may not do better than us. His warning is based on rising health care costs, aging of the population and the resulting rise in Social Security and Medicare expenses, and the risk of an end to productivity growth. Remarkably the upward redistribution of income doesn't feature in his story.

This is striking since upward redistribution is such a huge part of the picture. His example of workers not gaining is taken from a Health Affairs article that reported that 95 percent of compensation growth from 1999 to 2009 for a median four person family was eaten up by inflation and health care costs. However, if there had not been an upward redistribution of income over this period, compensation for a typical family would be about 10 percent higher (@$10,000 in today's dollars).

What about $10,000 per family, or at least a 10% increase in family income that was instead accrued by the top 5%? Is that enough money to pay the mortgage on foreclosed property owners for enough months to please the nervously comfortable?

And then there is this analysis, Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%, by Joseph Stiglitz:

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.

One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top.

In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today.

The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.

First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible.

Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.

Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead.

None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes. . . . .

Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late."

See the rest of this important article, written over four months prior to the world-wide Occupy Wall Street protest.

Jayson: [I] "understand--kind of"?

Next comes the suggestion that we would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we redistributed wealth:

"Besides which, if we take all that money then who’s going to pay the taxes that keep Medicare and Medicaid and all those social programs afloat?"

This question implies that the rich are paying so much money in taxes that we are fortunate that things are arranged the way they are.

Thing is, as Warren Buffet recently explained (see "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich", the very rich folks like himself are paying a much smaller percentage of their income in taxes than do the middle class workers he employs. Buffett explains:

"If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage [in taxes] may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.
To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher [Higher still, like around 90% for top brackets, if you go back to the 1940's--Chris], 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 would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.
But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice."

Here is another enlightening article:

How I Paid Only 1% of My Income in Federal Income Tax

"In a recent newspaper interview, I mentioned my absurdly low tax rate to illustrate the extent to which the tax system is biased in favor of the wealthy (my income varies widely from year to year, but is typically north of half a million dollars). My point was that with our country facing frightening budget deficits amid an ever-widening income gap between the rich and everybody else, I consider it both unwise and unfair that a former investment banker like myself pays less in taxes than working Americans with far lower incomes.

Among the dozens of emails I received in response were many from people who assumed that rich people avoid taxes through complicated strategies devised by an army of expensive advisors (many correspondents asked for the name of my accountant). But under our current tax system, the rich don't need high-priced lawyers who exploit obscure loopholes; I wasn't even trying to minimize my taxes (and, in fact, could have paid zero tax if I was). Warren Buffett has observed that if there's class warfare in this country, the rich are winning. I offer my 2009 tax return, then, as a flare to illuminate the battlefield.

Americans are understandably angry over the government's multi-billion-dollar bailouts of reckless bankers. But low tax rates on investment income have put far more money into Wall Street's pockets than the TARP bill did. Even President Obama's proposal to let the Bush tax cuts lapse for the richest Americans would leave a top marginal rate on capital gains and qualified dividends of just 20% -- half the proposed rate on labor income.

This difference creates a loophole you can drive a Rolls Royce through. . . . ."

My take is that if the wealth were redistributed downward, more revenue would be raised, because the lower brackets seem to always pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. If, in addition, tax rates on the very rich were raised back towards what they used to be, assuming reasonable fiscal responsibility in Congress, our budget problems would be over.

But who cares about concentration of wealth in America, because, after all, Jayson says:

". . . such abominations [should not be used] as a pretext for, in essence, busting up an entire economic system. For all its faults, that system has contributed to a society in which even those in the lower tier of the 99 percent, were they to consider the matter soberly and honestly, must admit they’ve made out pretty well over the decades.

(Sure there are exceptions. But how many bloated-belly toddlers have you seen recently? And Africa doesn’t count.)
[Apparently, belly size is supposed to be the new standard for health and a satisfying and productive life. -Chris]

Yet dismantling the Wall Street oligarchy seems to be a theme among this budding protest movement.

This might sound satisfying when you’re striding down the street, aglow with populist solidarity, your critical thinking skills subsumed by the crude power of the crowd."

Whoa--wait a minute--"busting up an entire economic system?" "dismantling the Wall Street oligarchy?"

My take is that people participating in the protests want to see Wall Street and the financial system regulated in an effective manner (yes, they used to be) which prevents the sort of greed, fraud, bubble creation, and Too-Big-to-Fail behavior that has brought financial disaster, home foreclosures, and personal insecurity to many millions of Americans.

And given the thought and facts that went into the Op-Ed, don't get me started on "critical thinking skills."

Jayson Jacoby, the editor of the Herald then states:

"I haven’t filched any of my meager dollars from some oppressed minority of laborers, either. I just show up for work when I’m supposed to.

There are tens of millions of Americans who do the same (although not as many as a few years ago). We’re all part of that mistreated middle class the protesters purport to represent, and as I said, many of us are equally disgusted by the more egregious abuses of crony capitalism."

Great Jayson, so glad you have a job you can show up to, with the family and all, but many millions of Americans who want one, with families and all, don't have one. But then maybe they can't produce mindless Op-Eds that cater to the well off and conservative patrons.

"Equally disgusted?" I'm thinking maybe they are not equally disgusted, but in fact much more disgusted, given that they don't have a paycheck and the security you now have. They might be disgusted because the homes they live in, or used used to live in, and had invested in, are now underwater or foreclosed upon. Maybe many of them, our younger generation, are wondering how they are ever going to pay off their gargantuan student loans in a system that has provided no jobs for them. They might even be wondering why their government doesn't provide free or subsidized higher education, as some other successful countries do. Maybe they don't have the national heath insurance for all that other western industrial nations provide. Perhaps an unforeseen health issue has caused them to go bankrupt. Perhaps it was not because they didn't want to "show up for work," but because the system controlled by the greed and criminal behavior of Wall street speculators, bought off politicians, and corporations, not to mention simple discrimination, caused the current economic disruption they are victims of.

The Op-Ed goes on to toss out yet another straw man:

"But I’d also wager that most of us would appreciate it if the marchers avoid trampling our 401(k)s while they’re clambering up to the penthouse to get their hands on those conniving 1-percenters."

Interesting imagery considering that the protests have thus far been pretty peaceful, aside from some bad behavior by the gendarmes.

Interesting too, because there is no mention of the harm done by the Wall Street bubble collapse to the 401(k)s of Americans lucky enough to have them. (See link above (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/17/60minutes/main4951968.shtml))

And then we are told:

"But speaking as a member of the people, I don’t want to spend my golden years eating ramen three times a day (or scraps of poster board) because one of the consequences of my power grab is that the market gobbled my retirement and excreted a few pellets of Social Security.

(And I probably won’t get those anyway.)"

I hate to be the one to inform the Herald that "the market" and the corporations have been gobbling up retirements for decades now. (Most recently, see again (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/17/60minutes/main4951968.shtml).

See also, for example:
Court approves termination of United Airlines pension plans

One suspects that some true believers still don't understand the game.

While I understand people's nervousness, given the mainstream media's constant propaganda about the coming end of Social Security, the reference to the collapse of Social Security is not supported by the facts and only serves as a self fulfilling prophesy. As more people, young people in particular, are led to believe that Social Security won't be there for them, these claims provide political support for it's dismantling. Then all people will have is their winnings or losses gambled on 401(k)s, if they are wealthy enough to have one.

According to Dean Baker, in the post mentioned above (If Our Children Don't Do Better Than Us, It Will Be Because the Top 1 Percent Took It All)
Monday, 17 October 2011 05:46

"it would take just 5 percent of the projected wage growth over the next 30 years to make the Social Security trust fund fully solvent for the rest of the century."

So there are some problems with the Op-Ed from my perspective. But then we get to the part that I found even more troublesome--the most flimsy "straw man" allegation of them all perhaps:

"But after perusing some of the material allegedly associated with their campaign, including a 13-point manifesto, I see little reason to trust my financial future to their judgment."

And

"I hate to be cynical but it may well be that the protesters aren’t motivated mainly, or even largely, by a beneficent concern for the well-being of ordinary, politically obtuse Americans like me.

Consider, for instance, demand number three on that manifesto I mentioned: 'A guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.'

I have no idea if most, or even many, of the people participating in the various protests consider this a reasonable demand.
But I hope not."

These concerns are apparently in reference to a bogus manifesto that was circulating on the internet as early as October 9, 2011. But it was false.

The disclaimer is prominent at the top of the list:

Admin note: This is not an official list of demands. This is a forum post submitted by a single user and hyped by irresponsible news/commentary agencies like Fox News and Mises.org. This content was not published by the OccupyWallSt.org collective, nor was it ever proposed or agreed to on a consensus basis with the NYC General Assembly. There is NO official list of demands.

In the first edition of “The Occupied Wall Street Journal,” published a week or so earlier, they wrote:

"We are daring to imagine a new socio-political and economic alternative that offers greater possibility of equality. We are consolidating the other proposed principles of solidarity, after which demands will follow."

"No list of demands"
We are speaking to each other, and listening.
This occupation is first about participation." [The No list of demands statement was repeated in issue #2. ]

and that:

"Through a direct democratic process, we have come together as
individuals and crafted these principles of solidarity, which are points of
unity that include, but are not limited to:

- Engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy;

- Exercising personal and collective responsibility;

- Recognizing individuals’ inherent privilege and the influence it has on all interactions;

- Empowering one another against all forms of oppression;

- Redefining how labor is valued;

- The sanctity of individual privacy;

- The belief that education is human right; and

- Endeavoring to practice and support wide application of open source."

They also said:

"Even now, three weeks later, the elites and their mouthpieces in the press continue to puzzle over what we want. Where is the list of demands? Why don’t they present us with specific goals? Why can’t they articulate what they need?

The goal to us is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word — REBELLION. We have not come to work within the system. We are not pleading with the Congress for electoral reform. We know electoral politics is a farce. We have found another way to be heard and exercise power. We have no faith in the political system or the two major political parties. And we know the corporate press will not amplify our voices which is why we have a press of our own. We know the economy serves the oligarchs. We know that to survive this protest we will have to build non-hierarchical communal systems that care for everyone.

These are goals the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites, stops. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into massive debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured.

And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in serious trouble. . . . ."

A difficult task, for sure.

What troubles me, more than Jayson printing things he admits may not be true, even as he attacks them (straw men), is that somehow the Occupy Wall Street protestors "aren’t motivated mainly, or even largely, by a beneficent concern for the well-being of ordinary, politically obtuse Americans like me." Why would someone admit they lack political intelligence and sensitivity, and then suspect that the protesters might not be concerned about them? Could it be that protesters may not be concerned and beneficent towards people that are clearly hostile to them? Beats me. I do hope the statement is not yet another version of the "I'm doing OK, so what's wrong with you?--get a job!" mantra that seems so prevalent in conservative circles these days. Seems to me that the Occupy Wall Street folks are trying to create a more fair and democratic system (spare me the rhetoric about a "republic" unless you also want to talk about the "general welfare" mentioned in the preamble to the Constitution!) that benefits everyone, even newspaper editors that disparage them.

That's what it is about folks, from their own journal. It is not about the Straw Men erected by the media so as to discredit and trivialize a promising movement that the media and the comfortable see as threatening. It is in fact a serious movement with the best of intentions and values, backed by action and sacrifice, about real hope and social change--one that could bring something valuable to the whole of society, as well as to the oligarchs and their apologists.
_____

Links

Got Class Warfare?
Got Class Warfare? Occupy Wall Street Now!
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Former Financial Regulator William Black: Occupy Wall Street a Counter to White-Collar Fraud
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Dylan Ratigan Show--Occupy Wall Street--Not Left-Right, Republican Democrat--William Black, David Degraw

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Chris Hedges: "This one could take them all down." Hedges on OWS w/ OccupyTVNY -- 10/15/11


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Occupy Wall Street (FULL) Interview with Chris Hedges Part 1

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Public and 'Occupy Wall Street' Movement Agree on Key Issues
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SEC Cases Bypass Top Execs to Target Employees for Negligence

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Iris Dement--Wasteland Of The Free



Living in the wasteland of the free...

We got preachers dealing in politics and diamond mines
and their speech is growing increasingly unkind
They say they are Christ's disciples
but they don't look like Jesus to me
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free

We got politicians running races on corporate cash
Now don't tell me they don't turn around and kiss them peoples' ass
You may call me old-fashioned
but that don't fit my picture of a true democracy
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free

We got CEO's making two hundred times the workers' pay
but they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage
and If you don't like it, mister, they'll ship your job
to some third-world country 'cross the sea
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free

Living in the wasteland of the free
where the poor have now become the enemy
Let's blame our troubles on the weak ones
Sounds like some kind of Hitler remedy
Living in the wasteland of the free

We got little kids with guns fighting inner city wars
So what do we do, we put these little kids behind prison doors
and we call ourselves the advanced civilization
that sounds like crap to me
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free

We got high-school kids running 'round in Calvin Klein and Guess
who cannot pass a sixth-grade reading test
but if you ask them, they can tell you
the name of every crotch on MTV
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free

We kill for oil, then we throw a party when we win
Some guy refuses to fight, and we call that the sin
but he's standing up for what he believes in
and that seems pretty damned American to me
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free

Living in the wasteland of the free
where the poor have now become the enemy
Let's blame our troubles on the weak ones
Sounds like some kind of Hitler remedy
Living in the wasteland of the free

While we sit gloating in our greatness
justice is sinking to the bottom of the sea
Living in the wasteland of the free
Living in the wasteland of the free
Living in the wasteland of the free
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Iris DeMent & Emmy Lou Harris - Our Town

Class War? part 2--Some Recent Press Clips

Class War part 2--Press clips

Forgive me for painting all corporate media as only corporate propagandists--MSNBC apparently sometimes produces news that contradicts that sentiment, at least in the first two clips that follow. It seems to be exceptional in that regard, even though their advertising supports the original point. The following clips are perhaps even more germane, RE "Class War," than two recent shows at Democracy Now! on the same subject.
_____

Michael Moore with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Dylan Ratigan With Author Ron Suskind: "Tim Geithner Ran The White House, Stopped Attorney General Eric Holder From Prosecuting Wall Street"

Who's the White House boss?

Start watching at the 2-minute mark.  This is the most important Ratigan clip since his on-air meltdown.  You will hear that Geithner and Summers defied orders from Obama and took over White House policy, instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to back off Wall Street criminal prosecutions.

▪ "Geithner developed a system to keep the existing Wall Street structure in place with no prosecutions, and billions in additional bailouts."

You got that?  That's called an Executive Gag Order - Mr. President. . . .

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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A Good Fight

Robert Reich
--MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

So the really big fight — perhaps the defining battle of 2012 — won’t be over Medicare. It won’t even be over Obama’s jobs program.

It will be over whether the rich should pay more taxes.

The President has vowed to veto any plan to tame the debt that doesn’t increase taxes on the rich. The Republicans have vowed to oppose any tax increases on the rich.

It’s a good fight to have.

. . . .

Trickle-down economics has been a cruel joke.

On the other hand — given projected budget deficits — if the rich don’t pay their fair share, the rest of us will have to bear more of a burden. And that burden inevitably will come in the form of either higher taxes or fewer public services.

If anyone’s declared class warfare it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street (and who comprise a disproportionate number of America’s super rich). They’ve declared it on average workers.

The ratio of corporate profits to wages is higher than it’s been since before the Great Depression. And even as corporate salaries and perks keep rising, the median wage keeping dropping, and jobs continue to be shed.

You’ve got the chairman of Merck taking home $17.9 million last year. This year Merck announces plans to boot 13,000 workers. The CEO of Bank of America takes in $10 million, and the bank announces it’s firing 30,000 workers.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but the way I see it we’ve got a huge budget deficit and a giant jobs problem. And under these circumstances it seems to me people at the top who have never had it so good should sacrifice a bit more, so the rest of us don’t have to sacrifice quite as much.

According to the polls, most Americans agree.
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Attica Is All of Us: Cornel West on 40th Anniversary of Attica Prison Rebellion
. . . .
Cornel West, professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University and the author of numerous books on race.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to another 9/11 milestone. This week marks the 40th anniversary of the Attica rebellion. Forty years ago, September 9th, 1971, prisoners took over much of Attica prison in upstate New York to protest the prison conditions. Four days later, on the morning of September 13th, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered state troopers to storm the prison. Troopers shot indiscriminately over 2,000 rounds of ammunition. Thirty-nine men would die—prisoners and guards. After the shooting stopped, police beat and tortured scores more prisoners. Ninety of the surviving prisoners were seriously wounded but were initially denied medical care. After a quarter century of legal struggles, the state of New York would eventually award the surviving prisoners of Attica $12 million in damages. . . . .

CORNEL WEST:

. . . .

And we live now in revolutionary times, but the counterrevolution is winning. The counterrevolution is winning. The greedy oligarchs and plutocrats are winning. One out of four corporations don’t pay taxes, been gobbling up billions of dollars. And yet, not just 21 percent of our children living in poverty, of all colors, each one precious, 42 percent of America’s children live in poverty or near poverty. That is sick. It’s a moral obscenity. It’s a national disgrace. And yet, we have a political class, no matter what color they are, that won’t say a mumbling word about that poverty. Why? Because it sits outside of the give and fro between a right-wing, mean-spirited Republican Party, run by the oligarchs and the plutocrats, and a spineless Democratic Party, that’s got ties to the oligarchs and plutocrats, and the poor people get left out. They get invisible, disposable.

And yet, we see the same brothers in the 1950s and '60s who were coming out of socially neglected and economically abandoned spaces, called "the ghetto" by Donny Hathaway. By Donny Hathaway, when he said "ghetto," that wasn't demeaning. If you’re from the ghetto, the way he talked about it, you straightened your back up. You got your mind together. You had love in your heart for your brother and sister on the block. And it started on the chocolate side of town, but it spilled over to the vanilla side and the red side and the yellow side and the brown side, too. The unity that we had in Attica among the black and brown—and I saw some white brothers, too. Oh, yes. And that’s elementary. You’ve got to have the unity, but you’ve got to be honest about the powers that be dividing and conquering. And this revolutionary moment, where the counterrevolution is winning. Every time I look at Brother Dhoruba—Brother, I’ve been so inspired by you for 25 years, because you’ve been talking the same thing I’m talking about right now. Same language, here and Africa. We had a good time in Ghana together. Oh, yes, we did. But now it’s coming back. It’s coming back.

And the young people are hungry and thirsty, but the young people are thirsty for truth. Oh, yes. They’re hungry for truth. And the problem is that most of our leaders have either sold out, caved in, gave up. They don’t want to tell people the truth. They’re too concerned about their careers. They’re too concerned about success. They’re too concerned about just winning the next election for their status. In 1971, the Attica brothers told the truth. But they weren’t the only ones. You had a whole cacophony of voices telling the truth. But who wants to tell the truth? The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. If you don’t talk about poverty, you’re not telling the truth. If you’re not talking about working people being pushed against the wall, with corporate profits high, you’re not telling the truth. If you’re not talking about the criminal activity on Wall Street and not one person gone to jail yet, you’re not telling the truth. Don’t tell me about the crime on the block with brothers and sisters and Jamal and Latisha out taken to jail, and yet gangsters who are engaged in fraudulent activity, insider trading, market manipulation, walking around having tea at night. That’s what we need.

But the sad thing is—and I’m going to end on this—the sad thing is, the kind of courage that these brothers had in 1971 is in short supply. It’s in short supply. Because when you bring together the national security state and the military-industrial complex, when you bring together the prison-industrial complex and all the profits that flow from it, when you bring together the corporate media multiplex that don’t want to allow for serious dialogue—unless we got Sister Amy or Brother Tavis and some others—and then, when you bring together the Wall Street oligarchs and the corporate plutocrats, and they tell any person or any group, "If you speak the truth, we’ll shoot you down like a dog and dehumanize you the way we did to dehumanize the brothers in Attica," the only thing that will keep you going is you better have some love in your heart for the people. That’s the only thing that will keep you going, the only reason why the long-distance runner Dhoruba, the only reason why Baraka is a long-distance runner. I don’t care if you agree with them ideologically or not. It doesn’t make any difference. They got enough love for the people in their heart to still tell the truth about poverty, about suffering, about struggle, and be able to look—not just presidents, because by presidents you’re just talking about the placeholder of the oligarchs and the plutocrats—I don’t care what color they are—to tell that truth. And most people, they hold off on that. They say, "No, I got one life, one life. I saw what they did. I saw what they done."

We’re going to have a new wave. We’re going to have a new wave of truth telling. We’re going to have a new wave of witness bearing. And we’re going to teach the younger generation that these brothers didn’t struggle in vain, just like John Brown and Nat Turner and Marcus Garvey and Martin King and Myles Horton and the others didn’t. And we shall see what happens. We might get crushed, too. But you know what? Then you just go down swinging, like Ella Fitzgerald and Muhammad Ali.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Princeton University professor, Dr. Cornel West, speaking before close to 3,000 people, part of two panels at the Riverside Church in New York remembering Attica 40 years ago and talking about a blueprint for accountability today.

See Also: Smiley and West’s Poverty Tour
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The Social Contract
By Paul Krugman

September 23, 2011 "NY Times" --This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”
. . . .
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Why conservatives hate Warren Buffett
Why conservatives hate Warren Buffett

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: September 28

Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make the case for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes. You can’t accuse a big capitalist of “class warfare.” That’s why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and is trying so hard to shut him up.

Militant conservatives are effective because they are absolutely shameless. Many of the same people who think the rich should be free to spend unlimited sums influencing our politics without having to disclose anything are now asking Buffett to make his tax returns public. I guess if you’re indifferent to consistency, you have a lot of freedom of action.

Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. He’s said this for years, but he’s a target now because President Obama is using his comment to make the case for higher taxes on millionaires.

. . . .
Buffett’s sin is that he spoke a truth that conservatives want to keep covered up: Taxing capital gains at 15 percent means that people who make their money from investments pay taxes at a much lower marginal rate than those who earn more than $34,500 a year from their labor. That’s when the income tax rate goes up to 25 percent. (For joint filers, the 25 percent rate kicks in at $69,000.) For singles, the 28 percent bracket starts at $83,600, the 33 percent bracket at $174,400.

So if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 million of his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all that money. For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate applies only to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they’re paying a higher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments. Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by two points, the payroll tax added another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levy doesn’t apply to capital gains or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- and middle-income workers much harder than it does the wealthy.

No wonder partisans of low taxes on wealthy investors hate Warren Buffett. He has forced a national conversation on (1) the bias of the tax system against labor; (2) the fact that, in comparison with middle- or upper-middle-class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentage of their income in taxes; and (3) the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.
. . . .
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Tracy Chapman - Talkin bout a revolution

Class War?

[Edited 9/20&25/11]
For as long as I can remember, Republican leaders, and others of the endless greed persuasion, have accused those progressive Democrats, few of which remain today, of engaging in "class war" or "class warfare."

Whenever progressives suggest even modest restructuring of the tax system, back towards what it had been in those prosperous years when Americans were solidly in favor of a progressive tax system which insisted that the fortunate rich contribute a higher percentage of taxes than the unfortunate poor, the Republicans, and now even some misguided and comfortable Libertarians and the right-wing Flea Paty, have made efforts to shut them down.

In the last few decades, with the greedier corporations taking near total control of the propagandistic ideology produced by US media, as well as financial control over our political process, ideas like progressive taxation, not to mention the rights of laboring Americans, have been under constant attack. During that time, the percentage of taxes paid by wealthy Americans and corporations has shrunk to levels beyond the elite's wildest dreams back in the 1970's, worker wages stagnated and the gap between rich and poor widened significantly. This largely Republican "class war" on American working people and the poor has succeeded in reducing millions to joblessness, homelessness, and poverty, and yet, they persist in claiming that anyone, even a corporate Democrat like Barak Obama, is engaging in "class war" when he recognizes the problem and proposes policies that might even slightly help to reverse the trend.

The fact is, there is a class war going on in America, and while it has violent consequences for the poor and unfortunate here and around the world, in the reality of poverty, war, and all that it entails, the real problems created by it have not yet affected the fortunate among us. Having been saturated in right-wing corporate propaganda, even many poor people have difficulty discerning the true causes of their extreme discomfort.

One reason for this is that, as Huxley envisioned, and others understood, "There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel. . . ."

Think of the endless advertisements for anti-depressant medications on television promising to make the personally intolerable perceptions of many into an accommodating if mindless bliss.

Of course corporate television has another role, as hinted at by Huxley, and described by George Orwell in 1984:
"The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary."

Today's news about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and etc., are full of rich examples, as are the reports of record poverty and joblessness here in the good old USA.

In Iraq, we continue to keep troops there, though we all know the reasons for the war were completely bogus.

In Afghanistan, we continue to fight a war about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, even though Al Qaeda are of little influence and Osama is supposed to be dead, while our hatreds are now transferred to the Taliban there and in Pakistan.

In Libya, a war we supposedly engaged in to protect civilians, has resulted in many needless deaths, at least 30 to 50 thousand civilians, including a racist pogrom that has claimed the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of black African migrant workers. NATO bombs continue to fall, killing civilians in support of antagonistic groups of tribal rebels intent on regime change--all this for control of oil, even though the original intent was said to be protecting civilians.

Through all this, the US continues to largely ignore the killings in Yemen, Bahrain, and Egypt, not to mention our long-standing support of Israel's slaughters in Palestine and Lebanon.

At home, we are urged to forget our successful history of taxing the rich at a time when corporate taxes and taxes on the rich have reached nearly historic lows, and when the working people of this country are experiencing painful and devastating joblessness, foreclosures and a seemingly hopeless future. Unions are penalized and demonized, even though they are what brought prosperity to the middle classes of past decades.

In addition, today's numerous television crime programs and movies portray a society where the poor and disenfranchised are demonized for acting in stereotypical ways, usually wildly exaggerated. Their civil rights are routinely violated in many of these crime programs, thus reinforcing the idea that they are sub-human, and worthy of any punishment they might receive from an uncaring society. Another aspect of the corporate media's agenda is the plethora of television programs and movies glorifying militarism and war. Given the lack of other opportunities, due in part to the class war by the wealthy, the disadvantaged come to see the military as a career which can provide them security and self esteem.

The poor have successfully been inculcated with a false consciousness that makes them unaware of their true oppressors, and to instead see the oppressor as their benefactors. How else can the elite get them to fight and die in resource/economic wars for a country that could care less about them--a country that does not provide for their livelihoods, higher education and health care--without fooling them with smiles, merit badges and lies? How else can one account for the passivity of the poor when the well-off in their own communities treat them as people who only exist to mow their lawns, clean their houses, serve as little more than ping-pong balls in the prison-industrial complex, and who are expected to increase the property values of their better off neighbors? How else can one account for the poor voting for people who don't serve their interests, but who instead fill them with falsehoods, and use them as tools for their own enrichment? The poor, and the society as a whole, must be led to believe that the problems of the poor are caused by the poor alone, even if they were abused in childhood and beyond, and were never afforded the many opportunities of those better off.

In the 1930's, there was no television or internet to distract people, only the useful, but much less effective propagandistic tools of radio and newsprint, not to mention the effects of the educational establishment and many "professional" psychologists/counselors. Today, the system has many effective distractions and much more effective propaganda, all of which train us for economic enslavement and distract us from our real problems, including those associated with class. These tools are used effectively to make people confused about who their real enemies are, and in the end, some of the downtrodden come to love and identify with their enemies. That is the new/old reality, and it is why our problems, especially the problems facing the less fortunate, are becoming intractable. One can't solve a problem if one is deceived by leaders and others about what the problem really is.

The problem is class war by the fortunate against the unfortunate, but it has been presented and disguised as a class war by the unfortunate against the fortunate, and the fortunate have far fewer scruples. The supporters of this elitist war on the poor, Republican, Democrat, or whatever, have little heart or compassion, and they should be treated accordingly. This is the real war, in America, Baker City, and elsewhere, and it is the only war worth fighting, if you happen to be poor in America.

As Richard Wolff notes in the article directly below:

"The final irony of loose talk about class war is this: the Republican and conservative voices opposing all tax increases for corporations and the rich thereby provoke, as Buffett intimated and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg more explicitly warned last week, a renewal of class consciousness in the US. Then, Washington might learn what class war really is."
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The truth about 'class war' in America
Republicans claim, in Orwellian fashion, that Obama's millionaire tax is 'class war'. The reality is that the super-rich won the war
Richard Wolff
guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 September 2011

Republicans and conservatives always fight back against proposals to raise taxes on corporations and rich individuals by making two basic claims. First, such proposals amount to un-American "class warfare", pitting the working class against corporations and the rich. Second, such proposals would take money for the government that would otherwise have been invested in production and thus created jobs.

Neither logic nor evidence supports either claim. The charge of class war is particularly obtuse. Consider simply these two facts. First, at the end of the second world war, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. Today, that ratio is very different: for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it takes 25 cents in taxes on business. In short, the last half century has seen a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation off business and onto individuals.

Second, across those 50 years, the actual shift that occurred was the opposite of the much more modest reversal proposed this week by President Obama; over the same period, the federal income tax rate on the richest individuals fell from 91% to the current 35%. Yet, Republicans and conservatives use the term "class war" for what Obama proposes – and never for what the last five decades have accomplished in shifting the tax burden from the rich and corporations to the working class.

The tax structure imposed by Washington on the US over the last half-century has seen a massive double shift of the burden of taxation: from corporations to individuals and from the richest individuals to everyone else. If the national debate wants seriously to use a term like "class war" to describe Washington's tax policies, then the reality is that the class war's winners have been corporations and the rich. Its losers – the rest of us – now want to reduce our losses modestly by small increases in taxes on the super-rich (but not, or not yet, on corporations).

To refer to this effort as if it had suddenly introduced class war into US politics is either dishonest or based on ignorance of what federal tax policies have actually been. Or perhaps, for conservatives, it is a convenient mixture of both.

Much the same sort of analysis applies to the Republican claims that taxing corporations and rich people takes money that would otherwise be invested in business growth and thus create jobs. Last Friday, the US Federal Reserve reported a record quantity of cash on the books of US businesses (over $2tn). Even with the currently low taxes on businesses and the rich, that money is not being invested and is not creating jobs. It is not being distributed to anyone else and so is not being spent on consumer goods either. Taxing a portion of that money to finance Washington's stimulation of the economy by spending that money – or even better, by using it to hire and pay the unemployed – would be a much more effective way to provide jobs than leaving it as cash hoards in corporations' coffers.

Last month, Warren Buffett upset many of his "mega-rich friends" by what he stated categorically in a New York Times op-ed. He made it clear that he had never encountered any serious investor who decided whether or not to invest based on tax rates. It was always the prospects of profit that made the difference. He then urged Americans to raise taxes on the rich like himself. He also hinted – none too subtly – that it was becoming politically dangerous for the whole economic system's survival to keep having the minority of extremely rich people paying federal tax at lower rates than the middle- and low-income majority.

The final irony of loose talk about class war is this: the Republican and conservative voices opposing all tax increases for corporations and the rich thereby provoke, as Buffett intimated and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg more explicitly warned last week, a renewal of class consciousness in the US. Then, Washington might learn what class war really is.

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February 13, 2010 09:00 AM
The Real Battle: Deficit Reduction is Class War

By Susie Madrak

Here's a really good post on the deficit wars - and the myth of economic "recovery." [via Corrente]

For about 20 years now, I've been warning people that the continuing rise in home values was unsustainable - and bad for the economy. I can't stress this enough: Shelter is shelter, and not an investment. Speculating in residential real estate on the basis of constantly-increasing equity is a relatively recent development that drives a lot of bad economic and social consequences. (Don't even get me started on what a very bad idea it is to use property taxes to fund school systems.)

Using houses as ATM distorted many things in the economy, not the least of which was the parallel stagnation in wages. Think about this: since the 70s, we've seen a steady rise in women working outside the home, a rise in property values, and a monstrous increase in personal debt.

Yet wages never kept pace with any of that. (In fact, those of us who still have jobs are now working harder for less money than we earned in the 1970s.) But with a working spouse bringing in additional income and home equity loans, we could convince ourselves that increasing equity was the same as earning more.

It also kept things calm on the domestic political front, because we bought the illusion that the economy was rewarding us. (Which is one of the reasons why otherwise conservative Republicans were always so supportive of women going to work. It helped keep wages low.)

Even though I see great amounts of psychic pain in the transition, I believe that deflated housing prices are an ultimate good. Housing simply shouldn't cost this much when we aren't earning enough to pay for them; we shouldn't have to take out equity loans to get by.

Which is why I'd recommend that you read Jesse's entire article. He points out that the bulk of Obama's bailout funds and the thrust of his policies is aimed not at bailing out underwater mortgages for drowning homeowners, but to reinflate the value of the bad housing assets.

In other words, to continue the class war on behalf of the bankers.

...in view of the rising and well-subsidized efforts of Harold Ford and his fellow Corporate Democrats, the actual “bipartisan” aim seems to be to provide political cover for cutting spending on labor and on social services. Obama already has sent up trial balloons about needing to address the Social Security and Medicare deficits, as if they should not be financed out of the general budget by taxpayers including the higher brackets (presently exempted from FICA paycheck withholding).

Traditionally, running deficits is supposed to help pull economies out of recession. But today, spending money on public services is deemed “bad,” because it may be “inflationary” – that is, threatening to raise wages. Talk of cutting deficits thus is class-war talk – on behalf of the FIRE sector.

The economy needs deficit spending to avoid unemployment and poverty, to increase social spending to deal with the present economic shrinkage, and to maintain their capital infrastructure. The federal government also needs to increase revenue sharing with states forced to slash their budgets in response to falling tax revenue and rising unemployment insurance.

But the deficits that the Bush-Obama administration have run are nothing like the familiar old Keynesian-style deficits to help the economy recover. Running up public debt to pay Wall Street in the hope that much of this credit will be lent out to inflate asset prices is deemed good. This belief will form the context for Wednesday’s State of the Union speech. So we are brought back to the idea of economic recovery and just what is to be recovered.

Financial lobbyists are hoping to get the government to fill the gap in domestic demand below full-employment levels by providing bank credit. When governments spend money to help increase economic activity, this does not help the banks sell more interest bearing debt. Wall Street’s golden age occurred under Bill Clinton, whose budget surplus was more than offset by an explosion of commercial bank lending.

The pro-financial mass media reiterate that deficits are inflationary and bankrupt economies. The reality is that Keynesian-style deficits raise wage levels relative to the price of property (the cost of obtaining housing, and of buying stocks and bonds to yield a retirement income). The aim of running a “Wall Street deficit” is just the reverse: It is to re-inflate property prices relative to wages.

Go read the whole thing.

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Robert Reich Debunks 6 Big GOP Lies About The Economy


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29122.htm


Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme as Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry claims? Noted author and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich debunks that claim and five other lies the right-wing tells about taxes, government and the economy.


The lies Reich debunks:

1) Tax cuts to the rich and corporations trickle down to the rest of us. 

2) If you shrink government you create jobs.

3) High taxes on the rich hurts the economy.

4) Debt is to be avoided and it is mostly caused by Medicare. 

5) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme

6) We need to tax the poor.


Reich was speaking at the "Summit For A Fair Economy" in Minneapolis, Minnesota on September 10, 2011.


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Tax Breaks Are Heavily Tilted Toward High Income Taxpayers
Dean Baker
Beat the Press 9/18/11

The Post had a front page column reporting on the cost of tax breaks. The piece likely gave many readers a misleading picture of the main beneficiaries of these tax cuts when it told readers that:



“the bulk went to private households, primarily upper-middle-class families that Obama has vowed to protect from new taxes. ‘The big money is in the middle-class subsidies,’ said Syracuse University economist Leonard Burman, former director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

”

In fact, by far the largest beneficiaries of these tax cuts are upper income individuals as the chart accompanying the piece shows. For example, tax breaks amount to average of $82,400 for families with income between $500,000 and $1,000,000. Close to 70 percent of the mortgage interest deduction goes to families with incomes above $100,000 a year.



These tax breaks tend to be worth less to more moderate income families since in most cases they do not amount to much more than the standard deduction. That means that most families near the median income (@$60,000) see little benefit from these tax breaks.
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Republicans Are Not Being Truthful When They Blame "Uncertainty" for Lack of Hiring

Dean Baker
Beat the Press
Monday, 19 September 2011 04:11

The Washington Post has a front page article outlining President Obama's plans for deficit reduction. It then quotes Representative Paul Ryan blaming "uncertainty" for slow growth and high unemployment.

. . . .[see article]

In short, the evidence does not support Representative Ryan's assertion that uncertainty is a major obstacle to hiring and recovery. It would have been appropriate to call readers attention to the fact that the data contradicts Ryan's assertions. Post reporters have the time to evaluate the evidence, the vast majority of its readers do not.

Serious news stories, unlike this one, do not include in their first sentence a reference to "the nation’s rocketing federal debt." Such phrases are best left for the opinion pages.
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Did the Stimulus Help?
By James Kwak

This could be a midsize political battle in the run-up to the midterm elections, as discussed by The New York Times. The positions on both sides are too obvious to warrant repeating. If I recall correctly, the Obama administration hurt itself by underestimating the course of future unemployment a year ago when it passed the stimulus (most people were making the same mistake at the time), so now if you compare actual unemployment against original projections it looks like the stimulus had no impact. But that was a forecasting error and has nothing in itself to do with the stimulus itself.

Menzie Chinn has an overview post on the debate in which he argues that, at least from the standpoint of economists, it’s hardly a debate: the stimulus worked.

He points out that leading private-sector economic consulting firms are crediting the stimulus with significant impacts on GDP growth and employment. Here’s the money chart (originally from the Times):

[see article for chart]

Chinn discusses the types of models used to generate those forecasts, and competing models used by a few academics that yielded different results. He also points out that the CBO also estimates significant growth and employment impacts. If you want to pursue the matter further, he links to a couple of contrary arguments.

Of course, none of this will matter in the end because, as someone (Barney Frank?) said, you can’t get elected saying things would have been even worse without you. Unemployment will still be high in November and the Republicans will blame it on Obama. Voters aren’t going to believe macroeconomic models, don’t realize that unemployment is a lagging indicator, and will (with a little justification) think that Obama could have done more to create jobs.
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More from CEPR
The Impact of Cutting Social Security Cost of Living Adjustments on the Living Standards of the Elderly

September 20, 2011, Dean Baker and David Rosnick
During the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama proposed cutting the annual cost of living adjustment for Social Security by switching to an index that would show a lower measured rate of inflation. This alternative index, the chained consumer price index (CCPI-U), shows an annual rate of inflation that averages approximately 0.3 percentage points less than the consumer price index (CPI-W) that is currently used to index benefits. While this change would lead to $122 billion in savings to the government over the next decade, it also means that beneficiaries would receive lower benefits.

Since the vast majority of retirees rely on Social Security for the bulk of their retirement income, this cut in the cost of living adjustment would imply a substantial reduction in the standard of living of retirees, unless they offset it by saving more during their working years or retiring later in life. While we cannot know for sure how workers in future years will adjust their behavior, this paper assesses their past response to changes in the cost of living adjustment. It finds that they were not able to raise their non-Social Security income in response to cuts in Social Security benefits.

See Report:
The Impact of Cutting Social Security Cost of Living Adjustments on the Living Standards of the Elderly
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"People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome." - George Orwell
-
"a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest"
From "The Boxer" by Paul Simon
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Bruce Springsteen: Born in the USA 1984