Robert Reich - 7 Lies About the Economy and Taxes

Each day, I read many, many articles that are important enough to post. Others are similarly flooded with information. Things are falling apart in so many places, so rapidly, that it becomes difficult to choose which ones to share from all those important articles. Today, I have decided to post just one, in the hope that it might be watched and read.
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The Seven Biggest Economic Lies


By Robert Reich


October 12, 2011

 
Robert Reich - 7 Lies

 

THE SEVEN BIGGEST ECONOMIC LIES

The President’s Jobs Bill doesn’t have a chance in Congress — and the Occupiers on Wall Street and elsewhere can’t become a national movement for a more equitable society – unless more Americans know the truth about the economy.

Here’s a short (2 minute 30 second) effort to rebut the seven biggest whoppers now being told by those who want to take America backwards. The major points:

1. Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. Baloney. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans’ wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and have dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.

2. Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth. False. From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they’ve been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since. (Don’t believe small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax; fewer than 2 percent of small business owners are in the highest tax bracket.)

3. Shrinking government generates more jobs. Wrong again. It means fewer government workers – everyone from teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and social workers at the state and local levels to safety inspectors and military personnel at the federal. And fewer government contractors, who would employ fewer private-sector workers. According to Moody’s economist Mark Zandi (a campaign advisor to John McCain), the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs this year and next.

4. Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy. Untrue. With so many Americans out of work, budget cuts now will shrink the economy. They’ll increase unemployment and reduce tax revenues. That will worsen the ratio of the debt to the total economy. The first priority must be getting jobs and growth back by boosting the economy. Only then, when jobs and growth are returning vigorously, should we turn to cutting the deficit.

5. Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits. Wrong. Medicare and Medicaid spending is rising quickly, to be sure. But that’s because the nation’s health-care costs are rising so fast. One of the best ways of slowing these costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to reduce costs, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system. And since Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private health insurers, we should make Medicare available to everyone.

6. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Don’t believe it. Social Security is solvent for the next 26 years. It could be solvent for the next century if we raised the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. That ceiling is now $106,800.

7. It’s unfair that lower-income Americans don’t pay income tax. Wrong. There’s nothing unfair about it. Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else.


Demagogues through history have known that big lies, repeated often enough, start being believed — unless they’re rebutted. These seven economic whoppers are just plain wrong. Make sure you know the truth – and spread it on.

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Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes. He is also Common Cause's board chairman.
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For more Videos from Robert Reich, see Robert Reich's archive.

Imnaha Wolves Get at Least a Temporary Pardon

[Edited 10/7/11--added links and information about program costs and insignificant # of cattle deaths due to wolves.]
Targeted Alpha Male after ODFW collaring, and etc. (Adorable ear-tags, pretty "wild," eh?)

Back on September 30, 2011, The Baker City Herald printed a well received editorial on ODFWs order to kill the alpha male and a youngster in the Imnaha wolf pack--Oregon's first pack since the wolf's extermination by government agents and ranchers in the first half of the last century. As these are two of apparently four remaining members of a pack that once numbered 16, State Wolf Coordinator Russ Morgan admitted that it could mean the end of a viable pack. Oregon Wild's Conservation Director, Steve Pedery, was quoted by AP as putting it more bluntly:

"This is really a kill order on the pack. It is very unlikely the mother and her pup will survive the winter . . . . They really have little hope of bringing down a deer or elk by themselves."

For the second time in 6 months, in unusual acts of compassion and good sense for a north east Oregon paper in wolf country, the Herald actually suggested not killing wolves that had killed livestock, recommending a temporary "pardon" instead. Yesterday afternoon, an Oregon appeals court, at the request of Cascadia Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Oregon Wild, granted that temporary pardon.

In a nutshell, the petitioner's motion seeks a review of whether the interpretation of the State's Wolf Plan, as codified in Oregon Administration Rule OAR 635-110-0010(6)-(8), that was used to justify the recent kill order, violates the state's own Endangered Species Act. An explanation of the reasons for the filing of the motion to stay the execution, can be found here. For more information on the motion, and the granting of the stay, see the press release here.

Cascadia Wildlands has also, in an informative alert sent out today, stated that:

Yesterday's court order prevents the state from killing the two wolves until the court can fully consider our case challenging the legality of the agency's wolf killing program. You can read more about this news in the Oregonian and Blue Mountain Eagle, as well as in our press release. In addition to making an emergency donation to our wolf campaign and lawsuit, please take a moment to take action by sending Governor Kitzhaber a personalized auto letter demanding protection for Oregon's wolves.

Targeted Imnaha Pack; Alpha female left, targeted juvenile 2nd from left, targeted Collared Male, 2nd from right, remaining puppy on right--ODFW Photo

A common theme, complaint if you will, that runs through the criticism surrounding the kill order, and past killings of the Imnaha wolves, expressed by both wolf advocates and objective observers, is that wolf recovery has always depended upon, if not good will, then at least an honest attempt by ranchers to employ non-lethal measures to protect their livestock. While some ranchers have begun to institute these measures, others seem to be begging the wolves to kill their unattended livestock, so that they can gain sympathy and use the ensuing political pressure to make the State eliminate the pack. If the kill order is reinstated by the appeals court, then they will have essentially succeeded.

One expression of this recurring theme is found in today's press release from the wolf advocate plaintiffs:

Plaintiffs in the case include groups that formerly supported the wolf plan but now believe the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is abusing its authority to kill wolves while downplaying portions of the plan that focus on conservation, education, and requiring livestock operations to adopt nonlethal alternatives to shooting wildlife.

Another articulate, more to the point voice, can be found in Baker City resident Suzanne Fouty's letter [third letter] in last night's Herald (A new approach with wolves):

However, despite these efforts [to educate ranchers and Mr. Nash in proper husbandry and non-lethal measures], Mr. Nash, the ranching community, and land management agencies have done little to prevent conflicts. Given their refusal to be proactive, ODFW’s decision to kill these wolves, at the same time expecting the public to “compensate” Mr. Nash for his loss, is absurd. He should not be compensated and the wolves should not be held accountable for poor animal husbandry.

The AP article mentioned earlier states that

He [Nash] was not using nonlethal controls such as flagging and electric fencing but did have a range rider checking the cattle.

Nash was visiting a new grandchild in California when he got the call . . . .

So who's watching the cows? My understanding is the wife has a day job and that the "rider" is hopelessly trying to cover hundreds of thousands of rugged acres that make up several grazing allotments with some 7000 head of cattle. Sources and press reports reveal that ODFW sends the location data on the collared wolves to the rider and ranchers at least twice daily, and yet the allegedly killed calf was largely consumed when found, and the collared wolf had returned to the scene over a period of time. Where were the Nash's? Where was the rider?

I suspect that the reality is that some, if not most, ranchers, like many of us, resist change. They like the ways they slouched into after helping to exterminate the wolf, i.e., put the cows out in the Spring and hope they drift back in the Fall. They, like many business enterprises, prefer to externalize their costs to the larger society. That way their cows get to mow down life giving riparian areas, leave their cow pies in our waterways, have the Feds, States and Counties pay for predator control and management with tax payer dollars, and to insist that we have little right to see wolves and their beneficial functions in our ecosystems. You also get to learn how to get through or over a barbed wire fence on public land without tearing up your pants or favorite shirt or blouse.

Along these same lines, wolf advocates point to the many examples of successful coexistence between livestock operators and wolves. Wally Sykes of Northeast Oregon Ecosystems, compiler of voluminous amounts of information on wolves, ranchers, and their conflicts, and who also helped support and contribute to rancher compensation plans, not to mention his efforts to save the Imnaha pack, sent in this example:

Whitney Angell Leonard’s Blog

Hey Wildlife Services, killing predators isn't the only option

Wally also presented a list of good reasons why ODFW should not kill the Imnaha pack and their Alpha male:

- This wolf has been implicated in only one confirmed and one probable depredation.
- The OWP does not require lethal removal of a depredating wolf, it allows it.
- Without the subadult, the Alpha male may not be able to successfully attack livestock.
- Removing the Alpha male destroys Oregon's first wolf pack and its only known breeding pair (the Wenaha pack is not known to have bred this year). [Since Wally wrote this ODFW says that the Walla Walla pack had at least two pups this year.]
- Without the Alpha male, the remaining pup. . . . may not survive.
- Without the Imnaha pack, efforts to develop an economic benefit from wolf presence in Wallowa County will be damaged.
- Non-lethal measures taken by the rancher involved may not be adequate to meet the recommendations of the OWP.
- This loss will be compensated by either Defenders of Wildlife or under the Oregon Compensation plan. If this proves impossible, Northeast Oregon Ecosystems will provide compensation for this loss under the same conditions as the Defenders program.
- The OWP does not envision a wolf population that does not have conflicts with livestock. The Plan realistically tries to minimize rather than eliminate such conflicts. That's why Oregon has a compensation plan.

Oregon has chosen to encourage a wolf population and the majority of its citizens support this decision. . . . .eliminating Oregon's first and most well-known pack is not the way to do it.

Concerning his statement that

The OWP does not require lethal removal of a depredating wolf, it allows it.

The following seems to confirm it:

2010 Wolf Plan; P. 51,

Table III-1. Matrix of Wolf Conflict Management Options.
31 While a species is state-listed, harassment or take is allowed only upon a finding that such harassment or take is consistent with conserving the species in Oregon.

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Other Bits & Pieces of the Puzzle

ODFW, despite the fact that the calf carcass they used to justify the recent kill order had been largely consumed over a period of two or more feedings, found that the 550 pound calf had been killed by wolves rather than simply scavenged by opportunistic wolves of the Imnaha pack. Nobody witnessed the alleged killing. This is why wolf advocates refer to an alleged killing by wolves.

ODFW does not provide, in my experience, the actual reports documenting their assessments of alleged killings. When I asked for the actual reports of the reported wolf kills on the Jacobs Ranch in Baker County in 2009, they only sent a sketchy summary of the wolve's activities. Given the majority support for wolf recovery in Oregon, the least they should do is post the reports on the ODFW website.
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Ranchers are often portrayed as noble, poor cowboys struggling to protect their small, traditional, family-owned ranches from the ravages of both wolves and environmentalists out to get them. That is sometimes at least partially the case, and there are many hard working people who actually own their ranches, even though hardly poor in the economic sense. The Marr Flat Cattle Co. L.L.C., managed in part by the Nash family in Wallowa County has been presented by the press in that light.

According to the Oregon Secretary of State's Business Registry, the Marr Flat Ranch has a number of principals, and Todd Nash is listed as one of two managers.

Angela Nash, who apparently is Todd's wife, has stated on Ecotrope that "

We have lost at least 36 calves to wolves. [(ODFW/USFWS say 14 [is] the number of livestock animals confirmed to be killed by the Imnaha pack in the past year and a half.)] We run on 100,000 acres. When wolves kill there is nothing left except maybe a leg or head or ribcage." "We run close to 600 head of cattle. About 400 are in wolf country. . . ."
This is 100,000 acres, 10,000 private which is where much of the killing takes place."

The other 90,000 acres are primarily YOUR public lands, wherein the state and the federal agencies grant them permits to disrupt the ecosystem for a pittance. (A flat out subsidy that degrades your public land and externalizes the costs of their use, such as destruction of wolves, to you.)

Some people are wondering what all the hullaballoo is concerning cattle predation by wolves. On a Friends of Animals web site, "Nabeki" writes:

Ok, 51,200 cows died in Oregon in 2010 from non-predation causes. (NASS 2010) This should be front page news, right? When wolves are involved in miniscule livestock losses they make the front pages of local media. So what about those 51,200 cows that weren’t killed by wolves?

ODFW is planning on killing the alpha male (pictured left) and another wolf from the Imnaha Pack, for tiny livestock losses. Yet huge numbers of cows drop dead in Oregon every year and all we hear is “crickets”.

See: 51,200 Dead Oregon Cows Not Killed By Wolves! Where’s The Media? September 28, 2011

The figures Nabeki cites come from a USDA report titled Cattle Death Loss, Released May 12, 2011, by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). If you dig around in the report, you find, using the ODFW figure of 7 livestock (assume they were all cattle) killed in 2010, that cattle deaths due to wolf predation in Oregon amounts to an insignificant 0.0127% of cattle deaths from all causes. See also: Wolf Predation and Livestock Losses

Reading Angela's words, you might assume that Marr Flat is a ranch that the Nash family owns, but the business registry states that there are four principals:
Chris Buhler (absentee from California),
Allison Reed, absentee from Lake Oswego, Oregon,
Leslie Miller absentee from Los Angeles, CA
Todd Nash of 64541 Alder Slope Road in Enterprise, OR

The last two are listed as managers. with Todd Nash listed as registered agent. My understanding is that Chris Buhler is the majority interest and that he resides in California, although getting to the bottom of ownerships in many cases is problematic, at best.

When I asked Angela if "the Buhler family actually own most or all of the outfit with Todd hired as one of the managers?" she did not answer, preferring to respond with an ad hominem attack to that and my other relevant questions.

Another interesting bit of information I have received is that the Nash family "don't own any of their cows nor do they own a ranch. Todd is a hired manger for the Marr Flat cattle co., owned by the Beuhler [Buhler] family. He works on salary base plus a percentage."

So some ranchers are as most of us, subject to the whims of the economy and employment opportunities--just workers like the rest of us. Fact is, ranching is big business, often corporate, and they might be expected to get the treatment that the rest of us get, not special interest protections from the government.
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Another interesting relationship:

The only rider for the huge area in question is Dan Warnock, said to be a friend of the Nash family. "Warnock has ridden the rugged country south and east of Joseph where thousands of cows graze on both private and public land."

One might expect that a rider, who is supposed to be interested in saving livestock from attack, should be a disinterested party, with no conflict of interest concerning the establishment of wolves in Oregon. I am told that the rider is also a friend of Todd Nash, manager of Marr Flat Cattle Co. L.L.C.. Interestingly, the principals of the THE MARR FLAT CATTLE ASSOCIATION are Joe and Charles Warnock.
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Other Comments by Angela Nash on Ecotrope:

I asked Angela Nash many questions, the most important of which she didn't answer.

Angela: "We live with the land everyday"

I'm told Angela has a full time day job at a "mental health" clinic, god forbid.

Angela: "We haven't received a dime from you or anyone else. OR has spent 4.5 million on these wolves already which has nothing to do with us or our cattle." And: "Oregonians have spent 4.5 million dollars on the Imnaha pack alone which had nothing to do with our cattle."

When I asked ODFW what they had spent, I was told that "ODFW’s wolf budget for this year is: $378K. I’ll have to get back to you on the cost since the Imnaha pack was first detected. B-300, the alpha female of the pack, was first confirmed in Oregon in January 2008."

They have yet to get back to me after a week. This Just in. 10/9/11--In response to yesterdays reminder, ODFW just sent an email with the 2009 & 2010 figures for the State wolf budget. This is for all wolf activities which I suppose was primarily the Imnaha pack for the first one and one half year, and now on all three packs plus dispersers.

2011 $378K
2010 $350K
2009 $143K
Total spent on all packs: $871K

Oregonians do contribute through taxes to other agencies spending dollars on wolves, such as USFWS and "Wildlife Services," but those costs are spread out among tens of millions of taxpayers in other states. So, it is incredibly unlikely that "Oregonians have spent 4.5 million dollars on the Imnaha pack alone."

Another poster wrote her that: "According to the Farm Subsidy Database, your company - Marr Flat Cattle has received $231,775 in the last decade."

As for whether they "haven't received a dime from you or anyone else," with regard to the Oregon wolf program, Angela, upon further questioning, wrote:

In response to this from Ecotrope--"I'd also be interested to know whether you will be reimbursed for the $40,000 you lost to wolf predation."

Angela responded with: "No we will not be reimbursed."

When pressed Angela wrote: "We have been paid for 1 confirmed kill in 09 when in 09 we lost 20." [19 unconfirmed, I might add.]

Angela never answered many more questions, including:

whether "the other ranchers in the Imnaha pack territory [are] losing a lot of these large summer range calves" to wolves?

"Do you get just one text a day from ODFW each day about the location of the alpha, or are there more?"

"how close together you keep them?" "Were the cows on the private 10,00 acres or so grouped "close together" so you could monitor them, or were they spread out over the property?"

With reference to the non-lethal methods allowed in the Oregon Wolf Plan: Did you or your husband go out on "your" private land to use these methods when you knew that the Alpha was in the neighborhood, or were you too tired after coming home from your day job?

How can one range rider hired to take care of some 7,000 head of cattle spread out over many thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of acres, including yours and other allotments around the Salt Creek Divide, possibly be able to cover the territory? Aren't many more needed? Where was Todd? What's he doing?

Are the cows yours, or are they owned by the Marr Flat Cattle Co. L.L.C.? Principals include Chris Buhler (absentee from California?), Allison Reed, Lake Oswego, Oregon, with both Leslie Miller of Los Angeles, CA and Todd Nash of 64541 Alder Slope Road in Enterprise, OR listed as managers. Does the Buhler family actually own most or all of the outfit with Todd hired as one of the managers?

You stated that "These wolves have no real fear of people as they simply come to town and kill also." I can find no documentation of that, and I have heard from Joseph, OR that the statement is simply not true. Will you please document your statement with some verifiable source?

Angela Nash didn't answer these questions. Her cute response was:

"Your fiddle is really out of tune...Playing dumb is also very unattractive."

Oh yeah, my fiddle is out of tune, but of course I don't play the fiddle, even though I'd like to.

My response:

What is truly unattractive Angela are your ad hominem attacks, your lack of candor, and your conflicting statements concerning your claims about wolves, compensation, land and cattle ownership, and efforts at non lethal control. People drew their own conclusions as to why you refuse to answer relevant questions concerning your statements. If all ranchers, as well as hired hands like Todd, had made an honest effort to use effective non lethal control, your servants at ODFW and "Wildlife Services" would not have issued the recent kill order for the two wolves. [Actually, ODFW ordered the kill, "Wildlife Services" just aids in the effort to carry it out.- Chris] Hopefully the state [appeals court] ordered stay of execution in response to the recent request by wolf advocates for judicial review will become permanent.

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See Also:

http://bakercountyblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/this-is-re-post-of-blog-from-december-6.html

And

http://bakercountyblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/wolves-and-other-predators.html

al-Awlaki Assassination Dramatically Steepened the Slippery Slope Leading to the Loss of Everyone's Constitutional Rights

[Edited & Ron Paul comment link added, 10/5-6/11]

When I mentioned the alleged assassination of American citizen al-Awlaki to a friend today, he responded, with reference to my, and other's comments about the "American Spring," with the question: "is it really the American Fall?" I responded with "Good point--hopefully the Fall before the Spring. When they deny due process to one, they can find ways to deny it to all."

"Hopefully?" Hope? Always the fallback position of those who feel they are powerless I guess.

When Jesse Jackson gave his "Keep Hope Alive" speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention, tears welled up in my eyes. When the elites offered up Clinton, "The man from Hope" in '92, I went for it the first time around. The Supreme Court changed the theme and gave us a murderous thug, with no promise of hope, in 2000, but in 2008 it was back to hope, with change tossed in for good measure. Obama, the corporate/militarist/Imperial Trojan Horse who emerged so prematurely within the Democratic party, shattered our hopes by breaking his promises and expanding the opposite of the change we expected. It was the kind of "change" that had been initiated by G.W. Bush in the wake of 9/11, a primary feature of which was the erosion of of our Constitutional rights.

Hope? Hopefully? Nice words, good thoughts, but without effective individual and group action towards what one hopes for, the words will not provide for change. That is the lesson, and also what is encouraging (hopeful? ;-)) about the Occupy Wall Street protests as well as the coming October 6, 2011 protest against the imperial wars and the corporate machine at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. They are getting up off their bottoms to publicly assemble and demand relief for their grievances. If people will act to effect the change they desire, the resistance will grow and finally impress upon the elites, and their Wall Street financiers, that we are not going to take it any more, that we are going to reign them in, demand equity and true democracy, and that we are going to actively insist upon our rights as U.S. citizens as enumerated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Only through action, not hope alone, will true change stand a chance in America.

[See also Liberty Tree Foundation: "We also understand that freedom to govern requires freedom from want. The rights to housing, to an education, to health care, to child care, to a livable income, are all democratic rights. People who don’t have these necessities of life are not free to participate in power. The impoverishment of Americans is the impoverishment of America."]

Obama's lawyers and other thugs in the US "Justice" Department, the CIA (Petraeus), and Congress, who justify the assassination a US citizen without formal charge and trial, without any evidence being scrutinized in a court of law, dramatically upped the ante and increased the stakes for US citizens everywhere when the administration decided to ignore our long-held right of Habeas Corpus and due process, including the protections afforded by the Fifth Amendment. A trial held secretly in the offices of the executive branch, the same offices that lied us into the Iraq War, with the help of a complicit corporate media, is no trial at all, and has no place in the "land of the free." Any citizen abroad, and, if the trend is not reversed, perhaps some day even at home, who opposes US policies or supports the rights of those deemed as our enemies or "terrorists," could be subject to similar actions, without recourse to a trial where they could defend themselves.

Here are a few videos and articles that better explain the situation we find ourselves in:
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Al-QAEDA DEATH: Barack Obama welcomes Anwar al-Awlaki killing


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Who Knew--A Real Reporter Exists!
Obama Admin Refuses To Offer ANY Proof Anwar Al Awlaki Was Involved In Terrorist Activity


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Wondering just what you can say about US foreign policy without being arrested or assassinated under current law? Wondering that if you speak your mind whether the government can call you a terrorist and put you on their hit list? Wondering what the traditional legal arguments are against assassinating US citizens abroad? Wondering if you and your expressions against the government's policies, as opposed to Obama and his extrajudicial killing of American citizens, are criminal under current law? Well (deep subject), given Obama's and Petraeus' actions, even the Constitution might not protect you when they ignore it. If, however, the government minds the constraints of the Constitution, the following audio commentary by former civil litigator and Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald, is the most comprehensive I can find with regard to free speech rights and the cases of of US citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were summarily executed by Obama and CIA director Petraeus.

If you are truly interested in these issues, please listen to this informative 30 minute audio with Glenn Greenwald and Scott Horton from Antiwar Radio and KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles:

Scott Horton Interviews Glenn Greenwald
Scott Horton, October 01, 2011

For download: http://antiwar.com/radio/2011/10/01/glenn-greenwald-34/

See Also:

With Death of Anwar al-Awlaki, Has U.S. Launched New Era of Killing U.S. Citizens Without Charge?
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Anwar al-Awlaki's extrajudicial murder
The law on the use of lethal force by executive order is specific. This assassination broke it – that creates a terrifying precedent

By Michael Ratner
October 01, 20911 "The Guardian"

". . . . Yes, Anwar al-Awlaki was a radical Muslim cleric. Yes, his language and speeches were incendiary. He may even have engaged in plots against the United States – but we do not know that because he was never indicted for a crime.

This profile should not have made him a target for a killing without due process and without any effort to capture, arrest and try him. The US government knew his location for purposes of a drone strike, so why was no effort made to arrest him in Yemen, a country that apparently was allied in the US efforts to track him down?

There are – or were – laws about the circumstances in which deadly force can be used, including against those who are bent on causing harm to the United States. Outside of a war zone, as Awlaki was, lethal force can only be employed in the
narrowest and most extraordinary circumstances: when there is a concrete, specific and imminent threat of an attack; and even then, deadly force must be a last resort.

The claim, after the fact, by President Obama that Awlaki "operationally directed efforts" to attack the United States was never presented to a court before he was placed on the "kill" list and is untested. Even if President Obama's claim has some validity, unless Awlaki's alleged terrorists actions were imminent and unless deadly force employed as a last resort, this killing constitutes murder. . . . ."

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An Unconstitutional Killing: Obama's Killing of Awlaki Violates American Law

By Ron Paul

October 03, 2011 "NY Daily News"

". . . . We have to take the fight against terrorism very seriously. In 2001, I supported the authority to capture and kill the thugs responsible for 9/11. In our efforts we must, however, work hard to preserve and respect our great American constitutional principles.

Awlaki was a U.S. citizen. Under our Constitution, American citizens, even those living abroad, must be charged with a crime before being sentenced. As President, I would have arrested Awlaki, brought him to the U.S., tried him and pushed for the stiffest punishment allowed by law. Treason has historically been judged to be the worst of crimes, deserving of the harshest sentencing. But what I would not do as President is what Obama has done and continues to do in spectacular fashion: circumvent the rule of law. . . . ."

See also: Obama impeachment a possibility, says Ron Paul
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The Day America Died

By Paul Craig Roberts

October 03, 2011 "Information Clearing House"

". . . . September 30, 2011 was the day America was assassinated.

Some of us have watched this day approach and have warned of its coming, only to be greeted with boos and hisses from “patriots” who have come to regard the US Constitution as a device that coddles criminals and terrorists and gets in the way of the President who needs to act to keep us safe.

In our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Lawrence Stratton and I showed that long before 9/11 US law had ceased to be a shield of the people and had been turned into a weapon in the hands of the government. The event known as 9/11 was used to raise the executive branch above the law. As long as the President sanctions an illegal act, executive branch employees are no longer accountable to the law that prohibits the illegal act. On the president’s authority, the executive branch can violate US laws against spying on Americans without warrants, indefinite detention, and torture and suffer no consequences.

Many expected President Obama to re-establish the accountability of government to law. Instead, he went further than Bush/Cheney and asserted the unconstitutional power not only to hold American citizens indefinitely in prison without bringing charges, but also to take their lives without convicting them in a court of law. Obama asserts that the US Constitution notwithstanding, he has the authority to assassinate US citizens, who he deems to be a “threat,” without due process of law.

In other words, any American citizen who is moved into the threat category has no rights and can be executed without trial or evidence.

On September 30 Obama used this asserted new power of the president and had two American citizens, Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan murdered. Khan was a wacky character associated with Inspire Magazine and does not readily come to mind as a serious threat.

Awlaki was a moderate American Muslim cleric who served as an advisor to the US government after 9/11 on ways to counter Muslim extremism. Awlaki was gradually radicalized by Washington’s use of lies to justify military attacks on Muslim countries. He became a critic of the US government and told Muslims that they did not have to passively accept American aggression and had the right to resist and to fight back. As a result Awlaki was demonized and became a threat.

All we know that Awlaki did was to give sermons critical of Washington’s indiscriminate assaults on Muslim peoples. Washington’s argument is that his sermons might have had an influence on some who are accused of attempting terrorist acts, thus making Awlaki responsible for the attempts.
. . . .
In a decision that sealed America’s fate, federal district court judge John Bates ignored the Constitution’s requirement that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law and dismissed the case, saying that it was up to Congress to decide. Obama acted before an appeal could be heard, thus using Judge Bates’ acquiescence to establish the power and advance the transformation of the president into a Caesar that began under George W. Bush.

Attorneys Glenn Greenwald and Jonathan Turley point out that Awlaki’s assassination terminated the Constitution’s restraint on the power of government. Now the US government not only can seize a US citizen and confine him in prison for the rest of his life without ever presenting evidence and obtaining a conviction, but also can have him shot down in the street or blown up by a drone.

Before some readers write to declare that Awlaki’s murder is no big deal because the US government has always had people murdered, keep in mind that CIA assassinations were of foreign opponents and were not publicly proclaimed events, much less a claim by the president to be above the law. Indeed, such assassinations were denied, not claimed as legitimate actions of the President of the United States.

The Ohio National Guardsmen who shot Kent State students as they protested the US invasion of Cambodia in 1970 made no claim to be carrying out an executive branch decision. Eight of the guardsmen were indicted by a grand jury. The guardsmen entered a self-defense plea. Most Americans were angry at war protestors and blamed the students. The judiciary got the message, and the criminal case was eventually dismissed. The civil case (wrongful death and injury) was settled for $675,000 and a statement of regret by the defendants.

The point isn’t that the government killed people. The point is that never prior to President Obama has a President asserted the power to murder citizens.

Over the last 20 years, the United States has had its own Mein Kampf transformation.
. . . .
Readers ask me what they can do. Americans not only feel powerless, they are powerless. They cannot do anything. The highly concentrated, corporate-owned, government-subservient print and TV media are useless and no longer capable of performing the historic role of protecting our rights and holding government accountable. Even many antiwar Internet sites shield the government from 9/11 skepticism, and most defend the government’s “righteous intent” in its war on terror. Acceptable criticism has to be couched in words such as “it doesn’t serve our interests.”

Voting has no effect. President “Change” is worse than Bush/Cheney. As Jonathan Turley suggests, Obama is “the most disastrous president in our history.” Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who stands up for the Constitution, but the majority of Americans are too unconcerned with the Constitution to appreciate him.

To expect salvation from an election is delusional. All you can do, if you are young enough, is to leave the country. The only future for Americans is a nightmare."

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was appointed by President Reagan Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and confirmed by the US Senate. He was Associate Editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and he served on the personal staffs of Representative Jack Kemp and Senator Orrin Hatch. He was staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, staff associate of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and Chief Economist, Republican Staff, House Budget Committee. He wrote the Kemp-Roth tax rate reduction bill, and was a leader in the supply-side revolution. He was professor of economics in six universities, and is the author of numerous books and scholarly contributions. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.
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Ralph Nader’s Grand Alliance
Progressives find hope—in Ron Paul.

By Michael Tracey | September 28, 2011

". . . .Not that he was ever particularly optimistic about the Obama administration, especially its potential to make headway on curtailing corporate welfare, now Nader’s signature policy objective. But in that, as with so many aspects of Obama’s presidency, the adjectives “disappointing” or “inadequate” don’t even begin to capture the depths of progressive disillusionment. Looking ahead to the 2012 presidential race, one might assume that Nader has little to be cheerful about.

Yet he says there is one candidate who sticks out—who even gives him hope: Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

That might sound counterintuitive. Nader, of course, is known as a stalwart of the independent left, having first gained notoriety for his 1960s campaign to impose greater regulatory requirements on automakers—a policy act that would seem to contravene the libertarian understanding of justified governmental power. So I had to ask: how could he profess hope in Ron Paul, who almost certainly would have opposed the very regulations on which Nader built his career?

“Look at the latitude,” Nader says, referring to the potential for cooperation between libertarians and the left. “Military budget, foreign wars, empire, Patriot Act, corporate welfare—for starters. When you add those all up, that’s a foundational convergence. Progressives should do so good.”

I thought I’d bring up the subject of Ron Paul with Nader after seeing the two jointly interviewed on Fox Business Channel in January. Nader had caught me off guard when he identified an emergent left-libertarian alliance as “today’s most exciting new political dynamic.” It was easy to foresee objections that the left might raise: if progressives are in favor of expanding the welfare state, how well can they really get along with folks who go around quoting the likes of Hayek and Rothbard?

“That’s strategic sabotage,” Nader responds, sharply. “It’s an intellectual indulgence. … If they’re on your side, and you don’t compromise your positions, what do you care who they quote? Franklin Delano Roosevelt sided with Stalin against Hitler. Not to draw that analogy, I’m just saying—why did he side with Stalin? Because Stalin went along with everything FDR wanted.”

There may be an insurmountable impasse between the camps on social-safety-net spending. “But,” Nader says, “you could get together on corporate entitlements, subsidies, handouts, giveaways, bailouts. Ron Paul is dead set against all that. So are a lot of libertarian-conservatives. In fact, it’s almost a mark of being a libertarian-conservative—in contrast to being a corporatist-conservative.”

“Do you read all these right-wing theoreticians?” he goes on. “Almost every one of them warned about excessive corporate concentration. Hayek did, [Frank] Meyer did, even Adam Smith did in his own way.” He leaves the mechanics of a left-libertarian political coalition to be sussed out later.

If the issues around which progressives and libertarians can coalesce, I ask Nader, are the most intractable, deeply entrenched problems, is he proposing that such a coalition would be more tenable than the one currently cobbling together the Democratic Party, with its many Blue Dogs and neoliberals?

“Exactly,” Nader says. “Libertarians like Ron Paul are on our side on civil liberties. They’re on our side against the military-industrial complex. They’re on our side against Wall Street. They’re on our side for investor rights. That’s a foundational convergence,” he exhorts. “It’s not just itty-bitty stuff.”

Nader cites opposition to “the self-defeating, boomeranging drug war” as another source of common ground, in the face of both parties’ indifference—with the scant exceptions of a few House Democrats who favor decriminalizing marijuana—to drug prohibition’s many ills. Ron Paul’s rejection of the very notion that personal drug use should be a criminal offense is something that has resonated with younger supporters, often catalyzing their first moment of political consciousness. . . . ."

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Information Clearing House, and Tom Feeley, provided me with many of these and other articles. ICH also provides their readers with many excellent quotes.

Here's the latest:

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything." Alexander Hamilton -  Secretary of the Treasury of the United States (1789-95), 1757-1804

Class War? Part 3: "Occupy Wall Street" Protest & Mass Arrests

Yesterday, the New York Police arrested 700 plus protesters who were peacefully crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. As the American Spring shows signs of warming up at the beginning of Fall, peaceful protests across the country are increasing. Occupy Wall Street is showing Americans the only way to meaningful change is millions of Americans engaging in peaceful protest, standing up to the Corporate State and their police, filling their jails, clogging their courts, and bringing their commerce to a standstill. With many millions unemployed, with millions being forced out of their homes so that wealthy investors can take them for a song (a low price denied to those being foreclosed upon), and with tens of thousands of Americans homeless, there are plenty of frustrated folks that could make it happen if they can get beyond their fear of the Corporate State. What do they really have to lose? [Edited & added Chris Hedges & other videos, 10/3/11]
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Occupy Wall Street Protesters Take Brooklyn Bridge - 700+ Arrested


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Published on Friday, September 30, 2011 by TruthDig.com
#OccupyTogether: The Best Among Us
by Chris Hedges

. . . .
To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.
. . . .
The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.
. . . .
either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

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The following video was produced early in the occupation of Wall Street. NYC has told the protesters they may not camp in the park since the video was produced. There are several good interviews of people at the protest who explain why they came to Wall Street.

"Days of Rage" Occupy Wall St.


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Occupy Wall Street protests - live coverage
Includes:

11.37am: This is good. The New York Observer has posted a video of "an interview Fox News filmed, but doesn't want you to see".

New York Observer: Exclusive "Occupy Wall Street" Unaired Fox Footage


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Keith Olbermann Covers Occupy Wall Street Protests Media Blackout


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


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"2nd time I've fought for my country. 1st time I've known my enemy." #OccupyWallStreet
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List of Demands from the Occupy NYC General Assembly meetings.
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Sun Oct 02, 02:54 PM
Wall Street occupation inspires Canadian protesters
Josh Visser | CTVNews.ca Staff

Inspired by protesters along Wall Street and in other U.S. cities, hundreds are expected to occupy Toronto's Bay Street in two weeks to air their various grievances against the financial system and its wealthiest companies.

The protest near Wall Street in New York is entering its third week, and doesn't appear to be slowing down. In fact, a police crackdown has only emboldened protesters and some are now expecting the "occupation" to continue into the winter.

The organizers of Occupy Toronto plan to descend on King and Bay Streets on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 15 to set a base of operation to prepare for a march on that Monday. Organizers hope the occupation will last into the following week.

It's not clear how or if the goals of the Occupy Toronto organizers differ from their American counterparts. In the U.S., the main complaints have been bank bailouts, the lack of financial oversight that led to recession, foreclosures and high unemployment. . . . . .

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American Spring? 'Occupy Wall Street just the beginning'


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SHAMEFUL police action @ Occupy wall Street


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More:

About OCCUPY TOGETHER

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.
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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