How can we take it back?
- Thread starter Skarekrow
- Start date
The occupy movement helped bring lots of people together and out of that a network has formed
On one hand its strength came from its lack of clear leadership and demands because it enabled it to keep a wide appeal and it prevented the corporate forces from assassinating or corrupting any leaders
However the lack of clear demands also meant that the corporate forces were able to weather the storm (for now)
What i think would be disasterous is if the country desecended into some form of chaos and violence. So if a change that is favourable to the people is to occur from a tipping point, as you put it, then the best way to achieve this would be an organised massed, peaceful but determined GENERAL STRIKE
This would require enough of the work force to agree to put down tools and stop working until the demands of the people are met for example relating to banking reform, tax reform and taking the money out of politics.
Obviously people need to eat so they couldn't afford to strike for very long unless they found ways around the inevitable food shortages that a strike would cause for example through the planting up of public land and golf courses so the strike would need to be as decisive as possible to minimise the harm
The best way to ensure the strike is decisive is to ensure a large participation. So if a million workers striked the corporate elite would be nervous but they'd use the federal government to help them weather the storm. However if 50 million people striked it would all be over in days
This would need a large amount of coordination and for all participants to understand the dynamics of the situation and to have agreement over the demands
Would demands be enough or would an entirely new system be preferable? Some would want reforms and a re-enforcement of the constitution whislt others would want the end of capitalism....so those kind of rifts would need to be overcome
On one hand its strength came from its lack of clear leadership and demands because it enabled it to keep a wide appeal and it prevented the corporate forces from assassinating or corrupting any leaders
However the lack of clear demands also meant that the corporate forces were able to weather the storm (for now)
What i think would be disasterous is if the country desecended into some form of chaos and violence. So if a change that is favourable to the people is to occur from a tipping point, as you put it, then the best way to achieve this would be an organised massed, peaceful but determined GENERAL STRIKE
This would require enough of the work force to agree to put down tools and stop working until the demands of the people are met for example relating to banking reform, tax reform and taking the money out of politics.
Obviously people need to eat so they couldn't afford to strike for very long unless they found ways around the inevitable food shortages that a strike would cause for example through the planting up of public land and golf courses so the strike would need to be as decisive as possible to minimise the harm
The best way to ensure the strike is decisive is to ensure a large participation. So if a million workers striked the corporate elite would be nervous but they'd use the federal government to help them weather the storm. However if 50 million people striked it would all be over in days
This would need a large amount of coordination and for all participants to understand the dynamics of the situation and to have agreement over the demands
Would demands be enough or would an entirely new system be preferable? Some would want reforms and a re-enforcement of the constitution whislt others would want the end of capitalism....so those kind of rifts would need to be overcome
5 Things to Know About How Corporations Block Access to Everything from Miracle Drugs to Science Research
Our system of intellectual property rights is patently ridiculous.
Should a company be able to patent a breast cancer gene? What about a species of soybean? How about a tool for basic scientific research? Or even a patent for acquiring patents (see: Halliburton)?
Intellectual property rights are supposed to help inventors bring good things to life, but there’s increasing concern that they may be keeping us from getting the things we need.
In this wild and contested jungle of the law, which concerns things like patents and copyrights, questions about the implications of allowing limited monopolies on ideas are making headlines. Do they stifle innovation? Can they cause the public more harm than good? Trillions of dollars are at stake. Companies known as “patent trolls” are gobbling up patents, then going on lawsuit sprees and extracting fees against infringement. Corporations are using intellectual property law to squash competitors and block our access to things as vital as lifesaving drugs, to place restrictions on things as intimate as parts of the human body. Third World countries are kept from accessing essential public goods related to everything from food security to education.
Surely, the producers of new ideas should be able to profit from their creations. But furious debates over what should be protected and who should profit are calling attention to the many things that are going wrong in this area. For example, a recent front-page story in the New York Times detailed how diabetics are being held hostage in America by companies that follow Apple’s playbook to lock patients into buying expensive, patented products that quickly become obsolete. If you don’t buy the product, you don’t miss getting the new iPhone. You may die.
Intellectual property rights have come under intense scrutiny, a trend on display at a recent conference in Toronto on innovation and society, "Human After All", sponsored by the Institute for New Economist Thinking (INET) and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), where I moderated a panel on the topic. Let’s take a look at some of the burning questions and issues in play in this debate.
1. Why do we have intellectual property rights?
The notion of giving inventors exclusive rights for a limited time goes back to the medieval era. The first patent in America was granted in 1641 to one Samuel Winslow, who came up with a new way to make salt. Patents could cover both tangible objects and also intangible stuff like methods and ideas. The U.S. Constitution has something to say about patents, namely this:
The question of whether ideas themselves should be protected by patents troubled some of the Founders, who saw the potential for abuse. In an 1813 letter, Thomas Jefferson observed that unlike objects, ideas inherently want to be shared: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Intellectual property rights have expanded quite a bit since Jefferson's day. The Industrial Revolution saw brutal battles over inventions associated with things like the steam engine where the public good was often sacrificed to individual and corporate profits. In the early nineteen twenties, US patent law was revised to favor corporate interests. In 1930, the U.S. began to allow patents for living organisms with the Plant Patent Act. The Motion Picture Association of America, as it emerged, took a hard line on intellectual property and fought for broad protections. As new industries like biotechnology and nanotechnology popped up, companies and individuals sought additional protections for technology. The growth of the Internet set off a yet another wave of intellectual property rights related to patents and copyrights.
Today, what we have is a giant mess, a system plagued by bad actors and bad faith that has often become a means for corporations to smash competition and block human progress rather than advance knowledge. More time and energy is spent by companies coming up with new ways to sue each other than coming up with new ideas (think: Apple v. Samsung). The public purse is picked as taxpayer-funded investments in research are appropriated by profit-making companies. Our patent system fuels inequality by socializing the risk associated with research and discoveries while privatizing the gains. Meanwhile lawyers, as you might expect, are making out like bandits.
2. Patents have exploded since the 1980s.
If you talk to some of the bright-eyed folks in Silicon Valley, America is on an innovation roll. Since the 1980s, the number of patents sought has soared, and the pace is accelerating. Over the last two decades, businesses have increasingly used patents to sue or threaten to sue other companies to get them to pay licensing fees. 2012 was quite a year for patents: the number of court cases increased 29 percent in that year alone, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Costs associated with the litigation come to billions per year.
Michele Boldrin and David Levine, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly, have noted that in a single four-year period, from 1997 to 2001, patent applications leapt by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the number of lawyers working on intellectual property in America went from 5,500 to nearly 22,000.
But are we really getting so much more creative with all these patents? Boldrin and Levine don’t think so. It appears that the number of patents has grown not because there is more innovation, but simply because the number of things that could be patented grew.
As economists William Lazonick and Oner Tulum have pointed out, changes in the law have allowed certain parties, like venture capitalists, to grow rich on patents at the expense of the public. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made it easier for companies, particularly those in biotech, to profit from the results of government-backed research done in universities. Seen an ad for Botox lately? Lazonick and Tulum point out that Botox is a drug whose medical applications were developed in taxpayer-funded universities in the 1960s. In 1983, something known as the Orphan Drug Act allowed companies like Allergan, which got hold of Botox, to commercialize certain kinds of drugs that were developed for use in a small population when additional properties of the drugs were discovered. In 2013, Botox generated $1982 million in revenues for Allergan, of which 54 percent were for therapeutic uses that your doctor prescribes and 46 percent were for the cosmetic uses that the company advertises.
3. Intellectual property rights can block innovation.
One of the biggest arguments in favor of robust intellectual property rights is that they are supposed to drive innovation, giving big rewards to those who come up with new ideas. But a growing list of experts, such as Boldrin and Levine, counter that this is nonsense. “Intellectual monopoly is not a cause of innovation,” they write, “but it is rather an unwelcome consequence of it.” They argue that in young, dynamic industries, intellectual monopoly doesn’t play a major role – it’s only when the ideas run out that companies become obsessed with having the government protect the old ways of doing business.
In other words, an explosion in patents could be a sign that a country is getting less innovative, not more.
Boldrin and Levine provide numerous examples in their book of how patents shut down innovation, from a steam engine patent that may have delayed the Industrial Revolution by a couple of decades to the Wright brothers American patent on the airplane which forced innovative work in the industry to move to France.
More recently, Heidi Williams examined work done in the area of human genome sequencing by the Human Genome Project (a public entity) and also by Celera (a private company). Williams concluded that Celera’s intellectual property rights claims resulted in a persistent 20-30 percent reduction in subsequent scientific research and product development.
Economist Petra Moser states that if you look at history, intellectual property laws have always had the potential to squelch progress:
4. The public is getting harmed and cheated.
It’s increasingly clear that taxpayers are getting ripped off, particularly in areas like in pharmaceuticals. Through entities like the National Institutes of Health, the federal government pays for basic research that gets plundered by corporations that make tremendous profits (and then, of course, lobby to have their taxes reduced). Companies like Apple expect the U.S. government to protect their intellectual property rights all over the world, yet they assiduously avoid paying taxes.
Considering the fact that iPhones, for example, would not exist without taxpayer-funded research in everything from touchscreen technology to GPS, this is especially maddening.
Battles between companies and sovereign countries are heating up. Eli Lilly and the Canadian government are gearing up for a showdown since the Canadians took away the company’s rights to two popular new drugs, one for attention-deficit disorder and another for psychotic illness. Despite the fact that countries are supposed to have the right to set their own domestic laws for rules of medicine patents, big corporations are increasingly able to get around them and effectively challenge national policy. Free trade pacts have become a prime vehicle for this. The much-debated Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade pact being negotiated between North American and Asian countries and backed by President Obama, has provoked outrage because it would enhance drug company profits by protecting patents on drugs and medical procedures while blocking less expensive generic drugs. The fear is that powerful corporations will blow right past the laws of individual countries and use patents in ways that pose serious human rights questions.
5. Things don’t have to be this way.
While we certainly want to promote new ideas and to reward creativity, many feel that intellectual property laws aren’t the best way to do this. As Levine has written:
Clearly the notion of public benefit has to be vigorously defended in discussions of intellectual property rights. There are many ways the public good get a better deal. The government, for one, could claim rights to revenues for ideas and inventions that were funded with taxpayer money. Or it could force companies like Apple that benefit from such research to pay their share of taxes. So far, the government has not exercised its muscle because there is an imbalance of power between public and private sector.
We need to recognize that science and technology grow by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection blocks exactly what it’s supposed to enhance: ideas that help us live better. The intellectual property system needs to be reevaluated so that social and economic progress aren't hampered by laws that only reward the few, and the public good becomes a top priority.
Our system of intellectual property rights is patently ridiculous.
Should a company be able to patent a breast cancer gene? What about a species of soybean? How about a tool for basic scientific research? Or even a patent for acquiring patents (see: Halliburton)?
Intellectual property rights are supposed to help inventors bring good things to life, but there’s increasing concern that they may be keeping us from getting the things we need.
In this wild and contested jungle of the law, which concerns things like patents and copyrights, questions about the implications of allowing limited monopolies on ideas are making headlines. Do they stifle innovation? Can they cause the public more harm than good? Trillions of dollars are at stake. Companies known as “patent trolls” are gobbling up patents, then going on lawsuit sprees and extracting fees against infringement. Corporations are using intellectual property law to squash competitors and block our access to things as vital as lifesaving drugs, to place restrictions on things as intimate as parts of the human body. Third World countries are kept from accessing essential public goods related to everything from food security to education.
Surely, the producers of new ideas should be able to profit from their creations. But furious debates over what should be protected and who should profit are calling attention to the many things that are going wrong in this area. For example, a recent front-page story in the New York Times detailed how diabetics are being held hostage in America by companies that follow Apple’s playbook to lock patients into buying expensive, patented products that quickly become obsolete. If you don’t buy the product, you don’t miss getting the new iPhone. You may die.
Intellectual property rights have come under intense scrutiny, a trend on display at a recent conference in Toronto on innovation and society, "Human After All", sponsored by the Institute for New Economist Thinking (INET) and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), where I moderated a panel on the topic. Let’s take a look at some of the burning questions and issues in play in this debate.
1. Why do we have intellectual property rights?
The notion of giving inventors exclusive rights for a limited time goes back to the medieval era. The first patent in America was granted in 1641 to one Samuel Winslow, who came up with a new way to make salt. Patents could cover both tangible objects and also intangible stuff like methods and ideas. The U.S. Constitution has something to say about patents, namely this:
“The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries…”
Notice the reasoning: We the People, through our representatives, grant intellectual property rights so that we can move knowledge forward – not enrich a few people at the expense of everyone else.
The question of whether ideas themselves should be protected by patents troubled some of the Founders, who saw the potential for abuse. In an 1813 letter, Thomas Jefferson observed that unlike objects, ideas inherently want to be shared: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Intellectual property rights have expanded quite a bit since Jefferson's day. The Industrial Revolution saw brutal battles over inventions associated with things like the steam engine where the public good was often sacrificed to individual and corporate profits. In the early nineteen twenties, US patent law was revised to favor corporate interests. In 1930, the U.S. began to allow patents for living organisms with the Plant Patent Act. The Motion Picture Association of America, as it emerged, took a hard line on intellectual property and fought for broad protections. As new industries like biotechnology and nanotechnology popped up, companies and individuals sought additional protections for technology. The growth of the Internet set off a yet another wave of intellectual property rights related to patents and copyrights.
Today, what we have is a giant mess, a system plagued by bad actors and bad faith that has often become a means for corporations to smash competition and block human progress rather than advance knowledge. More time and energy is spent by companies coming up with new ways to sue each other than coming up with new ideas (think: Apple v. Samsung). The public purse is picked as taxpayer-funded investments in research are appropriated by profit-making companies. Our patent system fuels inequality by socializing the risk associated with research and discoveries while privatizing the gains. Meanwhile lawyers, as you might expect, are making out like bandits.
2. Patents have exploded since the 1980s.
If you talk to some of the bright-eyed folks in Silicon Valley, America is on an innovation roll. Since the 1980s, the number of patents sought has soared, and the pace is accelerating. Over the last two decades, businesses have increasingly used patents to sue or threaten to sue other companies to get them to pay licensing fees. 2012 was quite a year for patents: the number of court cases increased 29 percent in that year alone, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Costs associated with the litigation come to billions per year.
Michele Boldrin and David Levine, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly, have noted that in a single four-year period, from 1997 to 2001, patent applications leapt by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the number of lawyers working on intellectual property in America went from 5,500 to nearly 22,000.
But are we really getting so much more creative with all these patents? Boldrin and Levine don’t think so. It appears that the number of patents has grown not because there is more innovation, but simply because the number of things that could be patented grew.
As economists William Lazonick and Oner Tulum have pointed out, changes in the law have allowed certain parties, like venture capitalists, to grow rich on patents at the expense of the public. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made it easier for companies, particularly those in biotech, to profit from the results of government-backed research done in universities. Seen an ad for Botox lately? Lazonick and Tulum point out that Botox is a drug whose medical applications were developed in taxpayer-funded universities in the 1960s. In 1983, something known as the Orphan Drug Act allowed companies like Allergan, which got hold of Botox, to commercialize certain kinds of drugs that were developed for use in a small population when additional properties of the drugs were discovered. In 2013, Botox generated $1982 million in revenues for Allergan, of which 54 percent were for therapeutic uses that your doctor prescribes and 46 percent were for the cosmetic uses that the company advertises.
3. Intellectual property rights can block innovation.
One of the biggest arguments in favor of robust intellectual property rights is that they are supposed to drive innovation, giving big rewards to those who come up with new ideas. But a growing list of experts, such as Boldrin and Levine, counter that this is nonsense. “Intellectual monopoly is not a cause of innovation,” they write, “but it is rather an unwelcome consequence of it.” They argue that in young, dynamic industries, intellectual monopoly doesn’t play a major role – it’s only when the ideas run out that companies become obsessed with having the government protect the old ways of doing business.
In other words, an explosion in patents could be a sign that a country is getting less innovative, not more.
Boldrin and Levine provide numerous examples in their book of how patents shut down innovation, from a steam engine patent that may have delayed the Industrial Revolution by a couple of decades to the Wright brothers American patent on the airplane which forced innovative work in the industry to move to France.
More recently, Heidi Williams examined work done in the area of human genome sequencing by the Human Genome Project (a public entity) and also by Celera (a private company). Williams concluded that Celera’s intellectual property rights claims resulted in a persistent 20-30 percent reduction in subsequent scientific research and product development.
Economist Petra Moser states that if you look at history, intellectual property laws have always had the potential to squelch progress:
"Overall, the weight of the existing historical evidence suggests that patent policies, which grant strong intellectual property rights to early generations of inventors, may discourage innovation. On the contrary, policies that encourage the diffusion of ideas and modify patent laws to facilitate entry and encourage competition may be an effective mechanism to encourage innovation.”
4. The public is getting harmed and cheated.
It’s increasingly clear that taxpayers are getting ripped off, particularly in areas like in pharmaceuticals. Through entities like the National Institutes of Health, the federal government pays for basic research that gets plundered by corporations that make tremendous profits (and then, of course, lobby to have their taxes reduced). Companies like Apple expect the U.S. government to protect their intellectual property rights all over the world, yet they assiduously avoid paying taxes.
Considering the fact that iPhones, for example, would not exist without taxpayer-funded research in everything from touchscreen technology to GPS, this is especially maddening.
Battles between companies and sovereign countries are heating up. Eli Lilly and the Canadian government are gearing up for a showdown since the Canadians took away the company’s rights to two popular new drugs, one for attention-deficit disorder and another for psychotic illness. Despite the fact that countries are supposed to have the right to set their own domestic laws for rules of medicine patents, big corporations are increasingly able to get around them and effectively challenge national policy. Free trade pacts have become a prime vehicle for this. The much-debated Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade pact being negotiated between North American and Asian countries and backed by President Obama, has provoked outrage because it would enhance drug company profits by protecting patents on drugs and medical procedures while blocking less expensive generic drugs. The fear is that powerful corporations will blow right past the laws of individual countries and use patents in ways that pose serious human rights questions.
5. Things don’t have to be this way.
While we certainly want to promote new ideas and to reward creativity, many feel that intellectual property laws aren’t the best way to do this. As Levine has written:
“It is a long and dangerous jump from the assertion that innovators deserve compensation for their efforts to the conclusion that patents and copyrights, that is monopoly, are the best or the only way of providing that reward.”
Several of the economists I spoke to at the INET/CIGI conference, such as Italian economist Giovanni Dosi and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have suggested other ways of rewarding inventors, such as prizes. Stiglitz has pointed out that prizes, as opposed to patents, could help reward research that might not be commercially profitable, like developing a cure for AIDs, or other urgent global problems.
Clearly the notion of public benefit has to be vigorously defended in discussions of intellectual property rights. There are many ways the public good get a better deal. The government, for one, could claim rights to revenues for ideas and inventions that were funded with taxpayer money. Or it could force companies like Apple that benefit from such research to pay their share of taxes. So far, the government has not exercised its muscle because there is an imbalance of power between public and private sector.
We need to recognize that science and technology grow by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection blocks exactly what it’s supposed to enhance: ideas that help us live better. The intellectual property system needs to be reevaluated so that social and economic progress aren't hampered by laws that only reward the few, and the public good becomes a top priority.
Robert Reich: 7 Reasons Why the Minimum Wage Should Be Raised to $15 an Hour
The esteemed economist explains how it helps everyone, and the overall economy.
Momentum is building to raise the minimum wage. Several states have already taken action — Connecticut has boosted it to $10.10 by 2017, the Maryland legislature just approved a similar measure, Minnesota lawmakers just reached a deal to hike it to $9.50. A few cities have been more ambitious — Washington, D.C. and its surrounding counties raised it to $11.50, Seattle is considering $15.00
Senate Democrats will soon introduce legislation raising it nationally to $10.10, from the current $7.25 an hour.
All this is fine as far as it goes. But we need to be more ambitious. We should be raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour.
Here are seven reasons why:
1. Had the minimum wage of 1968 simply stayed even with inflation, it would be more than $10 an hour today. But the typical worker is also about twice as productive as then. Some of those productivity gains should go to workers at the bottom.
2. $10.10 isn’t enough to lift all workers and their families out of poverty. Most low-wage workers aren’t young teenagers; they’re major breadwinners for their families, and many are women. And they and their families need a higher minimum.
3. For this reason, a $10.10 minimum would also still require the rest of us to pay Medicaid, food-stamps, and other programs necessary to get poor families out of poverty — thereby indirectly subsidizing employers who refuse to pay more. Bloomberg View describes McDonalds and Walmart as “America’s biggest welfare queens” because their employees receive so much public assistance. (Some, like McDonalds, even advise their employees to use public programs because their pay is so low.)
4. A $15/hour minimum won’t result in major job losses because it would put money in the pockets of millions of low-wage workers who will spend it — thereby giving working families and the overall economy a boost, and creating jobs. (When I was Labor Secretary in 1996 and we raised the minimum wage, business predicted millions of job losses; in fact, we had more job gains over the next four years than in any comparable period in American history.)
5. A $15/hour minimum is unlikely to result in higher prices because most businesses directly affected by it are in intense competition for consumers, and will take the raise out of profits rather than raise their prices. But because the higher minimum will also attract more workers into the job market, employers will have more choice of whom to hire, and thereby have more reliable employees — resulting in lower turnover costs and higher productivity.
6. Since Republicans will push Democrats to go even lower than $10.10, it’s doubly important to be clear about what’s right in the first place. Democrats should be going for a higher minimum rather than listening to Republican demands for a smaller one.
7. At a time in our history when 95 percent of all economic gains are going to the top 1 percent, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour isn’t just smart economics and good politics. It’s also the morally right thing to do.
Call your senators and members of congress today to tell them $15 an hour is the least American workers deserve. You can reach them at 202-224-3121.
The esteemed economist explains how it helps everyone, and the overall economy.
Momentum is building to raise the minimum wage. Several states have already taken action — Connecticut has boosted it to $10.10 by 2017, the Maryland legislature just approved a similar measure, Minnesota lawmakers just reached a deal to hike it to $9.50. A few cities have been more ambitious — Washington, D.C. and its surrounding counties raised it to $11.50, Seattle is considering $15.00
Senate Democrats will soon introduce legislation raising it nationally to $10.10, from the current $7.25 an hour.
All this is fine as far as it goes. But we need to be more ambitious. We should be raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour.
Here are seven reasons why:
1. Had the minimum wage of 1968 simply stayed even with inflation, it would be more than $10 an hour today. But the typical worker is also about twice as productive as then. Some of those productivity gains should go to workers at the bottom.
2. $10.10 isn’t enough to lift all workers and their families out of poverty. Most low-wage workers aren’t young teenagers; they’re major breadwinners for their families, and many are women. And they and their families need a higher minimum.
3. For this reason, a $10.10 minimum would also still require the rest of us to pay Medicaid, food-stamps, and other programs necessary to get poor families out of poverty — thereby indirectly subsidizing employers who refuse to pay more. Bloomberg View describes McDonalds and Walmart as “America’s biggest welfare queens” because their employees receive so much public assistance. (Some, like McDonalds, even advise their employees to use public programs because their pay is so low.)
4. A $15/hour minimum won’t result in major job losses because it would put money in the pockets of millions of low-wage workers who will spend it — thereby giving working families and the overall economy a boost, and creating jobs. (When I was Labor Secretary in 1996 and we raised the minimum wage, business predicted millions of job losses; in fact, we had more job gains over the next four years than in any comparable period in American history.)
5. A $15/hour minimum is unlikely to result in higher prices because most businesses directly affected by it are in intense competition for consumers, and will take the raise out of profits rather than raise their prices. But because the higher minimum will also attract more workers into the job market, employers will have more choice of whom to hire, and thereby have more reliable employees — resulting in lower turnover costs and higher productivity.
6. Since Republicans will push Democrats to go even lower than $10.10, it’s doubly important to be clear about what’s right in the first place. Democrats should be going for a higher minimum rather than listening to Republican demands for a smaller one.
7. At a time in our history when 95 percent of all economic gains are going to the top 1 percent, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour isn’t just smart economics and good politics. It’s also the morally right thing to do.
Call your senators and members of congress today to tell them $15 an hour is the least American workers deserve. You can reach them at 202-224-3121.
Robert Reich: Billionaires are poisoning American democracy
The former secretary of labor examines how the Kochs and Adelsons use their vast wealth to undermine the law
ROBERT REICH, ROBERTREICH.ORG
The former secretary of labor examines how the Kochs and Adelsons use their vast wealth to undermine the law
ROBERT REICH, ROBERTREICH.ORG
Charles and David Koch should not be blamed for having more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans put together. Nor should they be condemned for their petrochemical empire. As far as I know, they’ve played by the rules and obeyed the laws.
They’re also entitled to their own right-wing political views. It’s a free country.
But in using their vast wealth to change those rules and laws in order to fit their political views, the Koch brothers are undermining our democracy. That’s a betrayal of the most precious thing Americans share.
The Kochs exemplify a new reality that strikes at the heart of America. The vast wealth that has accumulated at the top of the American economy is not itself the problem. The problem is that political power tends to rise to where the money is. And this combination of great wealth with political power leads to greater and greater accumulations and concentrations of both – tilting the playing field in favor of the Kochs and their ilk, and against the rest of us.
America is not yet an oligarchy, but that’s where the Koch’s and a few other billionaires are taking us.
American democracy used to depend on political parties that more or less represented most of us. Political scientists of the 1950s and 1960s marveled at American “pluralism,” by which they meant the capacities of parties and other membership groups to reflect the preferences of the vast majority of citizens.
Then around a quarter century ago, as income and wealth began concentrating at the top, the Republican and Democratic Parties started to morph into mechanisms for extracting money, mostly from wealthy people.
Finally, after the Supreme Court’s “Citizen’s United” decision in 2010, billionaires began creating their own political mechanisms, separate from the political parties. They started providing big money directly to political candidates of their choice, and creating their own media campaigns to sway public opinion toward their own views.
So far in the 2014 election cycle, “Americans for Prosperity,” the Koch brother’s political front group, has aired more than 17,000 broadcast TV commercials, compared with only 2,100 aired by Republican Party groups.
“Americans for Prosperity” has also been outspending top Democratic super PACs in nearly all of the Senate races Republicans are targeting this year. In seven of the nine races the difference in total spending is at least two-to-one and Democratic super PACs have had virtually no air presence in five of the nine states.
The Kochs have spawned several imitators. Through the end of February, four of the top five contributors to 2014 super-PACs are now giving money to political operations they themselves created, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
For example, billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and his son, Todd, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, have their own $25 million political operation called “Ending Spending.” The group is now investing heavily in TV ads against Republican Representative Walter Jones in a North Carolina primary (they blame Jones for too often voting with Obama).
Their ad attacking Democratic New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen for supporting Obama’s health-care law has become a template for similar ads funded by the Koch’s “Americans for Prosperity” in Senate races across the country.
When billionaires supplant political parties, candidates are beholden directly to the billionaires. And if and when those candidates win election, the billionaires will be completely in charge.
At this very moment, Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (worth an estimated $37.9 billion) is busy interviewing potential Republican candidates whom he might fund, in what’s being called the “Sheldon Primary.”
“Certainly the ‘Sheldon Primary’ is an important primary for any Republican running for president,” says Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush. “It goes without saying that anybody running for the Republican nomination would want to have Sheldon at his side.”
The new billionaire political bosses aren’t limited to Republicans. Democratic-leaning billionaires Tom Steyer, a former hedge-fund manager, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have also created their own political groups. But even if the two sides were equal, billionaires squaring off against each other isn’t remotely a democracy.
In his much-talked-about new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty explains why the rich have become steadily richer while the share of national income going to wages continues to drop. He shows that when wealth is concentrated in relatively few hands, and the income generated by that wealth grows more rapidly than the overall economy — as has been the case in the United States and many other advanced economies for years — the richest receive almost all the income growth.
Logically, this leads to greater and greater concentrations of income and wealth in the future — dynastic fortunes that are handed down from generation to generation, as they were prior to the twentieth century in much of the world.
The trend was reversed temporarily in the twentieth century by the Great Depression, two terrible wars, the development of the modern welfare state, and strong labor unions. But Piketty is justifiably concerned about the future.
A new gilded age is starting to look a lot like the old one. The only way to stop this is through concerted political action. Yet the only large-scale political action we’re witnessing is that of Charles and David Koch, and their billionaire imitators.
Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School 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. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie "Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.
They’re also entitled to their own right-wing political views. It’s a free country.
But in using their vast wealth to change those rules and laws in order to fit their political views, the Koch brothers are undermining our democracy. That’s a betrayal of the most precious thing Americans share.
The Kochs exemplify a new reality that strikes at the heart of America. The vast wealth that has accumulated at the top of the American economy is not itself the problem. The problem is that political power tends to rise to where the money is. And this combination of great wealth with political power leads to greater and greater accumulations and concentrations of both – tilting the playing field in favor of the Kochs and their ilk, and against the rest of us.
America is not yet an oligarchy, but that’s where the Koch’s and a few other billionaires are taking us.
American democracy used to depend on political parties that more or less represented most of us. Political scientists of the 1950s and 1960s marveled at American “pluralism,” by which they meant the capacities of parties and other membership groups to reflect the preferences of the vast majority of citizens.
Then around a quarter century ago, as income and wealth began concentrating at the top, the Republican and Democratic Parties started to morph into mechanisms for extracting money, mostly from wealthy people.
Finally, after the Supreme Court’s “Citizen’s United” decision in 2010, billionaires began creating their own political mechanisms, separate from the political parties. They started providing big money directly to political candidates of their choice, and creating their own media campaigns to sway public opinion toward their own views.
So far in the 2014 election cycle, “Americans for Prosperity,” the Koch brother’s political front group, has aired more than 17,000 broadcast TV commercials, compared with only 2,100 aired by Republican Party groups.
“Americans for Prosperity” has also been outspending top Democratic super PACs in nearly all of the Senate races Republicans are targeting this year. In seven of the nine races the difference in total spending is at least two-to-one and Democratic super PACs have had virtually no air presence in five of the nine states.
The Kochs have spawned several imitators. Through the end of February, four of the top five contributors to 2014 super-PACs are now giving money to political operations they themselves created, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
For example, billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and his son, Todd, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, have their own $25 million political operation called “Ending Spending.” The group is now investing heavily in TV ads against Republican Representative Walter Jones in a North Carolina primary (they blame Jones for too often voting with Obama).
Their ad attacking Democratic New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen for supporting Obama’s health-care law has become a template for similar ads funded by the Koch’s “Americans for Prosperity” in Senate races across the country.
When billionaires supplant political parties, candidates are beholden directly to the billionaires. And if and when those candidates win election, the billionaires will be completely in charge.
At this very moment, Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (worth an estimated $37.9 billion) is busy interviewing potential Republican candidates whom he might fund, in what’s being called the “Sheldon Primary.”
“Certainly the ‘Sheldon Primary’ is an important primary for any Republican running for president,” says Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush. “It goes without saying that anybody running for the Republican nomination would want to have Sheldon at his side.”
The new billionaire political bosses aren’t limited to Republicans. Democratic-leaning billionaires Tom Steyer, a former hedge-fund manager, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have also created their own political groups. But even if the two sides were equal, billionaires squaring off against each other isn’t remotely a democracy.
In his much-talked-about new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty explains why the rich have become steadily richer while the share of national income going to wages continues to drop. He shows that when wealth is concentrated in relatively few hands, and the income generated by that wealth grows more rapidly than the overall economy — as has been the case in the United States and many other advanced economies for years — the richest receive almost all the income growth.
Logically, this leads to greater and greater concentrations of income and wealth in the future — dynastic fortunes that are handed down from generation to generation, as they were prior to the twentieth century in much of the world.
The trend was reversed temporarily in the twentieth century by the Great Depression, two terrible wars, the development of the modern welfare state, and strong labor unions. But Piketty is justifiably concerned about the future.
A new gilded age is starting to look a lot like the old one. The only way to stop this is through concerted political action. Yet the only large-scale political action we’re witnessing is that of Charles and David Koch, and their billionaire imitators.
Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School 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. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie "Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.
Inequality explained in pie charts (made of actual pie)
When one of you asked, "Are the rich getting too much of the economic pie?" the team behind Economics in Plain English got pretty excited. Because you said "pie." So we headed to Dangerously Delicious Pies in northeast Washington, D.C., with business editor Derek Thompson to explain income inequality over dessert. We ordered three pies -- peanut butter, blueberry, and something amazing called the "Baltimore Bomb" -- to make three charts that illustrate the income and wealth gap in the U.S. We're not the first to mix math and pastry, as we discovered recently, but we hope this video offers a tasty perspective on a complex economic question.
[video=youtube_share;21DrOfLH5WQ]http://youtu.be/21DrOfLH5WQ[/video]
When one of you asked, "Are the rich getting too much of the economic pie?" the team behind Economics in Plain English got pretty excited. Because you said "pie." So we headed to Dangerously Delicious Pies in northeast Washington, D.C., with business editor Derek Thompson to explain income inequality over dessert. We ordered three pies -- peanut butter, blueberry, and something amazing called the "Baltimore Bomb" -- to make three charts that illustrate the income and wealth gap in the U.S. We're not the first to mix math and pastry, as we discovered recently, but we hope this video offers a tasty perspective on a complex economic question.
[video=youtube_share;21DrOfLH5WQ]http://youtu.be/21DrOfLH5WQ[/video]
If the economy is working well for you, congratulations! You’re among the lucky few who are served by capitalism. But if things go the way they have been for the last several decades — with poor people staying poor and a lot of others getting poorer — capitalism as we know it won’t last. Thankfully, we have options. Revolution is one of them. But probably not the kind most people think of.
[video=youtube_share;qCDV7IUqSfs]http://youtu.be/qCDV7IUqSfs[/video]
[video=youtube_share;qCDV7IUqSfs]http://youtu.be/qCDV7IUqSfs[/video]
I know we’ve past Valentine’s Day...but keeping with the message of “how can we take it back?” I think that this video fits squarely into what we should strive to overcome in our world.
Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be either A) mushy and consumerist or B) desperate and lonely. There is an option C — to make it a day of empowerment and building support for a greater cause.
It is a shocking disgrace that one-third of all women and girls will be raped or beaten in their lifetimes. This beautiful and inspiring short film is a call for all of us to stand with those 1 billion women on Feb. 14 and beyond.
Trigger warning: This video opens with graphic depictions of domestic violence that can be tough on both the eyes and heart.
[video=vimeo;49860523]http://vimeo.com/49860523[/video]
Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be either A) mushy and consumerist or B) desperate and lonely. There is an option C — to make it a day of empowerment and building support for a greater cause.
It is a shocking disgrace that one-third of all women and girls will be raped or beaten in their lifetimes. This beautiful and inspiring short film is a call for all of us to stand with those 1 billion women on Feb. 14 and beyond.
Trigger warning: This video opens with graphic depictions of domestic violence that can be tough on both the eyes and heart.
[video=vimeo;49860523]http://vimeo.com/49860523[/video]
If the GOP's Obamacare Hissy Fit Seems Bad–You Won't Believe the Plot to Overthrow FDR
The right's freak out over the social safety net is nothing new.
Every baby step toward guaranteeing American working people a minimum of economic security with new social insurance programs has been greeted with howls of horror and outrage – and predictions that the end of the Republic is near. Every new addition to the safety net has been met with a concerted campaign by conservatives and the business establishment to undermine it. Eighty years after it was signed into law, the Social Security Act, arguably Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s signature piece of legislation, still is under attack from the right.
Last week, historian Harvey J. Kaye told Bill Moyers how FDR created a progressive generation that helped change American society in dramatic ways. Investigative journalist Sally Denton details a darker reality of that period in her 2011 book, FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right. It was a time, she writes, in which radicals of various stripes questioned the viability of American democracy and a group of bankers went so far as to plot to overthrow the president.
On Saturday, the 69th anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, BillMoyers.com spoke with Denton about this poorly remembered history. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.
Joshua Holland: Today, we think of FDR as a heroic figure. He remains one of the most popular presidents in the public’s imagination. How did business interests react to his presidency at the time — and to the significant changes he was bringing about with the New Deal?
Sally Denton: My book focuses on the year 1933, his first year in office, and there was great alarm throughout the country. It was the height of the Great Depression, and there was a sense that he was moving the country in a dangerous direction, especially among the moneyed interests. They saw him as a traitor to his class. There was concern that he had taken the dollar off the gold standard and there were elements on Wall Street and in major American corporations that were very worried about where he was heading.
There are parallels to today, when we see the same kind of hue and cry, and fear that America is turning socialist. But remember that Franklin Roosevelt was an über capitalist, so in retrospect, it all seems a little bit disingenuous, if not silly.
Holland: There are some startling similarities in the rhetoric that was used back then. John Taber was a Republican representative from New York, and he said of Social Security, “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers.” Daniel Reed, another Republican from New York warned, “The lash of the dictator will be felt, and 25 million free American citizens will for the first time submit themselves to a fingerprint test.” A Republican Congressional committee put out a statement claiming that Social Security would “impose a crushing burden on industry and labor,” and “establish a bureaucracy in the field of insurance” that “would destroy private pensions.”
It’s the kind of rhetoric that one might hear today about the Affordable Care Act – another rather modest social insurance program that’s supposedly depriving us of liberty.
Denton: That’s true. I write a great deal about the various organizations that got their start around that time in response to the New Deal, many of which later morphed into modern conservative institutions.
But I also explore the populism of Huey Long, who was approaching FDR from the left, and who thought he was not doing enough to redistribute the wealth. And then there was the right-wing populism of Father Coughlin. They led two very popular populist movements of the time, both of which were focused on this deep dissatisfaction with the role that government was playing – the role that Franklin Roosevelt wanted government to play – and they were equally vitriolic and angry from opposite sides. I found that fascinating.
I called that section of the book, “a rainbow of colored shirts.” There were silver shirts and black shirts and brown shirts. Some were Christian fundamentalists, some were extremely anti-Semitic, some were very anti-interventionist/isolationist. There was an anti-European impulse that ran very deep. There was a great collection of these kind of nascent organizations that were really just coming together to respond to what seemed to the right wing a very dangerous new administration.
Holland: In the period before World War II, fascism and communism were – not mainstream, but they were considered to be legitimate ideologies to a far greater degree than after the war.
Denton: That’s right. And Huey Long on the left and Father Coughlin on the right kind of symbolized that. Father Coughlin was rabidly anti-communist, and so even though they had some of the same complaints about the concentration of power in government, Coughlin thought that Huey Long had communist tendencies, which he saw as the most dangerous thing in the world. And Huey Long thought that Coughlin had fascist tendencies, which was really the extreme form of corporate capitalism with unfettered regulation.
There was a great intellectual pursuit on all sides about what the best form of government intervention was at this point. In 1933, there were thousands and thousands of unemployed and impoverished and hungry people roaming the streets of America. There was a great fear that there actually could be a revolution – that there could be violence.
In fact, there had been violence the year before, when the Bonus Army was dispersed by federal troops. So all of this was very real. It wasn’t like today’s armchair conversations about various forms of government. Everything was in play. Hitler was in play, Mussolini was in play. It was all happening.
Holland: What was the Bankers Putsch?
Denton: The Bankers Putsch was an ill-fated plot, sometimes called the Business Plot or the Wall Street Putsch. There was a famous, heroic marine general named Smedley Butler, who was kind of the soldier’s soldier, the veteran’s veteran. He had great influence with the veterans, and this was at a moment when there were a half million veterans who were trying to get their bonuses from World War I. The bonuses weren’t supposed to be released until 1945, but because so many of the veterans were starving, there was a great movement afoot in 1932 to get those bonuses released early.
And Smedley Butler claimed that he was approached by a couple of veterans who had connections to Wall Street financiers who were planning a nonviolent coup, a takeover of the Roosevelt Administration. They claimed to have $3 million that they were willing to spend toward this end, and they said that they had some armaments ready. And their theory was that Roosevelt was in over his head – again, we see a lot of the same rhetoric that we hear with Obama. And they thought FDR would welcome somebody coming in and taking charge because he didn’t know what to do. That was the theory, that they would go in and, because these men who were supplying the money were of Roosevelt’s class, Roosevelt would agree to their demands and become kind of a ceremonial figurehead. He would let these stronger, more military types control the White House.
Butler blew the whistle on it, so it never got very far at all. There were congressional investigations and there was an FBI investigation, and the media reported various aspects of it. But both the plot and the investigation were stopped before they got very far. So it’s unclear how much of it was a form of insanity on the part of the plotters and how much they really had any legitimate financial and military support. But it’s a fascinating story of that year.
Holland: Smedley Butler wrote a book called, War is a Racket, which is a damning criticism of what would later be called the “military industrial complex.” It’s strange that they would’ve seen him as a potential ally. He was also a Roosevelt supporter, no?
Denton: Well, he was a Republican and had run for Congress as a Republican. But he was not a huge FDR fan. Although I think he became one down the road.
But, yes, he’s the one who said that the marines were just racketeers for the capitalists. And he probably aligned himself more with Roosevelt after Roosevelt made clear that he thought that the US military should not be acting as enforcers for United Fruit throughout the world.
I think the impetus for selecting him was that there was no other military figure whom this half million-strong potential army of veterans would follow, and there must’ve been an assumption that Butler was malleable enough to stand up for the veterans above all else. And it backfired. He became the whistleblower and told the government what was going on.
Holland: There was also an assassination attempt against FDR in 1933.
Denton: Yes. Five people were wounded and the mayor of Chicago was killed in an attempted assassination of FDR. An Italian immigrant named Guiseppe Zangara was responsible. Roosevelt was coming into Miami, and he had not yet taken office. In fact, that was one of the reasons that the inauguration was changed from March to January, because there was this long interregnum between when Roosevelt was elected in November of 1932 and when he took office in March of 1933. And at the time, the country’s falling apart and nobody’s in charge – Herbert Hoover’s thrown his hands up and is appalled that he’s lost the election, and the country’s really teetering.
Roosevelt was cruising around the Caribbean with some of the people that had become part of his brain trust and his advisers, and they came into Miami. There was a motorcade taking them downtown, and when they got to this ballpark where FDR started to speak, this Italian laborer opened fire. Anton Cermak, who was the mayor of Chicago, had just reached out his hand to shake hands with Roosevelt and he got hit. And Roosevelt insisted that the Secret Service put Cermak in the back of the car with him and they sped off, and he lived for a short time and then died of infection. There were four other spectators who were also hit in the fire.
Zangara was quickly subdued and taken to the jail in Miami and interrogated, and he said he wanted to kill all capitalists. That was his motivation. So he was coming from the opposite side of the bankers. He was found guilty and executed in Florida’s electric chair.
Holland: It’s interesting how these stories have become somewhat lost in our popular history.
Denton: The coup attempt was dismissed and marginalized – and even ridiculed. Zangara was railing against capitalists, and saw Roosevelt as – he just assumed that he was also a raging capitalist fascist, and he was a very anti-Mussolini, anti-fascist labor activist.
And both of these events, the Wall Street Putsch and the assassination attempt, have been so marginalized in the Roosevelt history that I became fascinated by how deep this impulse against Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran, and how far people were willing to go to see him destroyed.
Joshua Holland is Senior Digital Producer at BillMoyers.com, and host of Politics and Reality Radio. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.
Attacking corporatism, consumerism, elitist wealth patterns etc., its all kind of old and most of the implied designs, of both left and right wing because at the radical reaches of each there is a tacit agreement, even if they have different definitions and if description does not equal prescription, havent worked.
Consumer sovereignty and the democracy of markets approximating perfect competition and achieving optimal allocative efficiency has failed but have most of the alternatives, most of which have assumed an even greater, more deliberative, more responsible, more exacting, attentive populous than theoretical capitalism (at least more lately, there are still elite or paternalistic hopes in some left wing circles).
I think the triumph of managerialism in every single sphere of human life is a major, major factor in this and has not been properly understood as a root cause, hence there being little in the way of formulating alternatives with that in mind too. It has transformed politics, most politicians and parties are judged by their peers and the "king makers" in the media or wealthy elites by their capacity to "manage expectations" among their supporters and the public generally, meaning stability of society at large, security for the elite (particularly of their "legacies"), and not much change or change only in a particular direction, ie the race to the bottom.
However, a big part of this escapes being reported because its not that interesting, public interest has been pretty successfully managed away from this sort of thing.
I wonder if there are going to be developments eventually when shareholders or the wealthiest decide they have got to find a way to downsize the managers too, especially given that the managers are now more and more keen to demand the same income and treatment as the elites they serve. I dont believe that this is liable to happen until such a time as the even worse conditions have been experienced by the general population but everything's eventual.
There are measures that I expect to happen before that too though, an assets based system of welfare, not because it makes for freedom or anything like that, it makes undreamt of privatisations possible, it makes a single price tagged welfare state costing possible for flighty capital globally shopping between welfare regimes, it makes the possibility of a complete transition from responsible to representative government possible (which I think would make for pretty unrepresentative government but anyway).
Then again assets based welfare could possibly point up alternatives, depending upon whether or not people's time is taken up providing social services for "free" to their communities as volunteers or spent in a poor man's consumerism, ie alcoholism, assholery, or break with those things.
Consumer sovereignty and the democracy of markets approximating perfect competition and achieving optimal allocative efficiency has failed but have most of the alternatives, most of which have assumed an even greater, more deliberative, more responsible, more exacting, attentive populous than theoretical capitalism (at least more lately, there are still elite or paternalistic hopes in some left wing circles).
I think the triumph of managerialism in every single sphere of human life is a major, major factor in this and has not been properly understood as a root cause, hence there being little in the way of formulating alternatives with that in mind too. It has transformed politics, most politicians and parties are judged by their peers and the "king makers" in the media or wealthy elites by their capacity to "manage expectations" among their supporters and the public generally, meaning stability of society at large, security for the elite (particularly of their "legacies"), and not much change or change only in a particular direction, ie the race to the bottom.
However, a big part of this escapes being reported because its not that interesting, public interest has been pretty successfully managed away from this sort of thing.
I wonder if there are going to be developments eventually when shareholders or the wealthiest decide they have got to find a way to downsize the managers too, especially given that the managers are now more and more keen to demand the same income and treatment as the elites they serve. I dont believe that this is liable to happen until such a time as the even worse conditions have been experienced by the general population but everything's eventual.
There are measures that I expect to happen before that too though, an assets based system of welfare, not because it makes for freedom or anything like that, it makes undreamt of privatisations possible, it makes a single price tagged welfare state costing possible for flighty capital globally shopping between welfare regimes, it makes the possibility of a complete transition from responsible to representative government possible (which I think would make for pretty unrepresentative government but anyway).
Then again assets based welfare could possibly point up alternatives, depending upon whether or not people's time is taken up providing social services for "free" to their communities as volunteers or spent in a poor man's consumerism, ie alcoholism, assholery, or break with those things.
I would rather attack it than surrender to cynicism.
If you think that is ignorant or a waste of time then you are entitled to that opinion.
I don’t think that the the managerial group will complain any time soon...they could be considered up there in the top 20% and clearly have nothing to worry about monetarily.
I still find it disturbing that you only associate the poor with “alcoholism, assholery” etc.
Have you even had any true contact with that level of society?
From my experience, most of them are good, honest people just trying to do the best they can with a shitty hand.
In fact, I am still surprised at how much integrity some of them have...far more than some fucking sales rep. for a giant corporation...(and I should know, I was a sales rep for Johnson and Johnson for a couple of years...until I couldn’t live with myself anymore and went back to assisting with surgery).
Percentage wise the poor have consistently given a higher percentage of their income to charities than their rich counterparts...and even if the top 10% do donate to charity, they generally donate to universities and bullshit like that in order to get their name on the building and have a family legacy secured there. That isn’t directly helping anyone but themselves.
Assholery? Who are the assholes?
I have a very strong sense of right and wrong...it is black and white...there is no grey area...it either is, or it isn’t.
It is morally wrong to sit on billions of dollars of money, basically stolen from the middle/working class, while people are struggling just to live from day to day...and millions of people are hungry or homeless.
Any sort of societal “help” that once was available in this nation has been systematically dismantled in the name of more profit.
The economy will reach a breaking point when the the majority can no longer buy the goods the rich make their profits from because all disposable income has gone the way of inflation and stagnant wages...this is already occurring...it is only a matter of time.
It will either collapse, or the people will rise up and correct the inequalities that are unsustainable.
It is morally wrong to sit on billions of dollars of money, basically stolen from the middle/working class, while people are struggling just to live from day to day...and millions of people are hungry or homeless.
Any sort of societal “help” that once was available in this nation has been systematically dismantled in the name of more profit.
The economy will reach a breaking point when the the majority can no longer buy the goods the rich make their profits from because all disposable income has gone the way of inflation and stagnant wages...this is already occurring...it is only a matter of time.
It will either collapse, or the people will rise up and correct the inequalities that are unsustainable.
It is going to collapse
This will lead to a military clamp down under martial law as the authorities seek to hold onto power
The real danger is that they will spark another world war to try and deflect the negative energies of the populace onto an external force for example the russians, the chinese or the iranians or syrians or all at the same time
This will lead to a military clamp down under martial law as the authorities seek to hold onto power
The real danger is that they will spark another world war to try and deflect the negative energies of the populace onto an external force for example the russians, the chinese or the iranians or syrians or all at the same time
Yeah, who said I was talking about your abstraction "the poor", if I'd been talking about them I would have perhaps said so, anyway, how many sales reps for giant corporations do you know to make any sort of comparison? Or is all this hypothetical?
If you'd read my post its not the managerial group I suggested would complain, they the piper, they dont call the tune, its their paymasters which I suspect or hope will eventually complain. Libertarians and others are doing a great bit of misdirection with the old demonising of working people and tax collectors but eventually the uber rich are going to discover huge, huge slices of the pie could still be theirs if they didnt choose to pay the salaries they do to managerial elites. Elite conflict results in social change. Any sort of subversion resulting in successful and enduring change is the rare exception.
Its really not cynicism that I'm engaging in, still less pessimism which I think is what you meant, or you might just not be using the cynicism in its proper philosophical sense.
No, I meant cynicism.
That is how it appears to be anyhow...perhaps I am wrong, I never claimed to be right.
I am pretty sure that I inferred that I was, indeed a sales rep for a giant corporation at one time.
The Ãœber-rich are already looking for ways to gain more profit...take our recent Supreme Court Decisions squarely handing over electoral power to the Ãœber-rich.
This is nothing but a scheme to further their political clout without the need for lobbyists...it’s so much easier to be beholden to someone and call in that favor.
You know, I never intended this to be a debate thread...I can go back and forth with you but that was not the point.
I am looking for constructive answers and thoughts on actions that can be taken.
If you disagree with the politics that I have to offer then you are free to start your own thread.