How can we take it back? | Page 28 | INFJ Forum

How can we take it back?

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I wish we would change this back to how it was intended to be.
 
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NBC has suspended Brian Williams for 6 months without pay for lying about his 'heroics' in Iraq.
How many pundits and politicians should be suspended for life for lying to drag the U.S. into a pointless war, and causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq?
​
 
These guys need to be stopped…WTF?
Nobody elected them to any position of power…and yet…they are ruling over us.
You’d think Fox News would be batshit over the subversion of our democracy by these assclowns…but they seem quite content to let them fuck up our economy and planet.

Solar Industry Prepares for Battle Against Koch Brothers’ Front Groups

Mark Twain said it best, there are “lies, damned lies and statistics.”
It’s hard to tell which is which after closely reviewing the latest hatchet job on solar energy by the Koch brothers’ front group, The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA).

Aside from spelling solar correctly, much of the report, Filling the Solar Sinkhole, is untrue or misleading–including its basic assertion that the U.S. solar industry receives $39 billion in annual subsidies.

Seriously?
How can that be?

How can an industry with a U.S. market value of $15 billion receive $39 billion in annual subsidies?
The answer: it doesn’t. This is fuzzy math, and dirty tricks, at their very worst.

Read the rest on the link below...

Full article - http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/...for-battle-against-koch-brothers-front-groups
 
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Nobody seems to care….
Do you not live in this world?!
No, we don’t have much power to change the system…but greater feats have been accomplished when people band together.

It just hasn’t negatively effected the working class enough for them to fight back…people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Addelson have a disproportionate amount of power…this is no democracy.

Maybe one day.
 
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Warren & Cummings: Free the middle class

Middle income working families are falling behind, trapped in debt, searching for opportunity.

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America is recovering from the Great Recession.
The stock market and corporate profits are at all-time highs.

Worker productivity is skyrocketing.
Unemployment is falling.
Inflation remains low.

The deficit is shrinking and many families have health insurance for the first time.
Good news — but not the whole story.

Millions of Americans are working harder than ever and still falling behind.
Deep structural changes in our economy over the past several decades have undermined the ability of millions of people to build a secure future.

For more than 30 years, America's middle class has been hammered.
For those not occupying corner offices or able to fall back on investment portfolios, incomes have stagnated while expenses have increased, forcing tens of millions of people into debt just to make ends meet .

Things haven't always been this way.
From the end of the Great Depression to about 1980, America built a middle class unlike anything known on earth.

As the economy grew, income and family wealth grew.
Families bought homes and cars, took vacations, educated their children and saved for retirement.

This spurred demand for consumer goods and housing, combining to build one of the most unprecedented periods of growth in American history.

But then things changed.
Beginning in the late 1970s, corporate executives and stockholders began taking greater shares of the gains.

Productivity kept going up, but workers were left behind as wages stagnated.
Families might have survived as their incomes flattened, except for one hard fact: thecosts of basic needs like housing, education and child care exploded.

Millions took on mountains of debt and young people began struggling to cling to the same economic rung as their parents.
After the 2008 economic collapse, massive financial institutions received billions of dollars in bailouts, while families across the country watched helplessly as their home values and savings crashed and millions of jobs disappeared.

These events were not caused by an invisible hand.
They were not the inevitable result of globalization or organic market trends.

Instead, powerful interest groups, massive corporations and the super-rich rigged the system to jack up their profits and grab the spoils for themselves.
For too long, government has worked for the rich and powerful.

Government needs to work for America's middle class again.
America's middle class is about opportunity.

People create their own opportunity: they work hard, get an education and make smart decisions.
But government also plays a role.

Investments in schools give people a chance to get an education.
Investments in infrastructure like roads and bridges, power grids and communications networks make it more profitable to create jobs here at home.

Investments in medical and scientific research provide the foundations for an innovation economy.
We do it on our own AND we do it together.

Opportunity is also about a level playing field.
A tax code riddled with special interest loopholes that taxes the wages of assembly line workers and teachers at higher rates than the capital gains of billionaire hedge fund investors is not on the level.

It just means that the rich get richer, and everyone else picks up the tab.

Under President Obama, the country has been digging out of the Great Recession.
We've made great strides based on policies that Democrats have championed.

But we must do more.
That's why this week we're launching a new Middle Class Prosperity Project to give a voice in Washington to those who need it most — hard-working people across this country.

On Tuesday, we will hold the first in a series of forums to examine economic policies threatening the middle class, and we'll hear from leading economists about how to help families rebuild economic security.

After the Great Depression, Congress enacted progressive policies to build and expand the middle class.
But Washington became captive to powerful interests that game the system at the expense of the middle class.

It's time to change that system.
We must free our government from the grip of armies of lobbyists and the corruption of corporate influence.

This is one of the most urgent issues this generation faces.
So we'll work together to do what Congress should be doing — promoting policies to ensure that the best days of America's middle class are still ahead.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is the Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Economic Policy, and Congressman Elijah Cummings is the Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
 
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[video=youtube;h8Czg5-pkIo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=h8Czg5-pkIo[/video]

The Middle Class Prosperity Project, launched by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Cummings, will examine economic policies that threaten the middle class and identify new proposals that will ensure the middle class remains the engine of America’s economic growth.

This February 24, 2015 event is the the first in a series of congressional forums to hear directly from leading economists about how the nation’s economic system has been rigged against the middle class over the past several decades. More details about the Middle Class Prosperity Project are available athttp://1.usa.gov/1acRUgT.

Panelists included:

- Dr. Jared Bernstein, Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
- Dr. Beth Ann Bovino, U.S. Chief Economist at Standard & Poor’s Rating Services
- Dr. Gerald Jaynes, Professor of Economics and African American Studies at Yale University
- Dr. Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University
 
This is big news!!!!
Did you know the only person serving jail time right now is this poor guy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou…the one who blew the whistle.
How that for American justice?

New York Times - Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses


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Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush.
But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible.
They are not.

The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.

Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten.

In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”

These are, simply, crimes.
They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”

They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.

So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal.

In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.”
They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods.

When the department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted.
They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods.

Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.

No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report.
Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable.

At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes."

The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable?
That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.

But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos.

There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.

One would expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr. Obama’s executive overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but with one notable exception, Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or actively defended the indefensible.

They cannot even point to any results: Contrary to repeated claims by the C.I.A., the report concluded that “at no time” did any of these techniques yield intelligence that averted a terror attack.
And at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been “wrongfully held.”

Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments.

Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.
 
What Trickle-Down Economics Has Done to the US:
The Rich Get All the Money

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Adapted from the as-yet-unpublished book by the author, Do What Works and Call It Capitalism.

That Improving Economy Is Further Away Than It Appears

Leisure and hospitality - the fastest growing major blue-skill industry - is the worst sector. The average leisure and hospitality worker makes just $18,900 a year (gross, before taxes). This is not even enough to keep a family of three above the poverty level ($19,790 in 2014). Similarly, retail, the largest blue-skill sector, is second-worst in terms of pay, with average annual earnings of $27,700. - Mike Cassidy, Where Are the Jobs? 2015 (1)

​
By most media accounts, the US economy at the beginning of 2015 is recovering nicely from the Great Recession.
GDP is growing at a historically healthy rate, above 2 percent per year. Unemployment is about the historic average, at 5.7 percent.

The stock market is near record highs. And more jobs are being created than at any time in more than 10 years.
But this is all a great deception.

The expansion is benefiting a tiny minority of the population only - the very rich.
No one else has any money, and without significant changes in government policies, no one except the wealthy is likely to have any in the future.

This is the fact that eluded the Democrats in the 2014 election.
When Democrats boast of how well President Obama has done with the economy despite Republican opposition to everything he does, they are missing the point.

This economic resurgence has not reached most Americans.

Ronald Reagan brought supply-side economics to the federal government, the belief that suppliers of goods drive the economy, not the consumers.
The supply-siders believe that lower taxes stimulate production and improve the economy.

They also favor deregulation of industry.
The theory, which acquired the nickname "trickle-down economics," was that economic growth would benefit everyone.

That has not happened.
The entire supply-side economic theory has proven to be totally wrong as the data in this article shows.

When George H.W. Bush ran against Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1980, he called Reagan's supply-side economics, "voodoo economics," and he was right.

It has no basis in reality, but it has bewitched the Republican Party and they still cling to it.
And most current government financial policies still are consistent with it.

Bill Clinton did not change things. Barack Obama has not changed things.
The Reagan economic program still is with us, and still is doing great damage to the US economy and most Americans.

At the beginning of 2015, more than six years since the crisis of 2008, most Americans were either in a worse financial condition than they were before 2008, or had experienced very little improvement in their economic condition.

Most Americans have no financial reserves and live paycheck to paycheck.
In January 2015, the Pew Charitable Trusts published "The Precarious State of Family Balance Sheets," in which the incredible conclusion is reached that virtually no one in the United States has ready cash reserves to cover two months of lost income.

Clearly, most of the top 20 percent have other assets, stocks and bonds, real estate etc. on which they can draw, and they seldom lose their jobs without good severance packages.

But 80 percent do not have enough reserves to last more than a month, and half of them do not have enough to last two weeks.
Most Americans also do not have much in the way of assets - property or investments.

The historic recovery of the stock market from the 2008 crash did not benefit the vast majority of Americans because they don't own stock.
Yes, many do indirectly through 401k mutual funds and pension funds, but those assets cannot easily be converted into cash.

Between the burst of the housing bubble and the huge trade deficit, a trillion dollars has disappeared from the US economy and Americans are not spending enough to make it up.

A substantial portion of the loss of $8 trillion in home equity in the subprime mortgage meltdown has not been recovered, especially for those in less expensive homes, and for the millions forced out of their homes, their losses will never be recovered.

The rapid rise in home values in the years prior to the 2008 meltdown was a giant real estate bubble larger than any in the past.
People borrowed against their rising home equity, or refinanced and took cash out of their homes.

That "bubble economy" generated hundreds of billions of dollars in annual economic activity.
When the bubble burst and those home values dropped, those hundreds of billions of dollars vanished from the economy.

And they have not been replaced.
At the same time, rising imports and a strong dollar caused a massive trade deficit of $505 billion in 2014.

When the US dollar rises in value against other currencies, it makes US products more expensive and imports more competitive.
It also reduces the overseas profits of US companies when those profits are converted into dollars.

Compare the loss of approximately $1 trillion in consumer spending annually with the one-time expense of the 2009 Obama stimulus package of $819 billion and it is not hard to see why the recovery from the Great Recession has been so slow, and has reached so few of the people.

The following chart shows the growth in actual dollars of household consumer spending in the United States between 1990 and 2013.
There was a steady increase through the 1990s and the total spending increased by $10,000, or 33 percent.

In the next five years, when the housing bubble was growing, it increased twice as fast, rising by another $10,000.
Then the crash of 2008 occurred and spending dropped.

By 2012, consumer spending had returned to the level of 2008, but it dropped slightly in 2013.
Consumer household expenditures in 2013 were only about 5 percent higher than they were in 2008.
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Average Annual Household Expendatures

There is no recovery of middle class jobs.

And then, to top things off, most of the jobs that have been created since the end of the Great Recession are at the upper levels, where significant education and/or skills are required, or at the lower levels, where the average wages are declining and are at or close to poverty levels.

The kinds of good-paying factory jobs that once provided people without college educations a chance at a middle-class life are a small fraction of the jobs being created today.

Many of the people who lost jobs that supported their middle-class lifestyles are now working for much lower wages in service jobs and living in, or close to, poverty.

A Federal Reserve study reported that the greatest demand for workers since the Great Recession has been in the poverty-level, minimum wage-paying service industries, and the lowest demand is for midlevel workers who once comprised the vast majority of the middle class. (2)

An April 2014 report (3) by the National Employment Law Project provided details supporting the Federal Reserve study.
During the recession, low-wage jobs, those paying less than $27,700 per year, had both the lowest percentage of losses and the highest percentage of gains.

Twenty-two percent of the total job losses were in the low-wage category, but 44 percent of new jobs were in that category.
Mid-wage jobs, those paying between $27,700 and $41,600, had the lowest percentage of new jobs created, 26 percent, but the second highest rate of job losses, 37 percent.

High-wage jobs, those paying more than $41,600, had the highest rate of losses, 41 percent, but a higher rate of new jobs created, 30 percent, than the mid-wage category.

In January 2015, The Century Foundation report, "Where Are the Jobs?," reinforced those earlier studies.
This chart shows the growth of jobs and in each classification indicates the percentage that requires a college education.

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Of the 257,000 jobs in the January 2015 report of jobs created, 22,000 were in manufacturing, but the average for the three previous months was 31,000, still not a great deal.

And the total of manufacturing jobs today is only about 10 percent of all jobs.
The most jobs created in any category were in retail, 45,900, the second-lowest paying of all job categories with an average wage of $27,000.

Health care and construction each created about 39,000 jobs.
The growth of construction jobs is good news for blue-collar people because generally jobs do not require a college degree and the jobs pay well, on average about $54,000.

Health-care jobs are mixed between some that require college and some that do not.
While health care is a rapidly growing field, wages are not particularly high except for professionals and those with advanced training.

Here are the average wages by job category:
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Only about 20 percent of people with jobs are experiencing increases in income.

Even if you were lucky enough to have a good-paying job in 2015, you probably were getting little in the way of pay increases unless you were promoted. Average wages have risen only slightly in recent years, about 2 percent per year in 2013 and 2014, and less than that previously.
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Among households, the only group that has increased its share of national income since 1980 is the top 20 percent.
Every other group has experienced a gradual decline.

And it can be seen from the following chart that in recent years there has been an acceleration of the increases in the earnings of the top 20 percent.
There definitely was a change in income distribution beginning in 1980 when Reagan was elected.

Prior to that, as can be seen in the row 1970-1980, the bottom 20 percent received the highest percentage gain in income.
Since 1980, the bottom 20 percent have received the lowest percentage increase in income.

Under President Obama, they have done particularly poorly, with their average income declining slightly.
The chart also shows how much better the top 20 percent have done since 1980 compared to everyone else.

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Wages of lower-paid occupations are getting even lower while wages of higher-paid occupations are rising.
The Century Foundation reports:''

The rich are getting richer. For every $10,000 in additional average weekly earnings an industry had in 2007, its average earnings grew by an extra 2 percentage points during the six-year period. For example, the average employee working in retail, a low-paying industry, earned $28,300 for a full year of work in 2007; after adjusting for inflation, the same employee actually made less, just $27,700, last year. By contrast, the average information worker earned $59,900 in 2007, among the highest of any industry. During the next six years, the advantage of information workers over poorly paid workers only grew, with average earnings increasing 9.4 percent, or $5,600 in real terms. The same is true of other white-collar sectors, like finance (a gain of $4,500) and professional services (a gain of $3,600). Like so many other labor market indicators, this link between earnings and earnings growth reflects rising inequality. (4)

​
A recent report shows that even the wages of factory workers are declining.
And the result of declining wages is increasing poverty.

Of the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes most of the countries in Europe, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, there are only four that have a higher percentage of their population in poverty than the United States: Chile, Mexico, Turkey and Israel.

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This graph compares the percentage of each country's population that is living below the poverty line against the percentage of the GDP each country dedicates to public sector social spending. The countries included are all of the members of the OECD.
France (which spends the largest percentage of its GDP on its safety net), Mexico (which spends the smallest percentage) and the United States are specifically marked. The US spends a low percentage of its GDP on its safety net and has a very high percentage of its population living in poverty. (5)

​
Economic inequality and increasing poverty are direct results of government policies.

There have been a number of policy decisions by the federal government that have had a negative effect on the economy and on average income, resulting in less money being available for consumption, and also increasing poverty.

With less money available for consumption, fewer goods are purchased, and fewer jobs are created.
And cheaper foreign goods sold by the discount chains have greater appeal.

One of the decisions has been not to increase the minimum wage, nor to index it to inflation.
As a result, it has not kept up with inflation, and it has not kept up with productivity.

It would be almost $11 an hour now if it had just kept up with inflation.
Various calculations have placed between it between $18 and $22 an hour if it had kept up with productivity.

While there are only a few million people working at the minimum wage, there are many millions more working at wages not much higher than the minimum. An increase in the minimum wage would push up the income of tens of millions of Americans.

Another decision has been to limit unemployment benefits.
Considering that unemployment benefits are mostly paid for by taxes on employers, it is truly outrageous that Congress has limited payments, especially at a time of economic malaise.

Every dollar paid in unemployment benefits is plowed back into the economy almost immediately and that has a "multiplier" effect.
More money in the economy generates more demand, more production and more jobs.

The Department of Labor reported in 2014 that because Congress chose not to extend the expiration times for benefits, only 27 percent of the unemployed were receiving unemployment payments at the end of 2013, a record low.

That we have a dysfunctional Congress has been obvious for some years, especially since the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010. Now they also have control of the Senate and there is little hope that they will behave responsibly.

They are interested only in increasing the wealth of the already wealthy and powerful, and they are willing to do so by further reducing the standards of living of almost everyone else.
Here is a graphic showing the impact of conservative policies.

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There is redistribution of wealth in the United States.
It is being redistributed from the poor and the middle class to the rich.

And because incomes are not rising, most people are not accumulating any wealth.
Many have less wealth than they did before the Great Recession.

This pie chart shows what has happened to wealth in the United States since Ronald Reagan.

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Economist Barry Bluestone, who, with Bennett Harrison, published in 1988, one of the first books harshly critical of Reagan's economic policies, recently explained onPBS "NewsHour" that supply-side economics redistributes wealth from the middle class and the poor to the wealthy.

The problem, he said, is that the wealthy only spend about 30 percent of their income, while everyone else spends nearly all of theirs.
Consequently, he said,

... as we move money away from working families towards very wealthy families, we take more and more consumption out of the economy, means slower and slower growth, means higher and higher and extended unemployment.

​
Emmanuel Saez, professor of economics and director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California, Berkeley, is the acknowledged US expert on economic inequality and the disparities of income and wealth.

He and French economist Thomas Piketty have jointly developed enormous databases of changes in income and wealth over time.
His graphic of the dramatic increase in the share of income by the top 1% over the past 35 years has become well known.

This is the latest version:

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In his January 25, 2015, update, Saez wrote:

The drastic cuts of the federal tax on large estates could certainly accelerate the path toward the reconstitution of the great wealth concentration that existed in the U.S. economy before the Great Depression. The labor market has been creating much more inequality over the last thirty years, with the very top earners capturing a large fraction of macroeconomic productivity gains. A number of factors may help explain this increase in inequality, not only underlying technological changes but also the retreat of institutions developed during the New Deal and World War II - such as progressive tax policies, powerful unions, corporate provision of health and retirement benefits, and changing social norms regarding pay inequality. We need to decide as a society whether this increase in income inequality is efficient and acceptable and, if not, what mix of institutional and tax reforms should be developed to counter it.

​
Conclusion: The economy could be fixed.
Prosperity could be widely shared.
Disparities of income and wealth could be diminished.
But none of this will happen if Americans keep voting for the Republicans and their failed trickle-down economic policies.

The tragedy for most Americans is that Democratic administrations have not developed new programs to counter the increasing inequality caused by the Reagan economic program.

Government policies - including trade deals, cutbacks in education spending, reduced government spending and failure to aggressively attack the economic crisis - have resulted in enormous inequality in the US democracy for which we should be ashamed.

Even this past December, Congress repealed one of the Dodd-Frank provisions adopted after the bank crisis of 2008 designed to protect the public from having to pay for bad investments made by banks.

Government policies dictated by Republicans and acquiesced to by Democrats are continuing to help the rich and powerful gain greater wealth and position, while reducing opportunities for education and good jobs for almost everyone else.

Our economic problems could be solved.
We could reduce economic inequality.

The solutions are well known.
We just have not developed the national resolve to solve the major problem: the control of governments at the state and federal levels by those who owe their allegiance to special interests - the wealthy and the big corporations.

The cures to our economic problems are known and could be implemented rapidly if progressives controlled the state and federal governments.
- The minimum wage is far too low, well below the poverty line.

Originally, it was intended to be the minimum amount that could provide adequate support.
It needs to be increased substantially.

A $15 minimum wage would lift millions out of poverty and low-wage jobs, and significantly reduce dependency on food stamps and the earned-income tax credit program, both of which are major subsidies to the giant corporations that don't pay living wages.

The increase in the minimum wage is necessary because most Americans no longer have the bargaining power of unions to help them gain living wages and decent benefits.

- Infrastructure spending creates tens of thousands of good-paying jobs, not only in construction, but also in the entire supply chain.
The nation's highways, bridges and rail systems need modernizing and it is time to do it.

- Restoring the progressive income tax by raising the tax rates on the wealthy back to where there were before Ronald Reagan would generate billions of new government revenue and would help to reduce economic inequality.

Increasing taxes on capital gains and estates also would generate additional billions.
Taxing Wall Street transactions, particularly derivative transactions, would generate billions more dollars in new revenue.

- Reducing or eliminating the cost of college education would lift the enormous financial burden that people face in trying to obtain the education necessary to earn a decent living in a highly technological world.

- Reducing or forgiving existing college loan debt would generate a burst of economic activity.
People would be able to buy homes - and stimulate the economy - if they did not have to pay off enormous student loans.

- Greater government oversight of corporations, including actual enforcement of antitrust laws to break up some of the oligopolies that have formed in many industries, would help to spur more free enterprise, more competition, better service and greater innovation, to say nothing of more jobs.

As I proposed in another article, government regulation should be consolidated into one major agency.
- Making it much more difficult and uneconomical for corporations to shift jobs, or their headquarters, out of the country would help to stem the tide of job losses.

- No new trade deals should be permitted that harm US workers or limit the government's regulatory abilities.
Existing trade deals should be renegotiated.

There are more things that government could do to restore the middle class and reduce poverty, but without a change in the political control of the government, nothing is going to happen.

Progressives must unite to block efforts at both the federal and state levels to roll back safety net programs, protection of privacy and voting rights, and offer the American people a true choice - a choice between the opportunity for prosperity for everyone, or wealth for a small minority at the cost of the economic security of everyone else.

Footnotes:
1. Mike Cassidy. "Where Are the Jobs?" The Century Foundation, January 2015,http://apps.tcf.org/where-are-the-jobs
2. For a discussion of this subject, with links to various articles, seehttp://economistsview.typepad.com/e...ogical-change-and-rising-wage-inequality.html
3. "Data Brief: The Low-Wage Recovery, Industry Employment and Wages Four Years into the Recovery." New York: National Employment Law Project, April 2014.
4. Cassidy. "Where Are the Jobs?"
5. "Poverty and Social Spending as a Percentage of GDP in the OECD."http://politicsthatwork.com/graphs/poverty-safety-net
http://www.nelp.org/page/-/Justice/...ing-Wages-Jobs-Built-Middle-Class.pdf?nocdn=1
 
How to Die of Dumb

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Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), right, listens to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) speak at a news conference in Washington about their opposition to the climate change bill on Wednesday, June 4, 2008. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski / The New York Times)

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Sen. James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma since 1994, took to the floor of the Senate the other day with a snowball in a bag.
Because it was cold in Washington DC, he said, because there was snow on the ground, that proves climate change is a hoax. "In case we had forgotten," he said, pulling the snowball from the sack, "because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, do you know what this is? It's a snowball, just from outside here. It's very, very cold out."

He went on to denounce what he called the "hysteria on global warming," and then threw the snowball at the presiding officer.

James Inhofe - who believes snow in DC disproves climate change - is the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, because of course he is.
He won with 57 percent of the vote in his last re-election campaign, because of course he did.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky since 1984, has been urging state officials all across the US to refuse to comply with the new EPA rule on carbon emissions that was championed by the Obama administration.

The rule requires existing power plants to cut their carbon emissions by 30 percent, based on the 2005 requirements, by the year 2030.
Senator McConnell is having none of it. "Think twice," he said, "before submitting a state plan, which could lock you in to federal enforcement and expose you to lawsuits, when the administration is standing on shaky legal ground and when, without your support, it won't be able to demonstrate the capacity to carry out such political extremism."

Mitch McConnell, as Senate Majority Leader, has the power to keep any bills he dislikes from coming to a vote.
Until January of 2017 at least, that means any legislation seeking to address the issue of climate change will never see the light of day, because McConnell thinks giving attention to the threat of carbon emissions - what is eventually going to kill us all - amounts to "political extremism."

Because of course he does.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, there is no snow. Wasilla, long the home of the re-start of the annual Iditarod race (which comes after the ceremonial start in Anchorage), has lost the privilege, because you can't run dog sleds without snow.

The race was required to move the re-start 300 miles north to Fairbanks, but even that is becoming chancy.
The Chena River, where they wanted to hold the re-start because it has, since time out of mind, been locked in reliably thick ice at this time of year, does not have reliable ice anymore.

The islands in the Beaufort Sea near Prudhoe Bay are swarming with polar bears, because the ice floes they once used to hunt seals are gone.
According to the locals, this is unprecedented.

Sounds pretty warm to me.

San Francisco, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Seattle, Salt Lake City, along with more than twenty other cities out West are experiencing the warmest winters they've ever recorded.

Meanwhile, back East, cities like Boston and Buffalo are trying to dig out from one of the most fearsome winters in memory.
People in New England and California have been joking about building a pipeline to ship all the frozen water blanketing the East out to the parched West.

If they can build the massive Keystone XL funnel from Alberta to the Gulf in order to ship poison to the world, why not build one to ship vital water to people who desperately need it.

It's a joke...for now, anyway.

Someday - if the West continues to dry out and the East continues to be buried and paralyzed by storms - it might be an idea whose time has come.
Speaking of warm and water, most of California has no water to speak of, and what they do have in the aquifers has been tainted by fracking waste.

In the mountains, there is virtually no snowpack, which not only means their drought will broaden and deepen in the months to come, but also means their fire season this year looks to be positively terrifying.

Australia can tell them all about it; vast swaths of the continent are engulfed in flames.
Fires during the Australian summers are not uncommon, but their size and severity have been dramatically increasing, and pretty much everyone there with knowledge on the subject chalks it up to climate change.

Don't try telling that to Messrs.
Inhofe and McConnell, however.

There's snow on the ground in DC, which means it's all a bunch of paranoid crap.
I don't have an easy answer for how to deal with this.

How to explain people like Inhofe and McConnell, how to explain people who have voluntarily returned them to Congress for a combined total of 52 years, would require a political, economic and sociological treatise that I have neither the space nor the time to compile at this juncture.

The short version, however, is that our cannibalistic economic model, indifferent news media, sagging voter turnout, general cynicism, religious derangement and fundamental addiction to a cognitive dissonance that motivates so very many to slap aside stone-carved facts staring them in the face, is going to put this whole human experiment into a shallow, unmarked grave.

People talk about "Destroying the planet," which is a hoot.
The planet isn't going anywhere.

Even the environment may recover in one form or another.
The equation we are busily erasing from the blackboard - for profit while encased in a suffocating bag of ignorance - is ourselves.

This is how you die of Dumb.
 
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Democratic Ideas...............................................Obama Ideas....................................Republican Ideas

Caliphate in the Middle East, allow Iran to take over all other countries without lifting a finger, allow Russian aggression, get rid of God in our country(thus destroying it), Screw Israel.

The price will be enormous.
 
just me said:
Democratic Ideas...............................................Obama Ideas....................................Republican Ideas

Caliphate in the Middle East, allow Iran to take over all other countries without lifting a finger, allow Russian aggression, get rid of God in our country(thus destroying it), Screw Israel.

The price will be enormous.
Click to expand...
Who created the conditions for that Caliphate to exist?
We did.
I would hate us too if my village were carpet-bombed…then occupied by some outside military that came to stabilize the oil production not the region.
Nonsense BS.
 
@just me

You know, you can at least tag a person’s name or quote them.
You do it all the time…it's sneaky is what it is.
Cut it out.
 
Curious…I wonder if it will work?
Why isn’t this in OUR media??
Hmmm?

Vermont towns vote to arrest Bush and Cheney


r


(Reuters) -
Voters in two Vermont towns on Tuesday approved a measure that would instruct police to arrest President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for "crimes against our Constitution," local media reported.

The nonbinding, symbolic measure, passed in Brattleboro and Marlboro in a state known for taking liberal positions on national issues, instructs town police to "extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them."

Vermont, home to maple syrup and picture-postcard views, is known for its liberal politics.
State lawmakers have passed nonbinding resolutions to end the war in Iraq and impeach Bush and Cheney, and several towns have also passed resolutions of impeachment.

None of them have caught on in Washington.
Bush has never visited the state as president, though he has spent vacations at his family compound in nearby Maine.

Roughly 12,000 people live in Brattleboro, located on the Connecticut River in the state's southeastern corner.
Nearby Marlboro has a population of roughly 1,000.

 
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