Stark Divide Between Who Caused Climate Change and Who's Being Hit - Damian Carrington

While rich, industrialized nations caused climate change through past carbon emissions, it is the developing world that is bearing the brunt.  The point is starkly illustrated in a new map of climate vulnerability: the rich global north has low vulnerability, the poor global south has high vulnerability.

Large areas of north America and northern Europe are not so exposed to actual climate risk, and are very well placed to deal with it. 

The map is produced by risk analysts Maplecroft by combining measures of the risk of climate change impacts, such as storms, floods, and droughts, with the social and financial ability of both communities and governments to cope. The top three most vulnerable nations reflect all these factors: Haiti, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe.

It is not until you go all the way down 103 on the list, out of 193 nations, that you encounter the first major developed nation: Greece. The first 102 nations are all developing ones. Italy is next, at 124, and like Greece ranks relatively highly due to the risk of drought.

The full article is available here

Saving Capitalism From Crony Capitalists - Nicholas D. Kristof

Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked communists aiming to bring down the U.S. economic system when they're not doing drugs or having sex in public.

The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a "mob" trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.

To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.

Financial institutions boost leverage in search of super-size profits and bonuses. Banks pretend that risk is eliminated because it's securitized. Rating agencies accept money to issue an imprimatur that turns out to be meaningless. The system teeters, and then the taxpayer rushes in to bail bankers out. Where's the accountability?

Yes, we face a threat to our capitalist system. But it's not coming from those manning the barricades at Occupy Wall Street protests. Rather, it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives.

The full article is available here

Immunity & Impunity in Elite America: How The 1% Subvert Rule of Law - Glenn Greenwald

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. 

While the Founders accepted outcome inequality, they emphasized -- over and over -- that its legitimacy hinged on subjecting everyone to the law’s mandates on an equal basis. Jefferson wrote that the essence of America would be that “the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.”

Today, it is glaringly obvious to a wide range of Americans that the wealth of the top 1% is the byproduct not of risk-taking entrepreneurship, but of corrupted control of our legal and political systems. It is equally obvious that they are using that power not to lift the boats of ordinary Americans but to sink them.

In lieu of the rule of law -- the equal application of rules to everyone -- what we have now is a two-tiered justice system in which the powerful are immunized while the powerless are punished with increasing mercilessness. As a guarantor of outcomes, the law has, by now, been so completely perverted that it is an incomparably potent weapon for entrenching inequality further, controlling the powerless, and ensuring corrupted outcomes.

The tide that was supposed to lift all ships has, in fact, left startling numbers of Americans underwater. In the process, we lost any sense that a common set of rules applies to everyone, and so there is no longer a legitimizing anchor for the vast income and wealth inequalities that plague the nation.

The full article is available here

New Inequality Data Likely to Boost "Occupy" Movement - Jim Lobe

A major study on income equality by a non-partisan government agency is likely to boost the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, whose standing with the general public appears on the rise, according to a new poll.

The study, released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), found that the average after-tax real income of the top one percent of the nation's households grew by 275% between 1979 and 2007 - about seven times greater than the increase in income by the remaining 99 percent over the same period.

And the income of the poorest 20% of the nation's earners grew by a mere 18% during that period, according to the report, which had been requested by the senior Democratic and Republican members on the Senator Finance Committee several years ago. That was less than one percent per year.

The report – the latest in a series of private or non-profit studies that confirm a sharp rise in income and wealth inequality over the past generation – came as a new New York Times/CBS News poll showed stronger-than-expected popular support for the "Occupy" movement, which has spread to dozens of cities across the country.

The full article is available here

Why America Must Revive Its Middle Class - Jeffrey Sachs

Economically, things began to fray, and fray badly, in the 1970s. Yet America misdiagnosed the problems. Rather than focus on the overseas challenge to U.S. competitiveness, Ronald Reagan declared in 1980 that government was not the solution to our problems--it was the problem. The key to re-establishing a sound economy, he claimed, was to slash taxes, reduce government programs like energy research and social insurance and generally adhere to a free-market course.

The Reagan diagnosis neglected the fact that the federal government had been a handmaiden of the country's inclusive growth of the 1950s and '60s. Worse, the Reagan Revolution failed to grapple with the even bigger upheaval of globalization.

The new globalization has accelerated the hollowing out of U.S. industries such as apparel, autos and textiles and in the process devastated the middle class employed in manufacturing, except in the highest-skill areas. Although American consumers have been the beneficiaries of a flood of low-cost and high-quality Chinese products, America's industrial workers have paid for it in wage cuts and higher unemployment.

The median earnings of full-time male workers reached their peak way back in 1973. Female workers have fared somewhat better, in part because they are disproportionately in areas like health care and education, which are more sheltered from global competition. The earnings of the CEOs who oversaw this loss of competitiveness, of course, soared spectacularly, especially as they grabbed stock options designed for their benefit.

The truth is that it will take more spending--not in the form of haphazard stimulus but in smart long-term public investments in education, infrastructure and human capital--to get us out of our present mess. It's time to stop arguing about spending cuts for everyone and tax cuts for the rich. Instead, Congress should be having a serious discussion about how we're going to fund our future competitiveness. In this way, we can build the skills and productivity in our society to compete effectively in the 21st century.

The full article is available here

Why Are Police Attacking Peaceful Protesters? OWS Exposes Militarization of US Law Enforcement

Now all of America is seeing the result of police militarization. Efforts to intimidate the protesters are symptoms of three decades of policies that have militarized civilian law enforcement.

Police repression in America is hardly new. Low-income neighborhoods, communities of color and political activists have always had to deal with unnecessary shows of force by some police officers. However, as the number of Occupy arrests nears 1,000, instances of police brutality continue to pile up.

The Oakland Police fired tear gas on demonstrators Tuesday night as they marched through downtown, determined to reclaim the camp that officers destroyed that morning. The use of force seriously injured an Occupy activist and Iraq War veteran. Scott Olsen, 24, remains sedated on a respirator, in stable but critical condition at Highland Hospital. Video posted to YouTube suggests that Olsen was hit at close range with a tear-gas canister. After demonstrators rush to Olsen's aid, an Oakland cop waits a few beats before lobbing a second explosive device at the crowd.

Felix Rivera-Pitre was punched in the face in New York during a march through the city’s financial district; Ryan Hadar was dragged out of the street by his thumbs at Occupy San Francisco; and at Occupy Boston, members of Veterans for Peace were shoved to the ground and dragged away for chanting and peacefully occupying a local park.

Now all of America is seeing the result of police militarization. Efforts to intimidate the protesters are symptoms of three decades of policies that have militarized civilian law enforcement.

A clear pattern has emerged in the response to occupations throughout the country, from San Francisco to Denver, involving midnight raids by heavily armed paramilitary units of riot police deployed to enforce park curfews.

This level of overwhelming police presence, along with the disproportionate and combative force directed at peaceful, unarmed protesters, alarms Americans previously unaware of the increasingly militaristic nature of American law enforcement.

The full article is available here

The Flat-Tax Fraud, and the Necessity of a Truly Progressive Tax - Robert Reich

The flat tax is a fraud. It raises taxes on the poor and lowers them on the rich.  The details of flat-tax proposals vary, of course. But all of them end up benefiting the rich more than the poor for one simple reason: Today’s tax code is still at least moderately progressive.

Flat-taxers pretend a flat tax is good public policy, for two reasons.  First, they say, it would simplify paying taxes. Baloney. Flat-tax proposals don’t eliminate popular deductions. Second, they say a flat tax is fairer than the current system.  The truth is the current tax code treats everyone the same.

The real problem is the top brackets are set too low relative to where the money is. The top-most bracket starts at $375,000 a year. People with incomes higher than that pay 35 percent – again, only on that portion of their incomes exceeding $375,000.  This is absurd. It means a professional who’s making, say, $380,000 a year pays the same income-tax rate as a plutocrat pulling in $2 billion or $20 billion.

Actually, it’s worse than that because the plutocrats get most of their income in the form of capital gains, which are taxed at only 15 percent. That’s why America’s 400 richest people – who earned an average of $300 million last year, and who have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together – now pay at a 17 percent rate (according to the IRS).

Regressives are pushing the flat tax as a smokescreen.

The full article is available here

Rabbit-Hole Economics - Paul Krugman

Reading the transcript of the most recent Republican debate on the economy is, for anyone who has actually been following economic events these past few years, like falling down a rabbit hole. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantasy world where nothing looks or behaves the way it does in real life.

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying. 

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation...

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

The GOP is becoming a caricature of itself.

The full article is available here

The Self-Righteous, the Ideologically Confused… “the 53%” - Claire Snyder-Hall

Although I shouldn’t be surprised, I have to say that I do find myself angered and appalled by a reaction that has recently emerged in opposition to the Occupy Wall Street movement, a reaction by working people who claim to speak for “the 53%.” According to Slate, the 53% figure refers to the number of households that actually pay federal income tax. The other 47% do not have to pay either because they have so many deductions or they are simply too poor.

The 53% Tumblr site I discovered this week has the following ridiculous tagline: “We are the 53%: Those of us who pay for those of you who whine about all of that … or that … or whatever.” Apparently, each person posting on the site feels like he or she is personally supporting a bunch of free-loaders and that somehow all the protestors are living on hand-outs. Talk about self-aggrandizing and ignorant!

The Tumblr page shows a series of hard working people, many of whom are economically marginal by their own account. These people should be the base for progressive politics, but they clearly reject any attempt to enact policies that help regular people, like themselves, have a better life.

Instead, they would rather self-righteously defend the economic interests of those who exploit the labor of working people, who pad their own pockets by systematically trashing the commons. Some of the 53%-ers even seem offended to be considered part of the 99% that isn’t benefiting from the current system of distribution – as if recognizing their objective place in the current economic system is some kind of insult.

The full article is available here

Six Demands to Make of Wall Street - Bernie Sanders

The financial crisis and the jobs crisis have demonstrated to the American people that we now have a government that is of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent, as Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz eloquently articulated.  We now have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major, advanced country on earth.  The top one percent earn more income than the bottom 50 percent and the richest 400 Americans own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans.   

Now that Occupy Wall Street is shining a spot light against Wall Street greed and the enormous inequalities that exist in America, the question then becomes, how do we change the political, economic and financial system to work for all Americans, not just the top 1 percent?

1) If a financial institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

2) Put a cap on credit card interest rates to end usury.

3) The Federal Reserve needs to provide small businesses in America with the same low-interest loans it gave to foreign banks.

4) Stop Wall Street oil speculators from artificially increasing gasoline and heating oil prices.

5) Demand that Wall Street invest in the job-creating productive economy, instead of gambling on worthless derivatives.

6) Establish a Wall Street speculation fee on credit default swaps, derivatives, stock options and futures.

Reform will not be easy.  After all, Wall Street is clearly the most powerful lobbying force on Capitol Hill.  From 1998 through 2008, the financial sector spent over $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to deregulate Wall Street.  More recently, they spent hundreds of millions more to make the Dodd-Frank bill as weak as possible, and after its passage, hundreds of millions more to roll back or diluter the stronger provisions in that legislation.  

The full article is available here

The Seven Biggest Economic Lies - Robert Reich

The Occupiers on Wall Street and elsewhere can’t become a national movement for a more equitable society - unless more Americans know the truth about the economy. Here's an effort to rebut the seven biggest whoppers now being told by those who want to take America backwards.

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

2. "Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth." From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they’ve been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since.

3. "Shrinking government generates more jobs." According to Moody’s economist Mark Zandi (a campaign advisor to John McCain), the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs this year and next.

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

5.  "Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits."  Medicare and Medicaid spending is rising quickly, to be sure. But that’s because the nation’s health-care costs are rising so fast. One of the best ways of slowing these costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to reduce costs, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system.

6.  "Social Security is a Ponzi scheme."  Social Security is solvent for the next 26 years. It could be solvent for the next century if we raised the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. That ceiling is now $106,800.

7.  "It’s unfair that lower-income Americans don’t pay income tax."  Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else.

Demagogues through history have known that big lies, repeated often enough, start being believed — unless they’re rebutted. These seven economic whoppers are just plain wrong.

The full article is available here

Solyndra and The Self-Referential Beltway Media Cycle - David Roberts

One sign of Republicans' success in hyping the Solyndra scandal is that they've got everybody calling it a scandal. Despite the turgid atmospherics, though, there still hasn't been any official wrongdoing established, or even charged. It's like an optical illusion of a scandal, a trick of the media light. Or, to mix metaphors, a hard candy shell with no nut inside.

Last Friday's Solyndra news blitz illustrates the point pretty well. In response to sweeping demands from Republicans, the White House released another huge cache of emails. Poring over them, searching desperately for scandal-ish material in the 65,000 pages of documents the White House has handed over so far, the best reporters could come up with was that Obama had appointed, as political liaison for the program, someone who had "bundled" money for his 2008 campaign.

Those of you awake earlier this century might recall that the Bush administration outdid this "scandal" roughly once a week. Remember Cheney's secret energy task force with fossil-fuel companies? Remember the illicit sex and cocaine at the Minerals Management Service? Remember "Brownie" at FEMA? Remember the manipulation of scientific reports on climate? Remember the $6.6 billion in lost reconstruction money in Iraq?

The Beltway media feedback loop has become grotesquely self-serving and self-referential. It is now for and about plutocrats. And it gives plutocrats what they demand: tidbits and titillation that embarrass Democrats and discredit challengers to the corporate status quo (22 percent of Politico's traffic comes from the Drudge Report). Solyndra-the-scandal is just too juicy too allow for any perspective on Solyndra-the-solar-company.

The full article is available here

Study: Income Inequality Kills Economic Growth - Josh Harkinson

Corporate chieftains often claim that fixing the US economy requires signing new free trade deals, lowering government debt, and attracting lots of foreign investment. But a major new study has found that those things matter less than an economic driver that CEOs hate talking about: equality.

"Countries where income was more equally distributed tended to have longer growth spells," says economist Andrew Berg, whose study appears in the current issue of Finance & Development, the quarterly magazine of the International Monetary Fund.

So how important is equality? According to the study, making an economy's income distribution 10 percent more equitable prolongs its typical growth spell by 50 percent.

The authors aren't the first economists to suggest that income inequality can torpedo the economy. Marriner Eccles, the Depression-era chairman of the Federal Reserve (and an architect of the New Deal), blamed the Great Crash on the nation's wealth gap.

The full article is available here

Middle Class Fights Plutonomy to Save the Dream - Robert Borosage

What Washington can’t seem to understand is the scope of the crisis that Americans face. It isn’t just the 25 million people in need of full time work. We have fewer payroll jobs now than we had in 2000 but 30 million more people. Wages and household incomes are falling. Barely half of employees get health insurance at work, and those that do pay ever more out of pocket before the insurance kicks in.

One in eight homes is in foreclosure or in arrears; one in four is under water. A staggering $12 trillion in wealth that people thought they had – much of it in their homes – has been lost. Only half of employees have any kind of retirement plan at work, and now Social Security and Medicare are under attack.

The middle class is getting crushed. And this isn’t an accident; it is a defeat. It is the result of conservative ideas and corporate interests that have dominated our politics for over thirty years. They launched an attack on labor, lowered the floor under the poorest Americans, and raised the roof for the rich. The money that was supposed to trickle down instead congealed at the top. The richest 1% captured all of the growth of the last decade, while the bottom 90% lost ground.

Right now, the American dream is endangered. America has become, Citibank analysts wrote, a “plutonomy,” made of the rich and the rest – and only the rich count. That is not what most Americans find acceptable.

The full article is available here

Top Five Reasons Why The Occupy Wall Street Protests Accurately Embody The Values Of The REAL Boston Tea Party

In recent years, the Boston Tea Party has been associated with a right-wing movement that supports policies favoring powerful corporations and the wealthy.  However, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations picking up momentum across the country better embody the values of the original Boston Tea Party. 

Indeed, the very first Boston Tea Party was truly radical and faced scorn from elites and conservatives of the era.

In the late 18th century, the British government became deeply entwined with the interests of the East India Trading Company, a massive conglomerate that counted British aristocracy as shareholders.

1.) The Original Boston Tea Party Was A Civil Disobedience Action Against A Private Corporation. In 1773, agitators blocked the importation of tea by East India Trading Company ships across the country. In Boston harbor, a band of protesters led by Samuel Adams boarded the corporation’s ships and dumped the tea into the harbor. No East India Trading Company employees were harmed, but the destruction of the company’s tea is estimated to be worth up to $2 million in today’s money.

2.) The Original Boston Tea Party Feared That Corporate Greed Would Destroy America. As Professor Benjamin Carp has argued, colonists perceived the East India Trading Company as a “fearsome monopolistic company that was going to rob them blind and pave the way maybe for their enslavement.” A popular pamphlet called The Alarm agitated for a revolt against the East India Trading Company by warning that the British corporation would devastate America just as it had devastated South Asian colonies.

3.) The Original Boston Tea Party Believed Government Necessary To Protect Against Corporate Excess. Smithsonian historian Barbara Smith has noted that Samuel Adams believed that oppression could occur when governments are too weak. As Adams explained in a Boston newspaper, government should exist “to protect the people and promote their prosperity.” Patriots behind the Tea Party revolt believed “rough economic equality was necessary to maintaining liberty,” says Smith.

4.) The Original Boston Tea Party Was Sparked By A Corporate Tax Cut For A British Corporation. The Tea Act, a law by the British Parliament exempting tea imported by the East India Trading Company from taxes and allowing the corporation to directly ship its tea to the colonies for sale, is credited with setting off the Boston Tea Party. The law was perceived as an effort by the British to bailout the East India Trading Company by shutting off competition from American shippers.

5.) The Original Boston Tea Party Wanted A Stronger Democracy. There is a common misconception that the Boston Tea Party was simply a revolt against taxation. The truth is much more nuanced, and there were many factors behind the opposition to the East India Company and the British government. Although the colonists resented taxes levied by a distant British Parliament, in the years preceding the Tea Party, the Massachusetts colony had levied taxes several times to pay for local services.

The full article is available here

Reagan Called For End To ‘Crazy’ Tax Loopholes For Millionaires Current Republicans Hate - Pat Garofalo

When President Obama released his plan for “the Buffett rule,” which involves closing tax loopholes and ensuring that millionaires pay their fair share in taxes, he explained that “middle-class families shouldn’t be paying higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires.”

Ever since, many Republicans have been attacking Obama for inciting “class warfare.” “It looks like the President wants to move down the class warfare path,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). “I don’t think I would describe class warfare as leadership,” agreed Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH).

However, if calling for an end to millionaires having lower tax rates than their secretaries is class warfare, Obama is only the latest class warrior to occupy the Oval Office. In a June 6, 1985 speech at Northside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, then President Ronald Reagan explained that tax loopholes allowing a millionaire to pay lower taxes that a bus driver were “crazy,” because they allowed the “truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.”

When Reagan asked the crowd whether millionaires should be paying more or less in taxes than a bus driver, the crowd resoundingly responded “more!” Reagan also told an Illinois crowd about a letter he had received from a man who said that tax loopholes allowed him to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. “He wrote me the letter to tell me he’d like to come to Washington and testify before Congress as to how that’s possible for him to do and why it is wrong,” Reagan said.

The full article is available here