Private Gain For The Few Trumps Public Good For The Many - Robert Reich

"Privatize" means "Pay for it yourself."

We’re losing public goods available to all, supported by the tax payments of all and especially the better-off. In its place we have private goods available to the very rich, supported by the rest of us.

A society is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

"Privatize" means "Pay for it yourself." The practical consequence of this in an economy whose wealth and income are now more concentrated than at any time in the past 90 years is to make high-quality public goods available to fewer and fewer.

Since the late 1970s, almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top. But as the upper-middle class and the rich began shifting to private institutions, they withdrew political support for public ones.  In consequence, their marginal tax rates dropped — setting off a vicious cycle of diminishing revenues and deteriorating quality, spurring more flight from public institutions

Outside of defense, domestic discretionary spending is down sharply as a percent of the economy. Add in declines in state and local spending, and total public spending on education, infrastructure and basic research has dropped dramatically over the past five years as a portion of GDP.

The full article is available here

The Moneyed Elite and The Crisis of Labor: Wall Street 2012-13 - James Petras

The financial crash of 2008-09 and the bailouts that followed reinforced the dominance of Wall Street over the US economy.

On July 16, 2013, Goldman Sachs, the fifth largest US bank by assets announced its second quarter profits doubled the previous year to $1.93 billion. J. P. Morgan, the largest bank made $6.1 billion in the second quarter up 32% over the year before and expects to make $25 billion in profits in 2013. Wells Fargo, the fourth largest bank, reaped $5.27 billion, up 20%. Citigroup’s profits topped $4.18 billion, up 42% over the previous year.

The financial crash of 2008-2009 and the bailouts that followed reinforced the dominance of Wall Street over the US economy. The result is that the parasitic financial sector is extracting enormous rents and profits from the economy and depriving the productive industries of capital and earnings. The recovery and boom of corporate profits since the crisis turns out to be concentrated in the same financial sector which provoked the crash a few years back.

The ascendancy of the plutocracy has been accompanied by cuts in public spending on health, education and social services. (Though painful, these cuts would be much larger and catastrophic had the regressive GOP House, steered off of the rails by the Tea Party, not been reigned in some. You may think it is coincidental that the very same plutocrats who benefit from the ascendancy of the financial sector at the expense of the common good are among those responsible for starting and funding the Astro Turf, manufactured, ill-informed rage-fest that is the Tea Party.  You would be wrong).

The bi-polar world of rich bankers in the North racking up record profits and workers everywhere receiving a shrinking share of national income spells out the class basis of “recovery” and “depression,” prosperity for the few and immiseration for the many.  This is typified by Detroit, once the cradle of both the auto industry and the organized industrial workers’ leap into the middle-class.  The big three auto companies have relocated overseas and to non-union states while the billionaire bankers “restructure” the economy, break unions, lower wages, renege on pensions and rule by administrative decree.

The full article is available here

Deficit Shrinking, Citizens Don't Know Bc Deficit Hawk Propaganda - Lynn Stuart Parramore

Disgraceful propaganda has left the public misinformed and confused.

Remember all those deficit hawks who screamed that the federal deficit is spiraling out of control and must be stopped with spending cuts that have a funny way of hurting the pocketbooks of the most vulnerable Americans?

Their excuse for ripping us off has been literally disappearing, but a new Google survey shows that not only do the vast majority Americans not know it — half of the public actually believes that the deficit is growing.

Here are the facts: The U.S. budget deficit has been shrinking at a rapid rate over the last few months. The deficit peaked at 10.2 percent of GDP in 2009, but over the past four quarters, it has shrunk to a mere 4.2 percent of GDP. What’s more, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the deficit will fall to 2.1 percent of GDP in 2015.

Why such a disconnect? Unfortunately, disgraceful propaganda has left the public misinformed and confused.

The full article is available here

48 Years Later, Same Conservative Arguments Against Voting Rights Act - Ari Rabin Havt

One would hope that segregationists' arguments would have been relegated to the dust bin of history, rather than in use by conservatives today to defend discriminatory policies.  

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that helped force states and localities with a history of discrimination to have the Justice Department preclear proposed changes to voting regulations. Representative John Lewis (D-GA), a civil rights icon, described the decision as "a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

Today marks the 48^th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson signing that act into law.

One would hope that segregationists' arguments against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would have been relegated to the dust bin of history, rather than in use by conservatives today to defend discriminatory policies.  

Unfortunately, much of the rhetoric used to attack the law and defend the Supreme Court's decision remains rooted in the segregationist defenses of Jim Crow.

Regardless of the motives, the use of similar rhetoric shows a lack of historic perspective.

The full article is available here