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Cash Bar 5:30
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2619 Brodhead Rd., Aliquippa, PA
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PA 12th CD Chapter, Progressive Democrats of America
Buffet Dinner with two meats, vegetables, coffee, dessert
Call to purchase or reserve tickets: Tina Shannon 724-683-1925
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/225b4178-3459-11e4-b81c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3CNp3Ura8
September 4, 2014 7:47 pm
Inequality in the US rose sharply in the past three years as a recovery in growth failed to turn around one of the defining trends of the modern economy.
According to one of the most definitive sources of data on inequality – the US Federal Reserve’s triennial survey of consumer finances – median family incomes fell 5 per cent from 2010 to 2013.
The boom in the stock market and a recovery in house prices fuelled large gains in the wealth of the richest, with the share held by the top 3 per cent of households rising from 51.8 per cent in 2007 to 54.4 per cent in 2013.
The release of the data is likely to reignite a furious political debate about rising inequality in the US, inflamed earlier this year by Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Based on in-depth interviews with more than 6,000 families, the SCF is one of the principle sources of data used by researchers on inequality.
According to the survey, real pre-tax incomes fell in every part of the income distribution except the very top, as income was redistributed upwards. Average incomes for the decile of households rose by 10 per cent from $361,500 to $397,500.
Families at the bottom of the income distribution saw continued substantial declines in average real incomes between 2010 and 2013, continuing the trend observed between the 2007 and 2010 surveys– Federal Reserve
Federal Reserve economists said that part of it was a bounce back from falling top incomes due to the financial crisis but not all.
“Families at the bottom of the income distribution saw continued substantial declines in average real incomes between 2010 and 2013, continuing the trend observed between the 2007 and 2010 surveys,” says the report. The survey does not look at after-tax income, which can be more equal because of redistribution.
For wealth, the Fed survey reported a slightly different trend than recent studies saying all gains have gone to the top one per cent – it finds that they are all going to the top three per cent instead.
From the start of the survey in 1989 until today, the share of wealth held by the top 3 per cent has risen from 44.8 per cent to 54.4 per cent; the share held by the next 7 per cent has changed very little; while the share held by the bottom 90 per cent has fallen from 33.2 per cent in 1989 to 24.7 per cent.
An important reason for the rising wealth share of the richest was the surge in asset prices that has seen the S&P 500 rally by more than 100 per cent from its trough to trade above 2,000.
But again, Fed economists said that is not the whole story, noting the falling share of families in the bottom half of the income distribution who own assets.
The Fed said that ownership rates of housing and businesses fell substantially between 2010 and 2013. For families in the bottom 50 per cent, participation in retirement plans kept falling, further reducing their asset ownership.
8 Pittsburgh area fast food workers have been arrested after not moving and taking the street to huge support from supporters and workers. We’re proud to stand with them.
Get involved in the nationwide Fight for $15. Tell McDonald’s that you stand with striking workers now.
Learn more about the Fast Food Swindle, taxpayer dollars, and public assistance.
http://strikefastfood.org/uncategorized/pittsburgh-8-arrested-fighting-for-15/#
The activists who gathered on the steps of the Indiana Statehouse to announce their new coalition last month wanted their voices to be heard: A low minimum wage is bad for people and the economy.
Touting arguments common in the minimum wage debate — that inflation has outpaced wage growth and that public welfare programs drain taxpayer dollars — they criticize state legislators for inaction and challenge them to better understand the difficulties of living on $7.25 an hour.
“For those who don’t support increasing the minimum wage, I challenge you to live my life for a week,” said McDonald’s employee Destiny Martin, surrounded by about 40 other activists. “Then tell me if I deserve a substantial wage.”
It’s one of the focal issues for Indiana Moral Mondays, one of a dozen groups cropping up nationwide with the goal of rolling back what they call “extremist” state laws.
Higher wages, a fast food labor union, voting reforms, environmental sustainability, higher public school funding, fairer treatment for minorities in the criminal justice system. Indiana Moral Mondays wants it all.
The goal is to bring together allies in the fight for progressive policies, said Nancy Holle, a leader in the coalition. Among the groups involved are the NAACP, Holle’s Family Faith and Labor Coalition and Raise the Wage Indiana.
“It’s the biggest tent you can imagine,” said Holle. “We’re bringing everybody together who have always been kicked to the curb by extremists in our state legislature, and we’re going to stand together.”
The broad range of issues is what makes Indiana Moral Mondays strong, Holle said. It makes them harder to ignore.
MILWAUKEE — President Barack Obama renewed his push for Congress to raise the minimum wage Monday in a buoyant accounting of the economy’s “revving” performance, delivered on behalf of Democrats opening their fall campaigns for the midterm congressional elections.
“America deserves a raise,” he told a union crowd in Milwaukee, vowing to keep a hard sell on Congress in much the way he once courted his wife. “I just wore her down,” he cracked.
“After all unions have done to build and protect working Americans, I know it’s frustrating when people have the gall to blame you for the problems facing working Americans. I know you’ve got some experience with that around here,” Mr. Obama told a raucous crowd. “But you know what? If I were looking for a good job that lets me build some security for my family, I’d join a union. If I were busting my butt in the service industry and wanted an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, I’d join a union … And if I care about these things, I’d also want more Democrats looking out for me. I’m just saying.”
Timing his push to Labor Day, the traditional start of the autumn campaign, Obama aggressively drew attention to recent economic gains, setting aside past caution on that subject.
“By almost every measure the American economy and American workers are better off than when I took office,” he said, rattling off a string of improving economic indicators even while acknowledging not all people are benefiting. “The engines,” he said, “are revving a little louder.”
It was, at least indirectly, a pep talk for Democrats facing tough races in a nation still gripped with economic anxieties.
The emphasis on the minimum wage is designed to draw campaign contrasts with Republicans, many of whom maintain that an increase would hurt small businesses and slow down hiring. No one expects Congress to act on it before the November elections.
Despite the absence of a federal increase, 13 states raised their minimum wages at the beginning of this year. Those states have added jobs at a faster pace than those that did not raise the wage, providing a counterpoint to a Congressional Budget Office report earlier this year that projected that a higher minimum wage of $10.10 an hour could cost the nation 500,000 jobs.
From 2009-2012, 95 percent of income gains went to the 1 percent. So it’s not surprising that the 1 percent is fully recovered from the economic downturn. The rest of us, not so much. The incomes of the bottom 99 percent have barely started to recover. This wage gap has widened in every state. You can check out your state at www.epi.org/publication/unequal-states.
The gap between workers’ wages and increases in productivity, now more than $500 a week, is the widest it’s ever been. There won’t be a robust economic recovery unless the 99 percent start to make real gains in income.
[Source: Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States, Emmanuel Saez, University of California, Berkeley, September 2013. Inequality, the Great Recession, and Slow Recovery, Barry Z. Cynamon and Steven M. Fazzari, Washington University, St. Louis, January 2014.]
by Randy Shannon, Progressive Democrats of America Economic & Social Justice Team
The velocity of money is the number of times a dollar changes hands in a certain period of time. The blue line falling on the right side means money is hardly moving. Production, earnings, and spending are depressed.
Folks, there is no recovery. Capitalism has failed. When it fails, the 1% panic and start militarizing the police, rigging elections, starting wars, and creating a surveillance state.
The red line shows that creation of money is at an all time high, and the rate of money creation is accelerating even now. The purple line shows that all this money is going to bank deposits of the 1%.
So the bankers policy of printing money and increasing their own wealth at our expense has not resulted in a recovery.
This is no recovery. This is another financial bubble, protected by systemic corruption, a lying corporate media, and an obstructionist Republican Congress owned by the 1%.
This is not stimulus. This is a fraud whose victims are the great majority – we who must work for a living, pay taxes, or deal with homelessness, hunger, depression, and violence.
This is not fate. Different economic systems benefit different classes. Figure out which class you belong to and make a choice. There’s a popular saying: “Those who show up decide.”
American debate on the hundreds of civilian deaths in Gaza and the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict is polarized between feelings of sympathy with civilian victims on either side and mutual vilification of the Likud-led government of Israel and the Hamas-led government in Gaza. But it may be more constructive for Americans to think about the role that the U.S. government plays in perpetuating this never-ending and heart-rending conflict.
Opinion polling during a crisis tends to reflect the passions of the moment, but Americans have told pollsters for decades that we want our government to take an even-handed position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Chicago Council Global Views survey in 2012 found that 65% of Americans want the U.S. to “not take either side”, while only 30% want it to “take Israel’s side”. That majority rose to 74% vs 17% at the height of the U.S. war in Iraq in 2004.
But despite decades of presenting itself as an “honest broker” for Middle East peace, there are three ways that the U.S. unequivocally takes the Israeli side in the conflict and effectively supports the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) with all it entails, from illegal settlement building to horrific violence:
By Yonah Freemark
SolidarityEconomy.net via CityLab.com
Aug 13, 2014 – Virtually every wealthy nation in the world has invested in a high-speed rail network—with the striking exception of the United States. From Japan to France, even from Turkey to Russia, trains travel through the country at speeds of 150 miles per hour or above, linking city centers and providing a desirable alternative to both air and automobile travel. Meanwhile, outside Amtrak’s 28 miles of 150-m.p.h. track in rural Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the American rail network is largely limited to speeds of 110 m.p.h. or less. There are few reasons to think the situation will change much in the coming decades.
So why has the United States failed to fund and construct high-speed rail?
The problem is not political process. Most of the countries that have built high-speed rail are democratic, and have submitted the projects to citizen review; others, like Germany and Russia, have federated governments similar to ours that divide general decision-making between levels of authority.
Nor is it geography. The British and French completed a 31-mile tunnel under the British Channel 20 years ago, while many American cities are located in flat regions with few physical construction obstacles.
Nor is it the characteristics of our urban areas. While U.S. cities are less dense than those of many other countries, the Northeast is denser, more transit reliant, and more populated than most areas served by high-speed rail abroad. Nor still is it money. Though the United States invests less in infrastructure than other developed countries do, America nevertheless remains an immensely wealthy nation perfectly capable of spending on new rail links if desired.
What’s missing is a federal commitment to a well-funded national rail plan.
Instead, we have a political system in which the federal government, having devolved virtually all decision-making power to states, cannot prioritize one project over another in the national interest. We have a funding system that encourages study after study of unfundable or unbuildable projects in places that refuse to commit their own resources. And we have a bureaucracy that, having never operated or constructed modern intercity rail, doesn’t understand what it takes. This helter-skelter approach to transportation improvements is fundamentally incapable of supporting large-expenditure, long-range projects like high-speed rail.
This wasn’t always the case. In 1956, Congress approved a significant increase in the federal gas tax, and with it a national plan for interstate highways. That plan, which included a steady stream of funding and a clear map of national priorities, was mostly completed over the next three decades. Though implemented by states, highway alignments were chosen at the national level, with the intention of connecting the largest cities, regardless of political boundaries. Funding came almost entirely (90 percent) from the national government and was guaranteed as long as a route was on the national map. Physical requirements for roadways were mandated at the national level and universally applied. And construction was completed by state departments of transportation that were technically knowledgeable, accustomed to building such public works, and able to make decisions about how to move forward.
The result was a system of roadways that most Americans rely on, often daily. The interstate system is unquestionably the nation’s transportation lifeblood.
Yet Americans do not have the same perspective on the role of the federal government that they had when this highway system was initially funded. Trust in Washington has declined from more than 70 percent during the 1950s to less than 20 percent today. So while President Dwight Eisenhower declared in 1955 that the federal government should “assume principal responsibility” for the highway system, its approach to a high-speed rail network has reflected this change in public thinking about Washington’s place in transportation planning. The response has been to reduce the federal government’s ability to commit to a long-term plan and associated funding.
Via Pew Research
Recent efforts to revive this federal role have been seriously flawed. Take the Obama administration’s attempt at a national plan of proposed intercity rail investments in 2009.
For starters, the map’s proposed routes were vague, a number of important connections were not identified, and some routes appeared to have been chosen at random—simply the consequence of previous state studies with no national outlook. Funding had been dedicated through an initial $8 billion included in the stimulus bill, but there was certainly no guarantee that railways on that map would be built in the long term. The definition of “high-speed rail” was not applied universally; the administration proposed some links at 90 m.p.h. and others at more than 250 m.p.h., with no explanation for why some would be fast and others not. Finally, many of the states that were supposed to be implementing these projects were woefully unprepared for the task, having made few such investments in the past. None had the experience of building 200 m.p.h. electric railways to the international standard.
Such an approach to national transportation doesn’t work. It leaves too many planning questions open to state decision making, and it fails to offer a financing source that actually produces the funds needed for intercity rail. Far from fulfilling Eisenhower’s mandate of assuming principal responsibility, the latest high-speed rail plan assumed too little.
It would be ridiculous to plan an intercity transportation system at the state level.
But the need is still there. With falling automobile vehicle miles traveled, rising transit use, and booming city centers, we need new ways to connect our cities. More highways are not the answer, not only because they pollute the environment and destroy the neighborhoods they pass through, but also because they’re relatively slow and become congested almost as soon as they’re built. With a growing population, the country needs an expanded transportation system. The United States must invest in clean, neighborhood-building, and congestion-relieving trains, but we cannot expect states to pick up the slack of an uncertain federal government.
The planning and funding of the interstate highway system was premised on the fact that the travel needs of Americans occur irrespective of state lines. Indeed, the 50 largest metropolitan areas, representing more than half of the country’s population, are located in 31 separate states and 15 of them actually straddle state borders. Given this reality, it would be ridiculous to plan an intercity transportation system at the state level. California’s high-speed rail progress—its proposed San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line remains the only truly fast train project in the country—is the exception that proves the rule; that state’s size makes it no example for the rest of the nation.
It’s time for the United States to commit to national planning, funding, coordination, and prioritization of rail investment. Intercity transportation systems require active federal engagement to guarantee the development of routes that reflect national needs and national priorities. Yet without political consensus on the need to develop national goals and focus investments, high-speed rail will remain a pipe-dream for decades to come.
This article is part of ‘The Future of Transportation,’ a CityLab series made possible with support from The Rockefeller Foundation.
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 