Sheila Bair, the longtime Republican who served as chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) during the fiscal meltdown five years ago, joins Bill to talk about American banks’ continuing risky and manipulative practices, their seeming immunity from prosecution, and growing anger from Congress and the public.
Also on the show, Richard Wolff, whose smart, blunt talk about the crisis of capitalism on his first Moyers & Company appearance was so compelling and provocative, we asked him to return. This time, the economics expert answers questions sent in by our viewers, diving further into economic inequality, the limitations of industry regulation, and the widening gap between a booming stock market and a population that increasingly lives in poverty.
Labor Day protest for minimum wage hike. Philadelphia has the highest rate of deep poverty of any of the nation’s 10 most populous cities. The annual salary for a single person at half the poverty line is around $5,700; for a family of four, it’s around $11,700. Philadelphia’s deep-poverty rate is 12.9 percent, or around 200,000 people.
By Alfred Lubrano Philadelphia Inquirer
March 19, 2013 – Philadelphia has the highest rate of deep poverty – people with incomes below half of the poverty line – of any of the nation’s 10 most populous cities.
The annual salary for a single person at half the poverty line is around $5,700; for a family of four, it’s around $11,700.
Philadelphia’s deep-poverty rate is 12.9 percent, or around 200,000 people.
Phoenix, Chicago, and Dallas are the nearest to Philadelphia, with deep-poverty rates of more than 10 percent.
The numbers come from an examination of the 2009 through 2011 three-year estimate of the U.S. Census American Community Survey by The Inquirer and Temple University sociologist David Elesh.
Of the 4,300,000 people living in the area around Philadelphia, there are nearly 160,000 in deep poverty – a rate of 3.6 percent – in Bucks, Chester, Montgomery, Delaware, Salem, Gloucester, Burlington, and Camden Counties as well as New Castle County, Del., and Cecil County, Md., Elesh’s analysis showed.
Nationwide, more than 20 million people live in deep poverty, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
These deep-poverty numbers don’t include noncash benefits such as food stamps, which help families survive, experts said.
The Philadelphia deep-poverty figure wasn’t a complete surprise for antipoverty advocates, since the city already has the highest poverty rate – 28.4 percent – of any of America’s biggest cities.
March 18, 2013 – On the decennial of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the persons responsible have shown remarkably little guilt over launching an unprovoked war of aggression, even when the lamentable results might be expected to give one pause to rethink the enterprise. Marveling at the complacency about Iraq of America’s foreign policy elite as they are fawningly interviewed on the Sunday talk shows, columnist Alex Pareene says that "[p]eople who were integral in the decision to wage that war sat there and opined on what the United States should do about Iran and China and North Korea and no one laughed them out of the room. It was disgusting." Disgusting, but hardly surprising here in the United States of Amnesia.
Are there any lessons to be drawn from the debacle? Here are three tentative conclusions:
American Exceptionalism is a more pernicious drug than crack cocaine. Almost 50 years ago, J. William Fulbright described American Exceptionalism extremely well in his book The Arrogance of Power:
The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image.
Whatever grubby calculations of realpolitik our political classes harbor — access to cheap oil, strategic military advantage, appeasement of political lobbies — they invariably mask them in the doctrines of American Exceptionalism, the idea that a war has a higher moral purpose when the United States is involved in it. The invasion of Iraq was a marquee example of this deception, because the aggression was so naked. What looked like an ordinary cynical land-grab was actually (according to American Exceptionalism) a selfless duty, rather like Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden.
‘A reminder that we don’t need to cut teachers and school lunches when we can eliminate wasteful giveaways to fossil fuel corporations.’ Watch Rep. Keith Ellison introduce the budget here:
March 14, 2013 – In the midst of ongoing hysteria about a ‘non-existent deficit crisis’ in Washington, the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Wednesday unveiled an alternative approach to destructive austerity economics by releasing their ‘Back to Work Budget’ plan for 2014.
Pushing back specifically on the dominant talking point of inside-the-Beltway elites, the budget challenges the idea that cutting programs, reducing corporate tax rates, and slashing investments is a pathway to economic prosperity. Its proponents argue the US does not have "a deficit crisis"—as those pushing for steep cuts suggest—but rather, "a jobs crisis."
Presented by CPC co-chairs Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva and Keith Ellison and backed by members of the caucus’ Budget Task force—Reps. Jim McDermott, Jan Schakowsky, Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan—the plan describes how smart investments, not deep cuts to key programs, would create almost 7 million jobs over the first year of its implementation.
“Americans face a choice,” Grijalva and Ellison said. “We can either cut Medicare benefits to pay for more tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or we can close outdated tax loopholes and invest in jobs. We choose investment.”
They continue:
The Back to Work Budget invests in America’s future because the best way to reduce our long-term deficit is to put America back to work. In the first year alone, we create nearly 7 million American jobs and increase GDP by 5.7%. We reduce unemployment to near 5% in three years with a jobs plan that includes repairing our nation’s roads and bridges, and putting the teachers, cops and firefighters who have borne the brunt of our economic downturn back to work. We reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion by closing tax loopholes and asking the wealthy to pay a fair share. We repeal the arbitrary sequester and the Budget Control Act that are damaging the economy, and strengthen Medicare and Medicaid, which provide high quality, low-cost medical coverage to millions of Americans when they need it most. This is what the country voted for in November. It’s time we side with America’s middle class and invest in their future.
Received as a breath of fresh air of economic sanity, the plan was praised by a variety of individuals and groups.
Typical Pennsylvania Wage is too Little to Pay the Average Rent
By Tim Grant Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
March 13, 2013 – When a basic two-bedroom apartment in Pennsylvania costs an average $895 a month, renters must earn at least $17.21 an hour — 2.4 times the state minimum wage — to afford a decent roof over their heads.
Although the cost of renting a two-bedroom unit in the Pittsburgh region is lower at $772 a month, Pittsburgh households still must earn about $14.85 an hour to afford the apartment, which amounts to more than twice the state minimum wage and 117 percent of what the average city renter earns.
An estimated 56 percent of Pittsburgh-area renters cannot afford to meet the expenses for a two-bedroom apartment.
"The [typical] renter’s hourly wage in Pittsburgh is $12.70. That means the most they could afford to pay is $660 a month in rent," said Liz Hersh, executive director of the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania. Her estimate is based on renters paying no more than one-third of their income on rent and utilities.
Posted: Mar 12, 2013 10:02 AM EDT Updated: Mar 12, 2013 10:02 AM EDT
HARRISVILLE, Pa. (AP) – Police say there are no injuries after an apparent drive-by shooting at a Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling site in northwestern Pennsylvania.
The Butler Eagle (http://bit.ly/hMQZ9u ) reports that on Saturday a suspect in a pickup truck pointed a small-caliber rifle in the direction of a drilling rig and fired two rounds.
State police report that the occupants of the vehicle were shouting profanities at the drilling site as they fled the scene.
Authorities say there’s no known motive for the shooting, nor were there any previous threats directed at the operators of the site or its employees.
Shell Exploration & Production Co., a unit of Royal Dutch Shell PLC, owns the drilling site.
Authorities are searching for leads in the case.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” candidate Barack Obama April 2008
by Randy Shannon
Progressive Democrats of America, PA Coordinator
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported a large increase in jobs in February as compared to January. At the same time the January jobs data was revised lower, which gave a boost to the February number. Let’s look at what happened to the people behind the numbers.
This graph shows two sets of data: the Employment to Population ratio and the Labor Force Participation rate. These are updated with February data.
They show that the percent of the population employed has not changed in February. The Employment-Population ratio was unchanged at 58.6% in February (black line).
It also shows that fewer members of the labor force are working.The Labor Force Participation Rate decreased to 63.5% in February (blue line). This is the percentage of the working age population in the labor force.
How can this be true with all the jobs added and the drop in the unemployment rate that the corporate media is advertising?
The answer starts with the rise in the number of long term unemployed shown in this second graph. According to the BLS, there are 4.8 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks and still want a job. This is up from 4.71 million in January.
Long term unemployment is a violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Long term unemployment is the ugly reality of dead end capitalism. The media doesn’t like to talk about this issue. These folks don’t count when calculating the unemployment rate.
The composition of the new jobs also contributes to the happy headline numbers. The February report shows that the number of part-time workers increased while the number of full-time workers decreased. Voila! more jobs. In February according to the Household Survey, the number of full-time jobs declined by 77K from 115,918 to 115,841 while part-time workers rose from 27,467 to 27,569, or 102K.
The income disparity is getting worse and the spending power of working people is further declining while more jobs are being created. This is not the stuff that makes for an economic recovery. The impact on working families is shown in this graph of wages and salaries compared to the value of the fruits of our labor (GDP).
The point of sequestration and austerity is to drive this line lower and lower to make corporate profits higher and higher. This thinking is natural for owners of finance but it is flawed because profits can only be realized when workers consume the output of their own labor.
The graph titled ‘multiple job holders’ shows an interesting development raised by blogger Zero Hedge: “But the most surprising development in February from a quality standpoint was that the number of multiple job-holders rose by a massive 340K, which just happens to be a record. One wonders: how many actual people got new jobs, as opposed to how many qualified single individuals ended up getting more than one job in February in order to boost that much needed weekly income to sustainable levels.”
This last graph should be familiar to those who’ve read It’s Time to Fight for Full Employment. This shows the slow paced advance out of the depths of the employment recession that began in 2007. This is a much longer and deeper employment recession than any since the Great Depression. It is evidence that the system isn’t working any more and those in control have lost control.
The rise in jobs just this year has come at the cost of $1.2 trillion in US government debt. Most of this debt was transfers to the big global criminal banks that are speculating in stocks, bonds, and politicians while calling for more austerity for working people.
The political servants of the wealthy, now in power, must be replaced by political servants of the people. Then our capital can be invested in productive enterprises, our social fabric can be repaired, and the criminal banks can be liquidated.
Rep. Keith Ellison, co-chair of Congressional Progressive Caucus
A Congress controlled by Progressive Democrats can pass HR 1000, the 21st Century Full Employment Act, that will tax Wall Street speculation to create a jobs and training fund controlled by the Department of Labor. Such a Congress will pass HR 676, the Medicare for All Act that will put everyone on Medicare, save $billions and create 3 million new jobs in the healthcare sector. Such a Congress will pass S 332,the Climate Protection Act, that will tax carbon to fund consumer rebates and transfer energy production from climate killing carbon burning to renewable solar, wind, and geothermal energy, another huge job creation project.
Voters in the PA 12th Congressional District are ready for a progressive Democrat to represent them in Congress. They have shown that corporate Democrats who oppose equal rights for women, who don’t support the top of the ticket, who oppose EPA protection for our air and water, and who cater to the right, can’t win elections anymore. Union members, young people, minorities, and women want to move our district out of the past and into a future of jobs, healthcare, and a sustainable environment.
March 7, 2013 – For years, the Obama Administration has been pummeled for failing to bring criminal charges against a single major Wall Street bank or a single leading Wall Street banker for what the FBI termed an “epidemic of fraud” that blew up the entire economy. Investigations revealed the banks committed routine fraud in peddling mortgage securities they knew were garbage, trampled basic property laws, laundered money from Iran, Libya and Mexican drug lords, conspired to game the basic measure of interest rates and more. Yet, time after time, the Justice Department and regulatory agencies settled for sweetheart deals, with no admission of guilt, no banker held accountable, and fines that were the equivalent in earnings of a speeding ticket to the average family.
Yesterday Attorney General Holder stated openly what was already apparent. The Justice Department believes that Too Big to Fail Banks are Too Big to Jail. Criminal indictments against banks or leading bankers might endanger the economy and thus were too big a risk.
Here’s what Holder said
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” he said. “And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”
Holder was responding to questions by Republican Senator Charles Grassley about why the Justice Department brought no criminal charges against the large British bank HSBC after it admitted laundering money for parties in Iran, Libya and Mexican drug lords.
March 19, 2013 – Philadelphia has the highest rate of deep poverty – people with incomes below half of the poverty line – of any of the nation’s 10 most populous cities. 
Presented by CPC co-chairs Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva and Keith Ellison and backed by members of the caucus’ Budget Task force—Reps. Jim McDermott, Jan Schakowsky, Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan—the plan describes how smart investments, not deep cuts to key programs, would create almost 7 million jobs over the first year of its implementation. 
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 