December 12, 2013
‘But the budget deal negotiated by Murray and Ryan
will do nothing to expand demand in the economy.
They could have devoted funds to rebuilding the
infrastructure, retrofitting homes and businesses to
make them more energy efficient, and improving
health care and education. Instead we see further
cuts that will both lead to deteriorating service and
fewer jobs.
‘This means that millions of people will continue to
unemployed or underemployed for the foreseeable
future and workers will lack the bargaining power to
secure their share of economic growth. But at least
the lives of members of Congress will be easier.
‘Happy holidays!’
Economist Dean Baker
CNN Opinion
December 12, 2013
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/11/opinion/baker-budget-deal/index.html
December 10, 2013‘Economically they’re already obsolete. The
Clinton/Third Way/Democratic Leadership Council
ideology – which typically markets itself as
“centrism,” even though its economic policies are far
to the right of public opinion – was thoroughly
discredited by the financial crisis of 2008. That
crisis was caused in large part by Wall Street
deregulation which they pushed, and it exacerbated
the growing wage inequality and loss of social
mobility which has devastated middle class and
lower-income Americans.
‘And yet, their brand of Wall Street-friendly
“centrism” made a remarkable comeback after 2008,
thanks in large part to the Obama White House’s
influence on the Democratic Party – and to corporate
money’s influence on the political process. Five
years after the crisis, the entire nation is still seeing
the disastrous effects of their economic policies on
our nation’s most intractable issues:
unemployment, wage stagnation and the lack of
opportunity for most Americans.’
Richard Eskow
Campaign for America’s Future
December 8, 2013
December 9, 2013‘ The good news, such as it is, is that the White
House and Senate Democrats are trying to make an
issue of expiring unemployment benefits. The bad
news is that they don’t sound willing to make
extending benefits a precondition for a budget deal,
which means that they aren’t really willing to make
a stand.’So the odds, I’m sorry to say, are that the long-term
unemployed will be cut off, thanks to a perfect
marriage of callousness – a complete lack of
empathy for the unfortunate – with bad economics.
But then, hasn’t that been the story of just about
everything lately? ‘
Economist Paul Krugman
New York Times
December 9, 2013
July 28, 2013‘Jack Lew to Detroit: Drop Dead. The city of Detroit
“must work with creditors” said Treasury Secretary
Jack Lew this morning to George Stephanopoulos.
Of course. And when it was $800 billion in taxpayer
money to bail out bankers? Fine. When it’s $2
billion to save an American city? Who cares. But
there’s $1.5 billion in tax money going to Egypt
every year – but there’s not even low level talk
about a federal bailout to save Detroit.’It was Jack Lew who more than likely advised
President Obama what a great idea it was to extend
the Bush tax cuts in 2010 and then make them
permanent on January 1, 2013 – adding $3.9
trillion to the debt. Had the President simply done
nothing and let the tax cuts expire there would be
$3.9 trillion in tax money that in part could be used
to save Detroit.’Included in that deal: Making the estate tax
permanent. And nothing in the deal to fix the
sequester. Apparently President Obama and Lew are
OK with handing huge take breaks for Warren
Buffett and Donald Trump and the top %1 while
sending $1.5 billion in tax money to Egypt. But the
idea of bailing out Detroit? No way.’Lauren Victoria Burke
Crew of 42
July 28, 2013
June 27, 2013‘Five years since the ‘great recession” started, the
failed policy of austerity has left a legacy of extreme
levels of unemployment, rising inequality, the
marginalisation of a generation of young people and
the desperation of a growing informal sector where
rules simply don`t apply.’International institutions did not prevent the
economic crisis; they are now failing to regulate the
greed and destruction of speculative capital and
prevent the next banking crisis. They are doing
nothing to rethink the economic and trade model,
which has caused unparalleled inequality. The
global economy is no more secure today than it was
five years ago.”Collective bargaining, a cornerstone of the
relationship between a worker and employer is
threatened with elimination. A fundamental global
right, set by the International Labour Organisation
(ILO), is being violated. Social unrest and
impoverishment are seen as mere collateral damage
in this attack on workers` rights, an attack which is
undertaken without economic evidence that stands
up to scrutiny.’International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)
Frontlines 2013 Report, quoted in ‘Futures
commission on alternatives to neoliberalism,’
address by Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the
South Africa Congress of South African Trade
Unions (COSATU)June 26, 2013
June 13, 2013‘ In the post-war economic boom years, prosperity
and the giving hand of social welfare went a long
way to closing the gap between rich and poor in
Western democracies. But since the 1970s – or the
1980s at the latest – the gulf has been widening
again. That doesn’t mean the societies in question
are home to rampant poverty, but that many people
– those with minimum qualifications and training,
and who often work in the service industry with no
job security – are running on the spot. And as they
run, others, such as academics and the self-
employed are striding ahead, and incomes and
fortunes at the very top of society reach
unimaginable proportions.’If one were to imagine the social structure of a
society as a pyramid, it would be like watching the
tip grow ever higher. The Occupy movement fights
against this small minority at the very pinnacle of
society; against the 1 percent that has cut free from
the other 99 percent, yet which still rules over its
fortunes.’It is not only a matter of social inequality and
justice, but of power and political dominance. That
the Occupy movement bangs its drum in the name
of democracy is no coincidence, for democracy
means equality, equal rights and influence. An elite
leadership will undermine the credibility of
democratic institutions, including elections and
parliament, if the global dominance of the very
capital that politicians push about at will has not
already done so.’Paul Nolte, professor of history at
the Free University of Berlin
Deutsche Welle
June 13, 2013http://tinyurl.com/n85bzbk
May 24, 2013‘Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to
draft legislation that softens financial regulations.
Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it
themselves.’… The lobbying campaign shows how, three years
after Congress passed the most comprehensive
overhaul of regulation since the Depression, Wall
Street is finding Washington a friendlier place.’The cordial relations now include a growing number
of Democrats in both the House and the Senate,
whose support the banks need if they want to roll
back parts of the 2010 financial overhaul, known as
Dodd-Frank.’New York Times
May 24, 2013http://tinyurl.com/orggqor
May 21, 2013‘In addition to those standard multinational tactics,
Apple established at the apex of its offshore network
an offshore holding company that it says is not tax
resident in any nation. That subsidiary, Apple
Operations International, has no employees and no
physical presence, but keeps its bank accounts and
records in the United States and holds its board
meetings in California. It was incorporated in
Ireland in 1980, and is owned and controlled by the
U.S. parent company, Apple Inc. Ireland asserts tax
jurisdiction only over companies that are managed
and controlled in Ireland, but the United States
bases tax residency on where a company is
incorporated. Exploiting the gap between the two
nations’ tax laws, Apple Operations International
has not filed an income tax return in either country,
or any other country, for the past five years. From
2009 to 2012, it reported income totaling $30
billion.’Henry Blodget | Daily Ticker
Yahoo Finance
May 21, 2013http://tinyurl.com/lowjckw
May 16, 2013‘Driven by their fetish of “competitiveness,” a part of
the European Commission and German Chancellor
Angela Merkel . are trying to better position Europe
globally by way of reducing hard-fought employee
rights and social standards in all countries. Cuts in
unemployment benefits, reductions in worker
protections, lower pensions, expansions to limited
work contractions . and weakening the unions:
Those are just some of the ideas that are on the
table. European Union countries are to pledge to
reform their social and labor systems so that they
conform to the market.’What should be done to counter such plans? … So
far, alternative models for how to stimulate Europe’s
economy and fairly tax wealth exist only on paper
and must be finalized. When it comes to linking
European protest movements and coordinating
salary demands … the unions are hopelessly
behind. And European, and particularly German,
Social Democrats (and the Greens in Germany) have
not emerged as credible opponents to austerity. On
the contrary.”But if the neo-liberal and post-democratic
restructuring of Europe is to be stopped, only frontal
opposition will prove effective. The existence of
Europe is at stake.’Die Tageszeitung (Germany)
[left-leaning daily]
May 16, 2013http://tinyurl.com/b37a63n
May 15, 2013‘Numerous studies assume a rise in summer
drought periods in North America in the future and
an increasing probability of severe cyclones
relatively far north along the U.S. East Coast in the
long term. The rise in sea level caused by climate
change will further increase the risk of storm surge.’Peter Hoppe, who heads Geo Risks
Research at the reinsurance giant
Munich ReNew York Times
May 15, 2013http://tinyurl.com/akvyh88
May 9, 2013‘The main barrier to confronting the climate crisis
isn’t lack of knowledge about the problem, nor is it
the lack of cost-effective solutions.’It’s the lack of political will by most world leaders to
confront the special interests that have worked long
and hard to block the path to a sustainable low-
carbon future. Until this changes, we’re not going to
see the action we need.’Alden Meyer, director of strategy
at the Union of Concerned
Scientists who has attended
virtually every climate negotiation
over the past 19 yearsInter Press Service News
May 9, 2013http://tinyurl.com/bmrqlaa
May 6, 2013‘Our investigators have been in neighboring
countries interviewing victims, doctors and field
hospitals. According to their report of last week,
which I have seen, there are strong, concrete
suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the
use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were
treated.”… This was use on the part of the opposition, the
rebels, not by the government authorities.’Carla Del Ponte, a member
of the United Nations
independent commission
of inquiry on SyriaNew York Times
May 6, 2013]http://tinyurl.com/crdwkcb
May 1, 2013‘I think of how many, and not just young people, are
unemployed, many times due to a purely economic
conception of society, which seeks selfish profit,
beyond the parameters of social justice.’Pope Francis in May Day appeal for
governments to tackle unemployment,
as ‘work is fundamental to
the dignity of a person.’Reuters
May1, 2013http://tinyurl.com/cb78kjz
April 29, 2013
about the foreclosure settlement. This whole
enterprise was conceived by the government solely
as a means of dealing with the explosive problem of
containing the private liability of these “systemically
important” companies. Not only are we not
prosecuting these firms anymore, we’re also actively
in the business of protecting them from litigation.’No other conclusion is possible from this testimony,
which shows that our two primary regulators not
only withheld information about bank illegality and
errors prior to the settlement, but plan on
continuing to do so going forward. There can be only
one reason for concealing that information from the
people affected by those “errors”.’Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
April 26, 2013http://tinyurl.com/c8yg3jk
April 28, 2013‘ Then lawmakers scurried out of town, taking a
week’s vacation while ignoring the low-income
victims of the mandatory budget cuts, who have few
representatives in Washington to protest their lost
aid for housing, nutrition and education. Though
they are suffering actual pain, not just
inconvenience, no one rushed to give them a break
from the sequester, and it is clear that no one will.’Catering to the needs of people with money, such as
business travelers, is the kind of thing the country
has come to expect in recent years from
Congressional Republicans. But Democrats share
full responsibility for this moment of cowardice. The
Senate version of the bill passed by unanimous
consent. That means not a single Democrat opposed
bailing out travelers while poor kids are getting
kicked out of Head Start or nutrition programs. ‘Editorial on bill to avert furloughs
to air traffic controllers, which were
mandated by Congress’s own
sequesterNew York Times
April 27, 2013http://tinyurl.com/cf76b2q
April 26, 2013‘The weak first quarter GDP numbers should be the
final nail in the coffin of the analysts who had been
singing about an acceleration in growth based on
the February jobs report and some other positive
reports from the same time period. The 1.5 percent
growth of final demand for the quarter is likely to be
close to GDP growth for the rest of 2013, assuming
that the sequester cuts are not reversed. At this rate
of growth, it is likely that the unemployment rate
will go up rather than down through the rest of
2013.’Economist Dean Baker
Center for Economic and
Policy Research
April 26, 2013http://tinyurl.com/cx3k7bq
April 23, 2013‘The people at the bottom rungs of our society know
austerity doesn’t work. They’ve known that for years.
After all, it is the people relying on public services
like schools who see the direct impact of austerity in
their day-to-day lives.’However, it seems as though at least some societal
elites are finally waking up to the fact that budget
cuts don’t work during recession.’Allison Kilkenny
Common Dreams
April 22, 2013http://tinyurl.com/boqnx3o
April 18, 2013‘I watch TV and read the papers like everyone else.
We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes
like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was
elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in
the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know
what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like
to take a tough vote. This was neither. These
senators made their decision based on political fear
and on cold calculations about the money of special
interests like the National Rifle Association, which
in the last election cycle spent around $25 million
on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.’Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic
representative from Arizona from
2007 to 2012, a founder of Americans
for Responsible Solutions, which
focuses on gun violence.New York Times
April 18, 2013http://tinyurl.com/cj2rvd7
April 16, 2013‘Most of the Western world has experienced an
increase in inequality in recent decades, though not
as much as the United States has. But among most
economists there is a general understanding that a
country with excessive inequality can’t function
well; many countries have used their tax codes to
help “correct” the market’s distribution of wealth
and income. The United States hasn’t – or at least
not very much. Indeed, the low rates at the top serve
to exacerbate and perpetuate the inequality – so
much so that among the advanced industrial
countries, America now has the highest income
inequality and the least equality of opportunity. This
is a gross inversion of America’s traditional
meritocratic ideals – ideals that our leaders, across
the spectrum, continue to profess.’Economist Joseph Stiglitz
New York Times
April 14, 2013http://tinyurl.com/d38qc5c
April 14, 2013‘One thing that people need to realize about Wall
Street and the financial system in general: many of
the self-congratulating millionaires and billionaires
you read about in the news aren’t “self-made” in any
real sense, but actually live either directly or
indirectly off of your money. The quickest way to
extreme wealth in this world is to attach oneself to
giant piles of institutional money like public
pension funds. The subprime mortgage crisis was
fueled in large part by sociopathic hotshots from
banks and hedge funds who convinced institutional
investors – your corporate retirement fund, your
public pension, your union – to buy crappy
mortgage-backed securities.’Author and journalist Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
April 13, 2013http://tinyurl.com/c8ezsjc
April 11, 2013’The Obama budget also continues to demand more
sacrifice from federal employees than from Wall
Street. Federal employees did not cause the Great
Recession. They did not cause the deficits that
resulted from the Great Recession. Yet their pay
and their retirement keeps getting cut. Why?’Putting aside the injustice of demanding sacrifice
from the innocent while letting the guilty off scot
free, the Obama budget falls short of putting our
economy on a path towards higher wages and full
employment. As we have said many times, the
greatest economic challenge facing America is the
jobs crisis, not the deficit. Yet the administration
cuts the part of the budget that pays for investments
in worker training and jobs, which has already been
cut to its lowest level since the Eisenhower
administration, by another $100 billion. This
austerity budget is bad economic policy at a moment
when the economy remains weak and we urgently
need more job-creating investments.’AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
April 11, 2013http://tinyurl.com/cyuqa6q
April 3, 2013‘During his first run for the White House, in 2008,
Mr. Obama said he would not cut Social Security. I
hope he remembers that promise and keeps it.’I also hope he follows up on another suggestion
that he made during that campaign and gets behind
my legislation to raise the cap on income subject to
the payroll tax, extending the life of Social Security
for generations to come without the need to cut
benefits or raise taxes on the middle class.’Yes, we must move forward on deficit reduction, but
it must not be done on the backs of some of the
most vulnerable people in this country.’Senator Bernard Sanders (Ind.- Vt.)
Letter to the Editor
New York Times
April 2, 2013http://tinyurl.com/chyk3cm
March 29, 2013‘ You don’t have to be a civil engineer to realize that
America needs more and better infrastructure, but
the latest “report card” from the American Society of
Civil Engineers — with its tally of deficient dams,
bridges, and more, and its overall grade of D+ — still
makes startling and depressing reading. And right
now — with vast numbers of unemployed
construction workers and vast amounts of cash
sitting idle — would be a great time to rebuild our
infrastructure. Yet public investment has actually
plunged since the slump began.’Or what about investing in our young? We’re cutting
back there, too, having laid off hundreds of
thousands of schoolteachers and slashed the aid
that used to make college affordable for children of
less-affluent families.’Last but not least, think of the waste of human
potential caused by high unemployment among
younger Americans — for example, among recent
college graduates who can’t start their careers and
will probably never make up the lost ground.’Economist Paul Krugman
New York Times
March 29, 2013http://tinyurl.com/bn8cp53
March 25, 2013‘That’s not to say Marx was entirely correct. His
“dictatorship of the proletariat” didn’t quite work out
as planned. But the consequence of this widening
inequality is just what Marx had predicted: class
struggle is back. Workers of the world are growing
angrier and demanding their fair share of the global
economy. From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the
streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern
China, political and economic events are being
shaped by escalating tensions between capital and
labor to a degree unseen since the communist
revolutions of the 20th century. How this struggle
plays out will influence the direction of global
economic policy, the future of the welfare state,
political stability in China, and who governs from
Washington to Rome. What would Marx say today?
“Some variation of: `I told you so,'” says Richard
Wolff, a Marxist economist at the New School in New
York. “The income gap is producing a level of
tension that I have not seen in my lifetime”.’Michael Schuman, writer on Asia
and global economic issues as a
Time magazine correspondent
in BeijingTime
March 25, 2013
http://tinyurl.com/cmzjeq8
March 23, 2013‘This city cannot destroy that many schools at one
time; and, we contend that no school should be
closed in the city of Chicago. These actions will not
only put our students’ safety and academics careers
at risk but also further destabilize our
neighborhoods.’This is why we intend to rally, united and strong,
on Wednesday, March 27 to send a signal that we
are sick and tired of being bullied and betrayed.
Some of us are going to put our bodies on the
line-because a threat to justice anywhere is a
threat to justice everywhere. And when we declare
the victory, some of us will sit back and sing the
lines of one of Mahaila Jackson’s songs-“How I Got
Over.”Rahm Emanuel has become the “murder mayor.” He
is murdering public services. Murdering our ability
to maintain public sector jobs and now he has set
his sights on our public schools. But we have news
for him: We don’t intend to die. This is not Detroit.
We are the city of big shoulders and so we intend to
put up a fight. We don’t know if we can win, but if
you don’t fight, you will never win at all.’The people of this city can no longer sit back and
allow this mayor, his school board and his corporate
cronies to run roughshod over democracy. They’ve
turned their backs on affordable housing; turned
their backs on job creation; and, now they’re turning
their backs on our students, their families and our
schools. We are tired of playing their school reform
games. But who are the winners and losers? Who
made the rules? And what do they keep telling the
losers to keep them playing their games?’Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis
March 22, 2013http://tinyurl.com/cnvq7oc
March 4, 2013‘… although experts estimate that sequestration
could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall
Street does not expect the cuts to substantially
reduce corporate profits – or seriously threaten the
recent rally in the stock markets.'”It’s minimal,” said Savita Subramanian, head of
United States equity and quantitative strategy at
Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Over all, the
sequester could reduce earnings at the biggest
companies by just over 1 percent, she said, adding,
“the market wants more austerity”.’New York Times
March 4, 2013http://tinyurl.com/ch3vvw9
February 28, 2013`I will not dignify Justice Scalia’s comment by
repeating it. But let us be very clear. The protection
of the right to vote is an American entitlement. It is
a democratic entitlement. And those who would
seek to use incendiary rhetoric from the bench of
the Supreme Court should think twice about their
place in history.’NAACP President Benjamin Jealous
ABC News
February 27, 2013http://tinyurl.com/c7hdtkp
February 21, 2013`As the president outlined in his State of the Union
address, we should be focused on making this
economy work for working people once more. This
would involve a long-term new strategy for growth
and jobs that would put people to work. To address
our long-term debt projections, we should be
continuing to reform our health care system to get
costs under control while providing affordable care
for all. If the rest of the industrial world can get
there with different models, surely we can, too.`Instead we are victims of a classic example of shock
doctrine – the right using an economic calamity to
roll back social protections. At a time of Gilded Age
inequality, they seek to exact more pain from an
already declining middle class – and get the
president and Democrats to offer bipartisan cover.
It’s a jackal time and it’s likely to get worse.’Robert Borosage
`The Wrecking Crew Is Winning’Campaign for America’s Future
February 19, 2013http://tinyurl.com/bfz65u6
February 19, 2013‘Once again, Bowles and Simpson have produced a
plan that tells working people to “drop dead.” In
December 2010, Bowles and Simpson put forward a
budget blueprint that proposed to cut tax rates for
corporations and the richest Americans and
eliminate taxes on overseas corporate profits, and
then pay for these lower tax rates by cutting Social
Security benefits, shifting Medicare costs to
individuals, taxing health benefits and cutting
federal employees’ pay, benefits and jobs. The
updated budget blueprint Bowles and Simpson put
forward today cuts tax rates for the richest
Americans and corporations and pays for these
lower tax rates by cutting Social Security COLAs,
taxing health benefits and cutting federal employees’
health and retirement benefits. For working people
and the future of our nation, it is dead on arrival.’AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka,
on the release of a new and revised
Simpson-Bowles ‘defcit reduction’
plan that would cut Social Security
COLAs to pay for lower tax rates for
corporations and the wealthiest.AFL-CIO
February 19, 2013http://tinyurl.com/b3d7a78
February 11, 2013‘Perhaps it’s too much to hope for, but I’d encourage
the President to call for boosting the economy:
Reversing the recent Social Security tax hike by
exempting the first $20,000 of income from payroll
taxes and lifting the ceiling on income subject to it,
to make up the shortfall. Reviving the WPA and
CCC, to put the long-term unemployed directly to
work. Raising the minimum wage. Imposing a 2%
annual tax surcharge on wealth in excess of $7
million to fund a world-class system of education,
so all our kids can get ahead. Cutting corporate
welfare and the military but not cutting public
investments or safety nets the middle class and poor
depend on. Giving tax credits to companies that
create more new jobs in America. Helping states and
locales rehire the teachers, fire fighters, police
officers, and social workers they need.’This is the most fragile recovery in modern history,
from the deepest downturn since World War II. Most
Americans are not experiencing a recovery at all. As
has been shown in Europe, austerity economics is a
cruel hoax. President Obama must acknowledge this
in his State of the Union, and commit to fighting
those who would impose it on America.’Economist Robert Reich
blog
February 10, 2013http://tinyurl.com/b5kpz2q
February 8, 2013‘Now that Tim Geithner has resigned as US Treasury
secretary, it is time to survey the damage wrought
from four years of his approach to the financial
crisis. The “Geithner doctrine” made the
preservation of the largest banks, no matter the
consequences, a top priority of the US government.
Aside from moral hazard, it has also meant the
perversion of the US criminal justice system. The
US faces a two-tiered system of justice that, if left
unchecked by the incoming Treasury and regulatory
teams, all but assures more excessive risk-taking,
more crime and more crises.’Neil Barofsky, former special
inspector-general of the troubled
asset relief program (TARP), a senior
fellow at NYU School of Law and
author of `Bailout’, out in paperback
this week.Financial Times
February 8, 2013http://tinyurl.com/af9zcrg
February 4, 2013‘[In] Portugal we have to live under the rules
dictated by this enormously powerful troika, making
us bow to a global financial system that is
unscrupulous and completely heartless and that
forces us to surrender our country to that pack of
vultures that are the large banks.’Marina Oliveira, a 26-year-old
psychologist who has been
unemployed for the past 13 months
Aljazeera
February 2, 2013http://tinyurl.com/a3bq9c4
February 3, 2013‘You cannot police poverty. You cannot police
broken dreams, you cannot police aspirations,” said
Jackson. “This cannot be dealt with on just a
citywide level. We have drugs and guns coming in,
and jobs going out. In most of the areas where these
shootings are taking place, the unemployment rate
is between 45 percent and 55 percent.’Rev. Jesse Jackson at a press
conference at the Rainbow/Push
Chicago headquarters following the
fatal 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton
on the city’s Southside earlier in
the week.Guardian (UK)
February 2, 2013http://tinyurl.com/bx8fcsy
January 31, 2013‘This year is off on the wrong foot in the wrong
direction continuing the path of lost chances to
make the investments to build our future-and now,
clearly, to have a strong economic recovery.
Continued debates on cutting government is to have
the government pull the economy down in the
immediate term, and our future in the long run.’This is why working families are calling on all
elected officials to protect Social Security, Medicaid
and Medicare from benefit cuts, cancel
sequestration and close loopholes for Wall Street
and the richest 2% of taxpayers.’William Spriggs,
AFL-CIO chief economist
AFL-CIO Now
January 31, 2013http://tinyurl.com/ba5tarf
January 21, 2013‘You can’t talk about solving the economic problem
of the Negro without talking about billions of
dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums
without first saying profit must be taken out of
slums. You’re really tampering and getting on
dangerous ground because you are messing with
folk then. You are messing with captains of
industry. Now this means that we are treading in
difficult water, because it really means that we are
saying that something is wrong with capitalism.
There must be a better distribution of wealth and
maybe America must move toward a democratic
socialism.’Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr
Quoted in: ‘Martin Luther King
Was a Radical, Not a Saint’
by Peter Dreier
LA Progressive
January 21, 2013http://tinyurl.com/ambj5jt
January 4, 2013‘The US currently spends almost as much on its
military and on paying for current and past wars in
terms of interest on war debt and care for wounded
and aging soldiers as the entire rest of the world
spends on arms and war. Approximately $1.3
trillion gets spent each year in taxpayer’s dollars
and in more borrowed funds (50 cents of every
federal tax dollar goes to pay for the US military, the
intelligence apparatus, veterans’ benefits and other
related military costs). It is simply ludicrous, given
this situation, to imagine that the US can
significantly reduce its budget deficit either by
raising taxes or by cutting social spending.’Think of it this way. The US is currently running a
$1.3 trillion deficit (that is federal spending less tax
revenue). That deficit, significantly one must note,
almost exactly matches the amount that is being
spent annually on the US military, and on
military/intelligence-related activities.’Dave Lindorff
This Can’t be Happening
January 3, 2012http://tinyurl.com/at9hxzx
December 28, 2012‘I’ve been in Washington waiting to see if Congress
would be called back into session, as it should be.
And there really is no reason, no legitimate reason,
why the country should be facing serious tax
increases for middle class and also spending cuts
that will further slow down the economy. You know,
Amy, all the-we’ve made all the wrong choices. We
should be talking about jobs, having more people
involved in paying taxes. We should be talking
about rebuilding America’s infrastructure. China
has gone ahead with high-speed trains and massive
investment in their infrastructure. Instead, we’re
back to the same old arguments about taxes and
spending without really looking at what we’re
spending. We just passed the National Defense
Authorization Act the other day, another $560
billion just for one year for the war machine. And so,
we’re focused on whether or not we’re going to cut
domestic programs now? Are you kidding me?’Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)
[serving his last
week as member of Congress]
Democracy Now!
December 28, 2012http://tinyurl.com/bmcuvyo
December 27, 2012‘At the end of “Wag the Dog,” the president easily
won re-election as the news about his sex scandal
was drowned out in the cacophony of news about
the made-up war and the made-up war hero. And
while we’ve all been hearing non-stop about the
“fiscal cliff” and how our budgetary woes can only be
solved through tax hikes or gutting Social Security,
the Senate unanimously approved a whopping $631
billion Pentagon budget in early December. The fact
that Republicans and some Democrats are still hell-
bent on telling us there’s a budgetary crisis that can
only be averted by cutting New Deal and Great
Society programs shows that their true allegiance
lies not with their constituents, but with the
military-industrial complex that President
Eisenhower, a former 5-star general, warned us
about more than 50 years ago.’It remains to be seen whether or not the backbone
of progressivism will be sacrificed in this
manufactured “fiscal cliff” fiasco. But nonetheless,
we have, as a nation, let ourselves be thoroughly
played by the politicians, the corporations and the
media so they can keep their goodies. To tell the
truth, the history books must document how easily
manipulated people can be when enough fear has
been injected into the conversation.’Carl Gibson
Reader Supported News
December 27, 2012http://tinyurl.com/ckmnkw2
December 26, 2012‘This is the year the consensus changed. Around the
world, policy-makers, regulators and bankers
recognised that the legacy of the 20-year credit
boom up to 2008 is more corrosive than all but a
few realised at the time. The bankers – and the
theorists who justified their actions – made a
millennial mistake. Navigating a way out of the mess
was never likely to be easy, but it is made harder
still by not recognising the magnitude of the disaster
and the necessary radicalism involved if things are
to be put right.’If there were any last doubts they were dispelled by
the record $1.5bn fine paid by the Swiss bank UBS
for “pervasive” and “epic” efforts to manipulate the
benchmark rate of interest – Libor – at which the
world’s great banks lend to each other. The
manipulation was at the behest of the traders who
buy and sell “interest rate derivatives”, whose price
varies with Libor, so that cumulatively billions of
pounds of profits could be made. Nor was UBS
alone. What is now evident is that all the banks that
made the daily market in global interest rates in 10
major currencies were doing the same to varying
degrees.’There was a complete disdain for the banks’
customers, for the notion of custodianship of other
people’s money, that was industry wide. It is hard to
believe this culture has evaporated with the
imposition of a fine. No banker falsifying the actual
interest rates at which he or she was borrowing or
lending, or trader who requested that they did so,
had any sense that there is something sacred about
banking – that the many billions flowing through
their hands are not their own. It was just
anonymous Monopoly money that gave them the
opportunity to become very rich. The UBS emails,
which will be used to support criminal charges,
could hardly be more revealing. This was about
making money from money for vast personal gain.’Will Hutton
‘Bank rate-fixing scandals reveal the
rotten heart of capitalism’
Guardian (UK)
December 22, 2012http://tinyurl.com/ce6dhjz
December 21, 2012‘Speaker Boehner’s failure last night should be seen
as one thing: A reset button to listen to the will of
the American people. The slate is clean and we call
on the President to come forward with an offer that
reflects the reasons he won the election. Across the
country working people continue to demand no tax
cuts for the richest two percent and no benefit cuts
to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. At this
point, cuts to the Social Security COLA to pay for
more tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent should be
off the table. The President and Congress have no
obligation to radical Republicans who have no
ground to stand on. What they do have is the
backing of millions of hardworking women and men
tired of being held hostage by far right-wing
Republicans who clearly have little interest in
governing.’AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
December 21, 2012http://tinyurl.com/d8fendd
December 20, 2012‘In this case, AARP speaks not just for seniors but
for the vast majority of voters. Sixty percent of
voters say it is unacceptable to change the way
Social Security benefits are calculated so that
benefits increase with inflation at a slower rate than
they do now, according to a new Washington
Post/ABC News poll.’Needless to say, those numbers put congressional
Democrats and progressive interest groups in a
bind. They can look the other way as President
Obama cuts a deal that cuts Social Security, or they
can do what the American people expect them to do:
raise their voices in loud objection-so loud that the
president has no choice except to keep his
campaign promises. For congressional Democrats,
the stakes are much higher than they are for
Obama. The president is done with elections. But
the Democratic Party must compete in elections to
come, and the fight that is now playing out will
define whether they do so as defenders of Social
Security or as a party that is always on the watch for
ways to compromise with House Budget Committee
chairman Paul Ryan and other Republicans who
salivate at the prospect of weakening and eventually
privatizing Social Security.’Journalist John Nichols
The Nation
December 19, 2012http://tinyurl.com/c968lya
December 18, 2012‘”Chained-CPI” is code for “let’s really impoverish
some women in their 90s!” It’s a bad policy.’Economist J. Bradford DeLong
blog
December 17, 2012http://tinyurl.com/cocadyr
December 8, 2012‘Rather than address unemployment with job-
creation measures, Congress is poised to end what
little aid is offered. Federal unemployment benefits,
which average $290 a week and typically kick in
after 26 weeks of state-based benefits, will expire at
the end of 2012. If Congress does not extend them,
two million workers will be cut off between
Christmas and New Year’s, and nearly one million
more will have no federal program to turn to when
their state benefits run out in the first quarter of
2013.’In total, over five million people who would
otherwise qualify for federal benefits in 2013 will
find that such benefits no longer exist. That would
be unconscionable at a time when 40 percent of all
jobless workers have been unemployed for more
than six months, many of them older workers. It
also would be foolish, because the abrupt
withdrawal of benefits would depress consumer
demand, leading to the loss of an estimated 400,000
jobs.’Editorial
New York Times
December 8, 2012http://tinyurl.com/b8t2hbf
December 6, 2012‘Republicans savor that potential catastrophe,
caring only that the threat won them $2 trillion in
spending cuts over a decade from Mr. Obama. Now
they want to do it again, and this time they want
something the last agreement missed: big cuts to
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other
programs that primarily benefit middle- and low-
income people. Grover Norquist, who leads the
party’s anti-tax cult, even suggested that the debt
limit be raised only enough to get through a month
at a time, so that Republicans can maximize their
blackmail power. ‘Editorial
New York Times
December 5, 2012http://tinyurl.com/9wkkle9
December 4, 2012‘The UN General Assembly has overwhelmingly
approved a resolution calling on Israel to open its
nuclear program for inspection “without further
delay.”‘Israel’s advanced nuclear arsenal has long been
understood to exist, although it hasn’t been officially
admitted by the Israeli government. Many have
argued Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons is
what drives the accelerated Iranian program and
causes other regional instability.’The resolution was approved on Monday by a vote
of 174-6 with 6 abstentions and calls on Israel to
join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty immediately
and open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the
International Atomic Energy Agency.’It also offered support for a high-level conference to
ban nuclear weapons from the Middle East which
was just canceled by the US and Israel, in order to
protect Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly.’John Glaser
antiwar.com
December 3, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/aazrevf
December 2, 2012‘Recent signs of a housing recovery aside, nearly
three million loans are now in or near foreclosure,
according to Moody’s Analytics. In addition, some
five million borrowers who are current in their
payments have high-rate mortgages that they have
not refinanced, in part because of excessive bank
fees. In all, nearly 12 million borrowers collectively
owe $600 billion more on their mortgages than their
homes are worth, a loss of wealth and a load of debt
that make a strong and steady economic recovery all
but impossible. ‘Editorial
New York Times
December 2, 2013http://tinyurl.com/bwa69wp
November 30, 2012‘So keep your eyes open as the fiscal game of
chicken continues. It’s an uncomfortable but real
truth that we are not all in this together; America’s
top-down class warriors lost big in the election, but
now they’re trying to use the pretense of concern
about the deficit to snatch victory from the jaws of
defeat. Let’s not let them pull it off. ‘Columnist Paul Krugman
New York Times
November 30, 2012http://tinyurl.com/cnrszju
November 22, 2012‘What happens at Walmart will have consequences
extending far beyond the company. Other big box
retailers are watching carefully. Walmart is their
major competitor. Its pay scale and working
conditions set the standard.’More broadly, the widening inequality reflected in
the gap between the pay of Walmart workers and the
returns to Walmart investors, including the Walton
family, haunts the American economy.’Economist Robert Reich
blog
November 21, 2012http://tinyurl.com/ya9eazs
November 20, 2012‘What happens when vulture capitalism ruins a
great American company?’The vultures blame the workers.’The vultures blame the union.’And vapid media outlets report the lie as “news.”‘That’s what’s happening with the meltdown of
Hostess Brands Inc.’John Nichols
The Nation
November 20, 2012http://tinyurl.com/cpllcc6
November 14, 2012‘ Petraeus’s Icarus flight began when he set himself
above President Obama.’Accustomed to being a demigod, expert at polishing
his own celebrity and swaying public opinion,
Petraeus did not accept the new president’s desire to
head for the nearest exit ramp on Afghanistan in
2009. The general began lobbying for a surge in
private sessions with reporters and undercutting the
president, who was trying to make a searingly hard
call.’Petraeus rolled the younger commander in chief
into going ahead with a bound-to-fail surge in
Afghanistan, just as, half a century earlier, the C.I.A.
had rolled Jack Kennedy into going ahead with the
bound-to-fail Bay of Pigs scheme. Both missions
defied logic, but the untested presidents put aside
their own doubts and instincts, caving to
experience.’Once in Afghanistan, Petraeus welcomed prominent
conservative hawks from Washington think tanks.
As Greg Jaffe wrote in The Washington Post, they
were “given permanent office space at his
headquarters and access to military aircraft to tour
the battlefield. They provided advice to field
commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders
the commanders were getting from their immediate
bosses.”‘So many more American kids and Afghanistan
civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went
on too long. That’s the real scandal. ‘Columnist Maureen Dowd
New York Times
November 14, 2012http://tinyurl.com/anuugo8
November 13, 2012‘We are still on a complete fighting posture because
we knew we had to win the politics in November and
then on the economy in December. For the
progressives who threw ourselves on hand grenades
for the president over the past 24 months and
especially the past six months, we are not going to
be happy at all if he turns around and takes a
chainsaw to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security
in pursuit of some misguided so-called grand
bargain.’Van Jones, co-founder of Rebuild the
Dream, noting that none of the progressive
political institutions have “demobilized”
since the election.Huffington Post
November 13, 2012http://tinyurl.com/aywjovo
November 12, 2012”I don’t know how seriously to take the buzz about
appointing Erskine Bowles to replace Timothy
Geithner. But in case there’s any reality to it, let’s
recall his record. Mr. Bowles, like others in the
deficit-scold community, has indulged in scare
tactics, warning of an imminent fiscal crisis that
keeps not coming. Meanwhile, the report he co-
wrote was supposed to be focused on deficit
reduction – yet, true to form, it called for lower
rather than higher tax rates, and as a “guiding
principle” no less. Appointing him, or anyone like
him, would be both a bad idea and a slap in the face
to the people who returned President Obama to
office. ‘Economist Paul Krugman
New York Times
November 12, 2012http://tinyurl.com/a24bxsm
November 10, 2012‘…I went three times to try to engage in early voting.
The first two times the line was out the building and
I decided to return at a later date. On the third time,
I thought I had arrived early enough only to discover
that the line started well within the building. I was
on line for two hours, and this was early voting.
Around the USA, there were stories like that one –
people standing in line for one to seven hours in
order to vote.’In effect, what we saw was a counter-attack by the
African American and Latino electorate against
those who would attempt to disenfranchise us. The
obvious intent to eliminate African American and
Latino voters, rather than scaring us into
submission and docility, energized us to turn out in
record numbers. There are many lessons there and
one is that we can actually overwhelm the other side
by sheer numbers and audacity.’Bill Fletcher, Jr.
BlackCommentator.com
November 9, 2012http://tinyurl.com/ber2ew9
November 8, 2012‘Let’s not fall for what I call “ham and egg” justice.
When it’s time for breakfast, the farmer calls for
“shared sacrifice.” But if the hen gives up an egg,
and the pig gives up a leg, that’s not balanced.
Instead of cutting help for sick kids, why don’t we
tax Wall Street speculation? Why not institute a
carbon tax that would also save our planet, or end
subsidies for big oil and handouts to Halliburton, or
close loopholes for tax-dodging corporations… and
then put that money to work rebuilding America?’The President won a hard-fought victory promising
to make the wealthiest pay their fair share. Vice
President Biden said he could “guarantee” no
changes in Social Security. But we’ve learned they
can’t create change on their own.’The most important thing is that we don’t rest now.’… America is not broke. America is being robbed.
Winning an election is just the first step to stopping
it. ‘Van Jones
Rebuild the Dream
November 8, 2012http://www.rebuildthedream.com/
November 7, 2012‘When we wake up tomorrow, we have a huge fight
on our hands.’The same corporations and right-wing billionaires
who spent record amounts trying to buy the election
for Mitt Romney have their priorities, and they’re
already spending millions more to bully Congress
into falling into line behind them. They’re mobilizing
right now — starting tonight.’Washington, D.C. is going to start talking about
extending the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2% and
turning the focus back to the deficit again. And
there’s a very real danger that cuts to Medicare,
Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs
Americans rely on will be on the table. Those cuts
would affect all of us– the very people that elected
President Obama, Vice President Biden, and other
working family candidates tonight.’So it’s up to us to fight like hell for the working
people in our communities. We need to work to
make sure the rich pay their fair share, there are no
cuts to our benefits, and programs that safeguard
our country’s future — like Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security — are safe for generations to come.’Please take a moment to sign the petition, telling
Congress to protect working families, and let the
Bush tax cuts for the top 2% expire.
[http://tinyurl.com/9w9esuj]’Then, go celebrate, hug someone, and look for more
from us very soon about the fight of our lives.’Richard Trumka
President, AFL-CIO
November 6, 2012
October 31, 2012‘ Our form of capitalism has led us to where we are
today. The United States may be good at generating
wealth. It is arguably one of the most innovative and
entrepreneurial economies in the world, producing
technologies that have been essential to powering
global growth. But the American way has not been
effective at transforming affluence into broad-based
well-being.’It may look as if our social and economic woes are a
product of rampant globalization. To a large degree,
however, they are a consequence of how we have
chosen to address the opportunities and challenges
of our high-tech, globalized world. Our cutthroat
approach to capitalism has exacted high social
costs. ‘Eduardo Porter
New York Times
October 31, 2012http://tinyurl.com/d4xkuvb
October 29, 2012‘My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those
people – not all of them, but most of them – who
are still basing their positions on race.’Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists.’The real reason a considerable portion of my party
wants President Obama out of the White House has
nothing to do with the content of his character,
nothing to do with his competence as commander-
in-chief and president, and everything to do with
the color of his skin.”That’s despicable.’Retired Army Col. Lawrence WilkersonMSNBC
October 28, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/8z8kt5l
October 21, 2012‘This government has made very clear political
choices. It’s spending 1.6 billion pounds on a re-
organization, a privatization, of our national health
service that people didn’t vote for and don’t support.
It cut the top rate of tax for those earning over a 150
thousand pounds a year, and at the same time it’s
cutting hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs
and devastating communities up and down the
country. And I think that the British public is
swinging behind trade unions and swinging behind
our analysis, which is that this is a government
governing for the rich and not for the majority of
people in this country. And we’ve got to put that
right.’Paul Nowak. head of the British Trade
Union Congress Organization and
Services Department, the giant
anti-austerity demonstration in
London SaturdayTheRealNews.com
October 21, 2012
[With Video]http://tinyurl.com/8p4m7e5
October 20, 2012‘I see two real and present dangers. One is that you
see an increase of the political capture.’… So of the people at the very, very top, capturing
the political system. And most crucially, I think
something that an economist, a guy called Willem
Buiter, who’s the chief economist at Citigroup, he
calls it cognitive capture. Where he says, look, it’s
not like this vast conspiracy. It’s not as if, you
know, everyone is on the payroll of the plutocrats.’And this guy, okay, he is now the chief economist of
Citigroup. He wrote this when he was an academic
economist. But so it’s, he’s hardly, you know, some
kind of Marxist on the barricades. His argument was
that part of the reason the financial crisis happened
is the entire intellectual establishment, not just
people inside investment banks, but regulators,
academic economists, financial journalists, had all
been captured by the financial sector’s vision of how
the economy should work. And in particular, light
touch regulation.’And I think there is a broader cognitive capture of,
you know, you might call it the intellectual class,
the public intellectuals, around maybe the
inevitability of plutocracy. You know, as Matt was
saying, this notion that if you’re poor, it’s your own
fault. You’re part of this dependent 47 percent.
Unions are very bad. All of that sort of stuff. ‘Journalist Chrystia Freeland, author
of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New
Global Super-Rich and the Fall of
Everyone Else. on BillMoyers.com:
‘The Plutocracy Will Go to Extremes
to Keep the 1% in Control’October 19, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/8kgts79
October 19, 2012‘In considering which candidate to endorse, The Salt
Lake Tribune editorial board had hoped that
Romney would exhibit the same talents for
organization, pragmatic problem-solving and
inspired leadership that he displayed here more
than a decade ago. Instead, we have watched him
morph into a friend of the far right, then tack toward
the center with breathtaking aplomb. Through a pair
of presidential debates, Romney’s domestic agenda
remains bereft of detail and worthy of mistrust.’Therefore, our endorsement must go to the
incumbent, a competent leader who, against tough
odds, has guided the country through catastrophe
and set a course that, while rocky, is pointing
toward a brighter day. The president has earned a
second term. Romney, in whatever guise, does not
deserve a first.’Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake City, Utah
October 19, 2012http://tinyurl.com/8l5hcbb
October 16, 2012‘A member of the Afghan intelligence service
detonated a suicide vest Saturday, killing two
Americans and four Afghan intelligence agency
colleagues, Afghan and international officials said
Monday.’Also on Monday, Afghan officials charged that a
coalition strike against a Taliban target had killed
three young children – two boys and a girl – from
one family over the weekend. ‘New York Times
October 16, 2012http://tinyurl.com/9mh75oy
October 15, 2012‘ After more than a decade of having American blood
spilled in Afghanistan, with nearly six years lost to
President George W. Bush’s disastrous indifference,
it is time for United States forces to leave
Afghanistan on a schedule dictated only by the
security of the troops. It should not take more than
a year. The United States will not achieve even
President Obama’s narrowing goals, and prolonging
the war will only do more harm.’Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. said on Friday that
“we are leaving Afghanistan in 2014, period. There
is no ifs, ands or buts.” Mr. Obama indicated earlier
that this could mean the end of 2014. Either way,
two more years of combat, two more years of sending
the 1 percent of Americans serving in uniform to die
and be wounded, is too long. ‘Editorial
New York Times
October 14, 2012http://tinyurl.com/95k3ben
October 7, 2012‘ There is one important number in the report that
barely budged from previous months. The share of
jobless workers out of work for six months or more
remained extremely high, at 40 percent, or 4.8
million people, of which more than half had been
out of work for more than year. And finding a job
remains difficult: in July, the latest month for which
data on job openings was available, nearly 13
million jobless workers were competing for 3.7
million openings.’Long-term joblessness is largely a measure of the
depth of employment loss during the recession from
the end of 2007 to mid-2009. Its persistence means
that a top priority now is to extend federal jobless
benefits, which kick in when state unemployment
insurance benefits run out, generally after 26
weeks.’Editorial
New York Times
October 7, 2012http://tinyurl.com/9d2xxvu
October 6, 2012‘There will be more debates. And the election has
not been decided by any means. But Obama’s
supporters need to make it clear that the time for
excuses is over. The president had no right to show
up for a debate unprepared and offer an expectant
nation an embarrassingly half-hearted performance.
Progressive leaders, who represent Obama’s
strongest and most faithful supporters, have an
obligation to convey that message in the strongest
possible terms.’The president let his people down. And if he’s
capable of doing that in an election that is clearly so
important, it means he’s capable of doing it again if
he wins a second term.’Bob Herbert, former staff columnist
for the New York Times – now a
distinguished senior fellow at Demos.Common Dreams
October 5, 2012http://tinyurl.com/9f2uzde
September 26, 2012
referees jeopardizes your health and safety. This
decision to remove more than 1,500 years of
collective experience has simply made the workplace
less safe.’It is the NFL’s duty to provide a workplace that is as
safe as possible. The League will want fans, the
media and sponsors to talk only about “the product”
on the field. We are not product.’While the focus today is about a blown call and the
outcome of one football game, our focus as a family
of players is and will remain squarely on workplace
safety.’Contrary to some reports, we are not crossing any
picket line. The referees are not on strike. The
owners locked them out.’We are actively reviewing any and all possible
actions to protect you.’NFL Players Association (NFLPA)
Executive Director DeMaurice Smith’s
message to playersAFL-CIO Now
September 26, 2012http://tinyurl.com/9l2xnmo
September 20, 2012‘I don’t believe any legitimate voter that actually
wants to exercise that right and takes on the according
responsibility that goes with that right to secure their photo
ID will be disenfranchised. As Mitt Romney said, 47% of the
people that are living off the public dole, living off their
neighbors’ hard work, and we have a lot of people out there
that are too lazy to get up and get out there and get the ID
they need. If individuals are too lazy, the state can’t fix
that.’Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-PA),
on KDKA Radio (Pittsburgh)
September 19, 2012
Think Progresshttp://tinyurl.com/coemnw6
September 18, 2012‘The Romney campaign has a messaging problem
because it has a policy problem … How do you
message: I’m doing away w Medicaid over the next
10 yrs, Medicare after that, to finance a cut in the
top rate of tax to 28%?’David Frum, a former speechwriter
for George W. Bush
September 13, 2012‘Today’s release of yet more chilling economic data
from the Census Bureau further demonstrates that a
generation-long experiment with right-wing
economic theories has failed America. The Census
report confirms the trend that the Economic Policy
Institute shows in The State of Working America
2012, released yesterday-falling incomes and
growing inequality. A generation after Reagan and
more than a decade after the Bush tax cuts to the
wealthiest among us, the middle class is less and
less secure. Median family household income fell
again last year and remains 8.9 percent lower than
its peak in 1999. The share of income going to
middle and lower middle income households
continued its fall, while the share of income going to
households in the top 5 percent continued to rise.
The top 20 percent now get a record high 51.1
percent of America’s income, leaving less for the
bottom 80 percent.’Instead of coddling the richest households, America
needs to return to the principles of “prosperity
economics” that have historically enabled economic
security for all and a growing middle class. But
Romney and Ryan seek to double down on a set of
policies that clearly tilt income growth to the top,
while hollowing out the middle. And, as the Ryan
budget makes clear, the only way to pay for those
tax cuts for millionaires is for the government to
turn its back on the middle class.’AFL-CIO President Richard TrumkaSeptember 13, 2012http://tinyurl.com/9gqzko8
September 12, 2012‘Teachers and their allies in local communities
across the country, amidst the most severe
contraction of jobs and budget cutbacks they’ve ever
faced, have been trying to warn the Democrats’
education wizards that they’re blowing it big time in
beating down teachers and trying to turn their
profession into a “business.” The outcome the
“reformers” have been pursuing for many years is to
reduce teachers to interchangeable cogs in a
corporate machine with few rights and negligible
input into the management of their own profession.
Across the country they have set out to reduce
teachers’ job security while imposing punitive
actions upon them. If teachers don’t obediently
jump through a new set of hoops designed for
“accountability” and the quantitative measurement
of “student learning outcomes,” they are told, then
they are “impediments” to children’s learning.'[Rahm] Emanuel, like [Arne] Duncan, has shown
repeatedly that he has no intention of really
listening to the teachers’ ideas or suggestions about
how to work with them in a productive way. Like
Wisconsin’s Republican anti-union governor, Scott
Walker, Mayor Emanuel would love to see the CTU
buckle under. He apparently would have no problem
with business executives managing the teaching
profession in the same manner they would a widget
factory.’Joseph Palermo
LA Progressive
September 12, 2012http://tinyurl.com/9r5we3v
September 7, 2012‘Look, I desperately want Obama to win. But the one
thing his speech last night lacked was the one thing
that was the most important for him to offer – a
plan for how to get the economy out of the
doldrums.’Last week Mitt Romney offered only the standard
Republican bromides: cut taxes on the rich, cut
spending on programs everyone else depends on,
and deregulate. They didn’t work for George W. Bush
and there’s no reason to expect they’ll work again.’But the President could have offered more than the
rejoinder he did – suggesting, even in broad
strokes, what he’ll do in his second term to get the
economy moving again. At least he might have
identified the scourge of inequality as a culprit, for
example, pointing out, as he did last December, that
the economy can’t advance when so much income
and wealth are concentrated at the top that the vast
middle class doesn’t have the purchasing power to
get it back on track.’Undeniably, we have more jobs today than we did
at the trough of the Great Recession in 2009. But
the recovery has been anemic – and it appears to
be slowing. We’re better off than we were then, but
we’re not as well off as we need to be by a long shot.’Economist Robert Reich
blog
September 7, 2012http://tinyurl.com/9ybr7hh
July 19, 2012‘Despite the perception that older Americans are
more housing secure than younger people, millions
of older Americans are carrying more mortgage debt
than ever before, and more than three million are at
risk of losing their homes. As the mortgage crisis
continues, millions of older Americans are
struggling to maintain their financial security.’AARP
New York Times
July 19, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/77c9xn7‘Nightmare on Main Street Older
Americans & the Mortgage
Market Crisis'[Full report: http://tinyurl.com/dxyd3gj]
July 18, 2012‘While I will always hold my colleagues and
coworkers in the highest regard, I cannot in good
conscience profit from what is technically the
‘plunder’ or ‘pillage’ of occupied natural resources
and the company’s situating its factory in an Israeli
settlement in the Occupied West Bank. Because of
complicated legal and financial constraints I am
unable to withdraw my investment at this time, but
will donate the corpus of the investment as well as
the profits accrued to me during the term of my
involvement to organizations working to end this
illegal exploitation.’Abigail Disney, daughter of Roy Disney,
who co- founded The Walt Disney
Company, renouncing her share of
the profits from her family’s investment
in the skin care company Ahava, which
has its factory in a settlement in the West
BankJewish Telegraph Agency
July 17, 2012http://tinyurl.com/86k4hzo
July 17, 2012”Whatever motivated Geithner’s* silence, or that of
the “government official” in the emails to Barclays,
this much is obvious: the mainstream media need
to drop their narratives of “Gosh, another oversight”.
The financial sector’s corruption must be recognized
as systemic. ‘”This global financial fraud and its gatekeepers”
Naomi Wolf
Guardian (UK)
July 14, 2012http://tinyurl.com/6pxfhr7* U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
July 15, 2012
‘…Voters aren’t interested in “process” issues. They
want to know about outcomes. Voters from right to
left will tell you, for example, that they
overwhelming reject the Supreme Court’s Citizens
United decision to allow unlimited, anonymous
money to flood our political system. But getting
them worked up about election laws isn’t easy. You
have to connect the dots to something that matters
to them – like the fact that once-middle-class
workers have seen their incomes drop by nearly 8
percent in three years and their wealth disappear by
a staggering 40 percent. And you have to make sure
they believe that the problem is not, as the right
would have it, the extravagant pensions of teachers
like my 82-year-old mother (who taught for over 30
years before retiring from the Atlanta city schools),
but the actions of bankers and C.E.O.’s who’ve
engineered a system that is decimating the middle
class.’
‘How to Get Our Citizens Actually United’
By Drew Weston
New York Times
July 14, 2012
July 14, 2012‘”Using a combination of Photoshop, Excel,
scanners, and both laser and ink jet printers I was
able to make very convincing forgeries of nearly
every document that came from the bank.’
A prominent futures-industry
executive Russell Wasendorf Sr.,
confessing to having stolen than
$100 million from customers at
Peregrine Financial Group.
New York Times
July 14, 2012
Quote of the Day
July 12, 2012
”Like the non-disclosure of his tax returns, Mitt’s
opaque foreign investments and bank accounts
make you wonder what he is hiding, not just about
money but other aspects of his life and career,
including his yet-to-be-detailed years as a lay official
of his church. Voters like to feel they know the
person they are voting for, and every Mitt secret on
any subject plays into the trope of Mitt the Mystery
Man. And, as with his tax returns, Romney doesn’t
have a good answer to the questions raised about
his offshore holdings. Speaking of his investments a
few days ago, he came up with this: “I don’t manage
them. I don’t even know where they are.” Which
prompted Romney’s persistent critic David
Letterman to counter: “He does not manage his own
finances and he doesn’t know where his money is —
This is the guy to fix the economy.”‘
Frank Rich
New York Magazine
July 11, 2012
June 7, 2012
‘But, from the beginning, the money behind Governor
Walker was intended to turn a once-reliable blue state
into a laboratory for Republican ideas, where business
could grow free of union fetters, taxes could be cut
and thousands of people could be removed from Medicaid
rolls.
‘That’s why David Koch, the billionaire industrialist
whose family money was crucial to Mr. Walker’s election
in 2010, gave $1 million to the Republican Governors
Association this year, which, in turn, ran ads
supporting Mr. Walker. Mr. Koch said Mr. Walker’s fight
against public unions was “critically important.”
‘The tactics worked in Wisconsin, and in several other
states. Labor, so long in decline in the private
sector, is also losing its clout in states and cities,
unable to match or withstand the unfettered bank
accounts of industry. The people who kept Mr. Walker
and his policies in power are just getting started.’
Editorial
New York Times
June 7, 2012
May 26, 2012
‘Sooner or later, people are going to clue into the
fact that one or two big banks, acting in concert with
a choice assortment of unscrupulous “preferred
investors,” can at least temporarily prop up or topple
just about anything they want, from Greece to Bear
Stearns to Lehman Brothers. And if you can move markets
and bet on them at the same time, it’s impossible to
not make tons of money, which incidentally is made at
everyone else’s expense. So we should always be on the
lookout for any evidence that that sort of coordinated,
non-disclosed activity is taking place.
‘This Facebook thing is a perfect example. It’s like
that scene in Brain Candy where the evil pharma CEO Don
Roritor takes his star scientist, Chris, on a walk in
the middle of a party at his house: after they walk
around Don’s rocking indoor pool, they open a set of
doors and there’s a completely different party going on
there.
‘”What’s this?” Chris asks. “Oh, this is the real
party,” says Roritor.’
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Via Reader Supported News
May 24, 2012
May 25, 2012
‘In the last two decades, the economy seems to have
created many openings for people whose primary skill is
lifting money out of other people’s pockets, not in
doing anything productive. Wall Street is the center of
such practices.’
Economist Dean Baker
Guardian (UK)
May 22, 2012
May 20, 2012
“Where the world financial crisis has brought about the
loss of millions of jobs, socialized private debt
burdens and now risks causing significant human rights
regressions through wide-ranging austerity packages, a
financial transaction tax (FTT) is a pragmatic tool for
providing the means for governments to protect and
fulfil the human rights of their people.’
Magdalena Sepulveda, United Nations
special rapporteur on extreme poverty
and human rights
Merco Press (Uruguay)
May 18, 2012
May 16, 2012
‘In 1990, [California] spent twice as much on its
universities as its prisons. Now it spends almost twice
as much on prisons.’
Edward Luce, Washington columnist
for the Financial Times, in his
new book: Time to Start Thinking.
Quoted by the paper;s columnist
Martin Wolf.
Politico
May 16, 2012
May 15, 2012
‘Finance is supposed to simply be a middleman to help
the real economy. It in fact now completely dominates
and is a parasite on the real economy. German austerity
has pushed the entire eurozone into recession and the
periphery into Great Depression-level unemployment. And
the same arguments are being made in the United States
and are used as a pretext to try to destroy Social
Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It is economically
illiterate, but politically attractive.’
White-collar criminologist
and former senior financial
regulator William Black
Democracy Now!
May 15, 2012
May 14, 2012
‘The recent election results in France and Greece are a
massive blow against the failed policies of austerity
in Ireland and across Europe.
‘A “no” vote in Ireland on 31 May will strengthen the
hand of all those arguing for jobs and growth.’
Sinn Fein’s deputy leader
Mary Lou McDonald on
Ireland’s upcoming referendum
on the latest European Union
treaty
BBC
May 10, 2012
May 12, 2012
‘They are calling for austerity by the poor, the
workers and governments of the most economically
fragile countries. But at the same time, they accepted
packages and packages of financial resources injected
in the financial system which precisely benefit sectors
responsible for the speculation that trigger the crisis.
‘They are punishing victims of the crisis and awarding
prizes to those who are responsible for it. This is a
big mistake,
‘…The logic could be summarized in this way: the
financial system enjoys all the necessary support so as
not to suffer from the crisis. But workers, retirees,
the most fragile and the poorest, are helped by no
one.’
Former Brazilian president
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
‘Brazil’s Lula slams rich countries and IMF’
AFP
May 4, 2012
May 11, 2012
‘In the United States and around the world, the middle
class is in steep decline while the wealthy and large
corporations are doing phenomenally well. The message
sent by voters in France and other European countries,
which I believe will be echoed here in the United
States, is that the wealthy and large corporations are
going to have to experience some austerity also and
that that burden cannot solely fall on working
families.
‘In the United States, where corporate profits are
soaring and the gap between the rich and everybody else
is growing wider, we must end corporate tax loopholes
and start making the wealthy pay their fair share of
taxes. At the same time, we must protect Social
Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Austerity, yes, but
for millionaires and billionaires, not the working
families of this country.’
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
May 7, 2012
May 10, 2012
‘We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or
women want to have some control over when they have
babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting
exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average
workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand
short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of
a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts
of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery
of public officials through unlimited campaign
“donations.”
‘Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality.
It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public
trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and
democracy and have led millions of Americans to
conclude the game is rigged.
‘What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do
with other consenting adults. It’s what those with
great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.’
Economist Robert Reich
blog
May 10, 2012
May 6, 2012‘The left should embody grand hopes, but it must not
reduce itself to grand moments,. I want to initiate a
transformation of society in the long term.
‘…Progress is no longer an ideology, but it remains a
fertile idea. I am a militant of progress.’
Francois Hollande
President-elect of France
New York Times
May 6, 2012
May 4, 2012
‘State and local governments continue to shed jobs.
They would be my first target for stimulus in a sane
world. Last month, local education jobs were down
11,000 and they’re down about 100,000 over the last
year. Next time your friendly politician is jawboning
about a) the benefits of austerity and spending cuts,
and b) the importance of education, please point out
the hypocrisy.’
Economist Jared Bernstein
blog
May 4, 2012
May 1, 2012
and the world are coming together to commemorate May
Day. The message is the same everywhere: Workers’
rights should be universal and every person – no matter
what nationality, ethnicity or gender- must have equal
rights and the opportunity to achieve a better life.
‘Those are the values that have carried our nation to
prosperity. But increasingly today we see a group of
special interests-the 1%-who seek to divide and weaken
the collective power of working people. They are trying
to limit the freedom of working people to vote or to
join together in a union at the workplace or to live
without fear of harassment or discrimination – whatever
their national origin. Special interests are not only
attacking the values we share; they are playing the
politics of division.
‘America was built by the hard work of all working
people, not by a small group of rich people. And
together, we’re responding to the politics of hate by
forging new partnerships with worker centers, domestic
workers, day laborers, taxi drivers, and all people who
work. America’s working families will continue to stand
together in their fight to reestablish fairness and
opportunity so everyone can have access to their own
American dream. ‘
AFL-CIO President
Richard Trumka
May 1, 2012
April 30, 2012
‘A mile and a half from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters
is De Anza College, a community college that Steve
Wozniak, one of Apple’s founders, attended from 1969 to
1974. Because of California’s state budget crisis, De
Anza has cut more than a thousand courses and 8 percent
of its faculty since 2008.
‘Now, De Anza faces a budget gap so large that it is
confronting a “death spiral,” the school’s president,
Brian Murphy, wrote to the faculty in January. Apple,
of course, is not responsible for the state’s financial
shortfall, which has numerous causes. But the company’s
tax policies are seen by officials like Mr. Murphy as
symptomatic of why the crisis exists.
‘”I just don’t understand it,” he said in an interview.
“I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De
Anza. Their kids swim in our pool. Their cousins take
classes here. They drive past it every day, for Pete’s
sake.
‘”But then they do everything they can to pay as few
taxes as possible.” ‘
‘How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes’
New York Times
April 28, 2012
April 23, 2012
‘”Let me tell you who my rival is. It does not bear a
name or have a face, it’s the finance industry. In the
past 20 years, the financial industry has taken control
of our societies, of our lives and threatens our
states.
French Socialist Presidential
candidate Francois Hollande
Bloomberg
January 23, 2012
April 20, 2012‘I think this is about really a big question about how
we see our future. Are we really a people who say, “I
got mine. The rest of you are on your own.” Or are we a
people who say, “This is about — we have to make the
investments in our future. We’re the ones who together
create opportunity for our kids, for our tomorrow.” I
think it’s about that,’
U.S. Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren
(D-Mass.) on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show
Real Clear Politics
April 20, 2012
April 7, 2012
‘Wall Street has decimated the middle class and calls
it a meritocracy. Obama won’t acknowledge that charade
(at least, not sufficiently). Romney accepts it
wholeheartedly. Wall Street leaders’ shift from Obama
to Romney isn’t just about preserving their tax breaks
and, by repealing the Dodd-Frank financial reform,
bringing back high-yield deals that may imperil the
broader economy. It’s also about having a president who
won’t challenge the lies they tell about – and to –
themselves.’
Columnist Harold Meyerson
Washington Post
April 4, 2012
March 31, 2012
‘We must go from moment to movement and struggle to
gain the substance of things hoped for. What do we hope
for? A fair and healthy start for every child. An end
to Stand Your Ground laws and vigilantes. Quality
public education for everyone. Full employment and an
end to discrimination that results in an African-
American jobless rate twice that of whites.
‘… We have to decide. Let us take a moment to grieve
for Trayvon Martin, whose life was so brutally taken
from him. Then let us move from moment to movement, and
revive the struggle for a more perfect Union.’
Rev. Jesse Jackson
Counterpunch
March 30, 2012
Quote of the Day
March 30, 2012
‘And so the march to equality shall begin. Equality
with which everything begins in France – equality that
will lead us to proclaim the end of capital’s
privileges, the establishment of citizens’ rights in
the workplace – which will make good what was left
uncompleted when – as Jean Jaures said – the great
revolution “made French people kings in the city and
left them serfs in the workplace” – these new workers’
rights being the rights to veto, the right to pre-empt
the property of capital and set up workers’
cooperatives, the rights of requisition by the Nation
when a property is deemed to be a common utility. And
we shall inscribe this new right into law that there is
a collective human property of basic goods, such as
water and energy’
Left Front Presidential
candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon
l’Humanite (France)
March 22, 2012
Quote of the Day
March 22, 2012
‘Netanyahu* reportedly feels he has Obama boxed in –
that in the months before the November election, the
president will have no choice but to back up an Israeli
attack however ill advised or opposed because failure
to do so would look like abandoning our close ally in
its hour of need. To drive home that point, leading
contenders for the Republican nomination gave saber
rattling speeches to the AIPAC conference virtually
accusing the president of letting down Israel by being
afraid to confront Iran.
‘It’s no secret than one of Netanyahu’s objectives is
to help defeat the incumbent because Obama in a second
term might not be so easily bullied.’
Columnist Douglas Bloomfield
Jerusalem Post (Israel)
March 22, 2012
* Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Quote of the Day
March 21, 2012
‘The budget proposed today by House Republicans is a
blueprint of what our country would look like under
their control – a government of, by, and for the 1%.
There’s nothing courageous about worsening the
imbalance in our economy by protecting only the
wealthiest, most powerful people and corporations. And
there’s nothing courageous about cutting Social
Security and Medicare for seniors in order to cut taxes
for the super-wealthy.
‘House Republicans have dropped all pretenses and laid
out their plan to destroy Medicare and Social Security.
This plan would end Medicare as we know it and shift
the health care cost burden to seniors, and it endorses
significant cuts in Social Security benefits for middle
class seniors. Strengthening critical programs like
Social Security and Medicare is a key part of the
solution, not the problem. Our country should value
each person’s contributions and hard work.’
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
March 21, 2012
March 20, 2012’It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too
often bend the acts of government to their selfish
purposes. ..In the full enjoyment of the gifts of
Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy,
and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection
by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these
natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to
grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to
make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the
humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics,
and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means
of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to
complain of the injustice of their Government.’President Andrew Jackson
when he vetoed the National
Bank Act in 1832Quoted in ‘Five Ways that
Financial Elites are
Destroying Democracy’
By Les Leopold
AlterNet
November 21, 2011http://tinyurl.com/8xxhzn8
July 17, 2011
‘Should any political party attempt to abolish social
security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor
laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that
party again in our political history. There is a tiny
splinter group, of course, that believes you can do
these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly
know his background), a few other Texas oil
millionaires, and an occasional politician or business
man from other areas. Their number is negligible and
they are stupid.’
Former President Dwight David Eisenhower
Letter to Edgar Newton Eisenhower
November 8, 1954
July 9, 2011
‘I don’t want to be a prophet of doom – and I
don’t think we are approaching doom – but I think
we’re going to slide into intensified social
conflicts, social hostility, some forms of
radicalism, there is just going to be a sense
that this is not a just society,’
Former National Security Advisor
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski on MSNBC’s
Morning Joe
Information Clearing House
July 7, 2011
[with video]
Quote of the Day
December 17, 2010
‘Not many senators in Congress can claim in their time
to have made C-Span, the cable equivalent of BBC
Parliament, the hottest topic on Twitter. Such was
Bernie Sanders’ achievement when he spoke for eight and
a half hours on the Senate floor. His fire was aimed at
President Obama’s Faustian pact with the Republicans
which allowed the Bush tax cuts for the rich to
continue for two more years. It was not technically a
filibuster because Mr Sanders did not hold up Senate
business. But he did generate an audience for his
principal theme that America’s besetting sin is to make
the richest people richer still. And a marvellous
performance it was too. It was not simply that he spoke
from the heart. It was also that he was manifestly and
abundantly right. One of the worst elements of the deal
was an estate tax that would affect just 3,500
families. Government of the people, by the people, for
the people ? Hardly. Mr Sanders is sui generis, as is
the state of Vermont, which he has represented for 20
years. In a nation where liberal can be used as a term
of abuse, he has no hesitation calling himself a
socialist. He is an independent but caucuses with the
Democrats and has been an Obama supporter. For all
these reasons, no one should kid themselves that the
Democrats will turn as a result of this intervention
into a progressive party. But in a climate where
congressmen are expected to mouth the lines their
funders feed them, Mr Sanders reminds us that there are
still people around who refuse to be bought.’
Editorial
The Guardian (UK)
December 15, 2010
Quote of the Day
December 12, 2010
‘On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine
members of an elite Wall Street society gather in
Midtown Manhattan.
‘The men share a common goal: to protect the interests
of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of
the most profitable – and controversial – fields in
finance. They also share a common secret: The details
of their meetings, even their identities, have been
strictly confidential.
‘Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs
and Morgan Stanley, the bankers form a powerful
committee that helps oversee trading in derivatives,
instruments which, like insurance, are used to hedge
risk.
‘In theory, this group exists to safeguard the
integrity of the multitrillion-dollar market. In
practice, it also defends the dominance of the big
banks. ‘
New York Times
December 12, 2010
Quote of the Day
December 6, 2010
‘In my view, it is an obvious conflict of interest for
C.E.O.’s of banks and large corporations who serve on
the Fed’s board of directors to have received cheap
loans from the Fed.
‘While they got a huge amount of government support,
small businesses are going bankrupt because they can’t
receive affordable credit, workers are losing their
homes to foreclosure, and consumers are being charged
25 percent to 30 percent interest rates on their credit
cards by the very same banks that were bailed out,’
Senator Bernard Sanders, a Vermont
independent who wrote the legal
provision requiring the Federal Reserve
to disclose which companies received
government support during the economic
crisis.
Quote of the Day
December 2, 2010
“We’ll put up decorations, but we just don’t have the
money for a Christmas tree.’
Shawn Slonsky, a 44-year-old
union electrician and
father who is one of nearly
2 million Americans whose
extended unemployment benefits
will run out this month
Associated Press
December 1, 2010
Quote of the Day
November 27, 2010
‘We are trying to reclaim our sovereignty before it’s
lost and before the IMF sell our natural resources and
assets to the highest bidder.’
Feilim Wakely, from County Louth,
holding a sign that read
‘EIRE NOT FOR SALE’ at a demonstration
today against the Irish government’s
proposed austerity budget, as trade
union protesters marched on the
General Post Office building, the
headquarters of a nationalist
uprising against British rule in 1916
Quote of the Day
November 13, 2010
‘The current federal budget deficit was caused mainly
by unnecessary wars and related military spending, the
worst economic downturn since the 1930s, and large tax
cuts and bailouts for the rich, all stemming from the
Bush administration.
‘Now a bipartisan commission proposes that we solve the
long-term deficit “problem” by cutting back Social
Security, Medicare and other social welfare programs.
Thus the poor, the sick and the elderly would pay for
the tax breaks and bailouts for the already wealthy.
‘The Republicans have made it clear that they have only
one economic goal: making the rich richer. Are there no
Democrats left with any backbone?
‘Robert Ortner ‘Short Hills, N.J.’
The writer was chief economist and under
secretary of commerce during the Reagan
administration and is the author of “Voodoo
Deficits.”
Letter to the Editor
Re “Some Fiscal Reality”
(editorial, Nov. 11)
New York Times
November 13, 2010
Quote of the Day
November 11, 2010
‘The chairmen of the Deficit Commission just told
working Americans to ‘Drop Dead.’ Especially in these
tough economic times, it is unconscionable to be
proposing cuts to the critical economic lifelines for
working people, Social Security and Medicare.
‘Some people are saying this plan is just a “starting
point.” Let me be clear, it is not.
‘This deficit talk reeks of rank hypocrisy: The very
people who want to slash Social Security and Medicare
spent this week clamoring for more unpaid Bush tax cuts
for millionaires.
‘What we need to be focusing on now is the jobs
deficit.Working families already paid for Wall Street’s
party that tanked our economy. If we actually want to
address our economic problems, we need to end tax
breaks that send American jobs overseas and invest in
creating jobs by rebuilding our crumbling
infrastructure and green technologies.’
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
AFL-CIO blog
November 10, 2010
Quote of the Day
November 9, 2010
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” – Thomas Jefferson in 1802 in a letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin
Quote of the Day
November 8, 2010
‘Republican leaders have made clear they have no plans
to use the power of government to stimulate the
economy, invest in job creation and spur job growth.
The Fed’s plan is to give banks more money to finance
the private sector job creation. But banks have ample
cash now; they aren’t lending, and the private sector
is not creating the jobs. That is why we have 15
million people unemployed.
‘Without a plan to add jobs to the economy so that
businesses have consumers to sell to, the Fed takes a
real risk that the money being introduced will simply
be hoarded by banks unwilling to lend.
‘The Fed should be financing government investment in
badly-needed infrastructure repair. This would create
jobs and help the Fed fulfill its mandate of promoting
low unemployment, instead of being an elite,
unaccountable institution that exists solely for the
benefit of bankers.’
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
Common Dreams
November 4, 2010
Quote of the Day
October 30, 2010
‘Israelis might dismiss the Palestinian threats to go
to the United Nations as theatrics. Today they might
be. But the Israelis cannot bet on the infinite
patience of the Palestinian people – or the
international community.’
Editorial
New York Times
October 30, 2010
Quote of the Day
October 18, 2010
‘Charting a new course for our economy requires that we
understand the causes behind wage stagnation and
growing inequality over the past 35 years. And
prominent among those causes is the free market
orthodoxy that has served the interests of our nation’s
wealthiest families and most powerful institutions but
left the vast majority of working families behind.
‘We have to wage a sustained war of ideas to challenge
free market fundamentalism and fight for our own
strategy to recover, rebalance and rebuild an economy
that works for all.’
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
afl-cio blog
October 18, 2010
Quote of the Day
October 16, 2010
“We’re prepared to demonstrate under the snow if it
takes that long. We’re mobilised, everyone seems
motivated. With right-wing governments, we know you
have to resist,”
Airbus worker Stephane Thibault, 37,
at a pension demonstration in the
southern French city of Toulouse.
AFP
October 16, 2010
Quote of the Day
September 26, 2010
‘China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I
say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-
year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at
least four going now: one is building a network of
ultramodern airports; another is building a web of
high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is
in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute
this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers – from America –
giving China the largest number in the world in one
institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic
engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just
announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed
money for the country’s leading auto and battery
companies to create an electric car industry, starting
in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named
its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move
China off oil and into the next industrial growth
engine: electric cars.
‘Not to worry. America today also has its own
multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing
moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.’
Columnist Thomas L. Friedman
‘Their Moon Shot and Ours’
New York Times
September 26, 2010
Quote of the Day
July 17, 2010
‘With 96 closures nationwide so far this year, the pace
of bank failures far outstrips that of 2009, which had
been a brisk year for shutdowns. By this time last
year, regulators had closed 57 banks. The rate has
accelerated as banks’ losses mounted on loans made for
commercial property and development.
‘The number of bank failures is expected to peak this
year and be slightly higher than the 140 that failed in
2009.’
Associated Press
July 16, 2010
Quote of the Day
June 18, 2010
‘German deficit hawkery seems more sincere. But it
still has nothing to do with fiscal realism. Instead,
it’s about moralizing and posturing. Germans tend to
think of running deficits as being morally wrong, while
balancing budgets is considered virtuous, never mind
the circumstances or economic logic. “The last few
hours were a singular show of strength,” declared
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, after a special
cabinet meeting agreed on the austerity plan. And
showing strength – or what is perceived as strength –
is what it’s all about.
‘There will, of course, be a price for this posturing.
Only part of that price will fall on Germany: German
austerity will worsen the crisis in the euro area,
making it that much harder for Spain and other troubled
economies to recover. Europe’s troubles are also
leading to a weak euro, which perversely helps German
manufacturing, but also exports the consequences of
German austerity to the rest of the world, including
the United States.
‘But German politicians seem determined to prove their
strength by imposing suffering – and politicians around
the world are following their lead.
‘How bad will it be? Will it really be 1937 all over
again? I don’t know. What I do know is that economic
policy around the world has taken a major wrong turn,
and that the odds of a prolonged slump are rising by
the day. ‘
Columnist Paul Krugman
New York Times
Quote of the Day
February 11, 2010
‘At the very least, though, we should make the return
to a more normal jobs environment an unflagging
national priority. The stock market has rallied, the
financial system has stabilized, and job losses have
slowed; by the time you read this, the unemployment
rate might be down a little. Yet the difference between
“turning the corner” and a return to any sort of
normalcy is vast.
‘We are in a very deep hole, and we’ve been in it for a
relatively long time already. Concerns over deficits
are understandable, but in these times, our bias should
be toward doing too much rather than doing too little.
That implies some small risk to the government’s
ability to continue borrowing in the future; and it
implies somewhat higher taxes in the future too. But
that seems a trade worth making. We are living through
a slow-motion social catastrophe, one that could stain
our culture and weaken our nation for many, many years
to come. We have a civic-and indeed a
moral-responsibility to do everything in our power to
stop it now, before it gets even worse. ‘
Don Peck
The Atlantic
March 2010
Quote of the Day
January 18, 2010‘If you’re a retiree who relies on interest income, you
know that the tap is running dry. In fact, many
investors in certificates of deposits, savings accounts
and money market accounts are losing money once taxes
and inflation are subtracted from today’s extremely low
yields.
‘Less well known is that measly savings yields are
central to the government effort to buy time for the
banks to earn their way back to health. It is important
to rebuild the banks. But more attention must be paid
to the collateral damage from that effort. ‘
Editorial
New York Times
January 18, 2010
Quote of the Day
January 13, 2010
‘… the widening gulf between Wall Street and Main
Street – a big bail-out for the former, unemployment
checks for the latter; high profits and giant bonuses
for the former, job and wage losses for the latter;
buoyant expectations of the former, deep anxiety and
cynicism by the latter; ever fancier estates for
denizens of the former; mortgage foreclosures for the
rest – is dangerous. Americans went ballistic early
last summer when AIG executives got big bonuses after
taxpayers had bailed them out. They will not be happy
when Wall Street hands out billions in bonuses very
soon. Angry populism lurks just beneath the surface of
two-party politics in America. Just listen to Sarah
Palin or her counterparts on American talk radio and
yell television. Over the long term, the political
stakes in reforming Wall Street are as high as the
economic.’
Economist Robert Reich
Financial Times
January 13, 2010
Quote of the Day
January 10, 2010‘The window for change is rapidly closing. Health care,
Afghanistan and the terrorism panic may have exhausted
Washington’s already limited capacity for heavy
lifting, especially in an election year. The White
House’s chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers, has
repeatedly announced that “everybody agrees that the
recession is over” – which is technically true from an
economist’s perspective and certainly true on Wall
Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record
profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans
who have lost pay, jobs, homes and savings are either
patronized or drowned out entirely by a political
system where the banking lobby rules in both parties
and the revolving door between finance and government
never stops spinning.’
Columnist Frank Rich
New York Times
January 10, 2010
Quote of the Day
January 7, 2009‘It’s a very blunt instrument. It makes far more sense
on policy and political grounds to tax the top 1
percent rather than sweep in so many people that are
paying more for health care, not because they are
getting more health care but because they’re older or
working for small businesses.’
Economist Robert Reich,
on the proposal to impose
a new tax on more generous
health insurance plans
Washington Post
January 7, 2009
Quote of the Day
January 4, 2010‘So the odds are that any good economic news you hear
in the near future will be a blip, not an indication
that we’re on our way to sustained recovery. But will
policy makers misinterpret the news and repeat the
mistakes of 1937? Actually, they already are.
‘The Obama fiscal stimulus plan is expected to have its
peak effect on G.D.P. and jobs around the middle of
this year, then start fading out. That’s far too early:
why withdraw support in the face of continuing mass
unemployment? Congress should have enacted a second
round of stimulus months ago, when it became clear that
the slump was going to be deeper and longer than
originally expected. But nothing was done – and the
illusory good numbers we’re about to see will probably
head off any further possibility of action.’
Columnist Paul Krugman
New York Times
January 4, 2010
Quote of the Day
January 1, 2010‘In Yemen the US will be intervening on one side in a
country which is always in danger of sliding into a
civil war. This has happened before. In Iraq the US was
the supporter of the Shia Arabs and Kurds against the
Sunni Arabs. In Afghanistan it is the ally of the
Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara against the Pashtun
community. Whatever the intentions of Washington, its
participation in these civil conflicts destabilises the
country because one side becomes labelled as the
quisling supporter of a foreign invader. Communal and
nationalist antipathies combine to create a lethal
blend.
‘Despite sectarian, ethnic and tribal loyalties in the
countries where the US has intervened in the Middle
East, they usually have a strong sense of national
identity. Yemenis are highly conscious of their own
nationality and their identity as Arabs. One of the
reasons the country is so miserably poor, with almost
half its 22 million people trying to live on $2 a day,
is that in 1990 Yemen refused to join the war against
Iraq and Saudi Arabia consequently expelled 850,000
Yemeni workers.’
Patrick Coburn
The Independent (UK)
December 31, 2009
Quote of the Day
December 31, 2009
‘The delegation concluded that a unit of international
forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi
Khan village, in Narang District of the eastern
province of Kunar, and took 10 people from 3 homes, 8
of them school students in grades 6, 9 and 10, one of
them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot
them dead.’
Statement from the office of
President Hamid Karzai
concerning allied raid in a
remote district of eastern
Kunar Province in which 10
civilians were reported
killed
New York Times
December 31, 2009
Quote of the Day
December 25, 2009‘No doubt the president is one of the most compelling
figures in American political history, perhaps more
interesting as a person than any occupant of the White
House since his moral opposite, Richard Nixon. His
combination of political skill, intellect, discipline,
confidence, and command of language is unprecedented,
and his theory of politics, which brought with it the
first actual Democratic electoral majority since 1976,
may have changed the parameters of political
possibility. It’s hard to take your eyes off that
phenomenon.
‘But even world-historical figures color within lines
that they do not draw themselves. What presidents,
governors, or even legislators are willing and able to
do is defined by forces and efforts outside of
themselves. And for progressive politicians, those
factors include the condition and power of the
progressive coalition and its organizations — its
ability to generate and refine ideas, as well as its
organizational capacity to bring pressure to bear on
the political system. Every success or failure can be
seen as a measure of the strength or weakness of that
infrastructure. ‘
Mark Schmitt
The American Prospect
January/February 2010
Quote of the Day
December 10, 2009‘Mr. Obama rightly called the apparent conflict between
stimulating job creation and reducing the fiscal
deficit “a false choice.” The budget gap cannot be
closed in a sustainable fashion without first achieving
robust job growth. He also criticized Republicans who
eagerly championed budget-busting tax cuts under
President George W. Bush, only to pose as deficit hawks
now.
‘There is other hypocrisy to be highlighted. A Congress
that agreed to spend hundreds of billions to rescue
enormous financial institutions should be willing to
spend far less to put Americans back to work. The
president can win this argument on the merits of
economic soundness and fairness. But he must be willing
to fight.’
Editorial
New York Times
December 10, 2009
Quote of the Day
December 9, 2009
‘… I believe we cannot and should not continue the
spilling of American blood with the consequent deaths
and casualties, and massive expenditure of funds we
don’t have. On the issue of expense, The Times reported
that “[t]he economic cost was troubling [President
Obama] as well after he received a private budget memo
estimating that an expanded presence would cost $1
trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health
care plan.”
‘We should defend our homeland from all enemies, no
matter the cost. However, we will be more effective in
our battles against terrorists in both Afghanistan and
Pakistan if we attack the terrorists from offshore
bases and do not continue to be involved in a land war
or, worse still, expand that land war. Next year, there
will be the bi-annual Congressional elections – the
entire House of Representatives and one-third of the
Senate. Two issues will dominate the election – loss of
jobs and the ongoing war. The Democrats will be held
responsible for both and will lose their majority in
both Houses if either or especially both continue.’
Former New York City
Mayor Ed Koch
Real Clear Politics
December 9, 2009
Quote of the Day
December 8, 2009
“In light of the failure to restore President Jose
Manuel Zelaya to the position for which he was
democratically elected by the Honduran people, we want
to express our total lack of recognition for the Nov.
29 elections held by the de facto government, which
were undertaken in an unconstitutional, illegitimate
and illegal atmosphere.’
Statement of a summit meeting
of leaders of of Argentina,
Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay
and Paraguay.
Bloomberg
December 8, 2009
Quote of the Day
December 6, 2009‘When President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into
law, he didn’t just end welfare as we knew it. For all
practical purposes, it turned out, he brought an end to
cash help of any kind for families with children in much
of the country. While welfare reform was long ago
declared a success in some quarters, it was deeply
flawed from the beginning. The recession has shown how
seriously unprepared it left us for hard times. ‘
Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich
Washington Post
December 6, 2009
Quote of the Day
November 26, 2009
‘Whatever they’re eating, the Obamas will undoubtedly
discuss the things they want to give thanks for this
year. You wonder what the president would say. He can
always mention his family. Not every man has daughters
loyal enough to accompany him through a cheesy turkey-
pardoning.
‘But when he tries counting his blessings, does the
specter of President Karzai rise up through the mashed
potatoes? Do the brussels sprouts all look like little
versions of Joe Lieberman threatening a filibuster? If
it turns out that there is a turkey, and someone
inevitably remarks that it looks like the biggest ever,
does Obama think they’re talking about the unemployment
rate?
‘It’s not really fair. The president knows he could
jump-start the economy, fix health care and do his
ambitious energy policy – if only the last
administration hadn’t cut taxes, started two wars and
created a new, large Medicare entitlement without
paying for any of it.
‘When he’s not making his way through Thanksgiving
photo-ops, he’s adding up the numbers over and over in
his mind, and sending mental daggers at the Republicans
who are yelling at him about deficits that they
created.
‘Although what else could he expect in a Washington
that thinks you can pardon your turkey and eat it, too?’
Columnist Gail Collins
New York Times
November 26, 2009
Quote of the Day
November 21, 2009
‘The recession has created a unique systemic risk that
threatens all parts of the African-American community,
including the poor and the middle class. I have always
been committed to addressing that risk and will
continue to do so. This is a critical issue for my
constituents.’
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)
Politico
November 21, 2009
Quote of the Day
November 17, 2009‘As most of us are preparing for the holidays a small
clique in the Senate, with their collaborators in the
Washington punditry, are planning for a dramatic
hostage-taking event. Their target of opportunity is a
bill to increase the nation’s debt limit. The hostage-
takers propose to obstruct the bill’s passage unless
the rest of the country gives into their demands to cut
Social Security and Medicare and takes other steps to
meet their warped sense of fiscal responsibility.’
Economist Dean Baker
truthout
November 16, 2009
Quote of the Day
November 15, 2009‘It’s time to stop the verbal pretense. In the Near
East, there is no negotiation “process” underway.
Furthermore, there is also no prospect for peace. The
situation is nonetheless not in a state of status quo:
it is regressing. Dangerously. The United States bears
the primary responsibility. Several months ago, Barack
Obama had placed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at
the top of his priorities. He demanded that Israel stop
the expansion of settlements within Palestinian
territory on the West Bank. It was, if not a
prerequisite, at least a condition to allow the
reopening of negotiations with the Palestinians.
‘The Israelis said no: settlements will continue to
expand, but at a somewhat slower rate, replied Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The United States just
took it: speaking through Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, it flatly endorsed Mr. Netanyahu’s,
position…. Within a few weeks, Mr. Obama lost the
credit in the Arab world that his remarkable speech in
Cairo in June had gained him. Even in diplomatic
language, that’s called a monumental fiasco.’
Editorial
Le Monde (France)
November 12, 2009
Quote of the Day
November 10, 2009
‘Last Friday, a huge crowd of fans marched in a ticker-
tape parade in downtown Manhattan to celebrate the
Yankees’ World Series championship. More than once, as
the fans passed through the financial district, the
crowd erupted in rhythmic, echoing chants of “Wall
Street sucks! Wall Street sucks!”‘
Columnist Bob Herbert
New York Times
November 10, 2009
Quote of the Day
November 8, 2009
‘Five months after Barack Obama went to Cairo and
persuaded most of the Arab world, in a ringing
declaration of even-handedness, that he would face down
Israel in his quest for a Palestinian state, American
policy seems to have run into the sand. The American
president’s mediating hand is weaker, his charisma
damagingly faded. From the Palestinian and Arab point
of view, his administration-after grandly setting out
to force the Jewish state to stop the building of
Jewish settlements on Palestinian land as an early
token of good faith, intended to bring Israelis and
Palestinians back to negotiation-has meekly capitulated
to Israel.’
The Economist
November 7, 2009
Quote of the Day
November 7, 2009
‘Every day, it becomes more urgent that the federal
government step up to the plate with bold actions to
boost job creation. Those actions should include
urgently needed fiscal relief to state and local
governments, community jobs programs, additional
investments in infrastructure and green jobs and credit
relief to small and medium-sized businesses. Failing
to act puts us at very real risk of a lost generation
— of hard-working Americans who can’t put food on the
table and bright young people who never realize their
potential.
‘We must do better.’
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
November 6, 2009
Quote of the Day
November 5, 2009
‘Even though insurance companies make money not
providing health care, the so-called reform bill gives
so much power and money to the insurance companies that
we are giving far too much for the few benefits which
the bill may confer.
‘The insurance companies get at least another 26
million customers.
‘They will receive at least an extra $50 billion in new
revenue.
‘They will be able to raise premiums 25%, even though
in each of the last four consecutive years the industry
has raised premiums by double digits.
‘As long as there are for-profit health insurance
companies, there will be no effective way to protect
consumers against ever escalating premiums, co pays and
deductibles, unless the insurance companies know that
people at a state level will always have a choice to
reject the insurance companies and establish a single-
payer not-for-profit system.
‘That is why the Kucinich Amendment must be put back in
the health care bill, not just to protect the rights of
states to pursue single payer, but to protect the
rights of consumers to be free of the economic death
grip of the insurance companies.’
Congressperson Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
CommonDreams
November 4, 2009
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