https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/opinion/social-security-retirement-age.html
If seminar members are uable to read this, please let me know.
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Monday, February 27, 2023
Capitalism: What We Can Do?
From Ken Cross's seminar.
- Five myths about capitalism - Maybe greed isn’t so good.
Myth No. 1 - Greed, natural human instinct, makes markets work.
Myth No. 2 – Corporations must be run to maximize value for shareholders.
Myth No. 3 – Workers’ pay is an objective measure of economic contribution.
Myth No. 4 – Equality of opportunity is all people need to climb the economic ladder.
Myth No. 5 – Making the economy fairer will make it smaller and less prosperous.
By Steven Pearlstein - Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post economics columnist and the Robinson professor of public affairs at George Mason University, is the author of “Can American Capitalism Survive?” September 28, 2018
SOLUTIONS for Wall Street and Capitalism Abuses:
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_Bureau
- What Should Be Done? Charles Ferguson - author of the Inside Job: The Financiers Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century
Bring the financial sector under control:
- Reform, and tightly regulate, compensation structures at the individual, corporate, and industry levels.
- Break up the largest banks.
- Greatly strengthen the power and political independence of regulation and white-collar criminal law enforcement.
- Tax financial transactions.
- Tax financial sector income fairly.
- Close loopholes for activities such as “innovations” designed for tax avoidance or for betting against one’s own securities.
Natural result of proper re-regulation of the financial sector:
- Reduce its size, concentration & political power.
Many benefits:
- Increasing the supply of talented people for more productive activities.
- Reducing the pressures for political corruption.
Control the impact of money on politics:
- Lobbying and political contributions should be heavily taxed .
- Government and regulator salaries should be raised sharply, in return for strict prohibitions on revolving-door behavior.
- Some form of public campaign financing for political campaigns should be mandatory.
Reform the tax system:
- Both the individual and corporate, so as to raise revenues, increase fairness, and mitigate against the forms of hereditary and financial oligarchies.
- Extremely high estate taxes are one important element of this, as is the fair taxation of very high financial sector incomes.
Greatly strengthen antitrust policy and the regulation of corporate governance
- Antitrust policy and analysis have fallen victim to corruption in two ways:
- The corruption of U.S. government policy through campaign finance, lobbying, and revolving-door hiring.
- The corruption of the economics discipline that supplies the economic analysis, and the personnel, behind antitrust decisions.
Ø In the areas of industrial organization, regulation, corporate governance, and antitrust theory, the economics discipline doesn’t just need reform; it needs a five-organ transplant and a yearlong stay at a reeducation camp.
- More generally, America needs to figure out how to keep large, mature industries from going the way of General Motors, U.S. Steel, AT&T, Microsoft, or for that matter Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, either by deep reforms in corporate governance, by breaking up large and stagnant companies, or by creating other mechanisms for new entry in mature industries.
Improve educational opportunity and quality is fundamental.
- A country cannot compete economically, elect wise leaders, or call itself a fair society if it has a 25 percent school drop rate, or if only the wealthy can attend good schools. Here, there is a fairness issue that not even a bank CEO can openly deny. If there is one thing that nearly everyone can agree on, it is that all children deserve a fair chance. If a child is born in a poor area, or to drug-addicted parents, it isn’t the baby’s fault. And yet the way we handle school funding, child nutrition, foster care, and child poverty remain shameful, especially in the U.S., and if anything, threaten to become more so. Beyond this, a well-educated population yields a far happier, more prosperous society. As it stands, we are wasting a startlingly high fraction of our people, in ways that are painful and very expensive.
Create a truly universally accessible, high-speed broadband Internet infrastructure, both wireline and wireless.
- Broadband deployment should be viewed in much the same terms that a government deploys a national road system. If anything, broadband deployment is more important than transport, as a way to decrease foreign strategy dependence, insure security, and reduce global warning.
Week #5 Income Inequality Follow-up:
- Ready To Make A Difference?: Take Action – Follow the Inequality for All film website link to find how you can take action >http://inequalityforall.com/
+ Raise The Minimum Wage > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/raise-the-minimum-wage/
+ Strengthen Workers’ Voices > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/strengthen-workers-voices/
+ Invest In Education > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/invest-in-education/
+ Reform Wall Street > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/reform-wall-street/
+ Fix The Tax System > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/fix-the-tax-system/
+ Get Big Money Out Of Politics > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/get-money-out-of-politics/
A brief outline of recent economic history
Very Brief economic history focused on U.S.
This history adds context to the video; Inequality For All.
1945- 1972. Post war boom.
1964. The Great Society
1972- 1980. Europe rebuilt. EEC
Japan rebuilt. Competition.
U.S. Faces Economic competition.
Stagflation
1979. Neoliberalism emerges
Reagan for President.
Era of deregulation
1982. Savings and Loan Crisis
1989. Soviet Union collapses
1994. NAFTA passes. Globalization as policy
Russian economy collapses, Neoliberalism moves into Eastern Europe.
Rise of the computers and technology
Financialization of the economy
2001. China joins the World Trade Organization. ( globalization)
Unregulated finance. Repeal of Glass-Steagal.
U.S. Housing bubble grows.
2002. High tech economy crashes ( briefly)
2007. Housing bubble collapses Mortgage Derivatives
2008- 2012. The Great Recession.
Banks Too Big to Fail, Homeowners allowed to fail.
2011. Occupy Wall Street
Two million homes forclosed
Homeless camps in Sacramento
2016. Trump becomes President
2017. Massive corporate tax cuts
2019 Covid shuts down the economy.
2021. Recovery from covid.
See definition of neoliberal capitalism.
Greider, William. The Soul of Capitalism. 2003.
Klein, Naomi. No Is Not Enough; Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics. 2017.
Predator Nation. Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America. 2012.
Prins, Nomi. It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Main Street. 2009.
Reich, Robert B. Supercapitalism; The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life. 2007.
Smith, Yves. Econned: How Unelightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism. 2010.,
Wolin, Sheldon S. , Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. 2008.
Sunday, February 26, 2023
antiracismdsa: Alone and Exploited. Migrant Children in the U.S.
antiracismdsa: Alone and Exploited. Migrant Children in the U.S.: Alone and Exploited. Migrant Children in U.S. Migrant children entering the U.S. alone are ending up in dangerous jobs that violate chi...
Friday, February 24, 2023
Why Some Conservatives are So Angry
Why Conservative Parts of the U.S. Are So Angry
https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2022/03/21/republican-conservative-america-angry
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Choosing Democracy: Banning Books is Fascism
Choosing Democracy: Banning Books is Fascism: Banning ideas and authors is not a ‘culture war’ – it’s fascism Jason Stanley , Feb 14, 2023 The media’s framing of measures like Florida...
Stolen Focus : Why We Can't Pay Attention
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again Hardcover – January 25, 2022
Stolen Focus Bolsonaro,
Johann Hari, page 130. Excerpts
Algorithms privilege outrage over community.
Online platforms erode our focus and exploit one of our most precious resources – our attention – for their own financial gain. But these same platforms can be a force for good, strengthening community and driving collective action.
To better understand this potential, let’s travel to the Complexo do Alemão favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Brazilian government takes a militant approach to this crowded, low-income area, routinely sending in tanks to suppress unrest. And it’s an open secret that the police shoot to kill. When innocent kids get in the way of their bullets, the police plant drugs or weapons on them and claim self-defense.
Raull Santiago lives in Alemão. He also runs the Facebook page “Coletivo Papo Reto,” which collects and disseminates videos of the police shooting innocent people. The page has galvanized many favela-dwellers to rally against their treatment. And it has shifted the tide of public opinion in Brazil, where favelas like Alemão are often reviled.
But the situation in Alemão has only gotten worse since the election of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. And here’s the thing: Bolsonaro’s victory, like Coletivo Papo Reto’s success, can also be partly attributed to Facebook. Bolsonaro’s campaign inundated social media with clickbaity, fear-mongering campaigns – and he ended up getting elected.
So, what connects us can also divide us. Lately, it feels like online platforms have been much more intent on dividing than connecting. And it all has to do with algorithms.
Remember the infinite scroll? The content you see on this infinitely refreshing page isn’t ordered chronologically. It’s arranged by an algorithm that is programmed to feed us content that keeps us scrolling longer. It’s easier to disengage from calm, positive content. But if something strikes us as outrageous or controversial, we tend to keep looking. It’s part of a psychological phenomenon called negativity bias – that is, negative experiences impact us more than positive ones. So it’s in social media’s interest to literally provoke its users.
The algorithm has no ethics. It doesn’t condone or condemn; it just codes. But the people watching it feel, believe, and judge. For some, the more they’re exposed to misinformation, the more normal – even credible – it seems. A 2018 study that analyzed extreme right-wing militants in the US found that the majority of them were initially radicalized on YouTube.
You may not engage with misinformation online. You might put down your phone or close your laptop when you feel outraged by what you see online. You may choose not to spend your attention on provocative content. But this still affects you.
See, when online platforms privilege divisive, shocking content, they also corrode our power for collective attention – our ability, as a society, to focus on issues that affect us.
Back in the ’70s, scientists discovered that there was a hole in the Ozone layer. It had been created by a group of chemicals called CFCs, which are commonly used in hairsprays. The scientists issued a warning: if the hole in the ozone grew, we would lose a crucial layer of protection against the sun’s rays. Life on earth as we knew it was at risk. Activists campaigned against the use of CFCs. They persuaded their fellow citizens to join the cause. Eventually, they put enough pressure on governments that the use of CFCs was banned. This is an environmental success story. But the outcome might have been different if we hadn’t focused our collective attention – first on the science, then on the arguments of our fellow citizens, and finally on the group effort of lobbying the governments for a total ban on CFCs.
Would we be able to collectively train our focus on a similar issue today? We already know the answer to this question. Climate change poses a real and present danger to life on earth. But as a species, we can’t seem to absorb the science – or even agree on whether we should be listening to scientists in the first place.
The key message in these summaries is that:
Our attention spans are shrinking as a result of our accelerated pace of life and speed of communication. The internet – especially the rise of apps and platforms that prey on our focus – has supercharged this attention drain. And it’s not due to a personal flaw or individual weakness. Most of these attention-grabbing methods are intentional; they’re elaborately designed for the very purpose of keeping you distracted. To combat them we need large-scale, systemic change – on an individual level, as well as from the tech designers that invented these systems in the first place.
Johann Hari; Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention- and How to think again.
Saturday, February 18, 2023
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Still Democracy's Death Watch
Still Democracy’s Death Watch
Saving democracy does not resonate when the forces of reaction are gearing up for the next offensive.
To understand why nothing has changed in America after the midterm elections of 2022, fire up the wayback machine and decamp to the weeks after voters sent Barack Obama to the White House. Elevate one Black man to the presidency and America declares racism dead and white supremacy so much ancient history.
Obama was Martin Luther King’s dream made real: Mississippi would be transformed into “an oasis of freedom and justice,†Black and white children in Alabama would “join hands as sisters and brothers,†and the sons of former slaves and slave owners in Georgia would commune “at the table of brotherhood.†But many Black folk rejoiced for a minute and then returned to the collective business of being Black in America. It took longer for the Black president and kindred spirits to wake up from the reverie of a post-racial America to realize that racism was not only not dead, it was healthy and thriving.
The heirs to the great white supremacist project had no interest in setting foot in wherever a post-racial America is, or working with a Black man who had somehow managed to navigate the series of evasive maneuvers known as elections. The counterreaction to the 44th president set in almost immediately. Republican shape-shifters threw off the pretenses of the so-called compassionate conservatism that animated George W. Bush for more aggressive stances. All that remained after Obama departed was for the once and current presidential candidate Donald Trump to take the bitterness that had surfaced and sculpt it into a sinister but not unfamiliar force, at least to African Americans.
The 2008 election did not open the portals to a post-racial America, nor will Democrats’ current midterm gains save democracy. This delusion is still in its early days, but the all-too-American propensity for exquisite self-deception is already evident. Somehow, the most successful showing by the president’s party in 20 years is a bulwark against authoritarianism. But that conclusion ignores the salient fact that the forces of “interposition and nullification†that King ascribed to Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1963 are ascendant after three decades of single-minded pursuit of reactionary goals like eviscerating reproductive rights.
“None of the narratives that we read in white commercial media reflect what happened on Tuesday,†Greg Carr, a Howard University associate professor of Afro-American studies, told a national town hall forum on the midterms’ impact on Black America and the Pan-African world last week. “What happened on Tuesday is we bought some time and if we can seize the moment, there is some opportunity here to reimagine our relationship with this state polity we call the United States of America.†He held out statehouse victories (in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan) as “firewalls†protecting Democratic Party gains in 2024. But he warned that the clock is ticking. “We’ve got now 24 months, not even,†he said.
Indeed, the saving democracy project, like the beta version of the post-racial America project, is withering on the vine in real time. The average American voter is collateral damage in the disinformation war that forces people to plow through relentlessly partisan news programming, misleading voter information materials, doctored photos, fake news sites, Russian bots, political ads, and more. Nor is any of that offset by the Fourth Estate’s cancerous preoccupation with horse-race journalism that has reduced elections to poll-dissecting contests that, as the midterms made plain, trivialize voters’ concerns about complex, interrelated factors and transform them into simplistic rankings devoid of nuance.
The 2008 election did not open the portals to a post-racial America, nor will Democrats’ current midterm gains save democracy.
Behind the insistence on an inflation/economy narrative as the issue preoccupying voters was a shaky construct, namely that the average voter is unable to hold multiple concepts like abortion, inflation, and threats to democracy in adjacent brain cells in order to engage in decision-making about their local, state, and national officeholders. At the town hall, Julianne Malveaux, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, asked and answered this question: “Do they care about abortion or inflation? I would posit that Black women can care about both things at the same time.â€
November 8 did not erase voter suppression. It remains to be seen how Georgia’s voter suppression laws (one provision, a prohibition on providing water and snacks to voters waiting in line, evoked widespread derision) will be brought to bear on the Sen. Raphael Warnock/Herschel Walker run-off contest. Warnock has already filed suit to force election officials to allow Saturday voting (otherwise, due to a twisted law involving the day after Thanksgiving and a Confederate general that only a Southern legislature could perfect, this runoff will have no weekend voting days).
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
Monday, February 13, 2023
Social Security is Not Going Broke
Social Security is one of the most popular and successful government programs in the history of our country. For more than 80 years, through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American on time and without delay.
In 2021, Social Security lifted 26.3 million Americans out of poverty, including more than 18 million seniors. Before it was created in 1935, about half of our nation’s seniors were living in poverty. Today, the senior poverty rate is 10.3 percent.
Yet, despite this success, tens of millions of seniors and 25 percent of people with disabilities are still struggling to get by, and many older workers fear that they will never be able to retire with security and dignity.
The most recent evidence indicates that nearly 40 percent of seniors rely on Social Security for a majority of their income and one in every seven seniors rely on it for more than 90 percent of their income. And to make matters worse, nearly half of Americans age 55 and older have no retirement savings. Meanwhile, the average Social Security benefit is only $1,688 a month.
Social Security is not going broke. Social Security has a $2.85 trillion surplus in its trust fund and can pay every promised benefit to every eligible American until the year 2035. After that, the Social Security Administration estimates that there will be enough funding available to pay 80 percent of promised benefits.
The Last Pandemic Welfare Supports Get Kicked Out
The Last Pandemic Welfare Supports Get Kicked Out: Expirations around Medicaid and food stamps reinforce how Democrats failed to live up to professed ambitions on the welfare state.
Friday, February 10, 2023
Trump Supporters Call for End to Aid to Ukraine
at the "right-left" Rage Against the War Machine Rally : https://www.businessinsider.com/republicans-introduce-bill-calling-for-halting-us-aid-to-ukraine-2023-2
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Biden Forges a New Democratic Paradigm
Biden Forges a New Democratic Paradigm: The president repudiates the neoliberal ideologies of the past and puts the party on solid economic and political ground.
Biden economic policy,
The Budget and Tax Cheats
As one of their first acts in Congress, House Republicans passed legislation to repeal most of the additional funding for the IRS that was included in last year’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act.
Now, I know the Internal Revenue Service is nobody’s answer to “Which government agency is your favorite?”
But the reality is that Republicans in Congress have been chipping (and sledgehammering) away at the IRS budget for years. In fact, Republicans have slashed funding for tax enforcement so much that there are fewer auditors today than at any time since World War II.
Not at all coincidentally, that has made it easier than ever for giant corporations and the ultra-wealthy to avoid paying their fair share in taxes — which is exactly what far too many of them are doing.
This maneuver by House Republicans is good for gazillionaire and Big Business tax cheats and bad for everyone else.
The Senate is unlikely to advance this preposterous legislation, but let’s make sure every senator knows we’re paying attention.
Tell the United States Senate:
The IRS needs sufficient funding to go after billionaire and Big Business tax cheats and to provide reliable service to everyday taxpayers. The additional funding for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act will generate a net revenue increase of $124 billion over ten years. Do not pass the absurd and counter-productive legislation from House Republicans that would only hobble the IRS.
Click to add your name.
Thanks for taking action.
For progress,
- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
MLK: There Is Nothing New About Poverty
“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it…Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know‐how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life?…There is no deficit in human resources, the deficit is in human will…The time has come for an all‐out world war against poverty.”
– “Where Do We Go from Here?” 1967
Monday, February 6, 2023
Taxpayers Funded Moderna Vaccine
Pharmaceutical giant Moderna is threatening to more than quadruple the price of its COVID-19 vaccine. (Pfizer has already made similar noise.)
A few facts:
- Development of the vaccine marketed by Moderna was actually done in partnership with the federal government — specifically scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — and almost entirely funded by American taxpayers, to the tune of some $1.7 billion.
- On top of that, the U.S. government has been paying the company an additional $26.36 per dose — for millions and millions of doses — for almost three years now.
- As a result, Moderna — a company with just three employees as recently as 2013 — made more than $19 billion in *profits* over just the past two years.
- By the way, it costs the company less than $3 per dose to manufacture the vaccine. And — again — research and development was paid for by the American people, not the company.
- Yet Moderna’s CEO — a French man named Stéphane Bancel whose personal net worth is estimated at $6.3 billion — wants to jack the price up to as much as $130 per dose.
“The purpose of the recent taxpayer investment in Moderna was to protect the health and lives of the American people, not to turn a handful of corporate executives and investors into multi-billionaires. ... Now is not the time for unacceptable corporate greed.”
In reality, the so-called Moderna vaccine belongs to We the People. It is beyond outrageous for the company to even consider jacking up the price.
A message for Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel:
You have already become unimaginably wealthy as a result of the COVID-19 vaccine marketed by your company. As you know full well, the development of that vaccine was funded almost entirely by the American people. Yet you are now planning to more than quadruple the price, which will — not might, will — result in preventable deaths of people who cannot afford your outrageous and immoral price gouging. Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, refused to patent that medication — a choice estimated to have cost him $7 billion. Let that be your guidepost. How much more money could you possibly need, anyway?
Click to add your name.
Thanks for taking action.
For progress,
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