Friday, March 29, 2019
Thursday, March 28, 2019
U.S. Military Budget is Immoral - Dr. William Barber
The Rev Dr William Barber II
Donald Trump recently unleashed his dark vision for our nation and our world, in the form of his budget request to Congress.
A budget shows our values more clearly than any tweet, campaign speech or political slogan. It’s what marries detailed, dollar-and-cents policy decisions to deeper political – and moral – priorities.
One set of moral priorities – a different one – would end our endless wars and use the vast wealth of this nation to end poverty and lead to true security for all of us. It would invest in healthcare, well-paying jobs, affordable higher education, safe drinking water and clean air for all of us.
The proposed Trump budget drops bombs on that vision – almost literally.
With this budget, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and disperses fully $750bn to the military. Out of every taxpayer dollar, in other words, 62 cents go to the military and our militarized Department of Homeland Security. (Veterans’ benefits take another seven cents.)
That leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clean air, health and science research, and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid.
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Its Green And It's a New Deal
It's Green And It's A New Deal
Virginia Meyer
I’m from Lone Tree, Iowa – a town of about 1,300 in the eastern part of our state. Our Senator, Joni Ernst, has attacked the Green New Deal multiple times. She says it’s “radical,” “It will destroy jobs,” “It will hinder our strong ag industry,” and “It’s a far-left fantasy.” Ernst, sadly is far from alone in her hostility to environmental common sense. We hear similarly overheated remarks from her GOP colleagues, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and even a handful of Democrats. Yikes! That’s why I’m traveling to Washington on March 26 to set the record straight and demand that Senator Ernst, and all Senators, stand up and do the right thing for our planet and for their constituents: vote for the Green New Deal. It’s high time we worked together to address our most pressing problems. America has always benefitted from our spirit of innovation, technical expertise, our energy, optimism, and hard work. The Green New Deal will tap these qualities to tackle climate change. I do not consider these American values a “far-left fantasy.” The Green New Deal lifts us from denial or resignation to action and determination. It is an affirmation of love and concern for our children and all living things on Earth. Fight for our future with individual actions, collective participation in any of the many groups and organizations working for climate justice, and help elect tough and wise leadership to guide us.
Green New Deal Gets First Vote
Green New Deal, backed by Ocasio-Cortez, to get its first vote on Capitol Hill Tuesday. USA Today: “The Green New Deal, liberal Democrats’ sweeping proposal to address climate change, could get its first vote on Capitol Hill Tuesday. The Senate is scheduled to take up a procedural motion on the ambitious plan, which also calls for a broad social remake of the American economy, that could lead to a final vote as early as next week. The irony?
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Here Comes Deregulation - Again !
Condemned to Repeat the History of Bank Failures?
The 2008 crisis showed what happens when financial regulation is weakened while the economy is strong. The Trump administration is doing it again.
NY times.
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
antiracismdsa: Fox & Friends Whines About our Sacramento Work
antiracismdsa: Fox & Friends Whines About our Sacramento Work: Fox Contributor: Comic Book For Undocumented Kids Incites ‘Lawlessness’ In fact, the pamphlet specifically tells children not to li...
Monday, March 18, 2019
Don't Blame Robots for Low Wages
Paul Krugman,
The other day I found myself, as I often do, at a conference discussing lagging wages and soaring inequality. There was a lot of interesting discussion. But one thing that struck me was how many of the participants just assumed that robots are a big part of the problem — that machines are taking away the good jobs, or even jobs in general. For the most part this wasn’t even presented as a hypothesis, just as part of what everyone knows.
And this assumption has real implications for policy discussion. For example, a lot of the agitation for a universal basic income comes from the belief that jobs will become ever scarcer as the robot apocalypse overtakes the economy.
So it seems like a good idea to point out that in this case what everyone knows isn’t true. Predictions are hard, especially about the future, and maybe the robots really will come for all our jobs one of these days. But automation just isn’t a big part of the story of what happened to American workers over the past 40 years.
We do have a big problem — but it has very little to do with technology, and a lot to do with politics and power.
Let’s back up for a minute,
and ask: What is a robot, anyway? Clearly, it doesn’t
have to be something that looks like C-3PO, or rolls
around saying “Exterminate! Exterminate!” From an
economic point of view, a robot is anything that uses
technology to do work formerly done by human
beings.
And robots in that sense have been transforming our economy literally for centuries. David Ricardo, one of the founding fathers of economics, wrote about the disruptive effects of machinery in 1821!
These days, when people talk about the robot apocalypse, they don’t usually think of things like strip mining and mountaintop removal. Yet these technologies utterly transformed coal mining: Coal production almost doubled between 1950 and 2000 (it only began falling a few years ago), yet the number of coal miners fell from 470,000 to fewer than 80,000.
Friday, March 15, 2019
Thursday, March 14, 2019
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein. The worst is yet to come .
Democracy Now.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/30/naomi_klein_the_worst_is_yet
Democracy Now.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/30/naomi_klein_the_worst_is_yet
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Trump's FY2020 Budget Request increases Militarized Spending
Trump's FY2020 Budget Request Slashes Actual Human Needs
New HUD budget proposes massive cuts to affordable housing programs. ThinkProgress: “The federal government would largely abandon its longstanding commitments to keeping the poorest people in the country off the streets if President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were adopted. The plan unveiled Monday is less detailed than the equivalent proposals HUD has put out each of the past two years when the budget season wasn’t marred by a government shutdown, housing policy experts said. Closer analysis of how this year’s plan might differ from those precedents will have to wait until HUD releases full program-level specifics in the coming weeks. But the broad contours of the budget released Monday are consistent with longstanding Trump administration themes concerning the agency and its mission. It would impose rent hikes on the poorest tenants of publicly-subsidized rental housing, zero out all funding for the Community Development Block Grants program, and retreat from federal responsibilities on housing construction and maintenance in both urban and rural communities. ‘They’re willing to pay for increases they want to the defense budget on the back of America’s poorest families,’ Sarah Mickelson of the National Low Income Housing Coalition told ThinkProgress. ‘We’re in the midst of this housing crisis and Trump wants to walk away from America’s commitment to housing and increase rents on poor families.'”
Monday, March 11, 2019
Obama Got it Wrong- And We Are Paying the Price
A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance
“The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/4/18246381/democrats-clinton-sanders-left-brad-delong
It is almost certainly a stretch to take one person’s opinion to represent an entire political tendency, but Vox recently published a remarkable interview with Brad DeLong. Brad DeLong is in many ways an archetypical centrist Democrat. He had been a mid-level political appointee in the Clinton administration (Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury) where, according to Wikipedia, he “and Lawrence Summers co-wrote two theoretical papers that were to become critical theoretical underpinnings for the financial deregulation put in place when Summers was Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.”
Zack Beauchamp
What you’re describing is a broad theory of political economy, in which a vision for what economic policies are best is intertwined with a particular view of what makes policies popular and sustainable. You say something about this is wrong — do you think it’s the political part, the economic part, or both?
What you’re describing is a broad theory of political economy, in which a vision for what economic policies are best is intertwined with a particular view of what makes policies popular and sustainable. You say something about this is wrong — do you think it’s the political part, the economic part, or both?
Brad DeLong
We were certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics.
We were certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics.
Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. He’s all these things not because the technocrats in his administration think they’re the best possible policies, but because [White House adviser] David
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Elizabeth Warren: 'I am not a' Democratic Socialist
Elizabeth Warren: 'I am not a' Democratic Socialist
CNN News. See her definitions.
The Economic Failures of Neoliberalism
The Economic Failures of Left Neoliberalism
Let’s get into some research. The first tradeoff is that the economy would become more unequal under neoliberal policy, but that neoliberal policies would also lead to rising GDP growth. This, in turn, would also lead to stronger wage growth, increased mobility, and increased economic dynamism. So went the theory. Inequality did grow across this time period, first on the labor market income side then later on capital income.
The positive effects of more inequality never happened. Starting in 1980, the growth rate of the economy slowed. While the economy grew at 3.9 percent a year from 1950 to 1980, since 1980 it has only grown at a rate of 2.6 percent. Wage growth also slowed, diverging from overall economic growth and productivity growth.
…….
Where This Leaves Us
These background assumptions have been losing their power since around the middle of the Obama administration. Whether it was ever reasonable to believe them is a good question but besides the point, as these ideas are no longer able to convince liberals to the point that they shut down alternative ideas. Why always presume business and markets are the leaders in innovation and dynamism if the corporate sector looks like an increasingly bloated, shareholder-dominated rent machine? Why assume billionaires are a boom to our society if a majority of people won’t be better off than their parents? Why bother supporting this economic regime if you can’t point to these tradeoffs as having been worthwhile?
There aren’t a lot of convincing responses on the Right either. One reaction is to say nothing has changed, or that the last 40 years since Reagan have been even more about government and socialism rather than a turn to neoliberalism. I don’t think people find that convincing. Another is to try and locate the dysfunction in affirmative government policy, and if we only get government even more out of the way then we’ll make progress. These arguments are not very convincing and certainly not up to the challenge of describing or mitigating against what has happened. United conservative governance failed to do anything meaningful to correct for failed ideas. The current shift Left would have happened even without Trump—though he does accelerate the need for a new set of ideas, because it is ideas about a whole economic regime that are what we need now.
Why Is Dianne Feinstein So Opposed to the Green Ne...
SACRAMENTO PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE: Why Is Dianne Feinstein So Opposed to the Green Ne...: WEB ONLY / FEATURES » MARCH 5, 2019 Why Is Dianne Feinstein So Opposed to the Green New Deal? Look at Her Family Finances. Sen. Feinst...
Friday, March 8, 2019
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Myth of American Innovation
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Myth of American Innovation: The intrepid New Yorker pulls back the curtain on how private companies profit from taxpayer-funded research.
Defining Socialism
Defining socialism: What it means and how it's shaping 2020
CBS News
Bernie Sanders, is a self-described democratic socialist. ... a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America who now serves as a DSA ...
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In Blow to Trump, America’s Trade Deficit in Goods Hits Record $891 Billion
NYT.
Paul Krugman
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
Inequality for All.
Robert Reich recommendations. What should we do ?
.
Robert Reich recommendations. What should we do ?
.
- 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/
+ Get Big Money Out Of Politics > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/get-money-out-of-politics/
Monday, March 4, 2019
Moderate ( Neoliberal) Democrats Oppose the Green New Deal
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Democrats Need to Think Big for 2020 - Opinion
Robert Borosage
Democrats Need to Think Big for 2020
There is a dizzying array of potential presidential nominees for Democratic primary voters to choose from: so many that they won’t even fit on one debate stage. But there is one basic choice the party will have to make: Will it nominate someone based on perceived electability, which is usually code for incremental policy ideas and a long political career, or a fresh-faced progressive reformer with big ideas? This isn’t a new idea; both parties have embraced this line of thinking in the past. The problem is that it rarely works. If history is any judge, the promise of incremental change and working across the aisle isn’t realism; it’s a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Barack Obama ran as the great unifier. After becoming president, he attempted to govern by reaching out to Republicans with moderate Republican ideas, exemplified by his health-care plan. He embraced wrongheaded Republican tax cuts that weakened his stimulus plan. He nominated a moderate, pro-corporate judge to the Supreme Court. Yet he received scorched-earth opposition, with Republicans scorning every major entreaty. And Republicans are now even more extreme post-Trump than they were in the Obama era. So before Democrats and the media elevate those with incremental-reform ideas as the pragmatic realists, they might want to take a long look at recent history and think again. In the end, Democrats might do better voting with their hearts than with their heads.
Sunday, March 3, 2019
Path to a Green New Deal
The Climate Movement’s Decades-Long Path to the Green New Deal
How the climate movement learned to play politics.
Matthew Miles Goodrich February 15, 2019
That the public sector must be massively mobilized in the fight against climate change has long been a bugbear of the right. But the failure to conceive of just how large a role the federal government will have to play in combating climate change has been the left’s own climate denial. The chasm between our present addiction to fossil fuels and the decarbonized economy the world needs is so daunting that it has proven easier to chant “we have the solutions” than it has been to build the political power to win in government.
Social Security Expansion Bill
KEY POINTS
- The measure, which would expand benefits for current and future recipients, would extend the program’s solvency for 75 years, according to Social Security’s Office of the Chief Actuary.
- To help fund the proposed changes, earnings above $400,000 would be subject to Social Security taxes. In 2019, earnings above $132,900 are not subject to the levy.
- The payroll tax also would gradually rise to 14.8 percent from the current 12.4 percent by 2043, with workers and their employers splitting that tax as they already do.
As Social Security’s funding problems loom ever closer on the horizon, the program has emerged as a pet project on many lawmakers’ fix-it list.
Now in control of the House, Democrats have thrown their weight behind a measure that would extend and expand the program — largely by asking high earners to pony up, along with a gradual increase in the Social Security tax rate that applies to workers’ income.
Saturday, March 2, 2019
Book: Age of Sruveillance Capitalism
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Friday, March 1, 2019
NY Times Will Not Stop Publishing Misleading News about the Economy
It’s not uncommon to read news stories that quite explicitly identify economic mismanagement. For example, news reports on the hyperinflation in Zimbabwe routinely (and correctly) attribute the cause to the poor economic management by its leaders. We will see similar attributions of mismanagement to a wide range of developing countries.
One place we will never see the term mismanagement or any equivalent term applied is in reference to the austerity imposed on the euro zone countries by the European Commission, acting largely at the direction of the German government. In fact, major news outlets, like the New York Times, seem to go out of their way to deny the incredible harm done to euro zone economies, and to the lives of tens of millions of people in these countries, as a result of needless austerity.
A decade ago, it would at least have been an arguable point as to whether austerity, meaning budget cuts, in the wake of the Great Recession, was reasonable policy. There was some research suggesting that the boost to confidence from lower budget deficits could spur enough investment and consumption to offset the impact on demand of reductions in government spending.
Since then, however, we have far more evidence on the impact of deficit reduction in the context of an economy coming out of recession. There have been numerous studies, most importantly several from the International Monetary Fund’s research department, which show that lower deficits in this context slow growth and raise unemployment.
Furthermore, they show that periods of high unemployment have a lasting impact as a result of workers losing skills, and companies and governments in a downturn foregoing investment that they would have undertaken if the economy were closer to its potential level of output. This means that insistence on deficit reduction not only led to one-time drops in output and employment, but could reduce potential output by trillions of dollars over subsequent years.
At this point, the advocates of fiscal austerity, in the context of economies that are operating well below potential GDP, are ignoring a large body of evidence in favor of personal prejudices. These people should be viewed like global warming deniers or creationists. They are not credible people, and their policies have inflicted enormous damage where they have been put in place.
Incredibly, instead of pointing out that the advocates of austerity have been shown wrong, most reporting continues to treat their policies as being credible, and in fact often works to hide evidence of its failure. The New York Times (2/14/19) gave us a great example of this practice in an article on the decline of the middle class across Europe, with a focus on Spain.
Spain has been especially hard hit by the demands for austerity. In contrast to Greece and Italy, Spain had actually been running budget surpluses in the years leading up to the crisis. Its debt to GDP ratio was just 22.3 percent when the crisis hit, less than half of Germany’s, so there was no story of profligate government spending.
What Spain did have was a massive housing bubble, fueled largely by German banks, who apparently were not very good at their business. When the bubbles burst in Spain and elsewhere, the economy in Spain was especially hard hit, with the unemployment rate crossing 26 percent in 2013. While the unemployment rate has come down in the last five years, the number of people employed is still more than 1 million less than before the crisis.
Spain is a country that could have benefited enormously from a large-scale stimulus program, both domestically and the across the eurozone, since much of its GDP is exported. Instead, the great minds in charge of the euro zone’s economic policy insisted that Spain had to reduce its budget deficits to comply with the euro’s rules.
Given this history, the cause of the decline of the middle class in Spain seems about as clear as the causes of a person’s mobility problems after they have been run over by a truck. Instead, the New York Times made it all seem very mysterious, telling readers:
Spain’s economy, like the rest of Europe’s, is growing faster than before the 2008 financial crisis and creating jobs. But the work they could find pays a fraction of the combined 80,000-euro annual income they once earned. By summer, they figure they will no longer be able to pay their mortgage. [The “they” refers to a formerly middle-class couple who lost jobs in the downturn, and had to find new jobs at far lower pay.]It is a precarious situation felt by millions of Europeans.Since the recession of the late 2000s, the middle class has shrunk in over two-thirds of the European Union, echoing a similar decline in the United States and reversing two decades of expansion. While middle-class households are more prevalent in Europe than in the United States — around 60 percent, compared with just over 50 percent in America — they face unprecedented levels of vulnerability….The hurdles to keeping their status, or recovering lost ground, are higher, given post-recession labor dynamics. The loss of middle-income jobs, weakened social protections and skill mismatches have reduced economic mobility and widened income inequality. Automation and globalization are deepening the divides.
Just about every part of this story is wrong. Spain and most other European countries are not growing faster than before the recession. According to the IMF, Spain’s economy grew at a 2.7 percent rate in 2018 and is projected to grow 2.2 percent this year. By comparison, it grew at an average rate of more than 3.9 percent in 2006 and 2007, the last two years before the recession.
But more importantly, the immediately relevant factor is cumulative growth, not a single year. As a result of its sharp downturn and weak recovery, Spain’s per capita GDP was just 3.0 percent higher in 2018 than it was in 2007. By comparison, coming out of the Great Depression in the United States, per capita income in 1940 was more than 8.0 percent higher than in 1929.
Given these basic growth numbers, it would be surprising if Spain’s middle class had not taken a big hit. While other factors, like the weakening of labor market protections, have made its plight worse, the dismal story on growth goes a very long way in explaining the decline in Spain and Europe’s middle class.
Unfortunately, this sort of story in the New York Times is not an exception. The paper has repeatedly told readers that policies that undermined the welfare state and redistributed money upward, were being done for the purpose of revitalizing the economy. This was especially the case with Emanuel Macron in France (here, here and here). In these and other cases, the media took at face value the claims of politicians that the reason for the measures was to help workers, not to reduce their bargaining power, which is their immediate effect.
To be clear, labor market regulations can be excessive, and there are certainly contexts in which streamlining them would end up benefiting most of the labor force, even if such streamlining could hurt narrow groups of workers. But the idea that excessive labor market regulation, rather than inept macroeconomic policy, is the main problem limiting growth and reducing employment in France, Spain and elsewhere in Europe does not have any evidence to support it.
David Howell, Andrew Glyn, John Schmitt and I did a study showing the limited impact of labor market protections on employment more than a decade ago. Based on our work, the OECD did its own analysis, and reached similar conclusions.
In short, the New York Times and other media outlets have been engaged in a great exercise in misdirection. While the blame for Europe’s economic problems over the last decade can very clearly be laid at the doorstep of its leaders who have insisted on austerity, the media consistently ignore evidence that is as clear as day. They instead treat the problems facing Europe’s workers as being mysterious in origin, or due primarily to an overly generous welfare state and excessive regulations that protect workers. This is some seriously biased and/or misinformed reporting.
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