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Vol. 14 No. 12…Dedicated to the Dialogue on
Race…March 21, 2011
Intuit's Vibe
Losing Ground
By Tyrone Wells
Seems like a riddle
How do people move on?
When everything has
gone wrong?
Oh, and where did it come from?
How can it be so strong?
How does the rain
fall for so long? So long
Something tripped me, took my legs out
Thought I could fix it, repair it, climb over it
I'm so scared, I need you to hold me down
Hold me down, I'm
losing ground
Seems like a battle
How can anyone ever win?
How can we start over
again?
Sometimes I say I'd like you better
If you were only a little bit stronger
But I know I'm talking to me
When I'm talking to you
So what are we gonna do?
Something tripped us, took our legs out
Thought we could fix it, repair it, climb over it
I'm so scared, need you to hold me down
Hold me down, I'm losing ground, oh
Losing, losing ground
Something tripped me, took my legs out
Thought I could fix it, repair it, climb over it
Something tripped me, took my legs out
Thought I could fix
it, repair it, climb over it
I'm so scared, I need you to hold me down
Hold me down, hold me down, I'm losing ground
Hold me down, hold me
down, I'm losing ground
By John Burl Smith
During the boom years of the late
1990s, public views of the economy were relatively positive on employment and
opportunities for 
poorer
Americans to move into the middle class. Roughly as many said the nation was
making progress as said it was losing ground on the availability of good jobs
in both 1997 and 2001. However by 2008 that mood had soured and 72% said the
country was losing ground, while just 11% said it was making progress. Even
though large majorities say the nation is currently losing ground on the budget
deficit (67%) and the availability of good jobs (64%), this is down from 79%
losing ground on budget deficit and 72% on availability of good-paying jobs two
years ago.
The big divide on which more
Democrats (62%) than Republicans (50%) say the nation is losing ground is the
gap between the rich and poor. Independents are just as likely as Democrats to
say the nation is losing ground (62%) on the gap between rich and poor
Americans. As might be expected, people with lower family incomes are more
likely than those with higher incomes to say that the nation is losing ground
on the cost of living. Seven-in-ten (70%) with incomes of $30,000 or less say
the nation is losing ground on the cost of living compared with 54% of those
with annual incomes of $75,000 or more.
Surprisingly, income level seems
to have little effect on how people feel about the rich-poor gap. Those with
family incomes of $30,000 or less and those with incomes of $75,000 or more
reflect identical percentages (55%) that the nation is losing ground on the
rich-poor gap. Even those in the highest income category ($100,000 or more) by
virtually the same percentage (53%) say the nation is losing ground. Only 7%
say the nation is making progress, which is about the same percentage as those
that have benefitted the most from tax cuts and other government economic
policies.
David Cay
Born in 
ranch
in
After moving to the Philadelphia
Enquirer in 1988,
Although Johnston is a Pulitzer
Prize winning author, he prides himself on being a "regular guy,"
still driving a 2008 Honda CR-V he calls "Tigger;"
success has not gone to his head. In describing himself,
This attitude has won him many
admirers and close associates. "My friends range from businessmen to
carpenters, all people who use their minds to think about issues and problems.
Most people would describe me as hail fellow, well met. I am gregarious, full
of laughter and at the same time dead serious about my work and curmudgeonly in
my critiques of journalists. When I make mistakes I correct them,
forthrightly."
Very protective of his privacy,
Interviews with David Cay
According to David Cay Johnston,
2001 Pulitzer Prize winning author of the best-seller Perfectly Legal: the
Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat
Everybody Else, "The poor losing ground to the rich is not just about the tax
deal
that was passed last December which basically redistributed wealth to the
richest Americans but the new proposed budget cuts takes more money out of
programs that help the poor and the middle class." Johnston's latest book,
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government
Expense and Stick You with the Bill, explores the power of lobbyists and
wealthy donors to manipulate government policies such as regulation, taxes, and
subsidies to enrich themselves at tax-payers' expense. During Interviews
Johnston explains his view of the world, how the government aids corporations
and the super- rich in using the tax system like a "cash cow," and
why the middle class is drowning in a system awash in money.
"To begin with, as a result
of my father, who grew up in
I will be the first to admit,
there are lots of problems with the government. I've spent my life exposing all
sorts of problems with government. But government is fundamentally essential.
Government is what creates for us civilization. We created this country so that
we could be free and pursue our lives the way that we want to pursue them. And
wealth is a byproduct of that. But the government is being turned into a
vehicle not to ensure our liberties and create a level playing field but
instead into a vehicle to take from the many to enrich the few.
My life has worked out much better than I imagined when I was a teenager.
Growing up in Santa Cruz, in a leaking old wreck of a house on a cliff over the
beach that my na'er do well parents somehow rented
for a song, I was eager to get to better economic circumstances; not to be
rich, but to prosper enough to own my own home and raise a family without
worrying much about money. The President says "a rising tide lifts all
boats," that is, unless you're in the dinghy tied to the dock, and then
you get swamped. Poor Americans, which is not like being poor in the
This is not investing in the
future. One of the great blessing in my life (and my wife's) is that neither of
us has ever done anything we considered the least bit unethical because of
pressures from bosses or anyone else. President Obama is not a particularly
liberal president, despite all this talk about his being a socialist. Anyone
who has read his life story, read whom he promoted to the high positions at the
Harvard Law Review, when he became editor, will see this pattern of being very
closely identifying with Wall Street, wealthy people, and their interests. Look
who surrounds him in the White House? They're people from Wall Street. So it's
been a consistent pattern of the President's, and he has bought into a budget
now in which he's suggesting we're going to reduce support for college students
and graduate students. The people who are going to have the high incomes and
intellect to develop the future economy, my goodness, would you expect that of
Obama?
I'm asking in Free Lunch: Are you better off than you were a generation ago
when Reagan was elected? Government is just as big, there are vastly more
regulations, and as I show, we have many new rules and regulations that
handcuff the invisible hand of the market and instead, in subtle, sometimes
hidden, ways, extract money from the pockets of the many and funnel it to the
politically connected few. It's the very thing that Adam Smith said would ruin
the benefits of markets
Even though Republicans pledged not to raise taxes at all and President Obama
promised he would not raise taxes on those making less than $50,000 a year, it
turns out that poor and middle class incomes are not only getting taxed more
their incomes are being cut in the new budget. The tax deal killed what is
called the making work pay credit, which helped lower taxes on lower income
Americans. This resulted in increased taxes for a lot of poor people rather
than a tax cut like the richest Americans received. Think about it, 50 million
people in
At least 2/3 of the people making less than $18,000 a year will pay more in
taxes. So as a percentage of their income, the poor is getting hit the hardest;
40% of the people making less than $35,000 will pay more; 20% of the people
making less than $64,000 will pay more; 12% of the people making less than
$104,000 will pay more; but the worse thing is of the people making more than
$564,000 a year, less than 2% will see their taxes go up, thanks to the
so-called bipartisan tax deal. Moreover, 98% of the super-rich get huge tax
cuts, and two thirds of the poor get tax increases. And, all of this was agreed
to by a progressive Democratic President. "Would things have been worst
under a Republican? (Sources: http://reason.com/archives/2007/12/28/the-cost-of-a-free-lunch/1,
www.pbs.org, and www.vowels-patternsandsounds.com)
The Corporate-GOP Attack on
By Jim Hightower
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's autocratic attempt to abrogate the democratic
right of public employees to bargain with their governmental bosses is not
wearing well with the public. Recent polls show that a mere one-third of
Wisconsinites favor his blatantly 
political
power play, and that if he had told voters in the last year's election that he
intended to do this, he would've lost.
After only one month in office,
Yet,
In Congress, loopy GOP leaders
are out to abolish the legal mechanism through which workers can form a union
and have their bargaining rights protected. Meanwhile, war-whooping Republican
governors in
But it was the economic crash
caused by Wall Street greed and massive tax giveaways to wealthy elites that
depleted state budgets, not firefighters' pensions or teachers' health
insurance.
And check out
To the barricades, people!
Inside Job
"Not a single executive has
gone to jail." That is what Charles Ferguson said when he and Audrey Marrs accepted the 2011 Academy Award for Best Documentary
Film for Inside Job. Set on locations in the 
The documentary provides a nearly
comprehensive examination of the crisis because it does not mention the role
played by the Federal Reserve under Chairman Alan Greenspan. The Federal
Reserve's easy money policy following the dot.com bubble helped facilitate the
housing bubble that followed.
Through exhaustive research and
extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists and
academics, Inside Job traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted
politics, regulation and academia to give the world the worst financial crisis
since the Great Depression.
Narrated by Academy Award winner
Matt Damon, produced, written, and directed by
Even though Inside Job puts a
face on many of the culprits, none has gone to prison. In fact, many continue
to hold key positions in the industry and/or government and collect lucrative
salaries and bonuses.
For more on this powerful
documentary, see www.archive.org/details/InsideJob.
Another Inside Job
By Paul Krugman
Count me among those who were
glad to see the documentary "Inside Job" win
an Oscar. The film reminded us that the financial crisis of 2008, whose aftereffects
are still blighting the lives of 
millions
of Americans, didn't just happen -- it was made possible by bad behavior on the
part of bankers, regulators and, yes, economists.
What the film didn't point out,
however, is that the crisis has spawned a whole new set of abuses, many of them
illegal as well as immoral. And leading political figures are, at long last,
showing some outrage. Unfortunately, this outrage is directed, not at banking
abuses, but at those trying to hold banks accountable for these abuses.
The immediate flashpoint is a
proposed settlement between state attorneys general and the mortgage servicing
industry. That settlement is a "shakedown," says Sen. Richard Shelby
of
All of which goes to confirm that
the rich are different from you and me: when they break the law, it's the
prosecutors who find themselves on trial.
To get an idea of what we're
talking about here, look at the complaint filed by
The end result, the complaint
charges, was that "many
Still, things like this only
happen to losers who can't keep up their mortgage payments, right? Wrong.
Recently Dana Milbank, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about his own
experience: a routine mortgage refinance with Citibank somehow turned into a
nightmare of misquoted rates, improper interest charges, and frozen bank
accounts. And all the evidence suggests that Mr. Milbank's experience wasn't
unusual.
Notice, by the way, that we're not talking about the business practices of
fly-by-night operators; we're talking about two of our three largest financial
companies, with roughly $2 trillion each in assets. Yet politicians would have
you believe that any attempt to get these abusive banking giants to make modest
restitution is a "shakedown." The only real question is whether the
proposed settlement lets them off far too lightly.
What about the argument that placing any demand on the banks would endanger the
recovery? There's a lot to be said about that argument, none of it good. But
let me emphasize two points.
First, the proposed settlement only calls for loan modifications that would
produce a greater "net present value" than foreclosure -- that is,
for offering deals that are in the interest of both homeowners and investors.
The outrageous truth is that in many cases banks are blocking such mutually
beneficial deals, so that they can continue to extract fees. How could ending
this highway robbery be bad for the economy?
Second, the biggest obstacle to
recovery isn't the financial condition of major banks, which were bailed out
once and are now profiting from the widespread perception that they'll be bailed
out again if anything goes wrong. It is, instead, the overhang of household
debt combined with paralysis in the housing market. Getting banks to clear up
mortgage debts -- instead of stringing families along to extract a few more
dollars -- would help, not hurt, the economy.
In the days and weeks ahead, we'll see pro-banker politicians denounce the
proposed settlement, asserting that it's all about defending the rule of law.
But what they're actually defending is the exact opposite -- a system in which
only the little people have to obey the law, while the rich, and bankers
especially, can cheat and defraud without consequences. (Source: www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/opinion/14krugman.html)
Disgruntled says: We are told that the
Disgruntled
wants to know: At a recent town-hall style meeting, New York Fed
President William Dudley made the mistake rich people make when trying to
convince the rest of us that prices are not rising. His example of why the Fed
looks at "core" inflation, which excludes food and energy, drew a
hostile response from members of the audience. According to the wire service,
Disgruntled feels: Two-Faced! The West
will not demonize the manner in which
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls
Email http://noir.bloomberg.com...IMF Says
Global Bank Regulation Is Failing, Handelsblatt
Reports...By Brian Parkin...An International Monetary
Fund report shows that regulators haven't gone far enough in taming potential
financial-market excesses since the economic crisis began, the Handelsblatt newspaper reported. Banks remain too big and
their businesses even more complex even after efforts to curb their latent
capacity to rock the financial system, according to the IMF report that is
published today, the newspaper said. "We are at the moment even less
well-prepared than when the crisis erupted in 2007," Handelsblatt
cites the report as saying. Co-written by IMF Chief Economist Olivier
Blanchard, the document also says investors are switching to financial
institutions that are less regulated, such as hedge funds, in search of profit,
creating new risks for the financial system.
Email www.truth-out.org...Then They Came for the
Trade Unionists...By William Rivers Pitt ...On this day, it behooves us to
remember the words of Martin Niemoller...."First
they came for the communists," he wrote, "and I didn't speak out
because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I
didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the
Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and
there was no one left to speak out for me." I am a trade unionist, and
yesterday in