Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

Kasich’s ‘Ohio Story’ Not a National Model, Commerce Report Shows

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Source: Plunderbund

Author:

Emphasis Mine

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is out testing the presidential waters for 2016. While the governor may want people to believe he can walk on water, a report from the U.S. Department of Commerce shows he better take his water-wings with him because he might find himself treading water at best and submerged at worst, in light of earning reports on how the state stakes up to other states and the national average.

Ohio remains 37th in the national in job creation, as determined by the well-respected W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, and has consistently failed to break even with national job creation for 27 straight months. But when it comes to personal income in Ohio for 2014, it finally matches the nation at 3.9 percent. Ohio’s annual personal income on a per capita basis was $42,571, ranking the state in the bottom half of states at 29th. Per capita personal income in the United States was $46,129. The report ranked Connecticut first at $62,467 and Mississippi last at $34,333.

Forty-five states including Ohio experienced personal income growth in 2014 over 2013. That growth ranged from 0.5 percent in Nebraska to 5.7 percent in Alaska and Oregon. The report defined personal income including wages and other earnings from investments or Social Security payments, among other criteria. Again below the national average, net earnings grew by 3.5 in Ohio between 2013 and 2014 while during the same period 4 percent was the national average. And since inflation was way low at 1.3 percent in 2014, personal income growth in Ohio and other states exceeded that figure.

It’s no secret that workers’ wages have stagnated for decades, and net earnings in 2014 even though up don’t yet prove wages are growing again. In Ohio, the report said, personal income and net earnings growth are only slight better than over the past few years. Net earnings in Ohio grew by 3.6 percent in 2012 but slumped to only 1.6 percent in 2013, not a good benchmark to point to for Ohio’s governor who thinks his work in Ohio is a good model for the nation. Analysis of the report shows the health care and social assistance segment contributed the most to personal income growth in Ohio in 2014, while construction ranked second with manufacturing of durable goods in third place. Nationally, the report notes, professional, scientific and technical services were the largest contributing sectors.

Unfortunately for the Kasich Administration, Ohio experienced a decline in earnings in theses key sectors: farming, information, military and state and local government. In the U.S., by contrast, farming and military segments were the only areas to see earning declines. When Great Lake states were compared to each other, Ohio did perform better than its regional neighbors, which were pegged at 3.2 percent compared to 3.9 in the Buckeye State.

See: http://www.plunderbund.com/2015/04/13/kasichs-ohio-story-not-a-national-model-commerce-report-shows/

Social Security: The Surprise of 2016?

Social Security surfaced in the very first days of the campaign, thanks to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after the program with the zeal of a born huckster, demanding to raise the retirement age. In 2010 equivocation and deficit-reduction obsession from President Obama squandered Democrats’ good will on the subject. But this year anything less than an embrace of expansion this time is likely to leave the base unsatisfied.

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Source: PortSide

Author: Robert Eskow

Emphasis Mine

The 2016 election season is just beginning, but a surprise issue is already emerging among both Republican and Democratic candidates: Social Security. Some observers thought that conservative candidates would be inclined to avoid the so-called “third rail” of American politics this time around, but the opposite seems to be true. A lot of Republicans are eager to propose cutting it, even as many progressives talk of expanding it.

Where does that leave the Democratic Party and its odds-on favorite for the presidential nomination? Will Hillary Clinton embrace her party’s growing call to increase Social Security benefits?

It’s not an extreme idea, as some would have us believe, or even a particularly “leftist” one. In fact, Social Security expansion was a key part of the Republican agenda – in 1956. This new proposal turns out to have surprisingly old roots.

The Means Testing Bait-and-Switch

First, the Republican race: Social Security surfaced in the very first days of the campaign, thanks to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie, regurgitating the corporate-funded clichés of the self-described “center,” went after the program with the zeal of a born huckster. He wants to raise the retirement age, a benefit cut which would impose a heavy burden on working Americans.

Christie also trotted out some old, discredited arguments for means-testing, adding that by opposing it “the left are defending the rich.”

Nice try, Mr. Christie, but that bait-and-switch game has already been exposed. “Means testing” would deprive billionaires of a maximum monthly benefit of $2,663 in 2014. Think they care? Proposals from “the left,” on the other hand, would either lift the payroll tax cap altogether or reimpose it on earnings above a certain amount. That would add up to a significant amount for ultra-high earners.

Now who’s defending the rich, Governor?

Christie would start his means-tested cuts at earnings of $80,000 per year – but how long would that last? Conservative groups like the Concord Coalition have proposed doing it for average incomes as low as $20,000 per year.

Christie’s “bold plan” would become a race to the bottom for the American middle class. It would also convert Social Security from an insurance plan to a welfare program based on need. (And we know how Republicans feel about welfare, don’t we?)

Pandering

Jeb Bush soon joined in the act, trying to see Christie’s cuts and raise him – with other people’s benefit money. Bush insisted that “we need to raise the retirement age, not for the people that already nearing – receiving Social Security that are already on it [sic], but raise it gradually over a long period of time for people that are just entering the system.” (There’s that Bush syntax again. Did you miss it?)

But if Bush thinks raising the retirement age is such a good idea, why not do it for people who are “already nearing” it? It’s simple pandering. Both Bush and Christie know that older voters lean Republican, and they don’t want to alienate them. Bush and Christie want to get elected – and both want to protect their rich patrons from the plan to lift the payroll tax cap.

Then came an unexpected ploy by Mike Huckabee, who is attempting to outflank his opponents from the left on this issue. “I’m getting slammed by some in the GOP ruling class for thinking it wrong to involuntarily take money from people’s paychecks for 50 years,” said Huckabee, “and then not keep the promise government made.”

By opposing all Social Security cuts, Huckabee has staked out a position which is more progressive than that of President Obama through much of his administration – or, for that matter, of Sen. Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign. That’s a politically savvy move. Voters across the political spectrum oppose benefit cuts by wide margins.

Squandering

Social Security would seem like a natural issue for the Democrats. Their party created this popular and successful program, after all, and Democrats led the fight to thwart George W. Bush’s unpopular and potentially disastrous privatization plan.

But in recent years Democrats have had a knack for giving away the advantages Social Security brings to their party. That’s what happened in 2010, after two years of equivocation and deficit-reduction obsession from President Obama squandered their good will on this issue.

Polling figures from that time tell the story: a 20-point advantage on Social Security in 2005 had been turned into a dis-advantage of several points by the time the 2010 election rolled around. That’s the year the ever-cynical and ever-inventive Republicans invented something called the “Seniors’ Bill Of Rights,” ran to the rhetorical left of Democrats on Medicare and Social Security – and recaptured the House.

Changing Places

How is this year shaping up for Democrats? Secretary Clinton had this to say when asked this week about Social Security:

“I think there will be some big political arguments about Social Security. And my only question to everybody who thinks we can privatize Social Security or undermine it in some way – (is) what is going to happen to all these people …? … It’s just wrong.”

While that’s a firmer defense of the program than she offered in 2008, it’s not likely to satisfy voters on the left – or across the political spectrum. They’re likely to remember that Barack Obama offered similar reassurances in 2008, only to reverse himself once elected.

Obama the campaigner talked of lifting the payroll tax cap to protect the program, while then-Senator Clinton said “I don’t want to raise taxes on anybody.” Clinton called lifting the cap “a one trillion dollar tax increase” and said “I am for getting back to fiscal responsibility.” She talked of a plan to “rein in the budget” – that is, to impose benefit cuts – and proposed a “bipartisan commission” to ensure that the program was “solvent.”

We know what happened next. Obama won the nomination and the presidency. He then pivoted to Clinton’s approach, by convening a bipartisan “deficit commission” empowered to look at Social Security (Social Security does not contribute to the deficit) and appointing two longtime benefit-cut advocates to co-chair it.

These reversals may give rise to greater voter skepticism this time around.

Where The Voters Are

That means generalities and vague reassurances are less likely to be effective this year, especially when Social Security has become such a hot political issue. An endorsement of its expansion represents a firmer, more concrete commitment to the program. And expansion isn’t just a nod to the “Warren wing” of the party, as pundits have suggested. It’s also a nod to voters across the political spectrum.

Social Security expansion has “overwhelming” support, regardless of party affiliation, according to political consultant Celinda Lake. Lake’s research on this issue showed that 90 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of Republicans, and 73 percent of independents support “increasing Social Security benefits and paying for that increase by having wealthy Americans pay the same rate into Social Security as everybody else.”

To her credit, Secretary Clinton has been talking a lot about wealth inequality this time around. But how is that problem addressed? One concrete way is by increasing Social Security benefits.

Where The Party Is

Anything less than an embrace of expansion is likely to leave the base unsatisfied. And a refusal to commit to expansion would put Clinton at odds with most or all of the other potential candidates currently being discussed, most of whom (including Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, and reluctant draftee Sen. Elizabeth Warren) have already endorsed the idea.

Anything less than expansion would also place Secretary Clinton to the right of Senate Democrats, 42 out of 44 of whom voted to expand Social Security in an amendment which resembled the one studied in Lake’s research.

Tell ‘Em Ike Sent You.

Come to think of it: If the Democratic nominee endorses anything less than Social Security expansion, that would place the party to the right of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Republicans.

The GOP boasted about its accomplishments in the 1956 Republican Party platform. “Social Security has been extended to an additional 10 million workers,” said the platform, “and the benefits raised for 6 1/2 million.”

Eisenhower’s platform goes on to say: “We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs – expansion of Social Security.”

Benefits increases? Social Security expansion? Ike’s 1956 Republicans sound a lot like today’s Democratic “Warren wing.”

If the Democrats want to win on this issue in 2016, they might be wise to follow the trail Republicans blazed for them 60 years earlier

See: http://portside.org/2015-04-25/social-security-surprise-2016

4 Ways Lawmakers Still Grovel to the Christian Right, Even As Right-Wing Religion Declines in America

From Bibles to school prayer, legislatures are signaling their religious stripes.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Evan McMurray

Emphasis Mine

The proportion of conservative Christians is declining in the U.S., yet right-wing lawmakers are flipping out. Legislatures everywhere are passing religious-minded bills likely to be struck down after costly legal battles, merely to prove their allegiance to the Christian right. From Bibles to vouchers to school prayer, here’s how they’re signaling their religious stripes, even as the electorate scurries away.

1. The Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments has long been the fighting symbol of those who try to join state and religion—perhaps because its Old Testament roots makes it slightly more inclusive. The most public example is Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was evicted from the bench in 2003 for refusing to remove his Ten Commandments display from his courtroom under federal court order. (Moore was recently reelected and is currently squaring off with the federal government over gay marriage.)

But some states tried to go further than Moore. Last month the Arkansas Senate did just that, passing a bill, almost unanimously, that would allow the state to officially erect Ten Commandments monument on government property. The bill claims the monument would be constitutional, but the funds it provides for legal defense suggest they’re not too sure about that.

By the way, don’t worry about the state elevating one faith over others. “The placement of the monument under this section shall not be construed to mean that the State of Arkansas favors any particular religion or denomination over others,” the bill states. The Arkansas House must now consider whether that’s believable or not. Given some of the other bills this Arkansas legislature has passed (see below), chances are likely they’ll love it.

Arkansas didn’t dream this up. In 2009, Oklahoma approved legislation calling for a Ten Commandments monument. The thing was built, which apparently angered the big guy downstairs: last year a man drove his car into the monument, telling authorities Satan ordered him to do it.

2. Prayer

As Kentucky’s attempt to get the Bible into classrooms demonstrated, schools often become the arena for religious pandering. And there’s no pandering like school prayer, which is perfectly constitutional as long as the state doesn’t endorse it — which, of course, is exactly what legislators want.

The most egregious example in recent years was Alabama’s 2014 bill requiring prayer in public schools. The bill set aside 15 minutes at the beginning of each school day to read aloud the prayers that open sessions of Congress. “If Congress can open with a prayer, and the state of Alabama Legislature can, I don’t see why schools can’t,” one legislator said. (The Establishment Clause is the answer to that one.)

The bill was so ridiculous the committee had to pass it with a contested voice vote while some of the committee members were absent.

School prayer bills are often struck down, largely because they protect a right already guaranteed by the Constitution in a manner that seems to entail the state endorsement of a particular religion. In response, lawmakers have located a crafty workaround: school religious anti-discrimination laws. The bills take as their impetus cases, often anecdotal, of students being told they can’t make god the subject of assignments. The bills ostensibly would protect students’ ability to make explicitly religious material their subject matter.

Or so they claim. But critics argue the bills are simply school prayer mandates in disguise, and those who sponsor them don’t exactly dissuade anybody from that theory.

“There’s a lot of hostility or animosity towards Christianity when we know our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values,” one Alabama Republican said. “This is not preference to any particular religion, but students will be able to freely express their religious viewpoints in artwork and course work and then at school, if the SGA president has the microphone or the valedictorian, and they want to pray, student initiated prayer is 100 percent guaranteed by the Constitution.”

These bills have been popping up in Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and other states. For continuity’s sake, the bill’s sponsor in Alabama has previously tried to get a Ten Commandments monument erected on state grounds; in the event that his prayer bill passes and is legally challenged, which seems almost certain, Roy Moore has promised to defend it free of charge.

3. Vouchers

Another backend way to intertwine religion and schooling is to reverse the process: rather than force religion onto students, export students into religion. That’s been the path of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who’s overseen a massive voucher program, essentially privatizing—and pietizing—his state’s education system.

Many of the private schools endorsed under the program would effectively be delivering religious education (read: creationism) paid for by Louisiana taxpayer funds. This most famously includes the textbook teaching that the Loch Ness monster is a) real; b) a dinosaur; and c) co-existed with humans, thus proving the creationist math that the world is only several thousand years old.

Thus the voucher program was revealed to be not about improving education or guaranteeing religious liberty, but the state endorsement of Christian teachings.

4. Religious Freedom Bills

Thanks to the unexpected pushback against Indiana’s so-called religious freedom bill last month, which caught everybody, especially Indiana Governor Mike Pence, by surprise, religious freedom restoration acts are now the subject of public scrutiny.

It was almost too late. The federal RFRA was signed into law in 1993 by then-President Bill Clinton, in response to a Supreme Court decision leaving religious minorities vulnerable to federal laws. The RFRA was an example of Clinton’s patented triangulation, which also gave us the Defense of Marriage Act and don’t ask, don’t tell, though this one has been arguably less damaging.

Because the law only covered federal policy, states have slowly enacted their own RFRAs over the past 20 years, and unlike the other laws on this list, there was nothing particularly conservative or pandering about them: one of the first examples was passed in Connecticut, not exactly Alabama.

But in recent years the RFRAs have gotten nastier (see Kansas) as right-wing lawmakers have realized that “religious freedom” laws could be used as cover for discrimination against gays and lesbians. The salutary spread of gay marriage legalization created a new space of conflicts—the wedding business—and gave legislators all the inspiration they needed to come screaming to the defense of what they call religious persecution.

When the RFRAs pass in states that don’t have anti-discrimination protections for gays and lesbians (as, for instance, Connecticut does), they become effectively weaponized. For instance, earlier this year in Michigan the state considered a bill that would allow doctors and EMTs to refuse to treat gay patients over religious objections.

The bills are so egregious that criticism, largely from the business community, forced the legislatures of Indiana and Arkansas to scramble for a fix. Indiana lacked (and refused to provide) protections for LGBT citizens; Arkansas had gone further and passed a state law superseding city ordinances protecting gays and lesbians. Both ended up explicitly stating that the bills could not be used to discriminate against LGBT citizens, getting close to providing gays and lesbians with more protections than before the bills were passed.

Not learning the lesson, Louisiana is still considering a similar bill that would allow someone in the wedding industry carte blanche to refuse service to gay couples. IBM is now warning the state to make similar changes to the bill as Arkansas and Indiana did, or risk losing business and investment—which, as you could probably tell from the desperation over its school system, is all the state has going for it.

Evan McMurry is a political editor at Mediaite, interviews editor at Newfound: An Inquiry of Place, a regular reviewer at Bookslut, and the founding editor of A Flea In The Fur of the Beast. Find him on Twitter or contact him at evanmcmurry@yahoo.com.

 

See: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/4-ways-lawmakers-still-grovel-christian-right-even-right-wing-religion-declines?akid=13030.123424.v6kLP6&rd=1&src=newsletter1035255&t=3

Noam Chomsky: The Major Crime of This Millennium Is the US Invasion of Iraq

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Source:RSN

Author: RT

Emphasis Mine

Major American media organizations diligently parrot what US officials want the public to know about global affairs, historian Noam Chomsky told RT. To US leaders, any news outlet that “does not repeat the US propaganda system is intolerable,” he said.

The culpability of the West – namely the United States – for world affairs, such as the Ukrainian conflict or tensions with Iran, is another idea that is not permissible in leading American media, Chomsky said, adding that world opinion does not matter when that opinion counters US strategy.

“The West means the United States and everyone else that goes along,” he said. “What’s called the international community in the United States is the United States and anyone who happens to be going along with it. Take, say, for example, the question of Iran’s right to carry out its current nuclear policies, whatever they are. The standard line is that the international community objects to this. Who is the international community? What the United States determines it to be.”

He added that, “any reader of [George] Orwell would be perfectly familiar with this. But it continues virtually without comment.”

Chomsky’s remarks came this week just before a congressional hearing that was officially titled ‘Confronting Russia’s Weaponization of Information.’ Of the meeting, House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Ed Royce said, “The Russian media is now dividing societies abroad and, in fact, weaponizing information.”

The social philosopher and MIT professor said, “if there were any imaginable possibility of honesty,” Rep. Royce could be talking about the American media. He pointed to a recent New York Times story that discussed reasons not to trust Iran amid the tentative agreement between Tehran and Washington, along with other major global powers, over the former’s nuclear ambitions.

“The most interesting one is the charge that Iran is destabilizing the Middle East because it’s supporting militias which have killed American soldiers in Iraq,” Chomsky told RT’s Alexey Yaroshevsky.

“That’s kind of as if, in 1943, the Nazi press had criticized England because it was destabilizing Europe for supporting partisans who were killing German soldiers. In other words, the assumption is, when the United States invades, it kills a couple hundred thousand people, destroys the country, elicits sectarian conflicts that are now tearing Iraq and the region apart, that’s stabilization. If someone resists that tact, that’s destabilization.”

Chomsky also related American media propaganda to recent moves by US President Barack Obama to reach out to Cuba, which the US has long considered a state sponsor of terror while instituting a harsh embargo regime. Chomsky said top American media outlets go to great lengths to pit Cuba — and not the US — as the isolated party in the Western Hemisphere.

“The facts are very clear. This is a free and open society, so we have access to internal documents at an extraordinary level. You can’t claim you don’t know. It’s not like a totalitarian state where there are no records. We know what happened. The Kennedy administration launched a very serious terrorist war against Cuba. It was one of the factors that led to the missile crisis. It was a war that was planned to lead to an invasion in October 1962, which Cuba and Russia presumably knew about. It’s now assumed by scholarship that that’s one of the reasons for the placement of the missiles. That war went on for years. No mention of it is permissible [in the US]. The only thing you can mention is that there were some attempts to assassinate [Fidel] Castro. And those can be written off as ridiculous CIA shenanigans. But the terrorist war itself was very serious.”

Obama has changed course on Cuban policy not for reasons pursuant to freedom or democracy, as is peddled in the US media, Chomsky said.

“There is no noble gesture, just Obama’s recognition that the United States is practically being thrown out of the hemisphere because of its isolation on this topic,” he added. “But you can’t discuss that [in the US]. It’s all public information, nothing secret, all available in public documents, but undiscussable. Like the idea — and you can’t contemplate the idea — that when the US invades another country and the other resists, it’s not the resistors who are committing the crime, it’s the invaders.”

As for international law, Chomsky said it “can work up to the point where the great powers permit it.” Beyond that, it is meaningless. Thus, is international law an illusion if the US picks and chooses — while exempting itself — from what is enforced?

“To say that [international law is] dead implies it was ever alive. Has it ever been alive?” he said, citing US stonewalling of the world court’s demand in the 1980s that the US halt its war on Nicaragua and provide extensive reparations for damage done.

“International law cannot be enforced against great powers,” he said. “There’s no enforcement mechanism. Take a look at the International Criminal Court, who has investigated and sentenced African leaders who the US doesn’t like. The major crime of this millennium, certainly, is the US invasion of Iraq. Could that be brought to the international court? I mean, it’s beyond inconceivable.”

Chomsky said the so-called American Dream and US democracy are in “very serious decline,” as social mobility is among the worst among the richest nations. He added that, formally, the US retains a democratic veneer, but actual manifestations of democracy are dwindling.

“Basically, most of the population is disenfranchised,” he said, referring to public polling. “Their representatives pay no attention to their opinion. That’s roughly the lowest three-quarters on the bottom of the income scale. Move up the scale, you get a little more influence. At the top, essentially policy is made. That’s plutocracy, not democracy.”

See: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/29725-noam-chomsky-the-major-crime-of-this-millennium-is-the-us-invasion-of-iraq

What does GUN VIOLENCE actually cost?

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Source: Mother Jones

Author: Ted Miller

Emphasis Mine

THE DATA BELOW is the result of a joint investigation by Mother Jones and Ted Miller, an economist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. Based on Miller’s work identifying and quantifying the societal impacts of gun violence, the annual price tag comes to at least $229 billion a year (based on 2012 data). That includes $8.6 billion in direct spending—from emergency care and other medical expenses to court and prison costs—as well as $221 billion in less tangible “indirect” costs, which include impacts on productivity and quality of life for victims and their communities. (See the rest of our special investigation here.)  gun violence costs charts

gun violence costs charts

gun violence costs charts

gun violence costs charts
gun violence costs charts
gun violence costs charts
gun violence costs charts
gun violence costs charts
gun violence costs charts
gun violence costs charts
gun violence costs charts

 

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See:http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/charts-show-cost-price-gun-violence-america

Rush Limbaugh Dropped By Longtime Indianapolis Station

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Source: Media Matters

Author: Angelo Carosone

Emphasis Mine

Indianapolis’ WIBC has broadcast Rush Limbaugh’s show for 22 years. Despite this long history, parent company Emmis Communications announced April 13 that they are dropping Limbaugh’s show from WIBC’s lineup.

Charlie Morgan, an executive for Emmis, indicated that the decision to drop Limbaugh was about the “long-term direction of the station,” but also acknowledged that there was a “business element to the decision.” Underscoring the business considerations, Morgan explained to the Indianapolis Business Journal that the absence of Limbaugh could actually help WIBC’s advertiser prospects:

While Morgan expects some WIBC listeners to be “hugely disappointed” by the change, he said losing Limbaugh could open up the station to more advertising opportunities.

There are some–primarily national–advertisers that refuse to air commercials during Limbaugh’s show, Morgan explained. Emmis officials began notifying its advertisers of the change Monday.

“We believe this could open us up to a new group of advertisers,” he said.

Limbaugh’s show has been plagued with woes ever since advertisers began fleeing in the wake of Limbaugh’s multi-day attack on then-law student Sandra Fluke. Thousands of local and regional businesses refuse to advertise on Limbaugh’s show and the bulk of national advertisers are now reportedly boycotting his program. The cumulative effect of Limbaugh’s advertiser difficulties has created a problem so substantial that it has actually spilled over and is hurting conservative talk radio as a whole.

The Wall Street Journal recently confirmed the industry-wide damage resulting from Limbaugh’s beleaguered program. According to the report, the exodus of national advertisers has played a significant part in reducing talk radio advertising rates to about half of what it costs to run ads on music stations, even though the two formats have “comparable audience metrics.”

Further, the report also provides a look at the millions of dollars individual stations have lost. The chart below, which was taken from the Journal report, gives a before and after look at the advertising revenue of talker stations in some of the largest markets. Notably, three of the stations that carried Limbaugh originally (KFI, WSB, and WBAP) experienced the greatest losses:

What is happening at the stations identified in the chart is happening at other talk stations, especially those that carry Limbaugh’s program. While it was already reported that major radio companies were hemorrhaging millions of dollars due to Limbaugh’s toxicity, the Journal’s analysis of the effect at the local station level was revealing and may offer some additional insight into WIBC’s decision to drop Limbaugh.

WIBC is just the latest in a string of reminders that Rush Limbaugh is bad for business.

The Journal report also confirmed that advertisers continue to leave and stay away thanks to a dedicated group of independent organizers in the Flush Rush and #StopRush communities. Their participation matters and is having a tremendous effect.

 

See:http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/04/13/rush-limbaugh-dropped-by-longtime-indianapolis/203265

Where Government Excels

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Sgt._Pepper's_Lonely_Hearts_Club_BandSource: NY Times

Author: Paul Krugman

Emphasis Mine 

As Republican presidential hopefuls trot out their policy agendas — which always involve cutting taxes on the rich while slashing benefits for the poor and middle class — some real new thinking is happening on the other side of the aisle. Suddenly, it seems, many Democrats have decided to break with Beltway orthodoxy, which always calls for cuts in “entitlements.” Instead, they’re proposing that Social Security benefits actually be expanded.

This is a welcome development in two ways. First, the specific case for expanding Social Security is quite good. Second, and more fundamentally, Democrats finally seem to be standing up to antigovernment propaganda and recognizing the reality that there are some things the government does better than the private sector.

Like all advanced nations, America mainly relies on private markets and private initiatives to provide its citizens with the things they want and need, and hardly anyone in our political discourse would propose changing that. The days when it sounded like a good idea to have the government directly run large parts of the economy are long past.

Yet we also know that some things more or less must be done by government. Every economics textbooks talks about “public goods” like national defense and air traffic control that can’t be made available to anyone without being made available to everyone, and which profit-seeking firms, therefore, have no incentive to provide. But are public goods the only area where the government outperforms the private sector? By no means.

 

One classic example of government doing it better is health insurance. Yes, conservatives constantly agitate for more privatization — in particular, they want to convert Medicare into nothing more than vouchers for the purchase of private insurance — but all the evidence says this would move us in precisely the wrong direction. Medicare and Medicaid are substantially cheaper and more efficient than private insurance; they even involve less bureaucracy. Internationally, the American health system is unique in the extent to which it relies on the private sector, and it’s also unique in its incredible inefficiency and high costs.

And there’s another major example of government superiority: providing retirement security.  

Maybe we wouldn’t need Social Security if ordinary people really were the perfectly rational, farsighted agents economists like to assume in their models (and right-wingers like to assume in their propaganda). In an idealized world, 25-year-old workers would base their decisions about how much to save on a realistic assessment of what they will need to live comfortably when they’re in their 70s. They’d also be smart and sophisticated in how they invested those savings, carefully seeking the best trade-offs between risk and return.

In the real world, however, many and arguably most working Americans are saving much too little for their retirement. They’re also investing these savings badly. For example, a recent White House report found that Americans are losing billions each year thanks to investment advisers trying to maximize their own fees rather than their clients’ welfare.

You might be tempted to say that if workers save too little and invest badly, it’s their own fault. But people have jobs and children, and they must cope with all the crises of life. It’s unfair to expect them to be expert investors, too. In any case, the economy is supposed to work for real people leading real lives; it shouldn’t be an obstacle course only a few can navigate.

And in the real world of retirement, Social Security is a shining example of a system that works. It’s simple and clean, with low operating costs and minimal bureaucracy. It provides older Americans who worked hard all their lives with a chance of living decently in retirement, without requiring that they show an inhuman ability to think decades ahead and be investment whizzes as well. The only problem is that the decline of private pensions, and their replacement with inadequate 401(k)-type plans, has left a gap that Social Security isn’t currently big enough to fill. So why not make it bigger?

Needless to say, suggestions along these lines are already provoking near-hysterical reactions, not just from the right, but from self-proclaimed centrists. As I wrote some years ago, calling for cuts to Social Security has long been seen inside the Beltway as a “badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you are.” And it’s only a decade since former President George W. Bush tried to privatize the program, with a lot of centrist support.

But true seriousness means looking at what works and what doesn’t. Privatized retirement schemes work very badly; Social Security works very well. And we should build on that success.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/opinion/paul-krugman-where-government-excels.html?_r=0

Tax Cuts for the Wealthy DO NOT Create Jobs

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Source: DailyKos

Author: Jocava

Emphasis Mine

After 30 years of re-engineering our nation’s economy and tax code to deliver huge benefits, free of charge, to the wealthy, the most massive transfer of wealth in the history of the world —a transfer of wealth that has led to now catastrophically failed wealth disparities between the wealthiest and the poorest—, we have not seen the wildly prolific job-creation that was promised. Indeed, we have seen our manufacturing base stripped away piece by piece and our middle class society systematically eroded.

Now, after 10 years of massive tax breaks for the wealthiest people in the history of humanity, we have seen a further concentration of wealth and a further erosion of the open market for employment and innovation. The 400 wealthiest people in the United States now control more wealth than 155 million people at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum combined. The tax cuts that were supposed to be given to the “supply side” were never given to the supply side at all, only to those that seek to own it.

To distill the complicated economics down to simple terms: Why should the rich “create jobs”, why should they put money into wages in order to build businesses to make profits, when it’s being handed to them in unprecedented amounts, for free? That’s the real problem. When the government takes money from everyone, then hands it out to the wealthiest among us, it has the direct effect of disincentivizing investment by those individuals and interests in the creation of new businesses and new jobs.

It is economic incentive that drives enterprise, not the supposed nobility of spirit of the wealthy. That idea is aristocracy: that the ruling class is there because they deserve to be, because they are uniquely noble, because they have arete —excellence and a commitment to justice and humane values, to the better interests of society at large. Our nation is founded on the self-evident truth that medieval aristocracy is a lie, and that powerful elites do not tend to give their power and privilege back to the people.

It makes no sense to be fostering a new aristocracy, to be transferring literally trillions of dollars in wealth, as a matter of national policy, to the wealthiest people in our society. There is no economic reason for doing so. There is nothing about that process which upholds or defends democracy. Much to the contrary, the massive and unprecedented transfer of wealth from ordinary, working Americans to the already wealthy —which began with Ronald Reagan and accelerated to warp speed with George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts—, has crippled our economy and removed any incentive major financial interests have to invest in widespread job creation.

If you believe a vibrant middle class is essential to fostering generalized citizen participation and real elective democracy, then the collapse of that middle class, the decline in household wages, the rapid escalation in bankruptcies and home foreclosures, should worry you. Even if you are a billionaire, it should worry you, because the erosion of our middle class, the gutting of funds from our educational system, the prioritization of billionaires and multinational corporations, is eroding our democracy itself.

When Vice President Joe Biden left the Senate to join the Obama administration, he was the only member of the United States Senate who was not a millionaire. He had not used his office to enrich himself or his family, and he had not played the game of Washington insider. He was not a celebrity and he did not view politics as a battle for cold, hard cash. He made policy based on how it would affect ordinary citizens, local communities, the real human freedom of people he knows and understands.

As the Senate became the world’s most powerful millionaire’s club, it became harder and harder for ordinary people to break into politics. The power of the two-party system had made it risky for anyone not to support the one of the two parties most friendly to their views, because even the slightest erosion of support for one of the two parties is now translated, through furious and misleading reporting of public opinion poll numbers as a “gain” for the other party.

As the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has accelerated, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy has followed along, the outright lie that tax cuts for the wealthy are the best, indeed the only, way to create jobs continues to have widespread support. Though real people living in the real world can see with their own eyes that fundamental pillars of our democracy are being eroded, or even eliminated, while parents across the country know what it would mean for the House of Representatives to strip funding for Head Start, for public education and for college financial aid, the transfer of wealth goes ahead, and the job creation boom to which innovative, hard-working, democratic Americans are entitled, continues to stall.

There should be an indefinite, blanket moratorium on wasteful wealth spending.

Since we know that spending trillions of dollars on tax cuts for the wealthy is counterproductive, does not create jobs and is undermining our democracy, every independent voter, every Democratic and every Republican voter, should demand of every elected official that they cease to prioritize the giveaway of taxpayer money to those who have no use for it and will not use it to invest in rebuilding the middle class.

Tax cuts for the wealthy do not create jobs. Tax cuts for the wealthy are not a constructive way to build democracy. Tax cuts for the wealthy are not a sound investment for the already embattled middle class. Every proposed cut to social spending, every proposed tax break for millionaires and billionaires, is part of the same process of eroding our middle class and shoring up the long-term power interest of the already powerful.

It should not be the economic policy of a middle class democratic republic to prioritize the protection of millionaires and billionaires against economic hardship, when the economic hardship of the moment was created specifically and through many years of coordinated effort, by the mismanagement and bad practice of that very “investor class” that seeks to give the real power in our society to banks, hedge funds and offshore interests.

Whether by incompetence, ignorance or malice, the financial industry was hijacked by a logic of might makes right: anything that can be done to expand wealth, any “instrument” that can be devised that will make the digital, ethereal wealth of our times appear to increase, was to be cultivated, protected and propagated, regardless of the risk to the wider society or to the health of our people and our democracy.

The financial collapse of 2007 and 2008 was not brought about by working people’s mortgages; it was brought about by major financial interests that had agreed, implicitly and explicitly, it was no longer of any importance whether major national investment strategies represented real wealth or spurious wealth claims; what mattered was that those at the top could benefit from implementing the strategies.

That is what was done with our trillions of dollars in wealth subsidies: while the American people were told that tax breaks for the wealthiest of the wealthy would lead to widespread job creation, the money was devoted to creating entirely new markets where only money would be needed to make more money. Gone were the heady old days when earning millions was supposed to represent investment in an actual enterprise doing actual business, building a better society.

There should be an indefinite, blanket moratorium on wasteful wealth spending, because the work of our age needs to be the reinvention of our economy, the reversal of this egregious and undemocratic transfer of wealth from the tens of millios to the 400, and the restoration the principle that if it’s good for America, it’s because it’s good for building a vibrant, free and educated middle class that actually has the power to govern its own future and to steer the ship of state.

SOME DATA: The top 20% of the socio-economic pyramid in our country control well more than 80% of all the wealth. Just the top 1% control 40% of all financial investment assets.

In 2001, George W. Bush inherited a 10-year budget surplus of $1.7 trillion. His 2001 and 2003 tax cuts plunged the government into deficit spending, immediately. By 2002, the surplus was already erased, after just one year of the long-term tax cut plan.

By 2009, when Bush left office, he had doubled Defense spending, pledged over $1 trillion to banks, and average household incomes had FALLEN by more than $2,000 per year.

The result of these policies was: 25% of all American children living in poverty, near 10% unemployment (officially), as high as 25% among young people and well over 30% among some minority communities.

In 2008 and 2009, the nation saw record bankruptcies, record rates of home foreclosures, and despite massive investment in recovery efforts, in 2009 and 2010 job recovery has been slow to non-existent. The reason: even as banks and wealthy investors began to see their economic engine revving up again, they saw no economic incentive at all to invest in job creation.

The wrong kind of tax policy was giving them cash for nothing, and incentivizing them to invest it in money-for-the-wealthy financial schemes that don’t support small business, manufacturing, entrepreneurship or job-creation.

Originally posted to jocava on Tue Mar 08, 2011 at 06:28 AM PST.

Also republished by Income Inequality Kos, Daily Kos Classics, and Community Spotlight.

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The Age of Selfishness: What Made Ayn Rand Tick — And Why She’s a Right-Wing Favorite Today

A look at how her influence extends into the present day, and even played a role in bringing on the Great Recession and financial crisis.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Elias Isquith

Emphasis Mine

With Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul having recently announced his intention to be the next U.S. president (an announcement he delivered, incidentally, from Louisville’s Galt House Hotel), now seems as good a time as ever to reexamine the life and legacy of one Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, a woman better known as Ayn Rand.

This is not the first time that an avowed fan of the novelist, polemicist and pseudo-philosopher has reached such heights of American politics, of course. Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012, at the very least used to be a big fan; and her views were well-aligned with those of Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party’s 1964 presidential nominee (of whom she was a big fan). Her ideas — especially her uncompromising opposition to redistribution — permeate throughout the conservative movement still.

Yet while there have been books about Rand before, none of them have been quite like “The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality and the Financial Crisis,” a new graphic novel from artist, photographer and sculptor Darryl Cunningham. The artist and former mental health care worker combines mediums to take a long look at Rand’s history, but he goes one step further, looking at how her influence extends into the present day, and even played a role in bringing on the Great Recession and financial crisis.

Recently, Salon spoke about the book with Cunningham via Skype. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

When did you first come into contact with Ayn Rand? 

I think it would have been back in my 20s, sort of generally reading about things, and I think it possibly came up in connection with people I was reading like Robert Heinlein or science fiction stuff. A lot of more right-wing stuff seemed to ape a lot of philosophical ideas, and I came across her then without really knowing anything about her.

Through the years, I read bits about her and I was quite appalled because her philosophy seemed quite opposite to everything I seemed to believe, myself. I was drawn to it like you’re drawn to a car crash, really; with horror and fascination. Fascination because her view of things was so upside down, I just wanted to get to the nub of how she could come up with such conclusions. Along the way, a book seemed to be a good way to explain the attraction of neoliberal politics and how come we live now in a society so dominated by neoliberal politics. Looking at the philosophy and the psychology at the same time, using her as a starting point.

Did your research on Ayn Rand change your perspective on her at all? Was there anything about her that surprised you?

I found myself to be more sympathetic toward her as a person than I initially was. Having read her story— I read two of the big biographies of her and then some smaller books— I began to see that she was quite a sympathetic person, really. She could hardly be other than what she was. Although she could be monstrous, you could understand her outlook and the way she formed her views because it came out of a childhood, out of the difficulties she and her family had during and after the Russian Revolution. That forever colored her view of humanity.

What was it about her childhood that was so traumatic that made her particular worldview understandable, if not quite persuasive?

She grew up in St. Petersburg; her father owned a pharmacy, and they were quite a well-to-do middle-class family. Come the Revolution, the father’s business was appropriated by the Bolsheviks for the good of the people, and so they were left basically with nothing and had to leave St. Petersburg and go to the Crimea and try to make a living.

When they eventually returned to St. Petersburg, they found that the apartments they had had been taken over by others and they had to share just a small part of it with another family. The streets were filled with ex-soldiers and it was just a disaster, basically, all around. I think she saw how altruism had been a cover for a sort of naked grasp for power or money, so she became suspicious about altruism and to see selfishness as more of the real virtue and altruism as a vice to be avoided. It seemed to come out of those incidents.

When you were doing research about objectivism, was there anything there that wasn’t what you expected to find? Was it less weird or weirder than you thought?  

There’s much to be said about the philosophy of objectivism in terms of standing up for yourself or not compromising your beliefs. These are things everybody certainly should learn, to have strength of character, but she just takes it a little too far. It becomes about basically dominating other people, and that I can’t agree with. There were good and bad things about objectivism, but overwhelmingly, I found it a bad experience to read about.

How much did it feel that you were sort of a psychoanalyst in looking into her life and her philosophy? Is it wrong to look at objectivism as a philosophical version of what’s ultimately an emotional or psychological response to trauma?

I think at the root of her philosophy was an emotional response, that she was genuinely quite a selfish woman. Intellectually, she had to find a way of justifying it, and the whole philosophy of objectivism came out of that. Part of my sympathy to her is that my background is in mental health, so I naturally think in those terms. I was looking at her from a psychological point of view.

Do you think that selfishness was reflected at all in the people who gravitated toward her?

I think young people in particular are attracted to objectivism and toward Rand because, certainly when you’re a teenager, you feel quite often very alienated. If you want to raise your self-image, there’s no better way than to read objectivism because it puts you at the center of the universe; you can be more important than everyone else. If you want to feel that everyone else is a fool and a sheep, then objectivism will give you that power; it will lift your self-esteem.

I think most people grow out of that approach and see a more equal way of looking at things. That sounds like I’m dismissive of younger people but I’m not at all; I went through it just like everyone else.

Sometimes people, in their personal lives, aren’t how they’re perceived in public. Was that the case with Rand? Was she generous on an interpersonal level? Or was she selfish, there, too?

She was very much like her work; she was a very difficult woman to get on with. It was said that she never lost an argument. If you got into an argument with her, you’d kind of lose your bearings because she would simply outflank you in every way. People didn’t want to get involved in her inner circle because they felt they’d get sucked into this little cult that she had built up around her and see the things the way she saw them.

She was quite domineering and magnetic, really, but she was full of contradiction as well. She believed she was considered to be the first lady of logic, but she often didn’t see things that were right in front of her, even though the evidence was there all along. The younger man she had an affair with for years [Nathaniel Branden] was two-timing her with another woman, and although the evidence was there for all to see she just could not see it, would not accept it. She was as capable of being flawed in that way as anybody else.

You get into some pretty complicated stuff about financial transactions and mortgage law. Did you find any one part of your book more difficult to explain than any other? Or did your approach make it easier than it might have been if you were just writing? 

I think having the ability to actually draw it, visually, made it a lot easier to explain. When it comes to trying to explain things like derivatives, it’s very complicated. It took me quite a while to get my head around some of it, and I had experts looking over the material as I was doing it and partly rewriting some of it for me so I’d get a clearer picture. Certainly, to be able to visually show it as well as being written in the text above is incredibly useful.

In terms of economics, there is a sort of Grand Canyon-size gulf of understanding between the general public and economics, and I think that’s something we’d all benefit from understanding a little better. I think the media have done a very poor job of explaining these things to the general public; I certainly didn’t know anything about it before I set off on this road of research. My math is terrible, but just because you can’t do math, doesn’t mean you can’t understand the general concept.

Why is Ayn Rand still so influential? What has made her relevant to multiple generations?

I’ve been asked this a number of times and I still struggle with it a little. The British edition of the book is called “Supercrash” and it doesn’t mention her on the cover at all. The reason for that is that my European publishers didn’t think she was much of a draw in Europe, and she isn’t; she’s hardly known.

In America, of course, she’s very well known and my publisher in the U.S. wanted her front and center on the cover for that reason. I think it has something to do with the American character itself. Being a younger country, there’s still that hangover from the frontier days of individualistic liberalism, which there isn’t so much in Europe because we have countries and governments that have been there for many centuries. I think that might be part of it, but I do struggle to understand exactly what the difference is.

Do you think Ayn Rand was a happy person?

No, I think she struggled with happiness. However much success she had, I think she looked around and saw that she wasn’t changing the world in the way she had hoped to. Her personal life was also a struggle, so I think she had some success but I don’t think she was a particularly happy person throughout.

Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.

see: http://www.alternet.org/books/age-selfishness-what-made-ayn-rand-tick-and-why-shes-right-wing-favorite-today?akid=12994.123424.uI1qzu&rd=1&src=newsletter1034621&t=5

Rand Paul: Another anti-gay, anti-woman, GOP theocrat

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Source: Patheos

Author: Michael Stone

Emphasis Mine

Contrary to the hype, Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul is just another standard issue Republican: anti-gay, anti-woman, and subservient to the Christian patriarchy.

Today Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul formally announced his 2016 presidential campaign for the Republican nomination for president, declaring “we have come to take our country back.”

Presumably the “we” Paul speaks of is white, heterosexual, conservative Christian males.

Speaking at his “Stand for Rand” rally in Louisville today, the 52-year-old Paul said:

Today I am announcing, with God’s help and with liberty lovers everywhere, that I am putting myself forward as a candidate for president of the United States.

While it may be disingenuous to conflate liberty with subservience to Christianity, it is a political strategy Paul will deploy in his bid for the 2016 Republican nomination. Yet Paul is quite selective about who is entitled to liberty.

Paul opposes gay rights in general, and gay marriage in particular. In addition, Paul would also deny women the right to reproductive freedom, all in the name of conservative Christian values.

Last month, Paul told a group of pastors and religious leaders at a private prayer breakfast in Washington D.C. that the debate about legalizing same-sex marriage is the result of a “moral crisis” in the country, and called for a Christian revival, proclaiming:

We need a revival in the country. We need another Great Awakening with tent revivals of thousands of people saying, ‘reform or see what’s going to happen if we don’t reform.’

Indeed, for many months now Paul has been quietly running a stealth campaign, meeting with scores of leaders from the Christian right to gain their support for his presidential run.

Previously Paul has worried that same-sex marriage will lead to besitiality, relying upon the same ridiculous slippery-slope arguments used by many simple-minded religious conservatives opposed to same-sex marriage

As for women’s reproductive health, Paul is anything but a libertarian. Paul would deny women basic autonomy over their own bodies. Paul argues that life begins at conception, and when it comes to his anti-choice, anti-woman, conservative Christian “family values” Paul is an extremist. Paul supports fetal personhood legislation that would outlaw all abortion and prohibit contraception, stem-cell research, and in-vitro fertilization.

Perhaps even more disturbing, Paul has publicly stated that parents “own” their children, while making the absurd claim that vaccines cause “profound mental disorders.” While the idea that parents own their children is abhorrent to reasonable individuals, it is a common sentiment among conservative Christians. Paul wants to present himself as something different, but in the end he is just another Republican exploiting the fears and prejudices of conservative Christians for his own political advantage.

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2015/04/rand-paul-another-anti-gay-anti-woman-gop-theocrat/#ixzz3WuuDkhgX