The WAWG Blog

Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains in Last Economic Expansion (and you got nothing!) – If you are in the bottom 80 percent of American households, you’ve gained essentially no economic ground in the past three decades. Those of you lucky enough to be in the top 20 percent ($100,000+) might be heartened by the trajectory of the red line on the chart shown here—but sorry: The vast majority of those gains have actually gone to the top 1 percent (average income: $1.9 million). And though the chart doesn’t show this because the line would run off the page, if you’re in the tippy-top 0.1 percent, your gains make the merely filthy rich look like chumps.

Breitbart to Be “Election Expert” on ABC – Usually when you are a pundit who is caught lying and falsifying information, you can’t get hired again (at least, not by any place other than Fox News). So needless to say, there is a lot of anger around the news that ABC News has decided to hire Andrew Breitbart, the man who purposefully edited tapes in order to force Obama administration official Shirley Sherrod out of her job by claiming she was a racist, to do election day coverage for them. And a great deal of that anger is coming from the journalists at ABC itself, who apparently were not informed this would be occurring. Sign the petition to ABC at the link.

A Bad Deed Does Not Have to be Followed by Another Bad Deed – The following is a letter from stomping victim. Lauren Valle to her stomper, Rand Paul volunteer Tim Profitt:

Mr. Profitt, You have asked that I apologize to you. Perhaps this is not the apology that you are looking for, but I do have some things to say.

I have been called a progressive, a liberal, a professional agitator. You have been called a conservative, a Republican, a member of the Tea Party movement. Fundamentally and most importantly, you and I are both human beings. We are also both American citizens. These two facts, to me, are far more meaningful than the multitude of labels that we carry. And if these two facts are true then it means we are on the same team.

I have not been for one moment angry with you and your actions. Instead I feel thoroughly devastated. It is evident that your physical assault on me is symptomatic of the crisis that this country is struggling through. And it seems that I will heal from my injuries long before this country can work through our separation. Only when we decide let go of our hate, our violence and our aggression will we be able to communicate to each other about the issues that divide us. Right now, we are not communicating, we are stomping on each other. No one can ever win, no one can ever be heard, with violence.

You and I, as fellow citizens, and we, as a country, have a choice. Either we choose to continue the cycle of inflicting violence upon each other, screaming at each other, insulting each other and putting one another down or we and find a way to sit down and start listening to each other. We’ll see how far we get. We are all viciously and vociferously feeding a fire that will only burn us down together. We must reach inside ourselves and make space for each other. We must forgive each other. We must believe in our capacity for transformation. The moment we choose compassion and reconciliation is the moment that we will begin to move toward freedom. There is no other way.

I believe that you should be held accountable for your actions but I also recognize the incredibly negative impact that the consequences must be having on your life, and I wish you all the best as you yourself heal from this. Violence hurts everyone.

Regards,

Jim

The brain learns by repetition. The more repetition the more, and stronger, the links between neurons for remembering those repeated items.

Adding NOT to a conservative statement only reenforces the neural connections for it. Nixon said, “I’m not a crook.” Yeah, right. The more he said it, the more he became the crook.

There is no difference between conservative and liberal media if the later just repeats the former and prefixes the conservative idea with a “not”. We still learn only the conservative worldview from both.

“There are death panels.” “There are not death panels.” Nothing but conservative talking points from both sides and no progressive worldview from anywhere.

Progressives are losing the minds of voters because they can’t communicate their worldview and can only repeat their opponents words.

Liberals don’t give you anything progressive to work with.

The progressive worldview is about protecting and empowering all citizens. It’s about what a properly funded government – people must pay taxes – can do when it is run by those who care about all of us instead of only caring about those ‘like me.’ It’s about paying back a fair share of one’s income to help maintain the infrastructure that enabled that income and to create new infrastructure that will provide income for others instead of providing most of the income to those ‘like me.’ It’s about a cheaper way of providing good medical care for all, instead of health care just for those ‘like me.’ It’s about reversing the “Great Divergence” in income and providing a good income for all, instead of transferring income to those ‘like me.’ It’s about systemic causation instead of “I’m totally in charge and you deserve what you get if you aren’t ‘like me.’ ” It’s about individual choice, instead of “Christianism” and you better be ‘like me’ or you can’t worship. It’s about all of us going to war, if really needed, and all of us paying for it – more taxes – instead of buying that third yacht to entertain those ‘like me.’

As written about earlier, there is an immense divergence in income growth for most of us, the bottom 90 percent, and the income growth of the mega, top 1 percent, and ultra, top 0.1 percent, rich. This point is made clear in this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

The growth of the income for upper 0.1 percent is even more dramatic especially compared to how much less they have to repay the country, via taxes, for the infrastructure they used to make them so rich.

After WWII, the Greatest Generation enjoyed a more evenly distributed income growth, but starting in the late 70’s and after Reagan became President taxes kept falling, the trend shifted dramatically to the top 5 percent and above.

Timothy Noah has put together a summary of many recent studies on the factors contributing to the growing inequity of personal income since the late 70s. The problem is not so much that the rich are getting richer, it’s that this inequity is destroying the middle class, destroying our democracy and recreating a plutocracy like the one we revolted against over 230 years ago. And this gap will only grow thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision to let the super rich buy our government.

Here is Mr. Noah’s conclusion on the major contributors to the “Great Divergence” with links to more detail in his article.

We have now reviewed all possible causes of the Great Divergence—all, at least, that have thus far attracted most experts’ attention. What are their relative contributions? Here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, an admittedly crude composite of my discussions with and reading of the various economists and political scientists cited thus far:

• Race and gender are responsible for none of it, and single parenthood is responsible for virtually none of it.
• Immigration is responsible for 5 percent.
• The imagined uniqueness of computers as a transformative technology is responsible for none of it.
• Tax policy is responsible for 5 percent.
• The decline of labor is responsible for 20 percent.

[The other side of this coin is the surge in corporate power which just increased dramatically thanks to our conservative activist Supreme Court.]

• Trade is responsible for 10 percent.
• Wall Street and corporate boards’ pampering of the Stinking Rich is responsible for 30 percent.
• Various failures in our education system are responsible for 30 percent.

Most of the charts below came from references used by Mr. Noah.

Race is a neutral issue for the “Great Divergence” in income growth.

Gender does not account for the “Great Divergence.”

“The bar representing 1965–1998 on the graph includes about 3 million illegal foreign residents who took advantage of an amnesty offered by Congress to obtain legal residence between 1988 and 1991. It does not include 5 million others who, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, entered the country illegally or overstayed temporary visas between 1965 and 1998 and were not legalized. The largest number of them came from Mexico, but many other countries were represented.”

The estimates in Figure 7 suggest that the actual size-adjusted personal income in 2007 was 3.1 percent lower than would have been the case if no immigration had occurred after 1979.

The productivity of American workers have gone up due to many changes in the work place including the use of the personal computer. However, the income from increased productivity have been passed on to CEOs – not those that implemented the increases.

Over the last 30 years the U.S. economy has experienced a sea change in performance defined by the emergence of a disconnection between wages and productivity growth. The disconnection is captured in Figure A, which shows growth of productivity and hourly compensation for production and non-supervisory workers (who constitute over 80% of wage and salary employment). From 1959 to 1979 compensation moved with productivity. Since 1979 productivity has kept growing but hourly compensation has essentially flat-lined.

From Inequality and Institutions in 20th Century America, “In the quarter century between 1980 and 2005, business sector productivity increased by 71 percent. Over the same quarter century, median weekly earnings of full-time workers rose from $613 to $705, a gain of only 14 percent”

The “Top 400 are the 400 tax returns with the highest adjusted gross income reported to the IRS. Fifty percent of their income is from dividends that are taxed at 15%.

In 2003, just 1% of all households — those with after-tax incomes averaging $701,500 — received 57.5% of all capital income, up from 40% in the early 1990s. On the other hand, the bottom 80% received only 12.6% of capital income, down by nearly half since 1983, when the bottom 80% received 23.5%.

Taxes – bigger drops in marginal rates and income shifting to unearned income at even lower tax rates has shifted income to the the rich. Taxes may not have much effect on unearned income, but they certainly allow the “stinking rich” to keep more of it. What’s worse is their tax breaks reduce their payback for all of the nation’s resources they used to enrich themselves.

Union members “constituted about a quarter of the civilian labor force from 1950 to 1970. After 1970, the unionized portion of the labor force declined steadily.” WIthout unions, the CEOs decide who gets rewarded for increased productivity.

The United States stands out as the country with the highest level of inequality and, at 14%, the lowest level of union coverage.

“These results confirm that the rise in top income shares and the dramatic shift of income com- position at the top documented in Section IV are mainly driven by the surge in top wages during the last three decades.”

“Those at the very top of the income distribution therefore play a central role in the evolution of U.S. inequality over the course of the twentieth century.”

“Goldin and Katz calculate that it [college education] accounts for two-thirds of the increase in income inequality during the Great Divergence.”

“The annual number of male college graduates increased more than fivefold from 1946 to 1950, when millions of veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights to go to college. Another steep rise was associated with the educational deferments available during the Vietnam War. ” Since then, only the rich or those willing to go into debt for years, can get a college degree.

• So, if you want the Great Divergence to widen further aided by the Koch Brothers and other rich right-wing authoritarian conservatives without a conscience, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you want corporations to own our government, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you want public education privatized so only the mega and ultra rich can afford it, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you want people, who are mostly concerned about “me,” to continue breaking our government from their corporate headquarters, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you want the mega and ultra rich who gain the most for our nation’s infrastructure to keep pillaging our infrastructure, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you don’t care about others who suffer due to circumstances beyond their control, then do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you want your freedoms controlled by “Christianist” law, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you want to buy another yacht, staff your three muli-acre homes, and scream for more tax breaks while those not like you die for unjustified wars, lose their homes, or go bankrupt trying to pay medical bills, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you want to continue the transfer of the nation’s wealth from most of us to the mega and ultra rich, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you believe turning over government operations to corporations will improve citizen protection and empowerment, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you want to take this country back to the 1950’s or to the originial unamended Constitution, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you are fearful of whites becoming a minority, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you believe you have total control of your life and that those not like you deserve what they get from life, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you think complicated national problems can be fixed in just 2 years, do not vote for progressive Democrats.
• If you believe a growing income is needed for success, except for the federal governmnet, do not vote for progressive Democrats.

Still Need Help Deciding How to VOTE?

Five Lies That Republicans Are Spreading About Social Security – Some powerful people keep spreading lies about the program to scare people into accepting benefit cuts:

Lie #1: Social Security is going broke.

Reality: There is no Social Security crisis. By 2023, Social Security will have a $4.6 trillion surplus (yes, trillion with a ‘T’). It can pay out all scheduled benefits for the next quarter-century with no changes whatsoever. After 2037, it’ll still be able to pay out 75% of scheduled benefits—and again, that’s without any changes. The program started preparing for the Baby Boomers’ retirement decades ago. Anyone who insists Social Security is broke probably wants to break it themselves.

Lie #2: We have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer.

Reality: This is a red-herring to trick you into agreeing to benefit cuts. Retirees are living about the same amount of time as they were in the 1930s. The reason average life expectancy is higher is mostly because many fewer people die as children than they did 70 years ago. What’s more, what gains there have been are distributed very unevenly—since 1972, life expectancy increased by 6.5 years for workers in the top half of the income brackets, but by less than 2 years for those in the bottom half. But those intent on cutting Social Security love this argument because raising the retirement age is the same as an across-the-board benefit cut.

Lie #3: Benefit cuts are the only way to fix Social Security.

Reality: Social Security doesn’t need to be fixed. But if we want to strengthen it, here’s a better way: Make the rich pay their fair share. If the very rich paid taxes on all of their income, Social Security would be sustainable for decades to come. Right now, high earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,000 of their income. But conservatives insist benefit cuts are the only way because they want to protect the super-rich from paying their fair share.

Lie #4: The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided and is full of IOUs

Reality: Not even close to true. The Social Security Trust Fund isn’t full of IOUs, it’s full of U.S. Treasury Bonds. And those bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. The reason Social Security holds only treasury bonds is the same reason many Americans do: The federal government has never missed a single interest payment on its debts. President Bush wanted to put Social Security funds in the stock market—which would have been disastrous—but luckily, he failed. So the trillions of dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund, which are separate from the regular budget, are as safe as can be.

Lie #5: Social Security adds to the deficit

Reality: It’s not just wrong—it’s impossible! By law, Social Security’s funds are separate from the budget, and it must pay its own way. That means that Social Security can’t add one penny to the deficit.

A list of sources for the above facts is at the link.

Republicans Allowed Dumping of Mining Wastes Into America’s Waters (and They’ll Keep Doing It if We Let Them) – In 2002 the Bush administration created a loophole to the Clean Water Act that allows mining companies to dump untreated mining wastes in America’s lakes and streams. From mountaintop removal coal mines in Appalachia to gold mines in Alaska, untreated waste is destroying our waterways with tons of dumped material and threatening our communities with heavy metals and other toxins.

The Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to close the waste loophole in the Clean Water Act, but in order to ensure this happens by the end of the Obama administration’s current term, the process needs to begin immediately. Before the EPA can initiate the regulatory rulemaking process, however, it needs the go-ahead from the White House.

Extremist Republican Candidates to Replace Sane Deliberation With Crazy Knee-Jerk Reactionism – Republicans in the U.S. Senate have already broken all records for unprincipled partisan obstructionism, preventing the administration from putting people into key positions in the executive branch, blocking judicial confirmations, and delaying and preventing Congress from dealing with important issues facing the nation, from financial reform to immigration. Now a bumper crop of far-right GOP candidates threatens to turn the “deliberative body”into a haven for extremists who view much of the federal government as unconstitutional and who are itching to shut it down.

Fueled by the unlimited deep pockets of billionaire anti-government ideologues, various Tea Party and corporate-interest groups have poured money into primary elections this year. They and conservative voters angry about the actions of the Obama administration have replaced even very conservative senators and candidates backed by the national Republican establishment with others who embrace a range of radically right-wing views on the Constitution, the role of government, the protection of individual freedoms, and the separation of church and state.

Republican Senators have spent the past two years exploiting Senate rules and procedures to wage obstructionist partisan warfare to an unprecedented degree. But things could be even worse. If the November elections usher in a new crop of Senators with a 19th-Century view of the Constitution and reality-denying approaches to urgent problems, they could prove disastrous for America’s future, for the values of individual liberty and equality under the law, and for the ability of the federal government to take any effective action to advance the national interest and the common good.

Tea Party Intends to be in Charge of Counting the Votes – Do you remember how:

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell helped elect George W. Bush? Do you want the Tea Party to count the votes in 2012? With less than four weeks left until the election, many Secretary of State races in key battleground states hang in the balance. Whoever is elected now will be in charge of counting the votes for President Obama’s re-election. Not surprisingly, the Tea Party has made Secretary of State elections a key priority. If they win, vote suppression, demands for excessive ID requirements and sheer hysteria would rule the day in 2012.

Employees Given Ballots Pre-Marked for Republicans – According to a lawsuit, in 2008, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) came to the Altech Industries facility and talked to the employees about voting Republican. Plaintiff and other employees were informed they had to attend the rally with Senator Sessions. In addition, the owner of the company informed the employees they should vote Republican and gave the employees pre-marked ballots.

A white coworker told a black worker to take off a pro-Obama shirt when he wore it to the plant after the election.

He averred that his colleague told him that the “O” on his shirt “was the perfect circle for a cross hair. I can reach you from 500 yards away,” and added, “I’m not kidding.”

A second employee said that the firm allowed workers to wear Confederate flag insignia and that Altec “condoned and tolerated the racial harassment” and “has a habit and/or practice of discrimination against African Americans.”

Jim

Rick Perry Puts Up “For Sale’ Sign on Texas – The former director of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s technology fund office has joined with a controversial beneficiary of the fund to seek meetings with current and former state officials about an alternative fuels venture. A state representative, a former land commissioner and the head of a state board all said Thursday that they have talked with Alan Kirchhoff and David G. Nance within recent months about a business arrangement the two were proposing.

Kirchhoff is the former director of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. Nance is a major Perry campaign contributor whose company, Convergen Lifesciences Inc., was awarded $4.5 million from the fund in August despite bypassing a critical step in the approval process. Perry approved a $4.5 million award to Nance’s company from the tech fund even though the company failed to win the endorsement of a regional screening board. More than $16 million from the tech fund has been awarded to companies whose directors or investors are large donors to Perry.

Rick Perry is always “Open for Business.” (JLV)

Republicans Trying to Fool You With Fake Hicks – A Republican ad that shows a couple of regular-looking guys commiserating in a West Virginia diner turns out to have been shot with actors, from a script, in Philadelphia. But not just any actors: “We are going for a ‘Hicky’ Blue Collar look,” read the casting call for the ad, being aired by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “These characters are from West Virginia so think coal miner/trucker looks.” “Clothing Suggestions” included jeans, work boots, flannel shirt, denim shirt, “Dickie’s type jacket with t-shirt underneath,” down-filled vest, “John Deer [sic] hats (not brand new, preferably beat up),” “trucker hats (not brand new, preferably beat up).”

Fox News Host Says ‘All Terrorists Are Muslims’ – Fox News host Brian Kilmeade claimed Monday morning that “all terrorists are Muslims.”

In a follow-up discussion to Bill O’Reilly’s appearance on “The View” Thursday — in which Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar walked off the set after O’Reilly claimed “the Muslims killed us on 9/11” — the “Fox & Friends” co-host both dismissed the “View” debate as elementary and made the shocking claim.

How to Earn $900,000 an Hour While Unemployment Soars – Wouldn’t you like to rake in a cool $900,000 for one hour’s work? Hang in there for a month, and you’ll pull in $256.5 million. And in one year? Well, you’ll be earning what the top ten hedge fund honchos each averaged in 2009 — $1.87 billion.

You must be able to live with the knowledge that while you were making $900,000 an hour, more than 29 million other Americans had no job at all or were forced into part-time work. Also you’ll have to live with the uncomfortable fact that your sector — high finance — crashed the economy, leaving eight million Americans jobless in a matter of months.

You’re obviously good at math so you’ll be able to calculate that it will now take 22.5 million new jobs to bring the economy back to full-employment (an unemployment rate of 5 percent or less). That’s the equivalent of creating 630 new corporations the size of Apple Corp. (35,000 employees each).

A few tiresome critics will keep pointing the finger at you, saying that the financial sector crashed the economy. Ignore them and put the blame where it belongs – somewhere else – like Americans who bought homes that bankers said they could afford (They should have known better!).

Assert with the utmost confidence that it’s Wall Street billionaires who make our system the envy of the world. And say that regulation of your activities is bad.

Will our millions of unemployed workers eventually get fed up? Will the middle class finally get angry at the plutocrats who stole their dreams? Or will our anger continue to focus on government regulations, social spending and taxes instead of on our financial plutocrats? Eventually we’ll have to choose or the choice will be made for us: Do we want a $900,000 an hour Valhalla for the few? Or a prosperous America for the rest of us?

Wall Street Hopes to Use Republicans to Re-Purchase Congress – Much of the conventional wisdom in Washington assumed that the Wall Street reform bill would be watered down into thin gruel by the massive army of lobbyists they sent to do battle on the Hill. Wall Street spent almost a half-billion dollars lobbying to stop Wall Street reform. But the bill actually got tougher and tougher as the battle went on.

That was because Progressives held political ground so high on the issue that even the most “moderate” members of Congress were terrified to stand up for the Wall Street elite.

But this November, the Wall Street Empire plans to strike back.

The thing that is especially galling about Wall Street’s approach to politics is that it so brazenly plays upon the fears of the very people who are often the biggest victims of their greed.

It is no small irony that the very people whose recklessness caused so many everyday working class families to lose their jobs – who have systematically skimmed off a larger and larger portion of our national product and left smaller and smaller pieces of the pie for everyday Americans – are now stoking the anger caused by their own actions and directing it toward Democrats who have brought them to account.

In the Tea Party fantasy world everyday Americans are oppressed by bureaucrats with eyeshades who go to work on the Washington Metro. They are abetted by crunchy academics who spend their days dreaming up “social engineering” schemes in their offices at Yale or Harvard. And their oppressive regime is supported by liberal news anchors and the nihilistic denizens of Hollywood who spend their nights in hot tubs surrounded by Playboy Bunnies. That is the Tea Party version of class warfare; everyday Americans versus these “elites.”

This is a very convenient mythology for Wall Street. It ignores the existence of the real “elites” in America. They aren’t the bureaucrats who go to work on the Metro but rather the men and women who go to work in chauffeur-driven limousines, jet around the country in Gulfstream G-Vs, and make more on the first day of the year, before lunch, than a minimum wage worker makes all year long.

The gang on Wall Street wants normal Americans to forget that they — and the top one percent of the population — control 34.6% of net assets, compared to only 15% for the bottom 80%.

They want you to ignore that 42% of the financial wealth is controlled by the top 1% of the population, compared to only 7% controlled by the bottom 80% — or that 62% of the business equity that controls corporations is in the hands of the top 1% compared to only 7% for the bottom 80%.

Remember all of the reckless speculation in financial securities that sunk the economy? Well 61% of financial securities are owned by the top 1% — and just 2% by the bottom 80%.

And when it comes to income, the share going to the top 1% had grown from 12.8% in 1982 to 21.3% in 2006 while the percent going to the bottom 80% shrunk from 48.1% to 38.6%.

I know a guy who trades on Wall Street, call him George, who is absolutely disdainful of ordinary Americans. He thinks that anyone who can’t get rich, like he is, must be a chump. He’s happy to exploit anyone and anything to make money for himself.

Don’t let George make us all into chumps. Don’t let Wall Street use the anger caused by the economic disaster that they themselves caused, to elect Republicans and take back control of Congress.

Regards,

Jim

In Rick Perry’s Texas, Schoolchildren Are Tracked Like Cattle – Two school districts in the Houston area have begun monitoring students’ whereabouts on campus by issuing them identification badges with radio frequency identification technology — the same technology used to track cattle. The Spring school district in Houston has distributed the ID badges to about 13,500 of its 36,000 students since December 2008. The Santa Fe school district, about 30 miles south of Houston, began using the badges this year.

Many students already are used to being electronically monitored. Some campuses have had surveillance cameras for years. “It feels like someone’s watching you at all times,” said Jacorey Jackson, 11, a sixth-grader at Bailey.

Now, what was that I heard Rick Perry saying about liberty and freedom?

US is #1 in Longest Hours and Lowest Wages – At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not. [Excessively paid CEO can abuse any employee for any reason.]

In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.
According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”

Using data by the U.S. BLS, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not. Someone is profiting, it’s just not the average American worker.

There is not a federal law requiring paid sick days in the United States.

The U.S. remains the only industrialized country in the world that has no legally mandated annual leave.
In every country included except Canada and Japan (and the U.S., which averages 13 days/per year), workers get at least 20 paid vacation days. In France and Finland, they get 30 – an entire month off, paid, every year.

Then there’s this depressing graph on average paid vacation time in industrialized countries:

The U.S. is the ONLY country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. The average is over 12 weeks of paid leave anywhere other than Europe and over 20 weeks in Europe.

Zero industrialized nations are without a mandatory option for new parents to take parental leave. That is, except for the United States.

Wall Street Pay Expected to Climb Again While Many Don’t Even Have jobs – While many people in the US are unemployed, pay on Wall Street is likely to rise another 4 percent to what $144 billion, according to an estimate by the Wall Street Journal published Tuesday. “Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms,” the paper’s reporters wrote, with the total payouts leaping to $144 billion, “a 4% increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009.” “Until focus of these institutions changes from revenue generation to long-term shareholder value, we will see these outrageous pay packages and compensation levels,” Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, told reporters.

Chamber Receives At Least $885,000 From Over 80 Foreign Companies In Disclosed Donations Alone – In addition to multinational members of the Chamber headquartered abroad (like BP, Shell Oil, and Siemens), a new ThinkProgress investigation has identified at least 84 other foreign companies that actively donate to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6). All of this money is collected in the same 501(c)(6) the Chamber is using to run partisan attack ads.

Regards,

Jim

Rick Perry Using Taxpayer Resources and Time to Conduct His Political Campaign – A leak from the governor’s office revealed that Rick Perry has been hiding a secret schedule from Texans and using state employees to work on his political campaign. Just one day of the secret schedule showed state employees briefing Rick Perry on an issue just a few hours before Perry held a campaign announcement and endorsement event on that same issue. As this illegal use of state resources for political purposes was revealed, campaign finance records showed that 11 state employees, whose salaries are paid for by Texas taxpayers, also work for Perry’s political campaign.

Perry’s keeping the rest of those schedules hidden because he wants to keep his public corruption hidden too.

The political machine Rick Perry has built inside the governor’s office helped him raise $17 million in campaign contributions from his gubernatorial appointees. Perry’s machine funneled at least $50 million in taxpayer dollars to companies connected to his top campaign donors.

On Friday, after four different explanations from Perry’s office for why a secret schedule was being hidden from Texas taxpayers, it was finally clear just how Perry’s political campaign and the governor’s office work hand in hand.

Add your name to the petition for a criminal investigation into Rick Perry’s corruption — including the secret political schedule he’s been hiding from Texans.

California Shooter Says He Saw Glenn Beck as ‘Schoolteacher’

The 45-year-old “highway shooter” who engaged in a 12-minute shootout with California Highway Patrol officers earlier this year now says Fox News host Glenn Beck has been an inspiration for his activity. In an interview, the suspect shooter, Byron Williams, details what he saw as an elaborate global conspiracy and says to look to specific broadcasts of Beck’s show for information on the conspiracy he describes. The conspiracy theory that drove him over the edge: an intricate plot involving Barack Obama, philanthropist George Soros, a Brazilian oil company, and the BP disaster. Williams also points to other media figures — right-wing propagandist David Horowitz, and Internet conspiracist and repeated Fox News guest Alex Jones — as key sources of information to inspire his ‘revolution.’ Beck, in particular, he says, is “like a schoolteacher on TV.”

Foreign Funds Being Used to Help Elect Republicans – It’s not the Tea Partiers, as fun as they are. It’s not the debate over whether or not Christine O’Donnell is a witch. It’s not even the passage of landmark legislation like health care and financial reform, with all their historic implications.

It’s that with the Citizens United decision, the flood of multinational corporation money have been unleashed. And when I say multinational, I’m not even talking about American-based companies who sell goods and operate factories overseas, I’m talking about foreign corporations through and through.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is raising money from foreign companies and using it to run attack ads here against Democratic candidates.

The Republicans have blocked any action to keep this foreign corporate money out of our elections, and if we allow this to stand we will be so awash in foreign money in our elections that we will never get our democracy back. Check this story out (click the link), and tell every Democrat you know: make this an issue. This is a very big deal, and Republicans should be made to answer why they are okay with foreign corporations being allowed to do attack ads in our elections.

If You Like the Recession, You’d Love “Speaker Boehner” – The private sector job market is slowly stumbling out of the economic ditch into which it was steered by the policies of the Bush Administration. Sixty-four thousand private sector jobs were created by the economy last month — well short of what is necessary to allow the job market to achieve lift-off velocities and long-term sustained growth — but a least a positive number.

But that growth was entirely offset by the loss of 159,000 government jobs. Some of them were temporary census jobs. But the bulk — including the loss of 26,000 teachers — came from layoffs caused by the fiscal crunch of state and local governments. State and local governments cut jobs at the fastest rate in almost 30 years. The loss in jobs would have been even more massive if Democrats in Congress had not passed a bill to aid state and local government before they adjourned for the August recess. That bill was passed over virtually unanimous Republican opposition.

The cause of the reduction in employment last month was layoffs by state and local governments. Much of the fiscal pressure on state and local government came from the end of funding from the original federal stimulus bill which was opposed by most Republicans. Of course the Republicans also worked long and hard to stall the additional $22 billion aid package for state and local governments that finally passed Congress in August. And they assured that the package proposed by Democrats was cut in half before it could get the 60 votes needed to get out of the Senate. In fact, cutting government spending before the private sector has achieved sustained job growth is a recipe for economic disaster.

Pretty much everyone acknowledges that the deregulation of the financial sector was mainly responsible for the reckless behavior of the big Wall Street banks that threw the economy into free fall and cost eight million Americans their jobs late in 2008. Republican proposals to allow Wall Street and other big corporations to resume their orgy of recklessness and greed are a recipe for another major financial collapse — not long-term economic growth. The reason we needed — and still need — such a large amount of stimulus is that the Bush economic policy had driven us into the deepest economic ditch since the Great Depression. We need a lot of economic firepower to get us out of that ditch — more than has been necessary in 60 years.

So to escape a period of long-term economic stagnation, we need a major shot of additional stimulus now. But we will never get it — at least in the near term — if Republicans take control of one of the houses of Congress. Every one of the major Republican prescriptions for economic growth has demonstrated itself to be ineffective — or downright poisonous — in the real world of today’s real economy. Tax breaks for the rich are mainly about giving more money to the Republicans’ major constituency — the wealthiest of our citizens.

Instead we will get Republican prescriptions for the economy that are not just worthless — but toxic. We will get policies that will endanger our children’s futures and our competitive position in the world.

Republican Senate Nominee Vows Silence on Personal Background – Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller said Monday he will not be answering any more questions about his personal background for the rest of the campaign. “We’ve drawn a line in the sand. You can ask me about background, you can ask me about personal issues — I’m not going to answer,” Miller said.

It followed the Alaska Dispatch quoting an anonymous source Sunday night saying that Miller used borough equipment in the unsuccessful 2008 attempt to oust state Republican Party Chairman Randy Ruedrich.

In March 2008, Miller was the Interior regional chair of the Republican Party and, along with then-Gov. Sarah Palin, attempted to have Ruedrich replaced as party chair at the annual GOP convention.Several Alaska news organizations, including the Daily News, have been asking for borough records about Miller’s employment since summer, including information related to any disciplinary action Miller faced while employed there. The Dispatch filed a lawsuit Monday seeking their release.

FedEx Express Avoids Unions by Classifying Their Truck Drivers as Pilots – When you’re walking down the street and see a FedEx truck driving by, does it LOOK like a 747 taxiing for take-off? Nope! But in a move that makes it nearly impossible for its workers to form unions, FedEx Express is classifying all of its truck drivers as “pilots.” How did this happen? Back in 1996, the company used its money and behind-the-scenes influence to score a special deal from Congress – an unfair advantage that no other express delivery firm gets. A bill that would close the FedEx anti-worker loophole has already passed the House three separate times. Now, the Senate needs to finish the job.

FedEx Express – which holds a seat on the board of the anti-worker U.S. Chamber of Commerce – has a long history of anti-labor practices. And like many of the Chamber’s other board members, FedEx loves to lobby Congress for special sweetheart deals that only the very biggest businesses can get, while claiming to stand for “fairness,” “free enterprise,” and even, laughably, “small business.”

FedEx is desperate to keep the status quo. The company is spending millions, running misleading ads and lobbying on-the-fence senators. FedEx even had the audacity to call ending the loophole a “bailout!”

Regards,

Jim

Do you have Democratic (or at the very least, non-crazy) friends and family members who say they’re not gonna vote this November because they’re disappointed with Congress or Obama or something? Make sure they watch watch the video at the link.

Oh, yeah … and Rick Perry is going to vote, and he’s hoping you don’t.

Regards,

Jim

Rick Perry Trading Favors for Cash – Rick Perry has taken over one and a quarter million dollars ($1.266 million) in campaign contributions from donors who were significant investors or officers in companies that Perry chose to receive more than $16 million in TETF subsidies. Rick Perry and David Nance both say they are “big fans of each other.” Nance has taken Perry hunting, given him $80,000 in campaign contributions and Perry’s son even owned 100 – 499 shares of stock in Nance’s former biotech company, Introgen. n July and August of this year, tech fund awards of $6.5 million were made to companies founded or overseen by Nance. In December 2008, an organization founded by Nance received a two-year grant of $1.9 million from the Texas Workforce Commission. A commission spokeswoman said the grant was made at the direction of the governor’s budget office. The funds were awarded at the same time Introgen’s bankruptcy listed a debt of $50,000 owed to the governor’s economic development office. Introgen had pledged the money as part of a three-year, $150,000 donation to TexasOne Foundation, a non-profit Perry started to promote his primary business recruitment program, the Texas Enterprise Fund.

Rick Perry Continues to Hide Out – [Rick Perry’s] position to not visit with the editorial boards of Texas newspapers may be astute politically, but it demonstrates a disregard for newspaper readers and voters across the state, who deserve to hear substance rather than silence. We are facing what’s rumored to be the largest budget deficit and crisis in the history of our state – informed estimates of the budget shortfall range from $18 billion to $20 billion. Newspaper readers, whether Republicans, Democrats or Independents – deserve to hear your solutions to the staggering problems we will be facing as the legislative session begins. Instead, we’re confronted with an unacceptable and undeserved silence.

Signed by the editorial board and newsroom leadership of the Tyler Courier-Times–Telegraph.

Republican Senator Says Gays And Unmarried, Pregnant Women Should Not Teach Public School – Sen Jim DeMint (R-SC) said, “if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.” After significant criticism from LGBT groups, including the Log Cabin Republicans, DeMint apologized for saying “something as a dad that I just shouldn’t have said.”

Dirty Tar Sands Oil Coming to Houston Bay Area – Tar sands oil makes conventional oil look clean by comparison, as it produces 3.2-4.5 times more the carbon footprint than conventional fuel. If that weren’t bad enough cleaner fuels such as natural gas, which otherwise might be used to generate electricity, are wasted in the process of creating more dirty energy from tar sands.

There are 2.5-4 barrels of water dumped into these toxic lakes for every barrel of oil extracted. These toxic “ponds” are actually very large; some are even visible from space.

Needless to say these pools are quite harmful to surrounding ecosystems as well as ground water supplies. The land left behind from tar sands extraction is a barren wasteland lacking vegetation and dotted with these toxic waste pools.

Pipelines bringing this dirty oil to the United States have already been built, but TransCanada, an extractor of tar sands oil, has proposed to expand the pipeline system. Part of the proposed expansion will link to a current pipeline in Oklahoma and extend it into East Texas and the Houston Bay Area so that it might be refined there. These refineries will require expensive additions to handle this heavy crude. The pipeline is proposed to also travel near sensitive areas such as the Big Thicket National Preserve.

Republicans Have Been Lying about How Americans Feel About Health Care Reform – A new AP poll finds that Americans who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think the government should stay out of health care by two-to-one. The poll found that about four in 10 adults think the new law did not go far enough to change the health care system, regardless of whether they support the law, oppose it or remain neutral. Only about one in five say they oppose the law because they think the federal government should not be involved in health care at all.

Republicans Plans Will Kill Jobs and Growth in the Name of Austerity – Today there is a grave danger that the still-fragile economic recovery will be undercut by austerity economics. A turn by major governments away from the promotion of growth and jobs and to premature focus on deficit reduction could slow growth and increase unemployment – and could push us back into recession. The President and Congress should redouble efforts to create jobs and send aid to the states whose budget crises threaten recovery by forcing them to lay off school teachers, public safety workers, and other essential workers. It also makes sense to invest in public service jobs – and in infrastructure projects for transportation, water, and energy conservation that will make our economy more productive for years to come.

Fake News is Invading Your Home – It comes through your TV screen — corporate propaganda dressed up as real news.

Here’s the catch. It’s illegal, and the FCC needs to do something about it. paid spokespeople are hawking their wares on local news. The stations mislead viewers by presenting them as experts, and they’re getting away with it.

Aa an example, a “news” story about the “hottest cars of summer” only featured one manufacturer — General Motors. How’d that happen? GM paid a PR firm to produce the phony news segment and your local station ran it as objective reporting — without telling you where it came from. In another case,

a station was caught airing a “HealthWatch” segment from a local hospital that touted news of new cancer treatments to lure people in the door.

The FCC has hardly lifted a finger — and fake news is spreading.

Tell the FCC that it’s time to get tough on Fake News.

Some “Organic” Egg Farms are not Organic – A recent Cornucopia investigation revealed that conditions at many facilities that produce organic eggs are often just as crowded and industrial as those at conventional egg farms. And although US organic standards require outdoor access for laying hens, Cornucopia found that at many organic farms, “outdoors” often consists of nothing more than a tiny concrete screen porch adjoining the tenement-like henhouse.

Last year, twelve organic egg producers signed a letter to the National Organic Standards Board opposing the rule that mandates organic operations to grant their chickens outdoor access. Cornucopia rates major organic egg producers it investigated on this scorecard.

Republicans Pledge Would Slash Spending for Education, Cancer Research and Aid to Local Police and Firefighters – U.S. House Republicans’ pledge to cut $100 billion from the federal budget next year would slash spending for education, cancer research and aid to local police and firefighters. “This would have significant real-world consequences,” said Representative Rob Andrews, a New Jersey Democrat on the Budget Committee. “I don’t see any way there isn’t a hit on college students,” he said. “I don’t see any way there isn’t some hit on local police and fire.” Republicans have made their task even harder by taking military spending off the table.

Republicans Are Wrong About the Stimulus Act – President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is clearly a managerial success – on schedule, under budget, and according to independent investigators, remarkably free of fraud.

Yesterday, the administration met its self-imposed deadline of spending 70% of the Recovery Act, or $551 billion, by the end of the fiscal year. Almost all of the unspent stimulus money is already committed to specific projects, except for a few longer-range initiatives like high-speed rail and electronic health records. And the completed work has cost less than expected, so the savings have financed over 3,000 additional projects, from airport improvements in Atlanta to new child-care centers at military bases in Louisiana, North Carolina, Mississippi and Oklahoma, from a new five-lane road in Jacksonville to a $14.5 million transformation of a World War 2 ammunition factory into an eco-friendly government building in St. Louis.

Earl Devaney, the hard-nosed watchdog leading the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, recently testified to Congress that investigators “simply haven’t seen the kind of fraud that we would have imagined as professional law enforcement.” The board is using newfangled computer algorithms that can track suspicious spending patterns before there’s a complaint; the inspectors general of every major agency are bird-dogging the stimulus as well. Devaney likes to say that if you really want to steal, you’d be crazy to steal from the Recovery Act; it’s way too transparent, with every dollar traceable at www.recovery.gov, and there are way too many eyes on it.

Right-Wing White Supremacist Planned to Shoot Obama Advisor – James von Brunn, the white supremacist who officials say shot dead a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, last year, was planning to target senior White House adviser David Axelrod. Von Brunn reportedly said he wanted to draw attention to the notion that the Holocaust never happened.

After finding only disappointment in organized groups, Von Brunn retreated to his website and railed against passive comrades. “The American Right-wing with few exceptions … does NOTHING BUT TALK,” he wrote.

Republicans Still Thwarting Oil Spill Panel – The National Oil Spill Commission continues its investigation into the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill, but the president’s panel remains hampered by its inability to compel key witnesses to testify and turn over documents. Senate Republicans blocked a bill to grant the commission subpoena power in July. Now the Senate has gone home once without moving the measure forward.

The House passed the measure with nearly unanimous support in June, by a vote of 420 to 1. But the following month Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) objected to moving it forward, though he said he was just blocking it on behalf of another member of his caucus. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who has led the effort to get the bill passed in the upper chamber, tried to work out a way to get it through as a stand-alone measure before senators departed this week, but that didn’t happen. While Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said back in July that the Senate GOP would drop the objection, his spokesman told the Wall Street Journal this week that he had changed his mind.

The spill commission is supposed to deliver a report on the disaster and recommendations for the future of offshore drilling to the president by mid-January, but is significantly limited by the inability to force witnesses to appear before the panel or provide necessary documents.

Researchers Found 40-Fold Increase In Carcinogenic Compounds In Gulf – Researchers from Oregon State University say that a device taking samples just off the shore of Louisiana’s Grande Isle registered a 40-fold increase in PAHs between May and June.

What’s worse is that the sampling device was specifically designed to measure the fraction of PAHs in the environment that could make their way through a biological membrane. “This is a measure of what would enter into an organism,” said Kim Anderson, an OSU professor of environmental and molecular toxicology. There was a huge increase of PAHs that are bio-available to the organisms — and that means they can essentially be uptaken by organisms throughout the food chain.”

News Corp. Gave Another $1 million to Pro-Republican Group – News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, contributed $1 million this summer to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby that has been running an aggressive campaign in support of the Republican effort to retake Congress, a source close to the company told POLITICO.

It was the second $1 million contribution the company has made this election cycle to a Republican-aligned group. In late June it gave that amount to the Republican Governors Association.

Stealing From Bank Accounts Using Computer Viruses – More than 60 people have been charged in international schemes that used computer viruses to steal millions of dollars from bank accounts throughout America, state and federal prosecutors said Thursday in New York. The cyber attacks began in Eastern Europe and included malware known as the Zeus Trojan, which was typically sent in an e-mail to computers at homes, businesses and government offices in the United States. Once the e-mail was opened, the virus embedded itself in the victims’ computers, recording their keystrokes and capturing user names and passwords as they logged in to online bank accounts. Almost $4 million was stolen from victims throughout the United States.

Regards,

Jim