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FOCUS | The Four Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Inequality |
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Monday, 05 May 2014 12:25 |
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Reich writes: "Even though French economist Thomas Piketty has made an air-tight case that we're heading toward levels of inequality not seen since the days of the nineteenth-century robber barons, right-wing conservatives haven't stopped lying about what's happening and what to do about it."
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
The Four Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Inequality
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
05 May 14
 ven though French economist Thomas Piketty has made an air-tight case that we’re heading toward levels of inequality not seen since the days of the nineteenth-century robber barons, right-wing conservatives haven’t stopped lying about what’s happening and what to do about it.
Herewith, the four biggest right-wing lies about inequality, followed by the truth.
Lie number one: The rich and CEOs are America’s job creators.So we dare not tax them.
The truth is the middle class and poor are the job-creators through their purchases of goods and services.If they don’t have enough purchasing power because they’re not paid enough, companies won’t create more jobs and economy won’t grow.
We’ve endured the most anemic recovery on record because most Americans don’t have enough money to get the economy out of first gear. The economy is barely growing and real wages continue to drop.
We keep having false dawns. An average of 200,000 jobs were created in the United States over the last three months, but huge numbers of Americans continue to drop out of the labor force.
Lie number two: People are paid what they’re worth in the market.So we shouldn’t tamper with pay.
The facts contradict this.CEOs who got 30 times the pay of typical workers forty years ago now get 300 times their pay not because they’ve done such a great job but because they control their compensation committees and their stock options have ballooned.
Meanwhile, most American workers earn less today than they did forty years ago, adjusted for inflation, not because they’re working less hard now but because they don’t have strong unions bargaining for them.
More than a third of all workers in the private sector were unionized forty years ago; now, fewer than 7 percent belong to a union.
Lie number three: Anyone can make it in America with enough guts, gumption, and intelligence.So we don’t need to do anything for poor and lower-middle class kids.
The truth is we do less than nothing for poor and lower-middle class kids.Their schools don’t have enough teachers or staff, their textbooks are outdated, they lack science labs, their school buildings are falling apart.
We’re the only rich nation to spend less educating poor kids than we do educating kids from wealthy families.
All told, 42 percent of children born to poor families will still be in poverty as adults – a higher percent than in any other advanced nation.
Lie number four: Increasing the minimum wage will result in fewer jobs. So we shouldn’t raise it.
In fact, studies show that increases in the minimum wage put more money in the pockets of people who will spend it – resulting in more jobs, and counteracting any negative employment effects of an increase in the minimum.
Three of my colleagues here at the University of California at Berkeley — Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester, and Michael Reich – have compared adjacent counties and communities across the United States, some with higher minimum wages than others but similar in every other way.
They found no loss of jobs in those with the higher minimums.
The truth is, America’s lurch toward widening inequality can be reversed. But doing so will require bold political steps.
At the least, the rich must pay higher taxes in order to pay for better-quality education for kids from poor and middle-class families. Labor unions must be strengthened, especially in lower-wage occupations, in order to give workers the bargaining power they need to get better pay. And the minimum wage must be raised.
Don’t listen to the right-wing lies about inequality. Know the truth, and act on it.
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The Post-Constitutional Era |
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Monday, 05 May 2014 08:25 |
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Hedges writes: "The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law."
Occupy Wall Street activist Lauren Digioia is detained by police officers during a demonstration in New York's Grand Central Station. (photo: AP/Mary Altaffer)
The Post-Constitutional Era
By Chris Hedges, TruthDig
05 May 14
 he U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power—one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed—a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.
“In declining to hear the case Hedges v. Obama and declining to review the NDAA, the Supreme Court has turned its back on precedent dating back to the Civil War era that holds that the military cannot police the streets of America,” said attorney Carl Mayer, who along with Bruce Afran devoted countless unpaid hours to the suit. “This is a major blow to civil liberties. It gives the green light to the military to detain people without trial or counsel in military installations, including secret installations abroad. There is little left of judicial review of presidential action during wartime.”
Afran, Mayer and I brought the case to the U.S. Southern District Court of New York in January 2012. I was later joined by co-plaintiffs Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, journalist Alexa O’Brien, RevolutionTruth founder Tangerine Bolen, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir and Occupy London activist Kai Wargalla.
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Technology Law Will Soon Be Reshaped By People Who Don't Use Email |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29990"><span class="small">Trevor Timm, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 05 May 2014 08:13 |
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Timm writes: "The future of technology and privacy law will undoubtedly be written over the next few years by nine individuals who haven't 'really 'gotten to' email' and find Facebook and Twitter 'a challenge.'"
The Supreme Court. (photo: Larry Downing-Pool/Getty)
Technology Law Will Soon Be Reshaped by People Who Don't Use Email
By Trevor Timm, Guardian UK
04 May 14
The US supreme court doesn't understand the internet. Laugh all you want, but when NSA, Pandora and privacy cases hit the docket, the lack of tech savvy on the bench gets scary.
here's been much discussion – and derision – of the US supreme court's recent forays into cellphones and the internet, but as more and more of these cases bubble up to the high chamber, including surveillance reform, we won't be laughing for long: the future of technology and privacy law will undoubtedly be written over the next few years by nine individuals who haven't "really 'gotten to' email" and find Facebook and Twitter "a challenge" .
A pair of cases that went before the court this week raise the issue of whether police can search someone's cellphone after an arrest but without a warrant. The court's decisions will inevitably affect millions. As the New York Times editorial board explained on the eve of the arguments, "There are 12 million arrests in America each year, most for misdemeanors that can be as minor as jaywalking." Over 90% of Americans have cellphones, and as the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a briefing to the court, our mobile devices "are in effect, our new homes".
Most people under 40 probably would agree police should never have the right to rummage through our entire lives without a particular purpose based on probable cause.Yet during arguments, Justice Roberts insinuated that police might reasonably suspect a person who carries two cellphones of being a drug dealer. Is he unaware that a large portion of the DC political class with which he associates – including many of his law clerks – carries both a personal and business phone, daily? The chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States may have proved this week that he can throw out tech lingo like "Facebook" and even "Fitbit", but he is trapped in the closet from reality.
This is not the first time justices have opened themselves up to mockery for their uninitiated take on tech issues. Just last week, in the copyright case against Aereo, the justices' verbal reach seemed to exceed their grasp, as they inadvertently invented phrases like "Netflick" and "iDrop", among others. Before that, many ripped Justice Roberts for seemingly not knowing the difference between a pager and email. And then there was the time when a group of them tried to comprehend text messages, or when the justices and counsel before them agreed that "any computer group of people" could write most software "sitting around the coffee shop ... over the weekend." (Hey, at least Ginsburg reads Slate.)
The supremes tend to do better on tech cases when they avoid engaging directly in the actual technical substance of technology. They received praise for ruling, 9-0, two years ago that police need a warrant to place a GPS tracker on someone's car. Even then, though, Justice Alito ridiculed Justice Scalia's controlling opinion for determining such a modern issue "based on 18th-century tort law".
When it comes to the future of tech policy in the US, this week's cellphone arguments are just the tip of the iceberg. Right now the FBI is engaged in all varieties of warrantless surveillance, using a variety of devices. Most critically, the agency thinks it can get our mobile location information, which reveals the most intimate details of our lives, without a warrant. The sharp split in lower courts will only get more pronounced over the next year.
Other cases percolating through the justice system address the question of whether police can compel you to hand over the password to your devices. Given that the right to not self-incriminate is spelled out in the Fifth Amendment, and that it parallels between login credentials and other information stored in your head, compelled decryption may seem antithetical to the Constitution. But in cases involving encrypted hard drives, the government has argued otherwise.
That's not all: internet radio services, out-of-control software patents, and whether online posts should be judged the same as traditionally protected speech – all of these may all bubble up to the high court soon.
And remember, just months before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU was in front of the supreme court arguing the Fisa Amendments Act, one of the primary laws at the center of the NSA scandal, was unconstitutional. The court cowardly dismissed the case 5-4 on "standing" grounds, and never ruled on the merits. One of the first things Snowden reportedly said after his disclosures when the ACLU became his legal counsel was: "Do you have standing now?"
Do they ever. Thanks to Snowden's revelations, a second flurry of lawsuits – 25, by The Verge's count – have cropped up all over the country. Even NSA advocates, who for years tried to prevent courts from ruling on the subject, are suddenly suggesting the supreme court should weigh in, hoping it's their only way out.
Tellingly, the NSA's legal house of cards is pinned on a horribly outdated case from the 1970s that ruled the government could get the phone records for one suspect under active investigation, for a short period of time. The government has morphed that to mean they can collect all sorts of metadata, on everyone, forever.
The good news is, if the justices can avoid fixating on technical details – the very kind they don't seem to understand – the Roberts Court may still come to the right decision. After chiding the justices in Aereo, Vox's Tim Lee argued it's actually a good thing the justices are not technically savvy, because it allows them to see the bigger picture, citing that they have "done a remarkably good job of crafting a sensible body of patent and copyright laws in the past few decades". (They also delivered an encouraging decision on patent trolls just this week.)
There's evidence, in recent privacy opinions, that at least some of the justices understand how technology is used, even if they don't use it themselves. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her concurring opinion in the GPS case:
It may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties…This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.
Encouragingly, Justice Kagan made similar comments this week.
But as Electronic Frontier Foundation's Parker Higgins convincingly argues, it's not the justices' lack of personal experience with technology that's the problem; it's their tendency to not understand how people use it. Returning to Justice Roberts's concerns about villains with two phones: if he is in fact unaware of how common that behavior is – he certainly didn't watch Breaking Bad – then that suggests a major gap in his understanding of society.
This lack of basic understanding is alarming, because the supreme court is really the only branch of power poised to confront one of the great challenges of our time: catching up our laws to the pace of innovation, defending our privacy against the sprint of surveillance. The NSA is "training more cyberwarriors" as fast as it can, but our elected representatives move at a snail's pace when it comes to the internet. The US Congress has proven itself unable to pass even the most uncontroversial proposals, let alone comprehensive NSA reforms: the legislative branch can't even get its act together long enough to pass an update our primary email privacy law, which was written in 1986 – before the World Wide Web had been invented.
So the future of our privacy, of our technology – these problems land at the feet of a handful of tech-unsavvy judges. Future nominees to the bench should be quizzed on their knowledge of technology at confirmation hearings. And while many have made the argument that the secret Fisa court should employ a technologist to explain technical issues to the less technical judges, the same can be said of the supreme court. It's time to get the net already.
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What Happened to the Middle Class? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7122"><span class="small">Elizabeth Warren, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Sunday, 04 May 2014 14:13 |
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Warren writes: "The hollowing out of America's middle class has been years in the making, but it wasn't inevitable that working families would fall further and further behind."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Getty Images)
What Happened to the Middle Class?
By Elizabeth Warren, Reader Supported News
04 May 14
 great crack in America's middle class came to light recently: While our country continues to lead the world as the richest nation, our middle class, once the most affluent in the world, has fallen behind. According to an analysis by The New York Times, Canada's middle class is now the wealthiest, and working families in many countries have seen their incomes rise much faster than those in the United States.
The hollowing out of America's middle class has been years in the making, but it wasn't inevitable that working families would fall further and further behind. Instead, it was the direct consequence of deliberate choices Washington has made over the past generation to put the rich and powerful first and to leave working people to pick up whatever crumbs were left behind.
It didn't have to be this way. America knows how to build a middle class that is the envy of the world. After the Great Depression, America made two critical decisions.
First, it put in place strong rules to level the playing field for families, putting more cops on the beat to monitor financial markets and passing basic safety rules to temper the boom-and-bust financial cycle.
Second, the country made building a future for our children the priority. We invested powerfully in our education system, and we made sure that people who worked full time would stay above the poverty line. We built infrastructure -- roads and bridges, our power grids -- so that we had the right foundation for businesses to build jobs here at home. We also invested in basic medical and scientific research, confident that if we built a great pipeline of ideas, our children would have opportunities their parents could only dream about.
These steps were aimed at building a strong middle class, and they worked. For a half a century, as the country got richer, our middle class got richer. America built a middle class that promised a bright future to each succeeding generation, a middle class that inched its way toward building opportunities, not just for some of our children, but for all our children.
I lived this firsthand, growing up in a country that invested in its children. After my dad had a heart attack, my mom worked a minimum-wage job at Sears -- and that was enough to save our house. I went to a commuter college that cost $50 a semester, and my first husband worked on the moon shot. America was full of promise.
About 30 years ago, America began to move in a different direction. Washington took financial cops off the beat by slashing funding of our regulators, letting big banks load up on risk and target families with dangerous credit cards and mortgages. Washington also worked feverishly to cut taxes for those at the top, opening huge loopholes for big corporations and billionaires. Eventually, the loopholes got big enough to drive a truck through. According to the nonpartisan group Citizens for Tax Justice, by 2008-2012, while the corporate tax rate on paper remained 35%, 26 Fortune 500 companies paid $0 in taxes. That's right -- zero.
And how did Washington propose to balance a budget with lower taxes? Stop investing in the future. Instead of supporting college kids who are trying to get an education, the government now uses them as a source of revenue, making billions of dollars in profits off student loans.
Investments in roads and bridges have nearly ground to a halt. And government research -- the great pipeline of ideas that led to the creation of the Internet, nanotechnology, GPS and a million medical advances -- has had its legs cut out from under it.
Today, the director of the National Institutes of Health says there's only enough money to fund one out of six National Institutes of Health research proposals, and our investments in scientific research don't reflect the values of a nation that plans to lead the world in new discoveries.
The impact of these policies has echoed through the economy. Big banks, powerful corporations and billionaires -- people who can afford to hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers -- have amassed more and more wealth. Meanwhile, the foundations of our once strong middle class have begun to crumble, and families have been caught in a terrible squeeze.
Starting in the 1970s, even as workers became more productive, their wages flattened out, while the costs of housing, health care and sending a kid to college, just kept going up and up. In 1980, the minimum wage was at least high enough to keep a working parent with a family of two out of poverty. Now, the minimum wage isn't even enough to keep a fully employed mother and a baby out of poverty -- and on Wednesday, Senate Republicans filibustered a bill to increase the federal minimum wage modestly.
We know how to strengthen the middle class in this country because we have done it before. We need a level playing field to make sure everyone follows the rules -- and that breaking the law has the same kinds of consequences for bank CEOs who launder drug money as for kids who get caught with a few ounces of pot.
We need to decide that our children -- not our biggest corporations -- are our first priority. We can take on the student loan problem that is crushing our kids, and to rebuild our roads and bridges, upgrade our power grids and expand our investments in basic research. And we can pay for that by putting an end to the tax loopholes and subsidies that go to powerful corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
We can repair the cracks in the middle class. We can strengthen our foundations and make sure that all of our children have a fighting chance. But it means changing who Washington works for -- and doesn't.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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ast week, House Republicans released a deliberately misleading report on the status of health reform, crudely rigging the numbers to sustain the illusion of failure in the face of unexpected success. Are you shocked?
