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Who's Your Representative? |
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Tuesday, 01 February 2011 19:05 |
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JP Sottile writes: "Of 435 members of Congress, 261 are, by last count, millionaires. All are paid a tidy sum of $174,000 and all have access to America's richest power brokers. Or, more precisely, the richest Americans have access to them. And if your Representative or Senator isn't a millionaire? Well, they're certainly in the right place if they'd like to become one."
Is your healthcare coverage as good as your Representative or Senator's? (photo: Reuters)
Who's Your Representative?
By JP Sottile, Reader Supported News
01 February 11
Reader Supported News | Perspective
 our yearly salary is a comfortable six-figure affair. You have great benefits, get to take all the holidays on the calendar and enjoy lengthy paid vacations. In fact, you get to chose from nearly a dozen plans when selecting your heavily subsidized healthcare coverage.
You've flown on corporate jets, been repeatedly feted at lavishly catered events and regularly attend dinner parties with your peers, your benefactors and celebrities. And a bevy of your well-heeled friends got together to endow, and then frequently replenish, a fund that will help you keep your job and, if need be, help your spouse and children secure jobs, too.
Finally, if you do lose your job ... chances are you will get another job paying way more than the job from which you were just fired, or from which you willingly retired.
Wait a minute ... that doesn't describe you?
Well, there's an excellent chance it accurately describes the men or women who represent you in Washington, D.C.
Of 435 members of Congress, 261 are, by last count, millionaires. All are paid a tidy sum of $174,000 and all have access to America's richest power brokers. Or, more precisely, the richest Americans have access to them. And if your Representative or Senator isn't a millionaire? Well, they're certainly in the right place if they'd like to become one.
It seems with each passing year, and each passing bill, there's less and less of the average American "represented" in our much-ballyhooed representative democracy. Really, our representatives are more like intermediaries. Most are professional panderers who run interference for corporate cabals. They peddle "New & Improved" government schemes, but spend their time opening loopholes for those who can afford to buy 'em.
The great gulf between self-proclaimed "public servants" and the actual public they keep promising to serve was on full display during the State of the Union. Our national gaggle of millionaires, lawyers and MBAs came together to listen intently as a Harvard-trained law professor read carefully-crafted platitudes off of a pair of teleprompters. This time, though, they dropped the traditional pretense of un-crossable party lines in favor of sitting well-fed cheek by over-used jowl. Inspiring stuff, that is. There is nothing quite like the power of some senseless, highly publicized killing to bring together the bipartisan team charged with the duty of concocting a game plan to "Win the Future!"
That's right, folks. The future is a game and the President wants to win it. That was one of the few memorable, albeit bizarre, applause lines interlaced throughout a tiresome, squishy speech that ran about sixty-one minutes too long.
The orchestrated intermingling of Democrats and Republicans obscured the typical "half gets up and half stays down" audience-applause death match of past speeches. As if set to a drill instructor barking out orders - "left, right, left, right" - it had come to symbolize the lock-step partisanship that defines our politics, cable "news" and, in the post-Bush/Tea Party era, so much of American life.
Left vs. Right. Red vs. Blue. Us vs. Them.
There is, however, a little more truth in the seating arrangement than most of those "representatives" would care to admit. When it comes to brass tacks, and the brass rings that come with doling out those tacks, there is little difference between the two parties. Sure, a few divisive social issues offer ample opportunity to posture and rant and remind us why we should fear the other side. But look back over the last 30 years and you see "the middle" dutifully supporting tax breaks for the super-rich, job-crushing trade deals for multinationals and deregulated freedom for Wall St. to run Ponzi-like schemes. Don't forget the wars, Gitmo, the bailouts and the Patriot Act. All bipartisan.
Those representatives represent someone, just not Mr. or Ms. Average American.
Perhaps that's why the Tea Party got so popular, so quickly. Like 'em or not, many of the Tea Party candidates more closely reflect the backgrounds and ideas of those who campaigned to elect them. The voters saw themselves in their candidates. They might be kooky, but many are something most GOP and Democratic tools are not - they're genuine. They actually believe their shtick. And they're tired of GOP pandering.
Obviously, the two-party establishment represents fewer and fewer Americans.
And perhaps that's why there was some buzz about a Dennis Kucinich-Ron Paul alliance. Both are thought of as "kooks" in their own parties and both are on the same page about the wars, the corruption, preserving Constitutional liberties and the need for representatives to "represent" their constituents instead of their monetary benefactors. Despite the media's dismissals, they actually represent genuine ideas and adherence to principles. In fact, they often expose the two-system for what it is - one-party with two wings. Their continued popularity shows that the Left vs. Right catfight is increasingly a fallacy propagated by media sideshow barkers who sell us a bogus product called "politics."
In reality, it's about insiders vs. outsiders, elites vs. average folks and public relations vs. public service. The "middle" is where money meets its maker, all cloaked under the cover of gut-wrenching compromises and false dichotomies. Just like the State of the Union.
Of course, the GOP "went on the attack" as soon as the speech came to a merciful end. Obama, ever the radical socialist, went "way to the Left" by adopting GOP talking points: a ban on earmarks; a freeze in discretionary spending; even more tax cuts for corporations. Ever the bleeding heart, he promised to "protect our borders." And, ever the apologist for the America's past and present transgressions, he callously referred to the USA as "not just a place on a map, but a light to the world." Viva la revolución!
The President did say one thing you can take to the bank. He said to the assembled crowd that there "isn't a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth."
Duh! The median income of those assembled is somewhere north of $900,000 per year.
But forget other nations. Would they trade it for Cleveland? Or Detroit? Unfortunately, there are at least 280 million Americans who would love to trade places with them and their benefit-laden version of America. That cushy, monetary insulation must be why the President confidently reassured them that "the state of our union is strong."
Not to worry, though, if you live in that other, weaker "union." It'll surely work out for the best when our representatives lead us to victory over the dreaded "future." Or, is that in the dreaded future? Either way, let's just hope we get a pizza party and a trophy.
JP Sottile is a newsroom veteran. His credits include a stint on the Newshour news desk, C-SPAN, Executive Producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington, and a two-time Washington Regional Emmy Award Winner. In addition, JP is a documentary filmmaker.
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The Credit-Industrial Complex |
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Saturday, 29 January 2011 10:43 |
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"It's out there ... lurking. Stalking you at night and shadowing you throughout the day. It never sleeps. It doesn't need to. It scans, collates and registers its harsh judgments with cold specificity. It's ... your credit score," begins JP Sottile.
Visa Hello Kitty credit card promo. (art: Visa)
The Number Is a Beast
By JP Sottile, Reader Supported News
29 January 11
Reader Supported News | Perspective
 t's out there ... lurking.
Stalking you at night and shadowing you throughout the day. It never sleeps. It doesn't need to. It scans, collates and registers its harsh judgments with cold specificity.
It's ... your credit score.
Bearing the innocuous name "FICO," the widely used credit rating and "risk assessment system" tirelessly works to determine your "creditworthiness." Over the last twenty years most Americans have, either by choice or by surprise, come face-to-face with FICO and its potent power to kill a dream or make it come true.
Whether or not you get to take home that HDTV, go into escrow on that house with great "flip potential" or take advantage of that low, 6-month balance transfer APR ... it all depends on where you fall on the FICO scale. Ranging between 300 and 850, that number is, for all intents and purposes, who you are in the hurly-burly world of America's debt-driven economy. The closer you are to 850, the better you look to banks and lenders. If your number reaches 750 or above, debt mongers look at you like a credit-worthy starlet on GHB. As far as they're concerned you are ready for action. If, however, you are more in the 350-600 range, they tend to walk on the other side of the street when you saunter down credit card lane.
Fair enough, right?
We all understand the role of risk in lending. We also like to be rewarded for paying bills on time, and we kinda like it when those who haven't paid on time get punished. Being denied a mortgage or a credit card is the modern equivalent of the Puritans' stockade.
Unfortunately, the Credit-Industrial Complex reneged on its end of the FICO bargain.
Until the early 80s, they employed a high degree of selectivity when issuing credit. That made it a rarely relied-upon redoubt for working and middle class consumers who instead relied on store-issued credit cards and layaway plans. Some, if you can believe it, actually saved up long enough to pay for a T.V. with ... cash! Yup, actual stacks of government-issued bills exchanged hands. Few relied on a VISA, MasterCard or the elite calling card known as American Express. Mortgages were harder to get and young families saved and saved to make that all-important initial down payment on their dream.
By the beginning of the 90s, the high standards of the past were relics of a bygone era.
Like frat boys wearing beer goggles, creditors partied like it was 1999. In fact, by 1999 they were partying like it was 2012. Fueled by a cocktail of Reagan-Era deregulation and the "spend now/pay later" mentality of his "economic miracle," the credit flowed and flowed. Then Clinton Inc. came to town, loudly chanting their "It's the Economy, Stupid," mantra. For the next eight years the credit industry had carte blanche to act like drunken sailors. And they did. It quickly became "The economy, done stupidly."
In retrospect, the economic growth and declining budget deficits of Bubba-Time were mostly an illusion. It was driven by the financial industry, the 401K-fed vapor-ware bubble of the "internet economy," and, by the turn of the century, the bogus housing boom. Thanks to a flood of credit card offers, Americans lived like they were getting richer. In reality, they were on the fast track to becoming poorer.
Credit cards became the new sharecropping.
Monthly minimums were the yearly rent you paid to squat on the goods, services and properties that were actually owned by the Credit-Industrial Complex. Like the sharecroppers of the Jim Crow South, each year people fell further and further into debt, even if they paid their perfectly-crafted monthly minimum. You see, they calculated the exact amount needed to keep your debt slowly growing, while you paid them for the right to keep servicing it. Like those tenant farmers of old, there was little hope of paying off the debt.
Credit turned into a wealth re-allocation system, concentrating your monthly minimums into the hands of the real investor class - that high-falutin' top tier so heavily leveraged in banks, financial services and the mortgage market.
And the credit kept coming.
Despite a rapid growth in debt-to-income ratios for most Americans, FICO was largely ignored no matter how loudly it barked on the outskirts of creditworthiness. The Credit-Industrial Complex regularly walked over the tracks to the sketchy side of town. They hit on those once-unattractive scores with "nothing down" pick-up lines and turned interest-hiding lending tricks. And while you were trying to flip that fixer-upper, the folks on Wall Street were flipping you and your debt to slick financial lounge lizards eager to mop up their sloppy seconds.
Still, throughout the hallucinatory highs and the "credit crisis" lows, the FICO beast remained on patrol, always keeping score. The data collection industry vigilantly monitored your exposure to the debt collection industry. And, as you'd expect, scores declined once the credit bubble burst.
During their "credit crisis" hangover, lenders suddenly looked at those scores and decided to have some standards. The credit stopped flowing. They read their own fine print and raised interest rates, monthly minimums and fees. They took a bath, literally and figuratively. Sobered by the stark fear of re-regulation, they looked long and hard at everyone's FICO score and realized that they'd gone to bed with a 750 and woken up with a 400. For a moment, they cleaned up their act.
But, they are out of rehab. And, like archetypical alcoholics, they are at it again.
Credit is once again trickling down to "risky" borrowers. Perhaps they have no choice. With so many Americans out of work, struggling through foreclosures or unable to sustain those FICO-feeding monthly minimums, creditors have few options for their suddenly barren dance cards. Eligible scores are fewer and farther between in the Great Recession. And, frankly, they cannot help themselves.
They also know we've bought in to the mystical power of the FICO score. People are desperate to repair, restore or sustain their scores. Although the credit industry willingly ignored the contract implicit in the FICO system, the American consumer continues to believe that "creditworthiness" is the sum total of their worth. True enough; buying a home or a car or, oft-times, renting an apartment is tough if your score is under the magic median. And, increasingly, employers look at credit scores in the hiring process ... condensing down your life's experience to one scarlet number.
Perhaps it's time to reject the very notion of FICO. To force the issue by refusing to play the credit games required to rehabilitate our lagging digits. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to save up and pay cash. Try a little addition by subtraction. Take the plastic out of your wallet or purse. Leave home without it. And if they keep increasing the speed of your credit treadmill? Jump off. Take the leap and ignore the score, just like they did.
Maybe it'll take enduring a little short-term pain and some constricted credit to neuter the beast. The more folks wait out greedy creditors and ignore the threat of - gasp! - a low credit score, the quicker FICO will be forced into a holding pen of irrelevance.
So, stop jumping when it starts barking. Until you do, they've got your number.
JP Sottile is a newsroom veteran. His credits include a stint on the Newshour news desk, C-SPAN, Executive Producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington, and a two-time Washington Regional Emmy Award Winner. In addition, JP is a documentary filmmaker.
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Obama Ignored the Elephant in the Room |
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Wednesday, 26 January 2011 19:34 |
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Excerpt: "The President's failure to address the decoupling of American corporate profits from American jobs, and explain specifically what he'll do to get jobs back, not only risks making his grand plans for reviving the nation's 'competitiveness' seem somewhat beside the point but also cedes to Republicans the dominant narrative."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
Obama Ignored the Elephant in the Room
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
26 January 11
 he President's new emphasis on the importance of investing in education, infrastructure, and basic research in order to build the nation's long-term competitive capacities is appropriate. For the last three decades the federal government's spending on these three essentials has declined as a percentage of its total spending, arguably threatening America's technological and economic leadership.
But the President's failure to address the decoupling of American corporate profits from American jobs, and explain specifically what he'll do to get jobs back, not only risks making his grand plans for reviving the nation's "competitiveness" seem somewhat beside the point but also cedes to Republicans the dominant narrative.
The address he gave last night could have been given (indeed, was given) by Democrats in the 1980s when Japan seemed to threaten America's preeminence. Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign manifesto, "Putting People First," laid out the case. Only now the competitive threat comes from China.
A similar call for economic patriotism and public investment emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, when the competitive threat was the Soviet Union. John F. Kennedy challenged America to get to the moon ahead of the Soviets. Before him, Republican president Dwight Eisenhower committed the nation to building the interstate highways system - forty-one thousand miles of four-lane (sometimes even six-lane) freeways to replace the old two-lane federal roads that meandered through cities and towns - in order to speed troops, tanks, and munitions across the nation in the event of war. And a National Defense Education Act to educate a generation of mathematicians and scientists to catch up with the Soviets in space.
President Obama made the parallel explicit:
Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets, we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs. This is our generation's Sputnik moment.
Reviving these ideas, and the feelings they provoke, is politically astute. A call for national unity and economic patriotism is places the President above partisan rancor, and gives him a rationale for a strong and effective government at a time when Republicans want nothing so much as to shrink it.
But the new theme also poses a danger of appearing to ignore the elephant in the room - the nation's continuing scourge of high unemployment that shows little sign of abating any time soon.
It's one thing to challenge the nation to re-embark on the equivalent of a race to the moon when most people feel confident about their own family finances, but quite another when economic security is as endemic as now.
The President understandably wants Americans to feel upbeat about the economic recovery - "two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again," he said - but little of this has yet trickled down to ordinary people who continue to be plagued by a huge debt load, business's unwillingness to create full-time jobs, and a still fragile housing market.
The Great Recession wasn't due to America's loss of "competitiveness" relative to the Chinese or anyone else. In fact, American corporations are now enormously competitive, racking up some of their highest profits in history. But much of their success is occurring outside the United States. GE, whose CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was just tapped to head Mr. Obama's new advisory council on jobs and competitiveness, has more foreign employees than American. General Motors now sells and makes more cars in China than at home.
Republicans and their supply-side economists say the nation got into trouble because government became too large, and the answer is therefore to cut spending, cut taxes, and shrink the deficit. The President, having apparently given up on Keynesian pump-priming, has no retort except to invest for the long term.
What the President should have done is talk frankly about the central structural flaw in the U.S. economy - the dwindling share of its gains going to the vast middle class, and the almost unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at top - in sharp contrast to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years.
Although the economy is more than twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the median wage has barely budged. Most of the gains from growth have gone to the richest Americans, whose portion of total income soared from around 9 percent in the late 1970s to 23.5 percent in 2007. Americans kept spending anyway by using their homes as ATMs but the bursting of the housing bubble put an end to that - leaving them without enough purchasing power to reboot the economy. So the central challenge is put more money into the pockets average Americans.
This narrative would be politically risky (opening Mr. Obama to the charge of being a "class warrior") but at least honest. And it would allow him to connect the dots - explaining why his new health-care law is critical to reducing medical costs for most working families, why tax reform requires cutting taxes on the middle class while raising them on the rich, why the Bush tax cuts shouldn't be extended for the wealthy, why deficit reduction must not sacrifice education and infrastructure (both important to rebuilding middle-class prosperity) and why any cuts in Social Security or Medicare must be on the backs of the wealthy rather than average working families.
Importantly, it would give him a convincing counter-narrative to the Republican anti-government one. Government exists to protect and advance the interests of average working families. Without it, Americans have to rely mainly on big and increasingly global corporations, whose only interest is making money wherever it can be made.
Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, including "The Work of Nations," "Locked in the Cabinet," "Supercapitalism" and his latest book, "AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America's Future." His 'Marketplace' commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.
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Michele Bachmann's Alternate Universe |
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Wednesday, 26 January 2011 11:01 |
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Dana Milbank writes: "Bachmann is more than a little unusual. Her greatest hits are now legendary: Her suggestion that President Obama and the Democrats are 'anti-American,' her caution that the census could be used to create internment camps, her accusation that Obama is running a 'gangster government' and her request that people be 'armed and dangerous' to fight climate-change legislation."
Minnesota Representative and conservative siren Michele Bachmann. (photo: AP)
Michele Bachmann's Alternate Universe
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
26 January 11
he president was lofty.
"We will move forward together, or not at all - for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics," he said in his State of the Union address.
The official Republican response, too, aimed high.
"Americans are skeptical of both political parties, and that skepticism is justified - especially when it comes to spending," said Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. "So hold all of us accountable."
And then there was Michele Bachmann.
As the leader of the Tea Party Caucus in the House, the Minnesota Republican gave her own, unauthorized response to the State of the Union, live from the National Press Club, filmed by Fox News, broadcast live on CNN and telecast by the Tea Party Express. It had all the altitude of a punch to the gut.
"After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have," Bachmann said. "But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country."
Armed with charts and photographs, but not a word of fellowship, she railed against "a bureaucracy that tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill."
The State of the Nation was conciliatory Tuesday night, as each side made gestures to the other, and lawmakers for the first time crossed the aisle to sit - and applaud - together. But Bachmann and her fellow Tea Partyers raged on.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, for one, was not pleased. "Paul Ryan is giving the official Republican response," he said when asked earlier about her dueling response. "Michele Bachmann, just as the other 534 members of the House and Senate, are going to have opinions as to the State of the Union."
For Republican leaders, it's more than a one-night problem. Bachmann is bidding to become the new voice of the opposition, replacing the titular leaders of the GOP.
In the past week alone, Bachmann visited Iowa to test the waters for a presidential campaign and scored fifth in a field of 20 presidential candidates in a New Hampshire straw poll, besting such established figures as Mitch Daniels, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, John Thune, Haley Barbour and Mike Pence.
Returning to Washington, she hosted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a gathering of her Tea Party Caucus, then went for an appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News and a keynote speech to the March for Life's annual dinner. And that was all before her Tea Party response to the State of the Union address.
Two dozen reporters chased her down a hall in the Capitol complex this week, seeking an explanation for the speech. "I never took this as a State of the Union response, necessarily," she said innocently. The title above the text of her speech her office released Tuesday night: "Bachmann's Response to State of the Union."
Party leaders, intimidated by the Tea Party activists, have little control over Bachmann. They denied her the party leadership post she sought, but when it came to her plan to upstage the authorized GOP response Tuesday night, the most House Speaker John Boehner could do was grumble that it's "a little unusual."
Bachmann is more than a little unusual. Her greatest hits are now legendary: Her suggestion that President Obama and the Democrats are "anti-American," her caution that the census could be used to create internment camps, her accusation that Obama is running a "gangster government" and her request that people be "armed and dangerous" to fight climate-change legislation.
At a time colleagues have toned down their words, Bachmann went to Iowa and proclaimed: "If we want to kill Obamacare and we want to end socialized medicine, it must be done in the next election!"
"It is my firm belief that America is under greater attack now ... than at any time," she warned, voicing "grave doubt" about the nation's survival. She presented to the assembled Iowans a novel view of American history in which the "founders ... worked tirelessly until slavery was no more." In Bachmann's version, "It didn't matter the color of their skin... . Once you got here, we were all the same."
She was at it again Tuesday night. She ignored the bipartisan seating plan and placed herself between two other Tea Party House Republicans. Soon after, she was on air herself, reading out choice slogans: "failed stimulus ... repeal Obamacare ... government-run coverage ... voted out the big-spending politicians."
It was angry, and at times wrong, but Bachmann has gone far with that formula.
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