Tuesday, November 29, 2011

'We the People' versus 'We the Corporation': Sentiment Builds for Banning Corporate Personhood, But Tough Road Ahead.

How far should a constitutional amendment go to roll back corporate rights? And is it possible?


Bill of Rights
Across the country, momentum has been building for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring that the democratic rights and freedoms granted to people do not apply to corporations and corporate entities.

In November alone, local voters in ColoradoMontanaMaineWisconsin and California passed various resolutions to ban corporate personhood. Seven bills have been introduced in the current Congress, including four this month—including amendment proposals. Public interest groups have been gathering petition signatures, all with an eye to the two-year anniversary of a Supreme Court ruling, known as Citizens United, which granted significant new political powers to corporations by ending a century-old prohibition on directly spending money from their corporate treasuries for political campaigns.

Read the whole story on: AlterNet

Greg Colvin's Amendment

This attorney is a Yale graduate that practices public interest law.
He's published a number of good articles on his blog including his own
amendment language. It's worth a look:

http://www.ourfuture.org/users/new-2753

Bill Moyers on Plutonomy

Advocacy Groups Seek to Curb Corporations

Source: Roll Call

As Occupy Wall Street activists vacate public parks around the country, several new advocacy groups have sprung up to pursue OWS-inspired constitutional amendments to limit the influence of money and corporate lobbying in politics.

The idea of amending the Constitution to overturn “corporate personhood” has also taken hold on Capitol Hill, spawning a half-dozen resolutions in the House and Senate. These include three separate amendments introduced this month by Reps. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Betty Sutton (D-Ohio).

“I think the Occupy energy that’s sweeping across America is a huge wave, and anybody who doesn’t get a surfboard on top of it is losing a tremendous opportunity,” said Nick Penniman, president of United Republic, a new nonprofit that’s set out to fight what organizers call “the corrupting influence of well-financed special interests.”

The group moved up its launch date, Penniman said, in part to tap the energy behind the Occupy movement, which lacks a specific agenda but which has spotlighted anti-corporate slogans in cities around the country. Co-founded by Josh Silver, former CEO of the media and technology reform group Free Press, United Republic already has a staff of about a dozen people and plans a $10 million budget for 2012.

Another pro-reform activist who rushed to open his doors this fall is Cenk Uygur, a left-leaning Internet talk-radio host who has launched a group called Wolf PAC to push for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics. Uygur, who hosts the show “The Young Turks” and formerly hosted a program on MSNBC, announced the launch in a spirited call-and-response rally with Occupy Wall Street protesters in lower Manhattan last month.

“Corporations are not people,” Uygur shouted to a gathering of Occupy activists, who chanted back, “Corporations are not people.”

Uygur has rounded up 42,000 volunteers all over the country and will soon hire an executive director for his group, he said. Wolf PAC will operate as an unrestricted super political action committee and will focus first on amending the Constitution through the states, and not through Congress. (Any constitutional amendment must be approved by a two-thirds majority of the House and the Senate and ratified by three-fourths of the states.)

“We’re not kidding around,” Uygur said in an interview. “It’s going to be very aggressive. We will pressure the state legislators through calls, possibly occupying state houses.”

United Republic and Wolf PAC join an already existing cluster of pro-reform groups formed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling early last year. That ruling freed both corporations and unions to spend unrestricted organizational money on campaigns.

Groups spawned by the ruling include Move to Amend, a coalition of liberal organizations pushing to amend the Constitution to establish that political spending does not deserve the same protections as free speech; We the People, launched by a trio of progressives that includes Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation; and Free Speech for People, which is pushing a constitutional amendment to establish that “free speech and other Constitutional rights are for people, not corporations.”

“For the first time now, Congress has the opportunity to debate this basic question of whether corporations should be treated as people with constitutional rights,” said John Bonifaz, who co-
founded Free Speech for People the day after the Citizens United ruling with Boston lawyer Jeff Clements. Clements has just authored a forthcoming book titled “Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It.”

Given the large majorities needed to amend the Constitution at both the federal and the state level, lawmakers and activists pushing for constitutional changes face an uphill battle. They are also up against free-speech advocates who argue that amendments targeting corporations violate constitutional First Amendment rights.

“Silencing one group may be politically beneficial in the short-term for certain groups,” wrote Joe Trotter, media manager of the pro-free-speech Center for Competitive Politics, in a recent FrumForum blog post on recent anti-corporate rhetoric. “However, it ultimately leaves everyone worse off because it creates a knowledge vacuum. In our society, public and private sectors are hopelessly intertwined. It does everyone a disservice to hold only one group responsible.”

Some of the new groups organizing in the name of reform, moreover, are using the same tactics as the corporate-backed political groups they criticize. Uygur’s Wolf PAC will be free to raise and spend unrestricted money, something that was not permitted through PACs before Citizens United. As a nonprofit, United Republic faces no obligation to disclose its funding sources — not unlike the new corporate-backed political nonprofits that reform advocates deplore.

At the same time, the proliferation of activists taking aim at big corporate money offers Occupy activists some tangible goals beyond simply sleeping in parks. One of United Republic’s objectives, Penniman said, is to help firm up specific short-term and long-term goals for the nascent anti-corporate-reform movement, which has yet to articulate a uniform approach to amending the Constitution.

“One of our hopes is that we’ll be able to coalesce the reform community around a common strategy for both amending the Constitution in the long haul, [and] also figuring out what the short-term victories are between now and a Constitutional amendment,” Penniman said.

His group’s goals include a “main street communications strategy” to “de-wonkify” the money and politics issue and help average Americans grasp how campaign spending affects their daily lives. The group will reach out to both political parties and is recruiting board members who are Democrats, Republicans and independents, he said.

Uygur, too, said anti-corporate sentiment transcends political party: “Everybody gets it. The tea party and Occupy Wall Street have the same core issue, which is: I don’t think these guys [in Washington, D.C.] are on the level. Whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, these guys don’t represent us.”

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Money At The Top

Source: Paul Krugman

A bit more on the subject of whether there’s significant money to be raised through higher taxes on the very rich. As it happens, there’s a recent analysis from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center that bears quite closely on this subject.

The TPC analysis points out that before the 1981 tax cuts there used to be a larger number of tax brackets, with a number of brackets well above the current 35 percent maximum. And it asks how much revenue would be raised if those above-35 brackets were still in place; that’s quite close to the question of how much money might be raised through higher taxes on the very rich.

Their answer is that in 2007 the higher brackets would have raised an additional $78 billion, or a bit over half a percent of GDP. By the way, that estimate takes into account the likely “elasticity of taxable income”, i.e., the disappearance of some income from the tax rolls either through reduced actual earnings or through avoidance.

So, what I did was to apply that revenue as a percent of GDP to CBO projections of GDP over the next decade. And what this says is that going back to pre-Reagan-type higher-income taxation would yield about $1.1 trillion over the next decade.

That would not by itself close the budget gap– but as I’ve been saying, no one thing would. And, you know, $1.1 trillion here, $1.1 trillion there, and soon you’re talking about real money.

Seriously, the notion that denying health care to the near-poor is a serious deficit-reduction policy, but raising taxes on the very rich is not, is not something you can justify at all on the basis of the actual numbers. Anyone who says different is practicing, well, class warfare.

Record number in government anti-poverty programs

Source: USA Today

WASHINGTON — Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.

More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the federal-state program aimed principally at the poor, a survey of state data by USA TODAY shows. That's up at least 17% since the recession began in December 2007.
 

"Virtually every Medicaid director in the country would say that their current enrollment is the highest on record," says Vernon Smith of Health Management Associates, which surveys states for Kaiser Family Foundation.

The program has grown even before the new health care law adds about 16 million people, beginning in 2014. That has strained doctors. "Private physicians are already indicating that they're at their limit," says Dan Hawkins of the National Association of Community Health Centers.

More than 40 million people get food stamps, an increase of nearly 50% during the economic downturn, according to government data through May. The program has grown steadily for three years.

Caseloads have risen as more people become eligible. The economic stimulus law signed by President Obama last year also boosted benefits.

"This program has proven to be incredibly responsive and effective," says Ellin Vollinger of the Food Research and Action Center.

Close to 10 million receive unemployment insurance, nearly four times the number from 2007. Benefits have been extended by Congress eight times beyond the basic 26-week program, enabling the long-term unemployed to get up to 99 weeks of benefits. Caseloads peaked at nearly 12 million in January — "the highest numbers on record," says Christine Riordan of the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for low-wage workers.

More than 4.4 million people are on welfare, an 18% increase during the recession. The program has grown slower than others, causing Brookings Institution expert Ron Haskins to question its effectiveness in the recession.

As caseloads for all the programs have soared, so have costs. The federal price tag for Medicaid has jumped 36% in two years, to $273 billion. Jobless benefits have soared from $43 billion to $160 billion. The food stamps program has risen 80%, to $70 billion. Welfare is up 24%, to $22 billion. Taken together, they cost more than Medicare.
 

The steady climb in safety-net program caseloads and costs has come as a result of two factors: The recession has boosted the number who qualify under existing rules. And the White House, Congress and states have expanded eligibility and benefits.

Conservatives fear expanded safety-net programs won't contract after the economy recovers. "They're much harder to unwind in the long term," says Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Other anti-poverty experts say the record caseloads are a necessary response to economic hardship. "We should be there to support people when the economy can't," says LaDonna Pavetti of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning think tank.

Jimmy Kimmel Presents: A Charlie Brown GOP Debate

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Robert Reich: "The REAL Public Nuisance"

SuperCommittee: GOP wants rich to pay less towards deficit reduction

A potential breakthrough occurred in a meeting in the Capitol late on the night of Nov. 7, when Republicans, led by [Pat] Toomey, offered a $1.2 trillion package that included $300 billion of new tax revenue. It was the first time Republicans had shown themselves open to significant amounts of new taxes.
But as Democrats studied the proposal, they found much to criticize. The proposal would have permanently reduced tax rates for all taxpayers, and Democrats objected, in particular, to lowering the rates paid by the most affluent Americans.
This is when the patient seemed to take a turn for the worse.
In the eyes of Republicans, when Democrats rejected the Toomey plan, saying it would provide a windfall for millionaires and billionaires, little more could be accomplished.
And this is only half the story. The GOP plan offered by Toomey would have exchanged increased revenues through the closing of loopholes and deductions in exchange for tax reform that would have cut all tax rates, but would have locked down the tax rate for top earners at 28 percent. This is the “concession” the GOP offered.

But in truth, what the GOP proposal would have really meant is that that the wealthy would pay less in taxes towards deficit reduction than they would if we just did nothing, i.e., let the Bush tax cuts expire, as stipulated by current law. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained, this not only would have taken further tax increases on the wealthy completely off the table in future deficit reduction talks; the cutting of tax rates across the board would also have disproportionately benefitted the wealthy.

Read the whole article in the Washington Post.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Despite Supercommittee Failure, Republicans Intend to Get Their Pound of Flesh in 2012

Source: Truthout

The collapse of the supercommittee's effort to produce a joint package of recommendations for deficit reduction proves conclusively that, for Republicans and their corporate allies, deficit reduction is, and always has been, a secondary objective. The primary objective is to protect and expand the Bush tax cuts.

From reports now leaking out, it is apparent that Democrats on the supercommittee offered massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, amounting to a minimum of $500 billion over the coming decade. Those cuts were in addition to the automatic $1.2 trillion automatic additional deficit cuts negotiated as part of last August's debt ceiling deal. That deal already authorized $1 trillion in spending-only cuts. So, the Democrats' offer was the $1.2 trillion automatic deficit cuts - all spending, and about equally divided between defense and nondefense cuts - plus another $500 billion in Medicare-Medicaid, matched by another roughly equal $500 billion in tax revenue increases.

The Republicans on the supercommittee offered a different "mix" of tax revenue and spending cuts. Their counter was $760 billion in Medicare-Medicaid cuts, plus approximately $300 billion in tax revenue recovery. However, that tax revenue recovery was largely raised from increasing taxes on the middle class, by reducing the mortgage interest deduction and other middle-class tax breaks. In addition, the Republicans required a further major tax break for the top personal income tax bracket and for the corporate income tax. Both currently are set at a 35 percent tax rate. Republicans proposed to reduce both to between 25 and 28 percent. In other words, raise taxes on the middle class and give the money to the rich and their corporations. And make seniors, retirees and the poor pay $760 billion in Medicare-Medicaid benefit cuts.

What these maneuvers by both parties shows is the following:

First, Republicans' top priority is shielding the Bush tax cuts. Those cuts cost the US budget a minimum of $2.9 trillion last decade, another $450 billion in extensions in 2010-2012 and a projected $2.2 to $2.7 trillion if extended for another decade. By proposing further tax cuts for the top income brackets and corporations, it is clear Republicans aren't all that concerned about the deficit and debt, in fact. They are focused on protecting and further cutting taxes for the rich and their corporations. What's new in their position, revealed by the supercommittee's machinations, is that they now propose that not only seniors and the poor pay more for continuing (and expanding) those tax cuts, but also that now the middle class will also have to pay for those cuts for the rich with more tax hikes.

Second, it is clear the Democrats continue to be more than willing to put Medicare-Medicaid on the chopping block. They proposed $500 billion in cuts in June in the secret negotiations with Vice President Joe Biden, which broke down. They repeated that offer in July as President Obama offered the same as part of a "grand deal," which also imploded. On September 19, Obama subsequently offered $320 billion in Medicare-Medicaid cuts up front as an enticement to get Republicans to agree to his third recovery plan, price tag $447 billion. And just a few weeks ago, the Democrats again proposed $500 billion in cuts. In other words, the Democrats have repeatedly offered massive cuts in Medicare-Medicaid. They will likely continue to do so in the coming months.

Third, the sticking point between the two is not whether Medicare-Medicaid will eventually be cut, but when - nor is the amount of these cuts really in question. It will be between $500 billion and $1 trillion, when it happens - and it will, eventually, happen.

Fourth, the real bottleneck is the Bush tax cuts and Republican efforts to not only protect those cuts, but to extend them as well, even if, now, at the expense of the middle class.

What the breakdown of the supercommittee's efforts shows is that the Republicans calculated they would have a better chance at extending the $2.2 trillion Bush tax cuts for another decade by deferring the vote on their extension until next fall, 2012, in the midst of the final months of the 2012 election campaign.

Republicans no doubt looked beyond November 23 and see several legislative "choke points" that will enable them to extract more spending-cut concessions from the Democrats without having to give up on the Bush tax cuts. The first of such "choke points" will come next month, in December 2011.

There are four major legislative bills that Democrats and Obama desperately want that will have to be decided by Congress before the end of 2011. The first has already been raised by Obama: continue the 2 percent payroll tax deduction for workers another year. That will cost another $112 billion to the budget and deficit this coming year. A second is an extension of unemployment benefits for millions of more workers, whose benefits run out at year end. That's another $55 billion cost. The third is yet another year's "fix" to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) ,which impacts upper-middle-class taxpayers, who earn more than $150,000 a year. That's another $70 billion cost. The fourth is also another delay in the 29 percent cut in doctors' fees for serving Medicare patients. That's tens of billions more in costs to Part B Medicare spending. We're talking here about at least another $250 billion. If these bills are not passed, it will mean a major hit to gross domestic product (GDP) and the economy in the first quarter 2012, for an economy already extremely fragile and susceptible to a double dip early next year. In fact, the Federal Reserve now predicts that the likelihood of a double dip occurring in the US economy early next year is now greater than 50 percent.

The Republicans will especially drive a hard bargain and extract more than a pound of legislative flesh in exchange for agreeing to pass the extension of unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cuts for another year. They will demand more spending-only cuts, likely to include Medicare-Medicaid, and will also likely demand that the $450 billion in defense spending cuts mandated in the $1.2 trillion automatic deficit reduction are removed from the $1.2 trillion. Obama will be hard-pressed not to agree to remove the defense spending cuts if he wants his payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits extensions passed before year end 2011. Obama and the Democrats will be desperate in an election year to have the unemployment benefits and payroll tax extended, as well as the AMT "fix," which otherwise would heavily impact the "independent voters" whom he is courting closely in the coming election. The Republicans know all this, and will push to extract cuts in spending at least equal to the $250 billion cost for these various measures coming up in December 2011.

Republicans may also get another opportunity in early 2012 to extract spending cuts without having to touch their Bush tax cuts. According to August's debt ceiling deal, which reduced spending by $1 trillion immediately and outlined the $1.2 trillion additional automatic cuts that will now go into effect, there would be no further need to raise the debt ceiling until after the November 2012 elections. That was the trade-off for the $2.2 trillion in spending cuts that the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress agreed to; that is, no more debt ceiling crises in exchange for the $2.2 trillion in spending-only cuts.  But the debt ceiling issue may still re-emerge before the elections, and maybe even as early as spring 2012.

As part of the August 2011 deal, the US Treasury is authorized to raise another $400 billion or so this spring and increase the debt ceiling by that amount. But if the economy retreats in early 2012, as many now increasingly predict, that will mean less federal tax revenue than originally projected and a larger budget deficit in 2012 than originally forecast. That might reintroduce the need to raise the debt ceiling again in mid-2012 even more than projected last August. If this scenario unfolds, the Republicans will have yet another bite at the apple of deficit cutting. That's in addition to the four bills coming up next month costing $250 billion, for which Republicans will demand at least equivalent spending cuts elsewhere.

So, look for the issue of cutting Medicare-Medicaid to continue to be on the negotiating table despite the supercommittee's recent breakdown. The supercommittee may fade away, but not the fundamental issues behind it. Those issues are the continuing weak US economy and its impact on deficits, the intense commitment by the Republicans, corporations, and the wealthiest 1 percent to protect their Bush tax cuts "at all costs," and the repeated willingness of Obama and the Democrats to offer up Medicare-Medicaid as a bargaining chip.

The Republicans are in the preferred bargaining position going forward. They will try to cash in on some of the Democrats' repeated offers to cut Medicare-Medicaid by $500 billion - first in exchange for agreeing to pass the $250 billion in bills in December, and, thereafter, potentially in the spring, should the debt ceiling issue raise its ugly head again.

As the November 2012 election grows nearer, Democrats' resolve not to extend the Bush tax cuts another decade will also undoubtedly weaken. Republicans count on chipping away at Medicare-Medicaid and other spending over the coming year while biding their time for the best moment to extend the Bush tax cuts for another decade.

It's no wonder, therefore, that the Republicans on the supercommittee were more than willing to allow it to implode. They can protect their tax cuts better, and extract spending cuts more effectively, by going at them piecemeal over the coming year.

Taxing Job Creators

Source: Paul Krugman

Mark Thoma sends us to the new Journal of Economic Perspectives paper (pdf) on optimal taxes by Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez. It’s a tough read (I’m still working on it myself), but there’s one discussion that I think helps make a useful point about current political debate.

In the first part of the paper, D&S analyze the optimal tax rate on top earners. And they argue that this should be the rate that maximizes the revenue collected from these top earners — full stop. Why? Because if you’re trying to maximize any sort of aggregate welfare measure, it’s clear that a marginal dollar of income makes very little difference to the welfare of the wealthy, as compared with the difference it makes to the welfare of the poor and middle class. So to a first approximation policy should soak the rich for the maximum amount — not out of envy or a desire to punish, but simply to raise as much money as possible for other purposes.

Now, this doesn’t imply a 100% tax rate, because there are going to be behavioral responses – high earners will generate at least somewhat less taxable income in the face of a high tax rate, either by actually working less or by pushing their earnings underground. Using parameters based on the literature, D&S suggest that the optimal tax rate on the highest earners is in the vicinity of 70%.

OK, I hear loud screams from the right side of the room. Parsing those screams, I hear the following arguments:

1. Theft! Tyranny! OK, I hear you. This can’t be argued on rational grounds; I think there are a lot more important moral issues in the world than defending the right of the rich to keep their money, but whatever.

2. They’ll go Galt! This amounts to saying that D&S’s estimate of the “behavioral elasticity” is too low. Maybe, but they’re pretty careful about that, and your gut isn’t better than their econometrics.

3. You’ll kill job creation! This is where it gets interesting.
Right now the official rhetoric of the right, and a fair number of people who consider themselves centrist, is that high-income individuals are “job creators” who must be cherished for the good they do.

Yet textbook economics says that in a competitive economy, the contribution any individual (or for that matter any factor of production) makes to the economy at the margin is what that individual earns — period. What a worker contributes to GDP with an additional hour of work is that worker’s hourly wage, whether that hourly wage is $6 or $60,000 an hour. This in turn means that the effect on everyone else’s income if a worker chooses to work one hour less is precisely zero. If a hedge fund manager gets $60,000 an hour, and he works one hour less, he reduces GDP by $60,000 — but he also reduces his pay by $60,000, so the net effect on other peoples’ incomes is zip.

Of course, he doesn’t actually lose all of that $60,000, since he ends up paying less in taxes. So there is a loss of revenue from that withdrawal of effort. But that’s precisely what the Diamond-Saez calculation takes into account, and the reason the optimal top tax rate isn’t 100%.

So, are conservatives comfortable with this analysis? I would guess not, that they have a deep-seated belief that the 1%, by working harder, are doing the 99% a big favor, creating jobs and raising incomes — and that this gain isn’t fully (or even largely) captured by the money they’re paid.

My point, then, is that this claim — and the lionization of high earners as people who make a vast contribution to society — is not, in fact, something that comes out of the free-market economic principles these people claim to believe in. Even if you believe that the top 1% or better yet the top 0.1% are actually earning the money they make, what they contribute is what they get, and they deserve no special solicitude.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Newt Gingrich, the man who changed Washington

Source: Lawrence Lessig via CNN

(CNN) -- The Gingrich campaign has now confirmed a longstanding business relationship that enabled his consulting group to receive between $1.6 and $1.8 million from mortgage giant Freddie Mac. But it wasn't for "lobbying," Newt Gingrich insists. It was for "strategic advice on a wide range of issues."

OK, but then doesn't the payment, AP's Tom Beaumont asked the former House speaker, just remind people that "your background comes from being a Washington insider?"

"It reminds people," Gingrich corrected Beaumont, "that I know a great deal about Washington." And as he continued, "If you want to change Washington, we just tried four [sic] years of amateur ignorance and it didn't work very well, so having some-body who knows Washington might be a really good thing."

Newt Gingrich is certainly right about that. There is no candidate for president who has had more experience in changing Washington than Gingrich. Indeed, there may be no American since James Madison who has had more of an effect in making the institution of Congress what it is today.

For as far too few remember, more than any other living American, it is Newt Gingrich who gave us the current version of our hopelessly dysfunctional Congress — an institution which, according to a New York Times/CBS poll, now has the confidence of 9% of the American people. That monster is his baby, and no one should deny him his parental bragging rights.
 
More than any other living American, it is Newt Gingrich who gave us the current version of our hopelessly dysfunctional Congress. 
 
The question for Gingrich now, however, is whether he wants to change that institution — again. For nothing in his campaign so far has either explained what went so wrong in the practices that he helped birth, or how we might possibly reform them. And it is this, I suggest, more than anything else that Americans need "reminding" of.

The Framers of our Constitution meant Congress to be a great deliberative body. It has become an embarrassment. Congress doesn't deliberate to resolve important national issues. Congress fundraises, and postures to fundraise, to support the next fight for control.

The transformation to this "Fundraising Congress" began in 1993. Newt Gingrich was its leader. After claiming Republican control of both houses of Congress in 1995 — for the first time in 40 years — Gingrich launched his new army of reformers on a project to secure permanent control of that institution, and of government.

Fundraising was the key to that strategy of control. The Republicans came to power raising a then unheard of amount of money: $618.42 million in the election cycle ending in 1994, compared to the Democrats' $488.68 million.

In the four years between 1994 and 1998, Republican candidates and party committees would raise over $1 billion. Never before had a party come anywhere close to raising that amount of money, because never before had any party's leaders so effectively focused the energy of their members on this single task: fundraising.

Gingrich concentrated the "work" of Congress into a three-day "work" week. He sent his caucus home for the rest of the week, in part so that they had time necessary to launch cross-country fundraising missions.

He exploded the number of committees, radically increasing the number of fund-raising targets. He ended any idea of bipartisanship. Instead, as Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee, has described, the focus of Congress after Gingrich's reforms became the "majority of the majority," (i.e., the majority of the Republicans) polarizing the institution to the end of assuring ever more loyal and energized troops.

Members of Congress now spend between 30%-70% of their time raising money to get re-elected to Congress or to get their party back into power. And not just the Republicans: The Democrats quickly followed the lessons of Professor Gingrich. And in the almost 20 years since he came to power, practically everything about that great institution has changed.

Gone is any semblance of deliberation, or the idea that there is a business of the nation to be done, as opposed to the business of the party in power. Instead, the institution that Gingrich inherited — the one in which Democrats worked with Republicans to pass the most important tax reform in modern history (Reagan's), and in which Republicans led Democrats to break a filibuster in the Senate and pass the most important social legislation in a century (The Civil Rights Act of 1964) — was gone. What replaced it is the completely dysfunctional institution which practically no American has confidence in today.

More important to the right, as the business of Congress became the business of fundraising, the ideals that had brought Gingrich to power quickly got compromised. Fundraising demands pushed the Republican leadership to give up on its stated goal of shrinking the size of government, so that it could better use the power of majority status to raise campaign cash. As the Washington Post's Robert Kaiser reported in his 2009 book, "So Damn Much Money":

"Republicans took over ... determined to cut the government down to size. [But] their ambitions were soon compromised. ... Gingrich initially supported ... efforts to impose discipline on spending.... But in the face of perceived political necessity, the leadership wavered. Cutting spending was good, but Gingrich, (Dick) Armey, (Tom) DeLay, and others quickly realized that 'we have another aspect to our existence here, which is that we must use the Appropriations Committee as a resource to protect our vulnerables, because once we got into power, we wanted to stay in power.'"

The job of Congress was no longer the work of the nation. The job of Congress was to help its majority "to stay in power."

This is the legacy of Speaker Gingrich. It has been followed by Republicans and Democrats alike. It is a legacy that has done the nation great harm. And much more important than the question of how Gingrich might have profited personally from the economy of influence that he helped build is the question of whether, and how, he now intends to "change" it.

So it is perfectly true, Mr. Speaker, that you have the most "change" experience of any candidate for president. So would you use it this time to do good? Or would you continue to defend the practices that have destroyed the crown jewel of the Framers' Republic: Congress.

Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade’

Source: NYTimes

WASHINGTON — Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1996.

Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.

“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

The bureau’s findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade — including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession —had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country’s poorest citizens.

The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)
The report comes as President Obama gears up to try to pass a jobs bill, and analysts said the bleak numbers could help him make his case for urgency. But they could also be used against him by Republican opponents seeking to highlight economic shortcomings on his watch.

“This is one more piece of bad news on the economy,” said Ron Haskins, a director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “This will be another cross to bear by the administration.”

The past decade was also marked by a growing gap between the very top and very bottom of the income ladder. Median household income for the bottom tenth of the income spectrum fell by 12 percent from a peak in 1999, while the top 90th percentile dropped by just 1.5 percent. Overall, median household income adjusted for inflation declined by 2.3 percent in 2010 from the previous year, to $49,445. That was 7 percent less than the peak of $53,252 in 1999. Part of the income decline over time is because of the smaller size of the American family.

This year is not likely to be any better, economists said. Stimulus money has largely ended, and state and local governments have made deep cuts to staff and to budgets for social programs, both likely to move economically fragile families closer to poverty.

Minorities were hit hardest. Blacks experienced the highest poverty rate, at 27 percent, up from 25 percent in 2009, and Hispanics rose to 26 percent from 25 percent. For whites, 9.9 percent lived in poverty, up from 9.4 percent in 2009. Asians were unchanged at 12.1 percent.

An analysis by the Brookings Institution estimated that at the current rate, the recession will have added nearly 10 million people to the ranks of the poor by the middle of the decade.

Joblessness was the main culprit pushing more Americans into poverty, economists said.
Last year, about 48 million people ages 18 to 64 did not work even one week out of the year, up from 45 million in 2009, said Trudi Renwick, a Census official.

“Once you’ve been out of work for a long time, it’s a very difficult road to get back,” Mr. Katz said.
Median income fell across all working-age categories, but was sharpest drop was among the young working Americans, ages 15 to 24, who experienced a decline of 9 percent.

According to the Census figures, the median annual income for a male full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually unchanged, in 2010 dollars, from its level in 1973, when it was $49,065, said Sheldon Danziger, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

Those who do not have college degrees were particularly hard hit, he said. “The median, full-time male worker has made no progress on average,” Mr. Danziger said.

The recession has continued pushing 25-to-34-year-olds to move in with family and friends to save money. Of that group, nearly half were living below the poverty line, when their parents’ incomes were excluded. The poverty level for a single person under the age of 65 was $11,344.

“We’re risking a new underclass,” said Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“Young, less-educated adults, mainly men, can’t support their children and form stable families because they are jobless,” he added.

But even the period of economic growth that came before the recession did little for the middle and bottom wage earners.

Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that the period from 2001 to 2007 was the first recovery on record where the level of poverty was deeper, and median income of working-age people was lower, at the end than at the beginning.

“Even before the recession hit, a lot of people were falling behind,” he said. “This may be adding to people’s sense of urgency about the economy.”

The suburban poverty rate, at 11.8 percent, appears to be the highest since 1967, Mr. Sherman added. Last year more Americans fell into deep poverty, defined as less than half the official poverty line, or about $11,000, with the ranks of that group increasing to 20.5 million, or about 6.7 percent of the population.

Poverty has also swallowed more children, with about 16.4 million in its ranks last year, the highest numbers since 1962, according to William Frey, senior demographer at Brookings. That means 22 percent of children are in poverty, the highest percentage since 1993.

The census figures do not count noncash assistance, like food stamps and the earned-income tax
credit, and economists say that as a result they tend to overstate poverty numbers for certain groups, like children. But rises in the cost of housing, medical care and energy are not taken into account, either.

The report also said the number of uninsured Americans increased by 900,000 to 49.9 million.
Those covered by employer-based insurance continued to decline in 2010, to about 55 percent, while those with government-provided coverage continued to increase, up slightly to 31 percent.

Employer-based coverage was down from 65 percent in 2000, the report said.


Correction: September 15, 2011
An article on Wednesday about the rise in the poverty rate misstated the year in which the median income, which fell last year, was at a similar level. It was 1996, not 1997. The article also gave an incorrect figure for the number of people the Census Bureau found to be in poverty in the United States. The number is 46.2 million people, not 56.2 million.

Correction: September 17, 2011
An article on Wednesday about the rise in the poverty rate misstated the name of a research center based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It is the Institute for Research on Poverty, not the Institute for Research and Poverty.

Monday, November 21, 2011

supercommittee: Failure Is Good

Source: Paul Krugman

By next Wednesday, the so-called supercommittee, a bipartisan group of legislators, is supposed to reach an agreement on how to reduce future deficits. Barring an evil miracle — I’ll explain the evil part later — the committee will fail to meet that deadline.

If this news surprises you, you haven’t been paying attention. If it depresses you, cheer up: In this case, failure is good.

Why was the supercommittee doomed to fail? Mainly because the gulf between our two major political parties is so wide. Republicans and Democrats don’t just have different priorities; they live in different intellectual and moral universes.

In Democrat-world, up is up and down is down. Raising taxes increases revenue, and cutting spending while the economy is still depressed reduces employment. But in Republican-world, down is up. The way to increase revenue is to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and slashing government spending is a job-creation strategy. Try getting a leading Republican to admit that the Bush tax cuts increased the deficit or that sharp cuts in government spending (except on the military) would hurt the economic recovery.

Moreover, the parties have sharply different views of what constitutes economic justice.
Democrats see social insurance programs, from Social Security to food stamps, as serving the moral imperative of providing basic security to our fellow citizens and helping those in need.
Republicans have a totally different view. They may soft-pedal that view in public — in last year’s elections, they even managed to pose as defenders of Medicare — but, in private, they view the welfare state as immoral, a matter of forcing citizens at gunpoint to hand their money over to other people. By creating Social Security, declared Rick Perry in his book “Fed Up!”, F.D.R. was “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.” Does anyone doubt that he was speaking for many in his party?

So the supercommittee brought together legislators who disagree completely both about how the world works and about the proper role of government. Why did anyone think this would work?
Well, maybe the idea was that the parties would compromise out of fear that there would be a political price for seeming intransigent. But this could only happen if the news media were willing to point out who is really refusing to compromise. And they aren’t. If and when the supercommittee fails, virtually all news reports will be he-said, she-said, quoting Democrats who blame Republicans and vice versa without ever explaining the truth.

Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to “centrist” pundits who won’t admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?” Mr. Obama: “I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.” Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?”

You see, admitting that one side is willing to make concessions, while the other isn’t, would tarnish one’s centrist credentials. And the result is that the G.O.P. pays no price for refusing to give an inch.

So the supercommittee will fail — and that’s good.

For one thing, history tells us that the Republican Party would renege on its side of any deal as soon as it got the chance. Remember, the U.S. fiscal outlook was pretty good in 2000, but, as soon as Republicans gained control of the White House, they squandered the surplus on tax cuts and unfunded wars. So any deal reached now would, in practice, be nothing more than a deal to slash Social Security and Medicare, with no lasting improvement in the deficit.

Also, any deal reached now would almost surely end up worsening the economic slump. Slashing spending while the economy is depressed destroys jobs, and it’s probably even counterproductive in terms of deficit reduction, since it leads to lower revenue both now and in the future. And current projections, like those of the Federal Reserve, suggest that the economy will remain depressed at least through 2014. Better to have no deal than a deal that imposes spending cuts in the next few years.

But don’t we eventually have to match spending and revenue? Yes, we do. But the decision about how to do that isn’t about accounting. It’s about fundamental values — and it’s a decision that should be made by voters, not by some committee that allegedly transcends the partisan divide.
Eventually, one side or the other of that divide will get the kind of popular mandate it needs to resolve our long-run budget issues. Until then, attempts to strike a Grand Bargain are fundamentally destructive. If the supercommittee fails, as expected, it will be time to celebrate.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Rep. Deutch Introduces OCCUPIED Constitutional Amendment To Ban Corporate Money In Politics

Source: ThinkProgress

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) is tackling corporate money in politics head on.

In one of the greatest signs yet that the 99 Percenters are having an impact, Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, today introduced an amendment that would ban corporate money in politics and end corporate personhood once and for all.

Deutch’s amendment, called the Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy (OCCUPIED) Amendment, would overturn the Citizens United decision, re-establishing the right of Congress and the states to regulate campaign finance laws, and to effectively outlaw the ability of for-profit corporations to contribute to campaign spending.

“No matter how long protesters camp out across America, big banks will continue to pour money into shadow groups promoting candidates more likely to slash Medicaid for poor children than help families facing foreclosure,” said Deutch in a statement provided to ThinkProgress. “No matter how strongly Ohio families fight for basic fairness for workers, the Koch Brothers will continue to pour millions into campaigns aimed at protecting the wealthiest 1%. No matter how fed up seniors in South Florida are with an agenda that puts oil subsidies ahead of Social Security and Medicare, corporations will continue to fund massive publicity campaigns and malicious attack ads against the public interest. Americans of all stripes agree that for far too long, corporations have occupied Washington and drowned out the voices of the people. I introduced the OCCUPIED Amendment because the days of corporate control of our democracy. It is time to return the nation’s capital and our democracy to the people.”

Warning! Inequality May Be Hazardous to Your Growth

Source: iMFdirect

Many of us have been struck by the huge increase in income inequality in the United States in the past thirty years. The rich have gotten much richer, while just about everyone else has had very modest income growth.

Some dismiss inequality and focus instead on overall growth—arguing, in effect, that a rising tide lifts all boats. But assume we have a thousand boats representing all the households in the United States, with boat length proportional to family income. In the late 1970s, the average boat was a 12 foot canoe and the biggest yacht was 250 feet long. Thirty years later, the average boat is a slightly roomier 15 footer, while the biggest yacht, at over 1100 feet, would dwarf the Titanic!  

When a handful of yachts become ocean liners while the rest remain lowly canoes, something is seriously amiss.  

In fact, inequality matters. And it matters in all corners of the globe. You need look no further than the role it might have played in the historic transformation underway in the Middle East.

The increase in U.S. income inequality in recent decades is strikingly similar to the increase in the 1920s. In both cases there was a boom in the financial sector, poor people borrowed a lot, and it all ended in huge financial crises. Did the recent financial crisis result somehow from the increase in inequality?

Some time ago, we became interested in long periods of high growth (“growth spells”) and what keeps them going. The initial thought was that sometimes crises happen when a “growth spell” comes to an end, as perhaps occurred with Japan in the 1990s.

We approached the problem as a medical researcher might think of life expectancy, looking at age, weight, gender, smoking habits, etc. We do something similar, looking for what might bring long “growth spells” to an end by focusing on factors like political institutions, health and education, macroeconomic instability, debt, trade openness, and so on.

Somewhat to our surprise, income inequality stood out in our analysis as a key driver of the 
duration of “growth spells”.

We found that high “growth spells” were much more likely to end in countries with less equal income distributions. The effect is large. For example, we estimate that closing, say, half the inequality gap between Latin America and emerging Asia would more than double the expected duration of a “growth spell”. Inequality seemed to make a big difference almost no matter what other variables were in the model or exactly how we defined a “growth spell”. Inequality is of course not the only thing that matters but, from our analysis, it clearly belongs in the “pantheon” of well-established growth factors such as the quality of political institutions or trade openness.

While income distribution within a given country is pretty stable most of the time, it sometimes moves a lot. In addition to the United States in recent decades, we’ve also seen changes in China and many other countries. Brazil reduced inequality significantly from the early 1990s through a focused set of transfer programs that have become a model for many around the world. A reduction of the magnitude achieved by Brazil could—albeit with uncertainty about the precise effect—increase the expected length of a typical “growth spell” by about 50 percent.

The upshot? It is a big mistake to separate analyses of growth and income distribution. A rising tide is still critical to lifting all boats. The implication of our analysis is that helping to raise the lowest boats may actually help to keep the tide rising!

The immediate role for policy, however, is less clear. More inequality may shorten growth duration, but poorly designed efforts to reduce inequality could be counterproductive. If these distort incentives and thereby undermine growth, they can do more harm than good to the poor.

Still, there may be some “win-win” policies, such as better-targeted subsidies, better access to education for the poor that improves equality of economic opportunity, and active labor market measures that promote employment.

When there are short-run trade-offs between the effects of policies on growth and income distribution, the evidence in our paper doesn’t in itself say what to do. But our analysis should tilt the balance towards the long-run benefits—including for growth—of reducing inequality. Over longer horizons, reduced inequality and sustained growth may be two sides of the same coin.

Stepping further back, all this reminds us of the 1980s debt crises and the resulting “lost decade” of slow growth and painful adjustment. That experience brought home the fact that sustainable economic reform is possible only when the benefits are widely shared. In the face of the current global economic turmoil and the need for difficult economic adjustment and reform in many countries, it would be better if these old lessons could be remembered rather than relearned.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

The supercommittee’s health spending paradox, in three charts

Source: Sarah Kliff via Washington Post

As every health care interest group girds for potential deficit reduction cuts, the Medical Imaging Trade Association sent around these charts to make the case that they’re not the bad guy on costs. They show that the use of medical imaging and associated costs has decreased over the past few years:



That jives with larger trends across Medicare, where cost growth has slowed in recent years, at least partially due to this drop in utilization. Here’s how the S&P Health Economics Index charts it:



Medicare is, on average, seeing beneficiaries access less medical care than it has historically. There’s a bit of debate over what’s driving this trend; some speculate it’s the rough economy, where seniors are less willing to pay for medical services, while others contend that doctors have gotten better at coordinating care. Either way, utilization looks to be dropping. And that begs the question: If seniors are using less health care, how do we end up with this chart?



How does use of medical care go down, but federal health care spending go up? It’s largely wrapped up in demographics: A wave of baby boomers have begun aging into the program, expanding its size. AARP projects that Medicare enrollment will hit 79 million in 2030, more than double enrollment in 2000. So even if each patient uses fewer medical services, in aggregate, they still consume more medical care than if the entitlement program had to support fewer elderly patients.

In a lot of ways, this speaks to how some of the health spending challenges are outside of the supercommittee’s power. A few options might address this in roundabout ways, such as cutting doctor reimbursements or raising Medicare’s eligibility age (which raises issues about cost shifting). But the underlying challenge - that our population is getting a lot older - isn’t one that the 12-member panel can address with new policies.

What caused the financial crisis? The Big Lie goes viral.

A Big Lie is so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. There are many examples: Claims that Earth is not warming, or that evolution is not the best thesis we have for how humans developed. Those opposed to stimulus spending have gone so far as to claim that the infrastructure of the United States is just fine, Grade A (not D, as the we discussed last month), and needs little repair.

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault.

Read the whole story in the Washington Post

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

VIDEO: Announcing United Republic & Get Money Out

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

MoveToAmend should try to get a grant from Arnold Hiatt / UnitedRepublic

Here's part of an email I got today from Rootstrikers (Lawrence Lessig):

I am writing with some great news about Rootstrikers, Change Congress, and the Fix Congress First projects.

Over the past few months, a number of very significant funders of reform have decided that enough is enough. Led by Arnold Hiatt, former Chairman of Stride Rite, they have decided to form national powerhouse to advance sweeping reforms.

This is fantastic news for the movement, and for me. United Republic, the new organization, launches today at unitedrepublic.org, with a mandate to enact and inspire an extraordinary range of new and powerful work. We are also merging with the 250,000 members of MSNBC's host Dylan Ratigan's “Get Money Out” campaign.

United Republic will be led by one of the most effective political organizers I have known – Josh Silver, who ran the campaign in Arizona to get public funding enacted, and founded media reform group Free Press.

Here’s a good blurb about Arnold Hiatt:

In 1996, Stride Rite founder Arnold Hiatt tried to inspire then President Bill Clinton to make it a priority for the Democrats of that day. Hiatt was then the number-two largest contributor to Democratic candidates He was invited to a White House dinner with 30 other large funders so that the President could try to persuade them to help retire the Party's 1996 campaign debt. Each guest was asked to give the President his or her advice for the next four years. Hiatt was the last to speak.

He began by evoking Franklin Roosevelt, whom Clinton, Hiatt knew, admired greatly. In 1939, Hiatt reminded the assembled funders, Roosevelt worked hard to convince a reluctant nation to enter a war to save democracy. This, Hiatt insisted, was just what Bill Clinton had to do again -- to convince a reluctant nation to enter a war to save democracy. But this war would require no tanks or battleships. It would instead be the war to end private funding of public elections, to enact full funding for congressional elections, so that Americans would no longer believe as the vast majority even then believed that money buys results in Washington. It would be a war against interests that had corrupted the democratic process in America; a war against the very interest sitting in that room with Clinton.

When Hiatt finished, the room was silent. And the only published account of that evening reports a President impatient with his reformer-funder. Clinton, one guest that evening recounts, "effectively slashed Hiatt to pieces." "The president put this guy down so unbelievably. He didn't even do it graciously. He just took Arnold and phooom, like he would some junior aide who had made a really dumb mistake." Hiatt doesn't remember Clinton being that harsh, but he does recall feeling like a "skunk at a lawn party." (Source: Wiki)

At the United Re:Public website, there’s a tab for Get A Grant:


Ben Manski told us that MoveToAmend was going to try to get some funding. Here’s our chance!!!

Is money's deep role in politics the root of our woes?

Excerpts from: David Gergen via CNN

This past Sunday's "60 Minutes" and the latest issue of Newsweek bring back to the fore the complicated issue of money and politics. Both highlight a new book by Peter Schweizer, "Throw Them All Out," which rails against what Schweizer calls "honest graft."

Schweizer charges that leaders from both houses of Congress have been drawing on insider knowledge to make money in the stock market -- a practice that is banned in American industry and restricted in other sectors of government.  And although he is a conservative at the Hoover Institution, Schweizer is an equal opportunity scourge, attacking both Democratic and Republican leaders.

This controversy underscores a deepening sense that money plays far too large a role in politics. If anything unites the tea party and the Occupy Wall Street protesters, surely it is the sense that the system is rigged in favor of big shots in Washington and against little guys back home. Money is at the heart of it.

A new book that should receive far more attention makes an even more sweeping and thoroughly researched case against money in politics -- "Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress -- and a Plan to Stop It,"  by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig.

His argument is wide-ranging and impossible to do justice to in a brief column. But a few of the most striking facts he marshals are worth recognizing. Among them:

-- The cost of getting elected to Congress has exploded: from 1974 to 2008, Lessig notes, the average cost of a re-election campaign ballooned from $56,000 to more than $1.3 million, a more than twentyfold increase that far outpaces inflation.

-- Fundraising is a constant concern: Candidates have to spend between 30% and 70% of their time raising money. (Lobbyists, however can ease this pressure through many kinds of what Lessig calls "legislative subsidies" -- advice, research, support, and most of all, campaign cash.)

-- The revolving door between Congress and lobbyists is spinning faster: In the 1970s, just 3% of retiring members of Congress went into lobbying. But by 2004, in the previous seven years more than half of all senators and 42 percent of House members had made the switch.

-- The incentives for lobbying are clear. A 2009 paper found, for example, that firms get between $6 and $20 back for every $1 they invest in lobbying for tax benefits.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

GetMoneyOut.org is merging with United Re:Public

Source: Dylan Ratigan

We live in a system of legalized bribery. That's why Dylan Ratigan and Jimmy Williams started GetMoneyOut.org. Today, they're merging Get Money Out into a group called United Republic, who noticed the same thing we all did – our government is bought.

Joining Jimmy Williams are the two principals of United Republic: Nick Penniman and Josh Silver. I’ve known Nick for years. He and I first met when he was running an investigative journalism unit for the Huffington Post, exposing the powers behind the financial crisis. Josh, who I’ve recently gotten to know and like, is the former founder and CEO of Free Press, the nation’s largest media reform group.

United Republic is forging a bigger, bolder movement to end our current, corrupt way of financing politics in this country. Get Money Out will be their first campaign. And they have already forged an alliance with Lawrence Lessig’s Rootstrikers. Countless other organizations, from the People for the American Way to the Committee for Economic Development, to the Goo Goo Dolls, are with us.

See website: United Re:Public

Monday, November 14, 2011

Amend the Constitution and Overturn Citizens United

Source: Huffington Post

Co-authored with U.S. Senators Dick Durbin, Jeff Merkley, Chuck Schumer, and Sheldon Whitehouse

Now more than ever, the American people are showing just how fed up they are with the explosion of big corporate influence over our politics. And now more than ever, the Supreme Court is ignoring its own precedents to unleash a torrent of corporate and special interest money into our elections.

We must put the American people back in charge of our democracy. If the Supreme Court refuses to allow Congress and individual states to regulate the role of money in our elections, we must amend the Constitution to change that -- and together, we are beginning the amendment process this month.

Passing a constitutional amendment is no easy feat -- we've only passed 27 in our entire history, and powerful corporate interests are already lining up against us. But an incredible people-powered campaign to restore our democracy is already mounting, unlike anything we have ever seen.

Since launching our petition at ReverseCitizensUnited.com yesterday, over 50,000 activists have already stood up to demand this constitutional amendment, which would allow Congress and the states to enact common-sense campaign finance reforms.

If you've read this far, please take a moment to sign our petition, too.

Historically, Congress and state legislatures have established contribution limits, disclosure requirements, and other rules to limit the influence of special interests in elections and ensure that government works for the American people, not powerful corporations.

Then, in last year's controversial Citizens United vs. FEC decision, Republican appointees on the Supreme Court overturned prior precedent and struck down Congress' sensible regulations on corporate spending in political campaigns.

A key solution to address the root cause of this problem is to amend the Constitution to make it absolutely clear to the Supreme Court and the special interests that Congress and state governments have the power to limit the flow of corporate money into campaigns.

Our constitutional amendment will stop the growing corrosive influence of big business on our elections and on our government, but it won't pass unless the American people speak out and demand it.

These historic times call for extraordinary measures to ensure our government remains of the people, by the people and for the people, not just powerful interests with the deepest pockets.

Thank you for standing with us to return our elections to the hands of everyday citizens, rather than the special interests.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Cenk Uygur of WolfPAC interviews David Cobb of MoveToAmend at Occupy Oakland

Electoral Reform Act of 2012

Electoral Reform Act of 2012 Video: YouTube

Electoral Reform Act of 2012: Text

Senators Introduce Constitutional Amendment To Overturn Citizens United

Source: ThinkProgress

One of the overarching themes of the 99 Percent Movement is that our democracy is too corrupted by corporate special interests. This corruption was worsened last year by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed for huge new unregulated flows of corporate political spending.

Yesterday, six Democratic senators — Tom Udall (NM), Michael Bennett (CO), Tom Harkin (IA), Dick Durbin (IL), Chuck Schumer (NY), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), and Jeff Merkely (OR) — introduced a constitutional amendment that would effectively overturn the Citizens United case and restore the ability of Congress to properly regulate the campaign finance system.

The amendment as filed resolves that both Congress and individual states shall have the power to regulate both the amount of contributions made directly to candidates for elected office and “the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.”

“By limiting the influence of big money in politics, elections can be more about the voters and their voices, not big money donors and their deep pockets,” said Harkin of the amendment. “We need to have a campaign finance structure that limits the influence of the special interests and restores confidence in our democracy. This amendment goes to the heart of that effort.”

Passing this amendment or any other amendment to the Constitution is an arduous process. There are two ways to propose a constitutional amendment. Either two-thirds of Congress can agree to an amendment or there can be a constitutional amendment called by two-thirds of state legislatures (this path has never been taken). In order to ratify an amendment, three-quarters of state legislatures must agree or three-quarters of states must have individual constitutional conventions that agree.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone Else More Than Tripled In Last Three Decades

Excerpts from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP)

Based on CBO data:

  • In 2007, the share of after-tax income going to the top 1 percent hit its highest level (17.1 percent) since 1979, while the share going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level during this period (14.1 percent).
  • Between 1979 and 2007, average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281 percent after adjusting for inflation — an increase in income of $973,100 per household — compared to increases of 25 percent ($11,200 per household) for the middle fifth of households and 16 percent ($2,400 per household) for the bottom fifth (see Figure 1).
  • If all groups’ after-tax incomes had grown at the same percentage rate over the 1979-2007 period, middle-income households would have received an additional $13,042 in 2007 and families in the bottom fifth would have received an additional $6,010.
  • In 2007, the average household in the top 1 percent had an income of $1.3 million, up $88,800 just from the prior year; this $88,800 gain is well above the total 2007 income of the average middle-income household ($55,300). [1]

Income Gains at Top Have Outpaced All Other Groups Since 1979

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Almost all our national debt is from the Republicans

Could $12 Trillion Really Be Right?  Absolutely!
See Proof with simple calculation and documentation below.

-Reagan-Bush-National-Debt

The debt went up during Clinton's years only because of $2.2 Trillion interest on the Reagan-Bush debt. Otherwise Clinton would have paid off most the remaining WWII debt.


Complete Proof of the $12 Trillion Republican Debt

Just below you can see the calculation and the documentation links for the Reagan-Bushes $12 Trillion ($12,049 Billion) national debt as of September 30, 2010. You can download this as an excel spreadsheet by clicking: Download as XLS.

Their debt has 4 parts, but the bulk of it is calculated from 4 inputs (yellow and tan) that you can check with the color coded links to the treasury at the bottom. This will verify the $3.4 Trillion Reagan-Bush debt and the $6.1 Trillion G.W. Bush debt. Together that's $9.5 Trillion. Now some of G.W. Bush's debt is really interest on the Reagan-Bush debt, so he is not as bad as he looks, and Reagan-Bush are lot worse because of all their interest. You can see that in the graph above.

Interest is calculated on the second sheet (tab at bottom). But you know that 17 years of compound interest on 3.4 Trillion is going to add a lot. So a $12 Trillion total is very believable, and if you want to spend 10 minutes you can check it easily.

And if you think Congress did it, you better have a look here. Under Reagan and Bush-I, Congress actually made the debt a tiny bit smaller than what both presidents asked for. And G.W. Bush passed his supply-side tax cuts with a Republican Congress. There is just no wiggle room. The Republicans did it.


Reagan Told Us How to Track the Debt

October 30, 2010. From Reagan's first speech as President: "A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high. The interest on the public debt this year we know will be over $90 billion, and unless we change the proposed spending for the fiscal year beginning October..."

Well he changed it all right, and when he left office the stack of $1000 bills was 191 miles high.

So what did Reagan tell us about calculating his debt? (1) Start on October 1, 1981, and (2) Don't forget the interest costs of the debt.

October 1, 1981 is the beginning of his first budget year (fiscal year). He's right. He is not responsible for Carter's last budget year that runs until Oct. 1. But Reagan is responsible for his own last budget year, which ran until Sept. 30 1989. That's eight years, which is right for two terms. Reagan was right and fair about this, and that's what the spreadsheet above does.

And, like he said, the interest on the debt matters. And since he and Bush-I left us $3.4 Trillion of extra debt when Bush-I's last budget year ended on Sept. 30, 1993, that debt started collecting interest, and it still is. Clinton, G.W. Bush and Obama are not responsible for that interest. So the spreadsheet actually over-states G.W. Bushes debt because quite a bit of that was interest on the Reagan-Bush-I debt. But shifting that responsibility to Reagan-Bush (as the graph shows) does not affect our total for Reagan and the Bushes.

G.W. Bush took control of the budget on Oct. 1, 2001, when the debt was $5.8 Trillion and his last budget year ended Oct. 1, 2009, with the debt at $11.9 Trillion. During that last year, Obama got a stimulus bill passed, but that's the only significant change he was able to make in federal spending. (You can see it subtracted above.) Spending the stimulus money was slow, so only $36 Billion ($0.036 Trillion) contributed to Bush's deficits. So instead of raising the debt $6.10 Trillion, he only raised it $6.06 Trillion.

About $0.2 Trillion is still left from WWII, and Obama has $1.25 Trillion that's his. Of course half of that is from the Bush-II tax cuts and most of the rest is because of the Great Recession.



About the Graph

On the Graph above, the Reagan+Bush debt is the gap between the red line and Clinton's green line at the bottom. As it shows, if America had not had to pay the Reagan-Bush interest, Clinton's budget balancing would have nearly paid off the remaining debt from WWII--and we would have been in fabulous shape when the Great Recession struck.

Source: ZFacts