Category Archives: Democracy and Community

North Carolina State Senator Calls ‘Moral Monday’ Protesters ‘Moral Morons’

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“The appeal for each Moral Monday has been the same: urging legislators to govern for the good of the whole, rather than for the wealthy.”
— Rev. William Barber.

Since April, North Carolina citizens have been gathering at the state capital in Raleigh for “Moral Monday” rallies and acts of civil disobedience to protest the the cruel things Republican legislators are doing to the people of the state. This week, despite tornado warnings, more than 1,400 protesters gathered for the sixth week’s protests, and more than 80 were arrested, including one reporter clearly wearing news credentials. A week ago Monday, 151 were arrested. Arrests for this and recent Moral Mondays now total 388.

This video is from the June 3 Moral Monday rally:

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Austerity Is Dead – So Can We Fix The Infrastructure NOW?

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You might have heard that “austerity is dead.” You’ll certainly be hearing it, and with good reason: the U.S. deficit is down more than 50 percent from what President Bush left behind, projections of the rise in medical costs that drove future deficits are way down, the “intellectual foundation” that justified the push for cutting government has collapsed (as if it ever existed), and the European experiment has shown that budget cuts really just make things worse – much, much worse – and cause misery and suffering to boot. Meanwhile we have two real problems to worry about: unemployment and crumbling infrastructure. So can we hire people to fix the infrastructure now?

Economists Had Learned How To Revive A Falling Economy

Before the financial collapse economists had nailed down the way to get out of an economic crisis: Government has to spend to pick up the drop in demand caused by businesses and consumers cutting back. This investment into the economy causes businesses to hire again, which helps people to be able to spend again, and after things recover the resulting growth pays off that investment.

The Great Depression in particular had taught us that a downward spiral could develop in which a drop in demand caused businesses to cut back, lay people off and/or cut wages, and of course this caused people to have to cut back, which meant demand dropped even more so businesses laid off more people, so demand dropped more, etc.

The FDR administration tried various things to stop this spiral and found that programs that injected money into the economy, such as unemployment benefits and other assistance, direct hiring, investments in infrastructure, etc., could turn things around. And then after things turned around we had all that new, modern infrastructure driving continuing economic growth!

We also learned the hard way. In 1937 the government cut back too soon, and the economy sank into recession again. Then World War II came along, the government spent massively, and the economy grew so much that the ratio of debt to the size of the economy shrank dramatically. We had it figured out.

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A Better Way To Tax The Multinationals

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We the People put together a system here with schools, universities, scientific research, courts, a stable financial/monetary system, infrastructure like roads, dams, airports, and all the other components of a (used-to-be) prospering economy. That takes money, and naturally we expect the beneficiaries of all of that investment to give back into the system. But then the beneficiaries of that system figure out ways to get around paying back – and the larger and wealthier they are the more ways they find to give back even less.

Jeeze, look at what we learned about Apple!

It is time for Americans to change to a tax system that really gets corporations to pay their fair share – and stop letting them move their taxable income all over the world.

Who Pays Corporate Taxes

Any discussion of corporate taxes should begin with an understanding of what (who, actually) we are talking about. This chart shows who owns the corporations:

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The June Fight Over Student Loans

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Today President Obama is joining college students at a White House event launching a new push to keep student loan rates from doubling in July. Among the various plans offered, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plan is the most affordable for students, while the Republican plan tries to “make money” off of students using fluctuating “market rates.”

Student Loan Rates Set To Double

Student loan rates for more than 7.4 million students with federal “Stafford loans” are scheduled to double July 1 from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent if nothing is done. The amount of student loan debt is massive. U.S. students currently owe almost $1.1 trillion in student loan debt, and this amount is increasing at a rate of about $2,853.88 per second. This amount is greater than total credit card debt currently owed. Thirty-five percent of people under 30 are near default on their student loans, and approximately 32 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 49.

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Just Stop It: This Is NOT A Good Economy. We Can Fix It.

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Recent stories appearing in “mainstream” opinion-leader outlets would have you think that things with the economy are going great – if you didn’t know better (and they don’t). The thing is that outside of the geographic areas and cultural circles these opinion leaders inhabit, everyone knows better. Especially “Old Economy Steven.”

better than his kids

The old economy collapsed because it wasn’t sustainable, and to put that another way, “unsustainable” means it couldn’t be sustained. And it wasn’t. It didn’t work then for 99 percent of us and it won’t work now. We can’t go back to that.

“Good News”

The economy is slowly improving. Car sales are rising, housing has “bottomed” and started back up (and is in absolute bubble-mode again in some areas), and we’re actually seeing about as many new jobs as new people entering the economy! But that’s it. And this has taken how many years?

These small gains are enough for our media opinion-elite to declare good times are rolling. All around us we are hearing that we are out of the woods. For example, at The Washington Post Neil Irwin and Ylan Q. Mui wrote Tuesday that the sequester’s austerity (which has only partially kicked in so far) hasn’t really held back the booming economy. In “The economy is holding up surprisingly well in a year of austerity,”

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Is IRS “Scandal” Hype An Attempt To Stop Investigations Into Blatantly Illegal Campaign Activity?

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Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a 501(c)(4) group. This special tax status allows the organization to hide its donors from the public. But this also means it is prohibited by law from engaging in political activites. Founded with the support of the Koch brothers, AFP ran more than $30 million of 2012 election attack ads targeting President Obama.

Just HOW political were these ads? Political enough that the Chair of the Repubican Party released a statement accompanying the announcement of these ads. From Americans For Prosperity Ad Blasts Obama For Hope And Change Failure,

“Four years ago Americans entrusted that President Obama would truly bring ‘Hope and Change’ to Washington,” RNC Chair Reince Priebus said in a statement accompanying the new ads. “It is clear that he has failed to live up to his promises and has left our country with a mountain of debt and a health care bill that has cost the taxpayers trillions.”

A bit more on this from Tobacco giant funded conservative nonprofits, bt the Center for Public Integrity,

These groups, which obtain their nonprofit status because they say their “primary purpose” is not political activity, are generally under no legal obligation to detail their funding sources. Super PACs and other recognized political committees, by contrast, must report the names of their contributors who give more than $200 and the amounts they give.

Yet during the 2012 election cycle, various social welfare nonprofit organizations, emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in January 2010, spent more than $250 million to promote or attack federal political candidates, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The source of most of that money remains a mystery.

This is blatant, flat-out, unquestionable illegal campaign spending.

Maybe THIS has something to do with why the right is drumming up a false “scandal” claiming that the IRS “targeted” conservative groups. This is about scaring the IRS away from doing its job.

TPP: A Deregulation Treaty Not A Trade Treaty

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The upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is using a process that is rigged from the start. It is not being negotiated by governments for the benefit of their people, it is being negotiated by executives (or future executives/lobbyists currently in government) largely for the benefit of the giant corporations they serve. The process has these giant corporations “in the loop” but groups citizens, working people, consumers, the environment, human rights groups and especially democracy are not part of the process. That can only go one way: if you don’t have a seat at the table you are on the table — the meal.

Chile’s TPP Negotiator Quits, Warns Citizens

Rodrigo Contreras, Chile’s lead TPP negotiator recently up and quit to warn people of the dangers this agreement poses to everyone except the giant multinational corporations. In The New Chessboard, (English translation) Contreras warns that the TPP is solidifying multinational corporate control over the Internet, copyrights, patents (especially drug patents), and in particular warns that the giant financial interests are solidifying their current control over the regulatory process. He writes that this will block countries that are trying to “restore the space for applying financial safeguards. In these circumstances it does not makes sense to further liberalize capital flows, depriving us of legitimate tools to safeguard financial stability.”

In particular Contreras warns that smaller countries face a threat from this agreement’s solidifying of the con trol of the giant multinationals, concluding,

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Upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership Looks Like Corporate Takeover

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You will be hearing a lot about the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. TPP’s negotiations are being held in secret with details kept secret even from our Congress. But giant corporations are in the loop.

TPP is a “trade” agreement between several Pacific-rim countries that is actually about much more than just trade. It will be sold as a trade agreement (because everyone knows that “trade” is good) but much of it appears to be (from what we know) a corporate end-run around things We the People want to do to reign in the giant corporations — like Wall Street regulation, environmental regulation and corporate taxation.

One-Sided Process

The TPP process appears to be set up to push corporate interests over other interests. The TPP is being negotiated in secret, so what we know about it comes from leaked documents. Even our Congress is being kept out of the loop. But 600 corporate representatives are in the loop while representatives of groups that protect working people, human, political and civil rights and our environment are largely not in the loop.

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What Does It Mean To Be An “American” Corporation?

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What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be an American corporation? An article in the Wall Street Journal the other day should trigger questions like these.

WSJ: Domestic-Based Multinationals Hiring Overseas,

Multinational companies based in the U.S. boosted their global work forces in 2011 almost entirely by hiring workers overseas, underscoring the slow growth in the U.S. job market.

… The paltry hiring at home reflects where multinational companies are focusing their attention. Stronger economic growth in overseas markets in Asia and Latin America is driving their expansion, reinforcing their shift toward cheaper labor or closer access to customers.

The U.S. parents of multinational firms account for about one-fifth of total private U.S. employment. Since 1999, employment by U.S. multinationals is down by 1.1 million inside the U.S., while it is up by 3.8 million overseas.

The hiring by American companies is not happening in the U.S. At the same time these companies are holding $1.7 trillion of profits outside of the country, away from their own shareholders and our economy to avoid their taxes, while pushing to dramatically lower the taxes they pay us – and even to get out of paying any taxes at all on money they make outside of the country!

Why Do We Have Corporations?

Why do We the People even have laws that allow corporations and give them special benefits? The answer obviously is for our common benefit — why else would we do it? The corporate form of a business enables the company to easily obtain capital from investors, in order to accomplish large-scale projects that benefit us. To encourage this we give these entities special privileges. For example, we limit liability which means the investors are not held liable for the actions of the company – they won’t lose more than their investment if the company gets sued for some reason. We provide a system that helps them obtain financing, insurance, market liquidity and all kinds of things to help those investors get a good return on their money.

Benefit: We the People want railroads, but it takes a lot of money to build and operate a railroad. And our system wants private companies to do the work of building and operating railroads instead us just doing it ourselves. So we set up a way for a private company to gather investment from lots of people.

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Will Social Security Cuts Be The Democratic Party’s “New Coke?”

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All the smartest people in the executive suites just knew that the taste of Coca-Cola needed “reform.” Rival Pepsi was advertising to the “New Generation” and Coke’s executives came to believe their product wasn’t what the “cool” people wanted to drink. Everyone they talked to at the executive-level strategery seminars, and all the other executive-level geniuses they spoke with daily agreed. They were the elites, and they all knew better than their old-fashioned, uncool customers what the company needed. So they all drank the Kool-Aid and came up with “New Coke.” We all know what happened next. (Hint: it was bad.)

It couldn’t have gone better for Pepsi if Pepsi had placed those executives there themselves.

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Jobs

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Everyone knows that during the depression the government hired unemployed people to work on the infrastructure, parks, etc., and isn’t doing that this time.

Back then We the People were in charge, at least to more of an extent than today. So We the People did things to make our lives better. We the People doing things together to make our lives better is called democracy.

Now government just makes the lives of the wealthiest even better. This is plutocracy.