American Dream?

Was the dream that anyone could be president, own a home, and go to college?

Anyone who can raise a billion dollars can be president. Anyone who can raise a billion dollars can not risk alienating wealthy donors or corporations. Therefore anyone can be president who can raise the money and promise not to change the upside down tax structure that benefits the wealthy and corporations. This leads me to believe that whatever the American Dream was, it is becoming more unattainable for more people.
Homes are declining in value but increasingly they are being bought by investors paying cash. Housing is directly related to your income. If you do not have the income you can not buy the house. With incomes falling people can afford less expensive homes so the market will adjust prices downward, forcing more people to “walk away” from their property. The other wrinkle that concerns me about home ownership is that so much of the mortgage servicing industry and banks are under serious suspicion of illegal and or unethical practices. Even though you pay your bills it still can affect you adversely. One scam was the use of a company called, MERS and its avowed purpose was to replace the time honored system of public recording for mortgage and trust deed transfers, with an electronic registry that its bank members would voluntarily use. As we are learning in bankruptcy courts the deed to your home may have never been filed with your county clerk. Greed and scams have replaced solid, time honored business practices.
When I attended the University of Illinois- Chicago in 1973 the cost of tuition was about $700 per year. I worked, part time, in the grocery store and made $9.00 per hour with full health insurance coverage. It was a union store. I could afford to study liberal arts. I took a lot of courses that interested me and helped me grow personally and educationally. I eventually graduated from De Paul University, a private school, with no debt. I worked as a draftsman, which was not a “college level” career. Today the cost of college is prohibitive.
A liberal arts education did not lead me to a career in my field. It was very valuable to me but I question the wisdom of a life of indenture for a diploma that is now very common. We often hear that college graduates earn more than high school graduates, but those statistics are misleading. They compare skilled workers to unskilled workers. The true test is to compare a BA in English to a journeyman electrician or plumber.
The American Dream came about because of government’s active support of unions and huge deficit spending during and after WWII. We are heading in the opposite direction and we will see a corresponding shrinkage in our economy. There will be more completion for jobs, good or bad, and a continuing crumbling of the nation’s infrastructure. Through into the mix the trend to allowing people to carry guns in schools, work place, and probably libraries. Additionally health care is becoming something few can afford. Poverty among the elder will rise. The American Dream I grew up with is dead and turning into a neo-victorian hell for many people. Or it is the dawn of a great new day, but we won’t know until we have drunk the Kool-Aid.

Assault on Unions in Wisconsin

This is a post from The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-assault-on-unions-in-wisconsin/28647)

The Assault on Unions in Wisconsin

February 18, 2011, 3:29 pm

By Richard Kahlenberg

Union membership has declined precipitously in the U.S., in some measure because private-sector employers can fire employees for trying to organize a union and pay only small fines as a cost of doing business. Public-sector employers, by contrast, rarely if ever terminate employees for organizing, and membership has skyrocketed among teachers, police, firefighters, and some higher-education employees.

Now, a number of Republican governors are striking back and seeking to curtail, or even end, collective bargaining rights for public employees, including those in higher education. The epicenter is Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker is using the budget crisis as a pretext not just to trim pay and benefits for public employees, but also to constrain the right of collective bargaining itself.

Wisconsin, the first state in the union to provide for collective-bargaining rights to public employees in 1959, is now, ironically, trying to move in the direction of states which prohibit or severely limit the rights of public employees to bargain collectively. Most of those states are in the former Confederacy.

In Wisconsin, teachers, professors, graduate students, and other public employees have been marching in Madison to oppose efforts by Gov. Walker to limit collective bargaining to wages. (For University of Wisconsin faculty and staff, the bill would strip collective-bargaining rights entirely.)

The press is painting the battle as one between Democrats, who are helped by unions, and Republicans, who want to crush a key Democratic constituency; and politics is undeniably a huge motivating force in this debate. But on the merits, Walker’s proposal is flawed for several reasons.

For one thing, economists will note that in order to attract a given quality of candidate, the entire package of compensation is what’s relevant. If unions can no longer bargain for superior benefits, in the form of pensions or health care, government will either have to raise wages to make the entire package more attractive, or will attract a weaker pool of candidates.

For another, severely limiting the scope of collective bargaining to wages undercuts another important function of unions: to democratize the workplace by increasing workers’ voices on important issues. As the late Albert Shanker, the head of the American Federation of Teachers noted, conservatives who want to limit the scope of bargaining to issues like wages shrewdly put teachers’ unions in a box. Teachers and their unions also care about curriculum, and class size, and discipline codes, and equality in school funding. But when conservatives force them only to bargain over issues like wages, it makes teachers look as if they’re selfish and only care about money.

In the political debate in Wisconsin, both sides are taking some cheap shots. As Jack Stripling notes in The Chronicle, some professors have made a point of noting that Gov. Walker lacks a college degree, a tactic unlikely to win over members of the public—more than two-thirds of whom also lack four-year degrees. Gov. Walker, meanwhile, is cynically pitting private employees against public employees. He told a radio station that private manufacturing plant workers who “don’t have pensions” are not sympathetic to public employees who do. It appears not to occur to Walker that instead of leveling down, private employees could also unionize in order to win decent health-care and pension benefits.

Harold Meyerson, writing in the Washington Post, compared Wisconsin to Egypt and Scott Walker to Hosni Mubarak. There are, of course, enormous differences between the democratically-elected governor of Wisconsin and the deposed Egyptian dictator, but there are some interesting parallels. Wisconsin is witnessing, as Egypt did, a powerful alliance of students and workers. And the “assault on unions,” as Barack Obama properly characterized the legislation in Wisconsin, eats away at our democracy by undercutting the one viable sector of what was once a thriving American labor movement. The fight in Wisconsin, in other words, is about much more than health and pension benefits, as important as those are. It’s about the continuing vitality of the one force in American democracy that can provide a check on corporate power, and at the same time can give employees democratic voice in the workplace.

As one commentator ominously noted, “if it can happen in Wisconsin, it can happen everywhere.”

Squirm You Damn Republicans

I love watching the republicans on the Sunday talk circuit try to wiggle around the deficit. Yes you guys added a ton to the deficit. You enacted budget breaking prescription drugs to medicare in addition to wars and tax cuts. Now you are voting to add even to the deficit. It was only a few days ago that we had a commission report on deficit reduction. Only in Washington.

Go Bernie

Finally someone will stand up and scream at the top of their lungs that this if F***ing crazy.
“The Wall Street Journal reports that an estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office pegs the cost of the tax cut deal at $858 billion, a figure that would make the deal more expensive than the 2009 stimulus, which cost $787 billion.”
So this is how Republicans and Obama are going to have BI Partisan deficit reduction?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/10/bernie-sanders-third-world-america-arianna-huffington_n_795158.html

Who will run agianst Obama for the 2012 Democratic nomination?

Sanders?
Dean?
Krugman???

New Ideas In Washington Adding to the Deficit

So Republicans were sent to Congress to create a new way of doing business in Washington by cutting the deficit. They are not content with the Democrat’s deficit adding tax cuts, but now they want to ADD $680 billion in to the deficit over the next 10years. Not sure that this sounds like “new ideas” to me. Same old Washington politics.

“In a report released last week, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) revised the total cost of permanently extending all of the Bush tax cuts to $5.048 trillion over the next ten years.” (http://www.ombwatch.org/node/11353)

“Bush’s tax cuts accounted for $1.7 trillion in extra deficits in 2001 through 2008, and will add another $3.4 trillion to the national debt in the 2009 to 2019 period.” (http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/taxes/the-high-price-of-extending-the-bush-tax-cuts/19703600/)

“What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/23/paul-krugman-bush-tax-cut_n_690838.html)

The National Call-In Action Day on Tuesday, November 16 for continuing the federal unemployment insurance program.

Today was the first day of work for me at my new job. After over 17 months of unemployment I am finally at work. The relief that this brings is hard to explain. It is more than the money, although that was an obvious concern. The biggest change is that I now feel that I have not been discarded. At 55 years old I was feeling that I was irrelevant to myself and to the economy. Jobs that two years ago I would have for the asking were being filled by people with even more experience and years of work ahead. I felt that my age and the terrible desperation that we all feel was grinding me into irrelevancy. Was I really out of the work force- forever?

I have a Master Degree in Library and Information Science. I have current computer skills and twenty plus years in management and project engineering. Was that experience and education so unneeded today that I was really not going to work again? Unemployment, especially the kind that leads to endless job searching, with no hope of success, was robbing me of any future. It is hard to believe that there was going to be a happy ending.

I am lucky. It is more than being to get a job. It is that I was able to survive for 17 months and to regain my footing. I had the luxury to keep throwing resumes at the jobs that were there and to eventually find one. Without unemployment insurance I would never be back at work. I would not have been able to keep working at finding a job. I would never be employed again. That is certain. Unemployment insurance has given me the opportunity to find a job and to work at my career, earn a living, pay taxes and student loans.

But with unemployment still at unprecedented high levels and Congress voting on Unemplyment insurance funsding millions may not have the chance that I had to find a job. I never thought I would need 17 mothns to find a job but I did. i was able to stick it out and now I am back to work.  Give the 2 million people still working hard to find a job the chance to have a first day back at work.

So call your senator and congressman and tell them you’re a constituent. Tell them that they should vote to continue unemployment insurance. Go here and let them know- http://www.truemajority.org/callin/ui/

“We’ve had 17 consecutive months with unemployment rates above nine percent, and there is still only one job opening for every five jobless workers.” (via UPDATE: Out in the Cold for the Holidays | unemployedworkers.org) “2 million people in December alone will be left with no income. In the next five months it will be almost 6 million people. Local economies will be devastated if the unemployed have no income to spend in local stores, which could result in over 700,000 MORE people losing their jobs!” (http://www.truemajority.org/callin/ui/)

 

At It Again- Cutting Social Security

The White House’s fiscal commission is expected to include recommendations to raise the retirement age for Social Security and cut Medicare benefits. Republics love to hate social security. it is an example of a very successful social program. One reason they hate it is because it shows that the government can attack a problem like poverty among the elder successfully.

It is necessary to make it completely clear to ANYONE Republican or Democrat, that touching social security in anyway is a political death sentence. In order to accomplish that goal it may be necessary to attack, in the same fashion that Republicans attack liberals and Democrats, Republican office holders. With the an election just completed we have to wait two years to exact our retribution on those who attempt to destroy social security.Or do we?

Recalling of public official can be initiated by citizens in 18 states. Although there have not been any successful recalls of US Senators or Congressmen, that does not mean that the issue is dead. In an article by Attorney David C. Grossack, the possibility of being able to recall federal officials is discussed. I propose that we, the citizens, begin the process of citizen initiated recalls of any US Senator or congressman who have ever spoken of or advocated raising the retirement age, privatizing the program, or cutting benefits. It is easier to prevent the destruction of this vital program than to watch it be destroyed and then to rebuild from the ashes. Lets begin to recall every official in Congress who even thinks about destroying this successful program.

Here is the recall article:

Click to access Recalling%20U.S.%20Senators%20and%20Congressmen.pdf

Corporate Crime Wave

Crime statistics for Chicago, police officials reported, continued a drop in violent and property crime for the 22nd consecutive month. Total crime dropped by 3.7 percent compared to the same time last year while property crime dropped by 2 percent and violent crimes dropped by 9.8 percent, police said. Great news for street crime but another crime wave is continuing unabated. The wave of criminal behavior, that has been uncovered with the recent revelations in the mortgage industry, illustrates that Corporate Crime has infested this country at a level previously unimagined.

We have discovered an industry, that lies at the heart of the capitalist system, that is not only corrupt but actually criminally suspect. Banks and their sub-contractors have been found to be falsifying documents for foreclosure and then lying in court about those documents. The property they have foreclosed has been resold and the underlying documentation that conveys ownership may be flawed. This will seriously affect all future property sales. This behavior is not an isolated incident but appears to be part of an overall corporate philosophy.

When any organization feels that laws can be broken and rules bent simply because it is in their best interest to do so the nation has a crisis. But when those same criminals know they are immune to prosecution then the problem becomes more than a crisis. It is a sign that the system of laws and the respect for the rule of law has been destroyed. That is what we are facing. Banks are beyond the reach of those whose job it is to police their activities. The draw of lucrative post government employment is so strong or the political power to pressure legislators is so pervasive that effective policing is impossible.

What we are left with is a financial system that has the money to corrupt government employees or legislators. It is a situation were rule of law can only apply when and how the criminals want it applied. In the case of the foreclosure mess we have learned that people were evicted from homes under dubious legal authority. We have some evidence that loans were never properly executed and the necessary paperwork never done. We hear about banks packaging these defective mortgages into securities and resold, often more than once to different organizations.

With no effective policing and an unwillingness to pursue the offenders, we can only wonder what will be the end effect. Will the criminals stop their egregious behavior and revert to acceptable standards of behavior? Based on experience with other types of criminal activities, like street crime,  this seems unlikely. Criminals that get away with crime will keep committing the crimes often escalating in severity until they are stopped. Until we begin to prosecute, not only the criminals but those whose job it was to police them, corporate crime will escalate. Unlike street crime which can affect neighborhoods and cites, corporate crime affects the nation and the entire world financial system. Until someone in government or the legislature steps up and begins to fight back, the criminals will continue to destroy our economic life. I only wonder what crimes they are committing now that have yet to be unearthed?

Do you conservatives have the balls?

So conservatives who want to take back government, here is the golden opportunity to balance the budget and reduce the deficient. Just have everyone pay taxes, including The rich, those who work for a living, and corporations. EVERYONE PAYS INCOME TAXES. That would include politicians like Bill Bradley in Illinois who is running for governor of Illinois or Alexi Giannoulias who is running for the US Senate from Illinois. No tax breaks because you didn’t get up an go to work to earn the money. No discounted for bonuses funded from tax payer bailouts. EVERYONE PAYS INCOME TAXES. Bottom line is do you conservatives have the balls to really change the game and make Main St and Wall St play by the same rules?

Bruce Boccardy | October 27, 2010

A mountain of literature documents the unfairness in our tax system. Laws in the majority of states are rife with dodges that permit large corporations to avoid paying tax on a significant share of their profits. These dodges include depreciation rules, exemptions, deductions, credits, tax sheltering, accelerated depreciation allowances, special tax provisions for particular business sectors, debt finance, and tax planning. In 2008 the Government Accountability Office reported that about two-thirds of corporations, including the vast majority of foreign companies operating here, legally paid no income taxes. “Less government” translates to “protecting corporate interests” or “corporate welfare.”

The Treasury Department estimates that various corporate tax breaks will cost the federal government more than $1.2 trillion between 2008 and 2017.
“Local governments have seen their budgets under enormous strain because of the recession and, in some cases, unwise ‘anti-tax’ policies that have benefited the wealthy,” says Marty Wolfson, director of the Notre Dame labor studies program and former economist with the Federal Reserve Board.

Rich Pay Smaller Percentage

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that that the wealthiest 1 percent of Massachusetts residents paid only 4.8 percent of their income in taxes, while 80 percent of middle-and low-income residents paid more than 10 percent of their income. In other words, the burden of financing public services rested primarily on those who could least afford it. A second component of tax unfairness is that public services are funded largely by the personal income tax. Some defend the top 1 percent of Americans, who pay about a third of all income taxes. But this does not tell the whole story.

Consider tax shelters. Taxpayers in the top 1 percent receive much of their income not from wages but from investments. Capital gains are taxed at a much lower marginal rate. The tax rules on corporate, capital gains, dividend, estate, and interest taxes primarily benefit the economic elites, not working people.

Working people pay taxes on a bigger share of their earnings than the rich. They’re hit more by Social Security taxes, excise levies, and tariffs. Payroll taxes also unfairly gouge middle- and low-income folks. The employer’s share of the Social Security tax is actually a levy on wages, since employers reduce wages to compensate for that tax. And when property taxes and fuel taxes are included in the equation, it is clear that our tax system is painfully unfair to middle- and low-income people.

From Labor Notes: http://www.labornotes.org/2010/10/who-pays-taxes