The 6 Economic Facts of Life in America That Allow the Rich to Run off with Our Wealth | Alternet
A nice survey of the steep hill we have to climb...
An alert reader clued me in to an interesting study that has yet to make a big splash in the media. The study, conducted by Cornell's Peter Enns and University of Tennessee's Nathan Kelly, compared attitudes towards progressive taxation and welfare spending in times of higher and lower income inequality.
New research findings add complexity to the basic assumption that humans act in their own economic self-interest. By analyzing hundreds of survey questions from 1952 to 2006, Peter Enns, assistant professor of government, and Nathan Kelly of the University of Tennessee found that as inequality rises, low income individuals' attitudes toward redistribution become more conservative. Their paper appears in the October issue of the American Journal of Political Science. "It's a bit of a conundrum," Enns admits. The researchers also examined public opinion data on the question: Should government increase spending on welfare, keep it the same or decrease it? "As inequality rose, the high- and low-income respondents on average become less supportive of spending on welfare," Enns said. "And this is not because low-income people are unaware of inequality; our results show they are more aware of it than most people." The researchers found that higher levels of household income inequality in the United States generate more conservative public opinion. "We broke down pubic opinion by income group and found the high- and low-income groups responding in a similar way, both becoming more conservative when inequality rises," Enns said. "We were very surprised to observe that the self-reinforcing aspect of inequality holds for high- and low-income groups, and how they move together in parallel over time." Previous economic models predicted that low-income individuals will consistently support government redistribution. "If anything, when inequality rises, low-income people should become more supportive, and that's not what we observe in the data," said Enns, a member of the Institute for Social Sciences theme project on Judgment, Decision Making, and Social Behavior and faculty director of the Cornell Prison Education Program. Conversely, when inequality declines, the public becomes more liberal. The public works projects and other social programs following the Great Depression helped promote decades of declining inequality into the 1960s, Enns said. "And then there's a shift," he said. "Once inequality starts going back up, it appears to be perpetuated by public opinion. If inequality declined in the United States, our results suggest that then the public would become more supportive of government redistribution." Nevertheless, people in the lowest income group favor more redistribution than those in the highest income group.How can we explain this? Part of it may be simply a reflection of greater conservative domination of media after Reagan's first election. Yet I have another theory. People tend to approach the world with a rational or magical bias. When the reality you observe seems to follow reasonable rules, then it makes sense to apply rational solutions to problems. When the world is way out of balance, then praying for miracles seems the best approach. When your uncle goes to college on the G.I. bill, prospers, and builds a house, then you might feel part of an economic and political system that can work for all. When the Reagan government starts saying that ketchup is a vegetable, and raises payroll taxes while cutting income taxes on the wealthy, then alienation begins. When CEOs, who used to make about 40 times what their workers made, start making more than 400 times an average worker's salary, then lower-income folks see they no longer live in the bosses' world. Capitalism is now obviously an obscure and impenetrable system, lavishing huge rewards on an ever smaller ruling class, while leaving most working folks to fall behind. The mythology of stardom replaces the belief in the Great Society. Rap stars from the projects, country music stars from the farm, these become heroic figures, while making good money as a union shop steward recedes as an impossible dream. Better to buy lottery scratch tickets than study engineering. Who can trust government to do the right thing with our tax dollars? Better to imagine the possibility of sudden, improbable success. In this magical world, the rich will someday take care of the poor without a government middleman, and we'll all live happily ever after. The sad truth is, without any faith that the system cares, then transferring some money from the rich to the government seems futile. Only those of us who still feel connected to the system might worry about making it work better. Sadly, many of the rich and powerful, who could do something about it, seem content to see income inequality get even worse.
Teamster Nation: Teamsters holding the line for the middle class in...: Teamsters holding the line for the middle class in Philly. The energy in Philadelphia is "incredible," The AFL-CIO tweets: "@bctdprez:...
Report: Public sector cuts kill private jobs, too » peoples world
Very important key to understanding why U.S. unemployment is so high!!
From among the many excellent offerings at today's Eschaton, this pithy gem seems especially worth sharing with y'all:
According to Our Galtian Overlords, austerity is necessary. Except, of course, when it comes to massive failing companies known as banks. Just keep lighting billions of taxpayer money on fire, paying massive salaries to the people who are destroying the world. And nobody mention moral hazard, because that's what happens when you give someone an extra $10/week in food stamps. There are lots of reasons the banks are having problems, but one reason is that people have no jobs and no money. And the Galtian Overlords are determined to keep people broke and unemployed, while extracting everything possible from the economy to give to the banks. There's stupid, but also a whole lot of evil. Bad people run the world.Teamster Nation: Solidarity: More CA Teamsters honor locked-out IN ...: Local 665 and Local 215 members walking the picket line in Milpitas today. Today our California brothers are refusing to cross a picket ...
Normally I wouldn't pass on a rumor heard on the subway, but... These two pinstripes were chatting on the M train as it rumbled through Brooklyn on the way to Metropolitan Village. "Sammy the zit Zonfrillo is telling everyone to sell all their FedEx stock. He says the company is going down in flames!" The other suit replied: "Manny Leite, the friendly Portagee spy, recommends selling stock of any company that does business with FraudEx." Weird stuff, eh?? Don't worry, Ulysses is on the case.
Well, left-siders, our old friend dbshotz insists that I rerun this pithy little post, which she claims is her favorite... and believe you me, whatver db wants, db gets!!
Consume, produce, be silent, obey. That is all the plutocrats want from us worker bees. We can do so much more. We can: demand answers, refuse to cooperate in our own destruction, create, educate, and agitate. We can report injustices to our brothers and sisters. In short, break out of our selfish "bubbles," look around, define and solve problems.
If not now, when? If not us, who?
Solidarity Forever!!
Preview: Standing Up For Democracy
Check your local listings for when the interview will be on your T.V. Sarita Gupta is one of the most inspirational progressive activists in the U.S. today!!
All United States citizens are granted certain inalienable rights by our Constitution. One of those rights is clearly stated in the first amendment to our Constitution, namely the right of all U.S. citizens, without limit or exception, to peacebly "assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." You will not find anywhere in our U.S. constitution any language requiring citizens to apply for special permits from Government, to petition Government for a redress of our grievances. This goes straight to the heart of what it means to have representative government. When our Congress, whose performance is found to be poor by more than 85% of U.S. citizens according to recent polls, sends in militarized, heavily armed thugs to assault men, women, and children in the early hours of the morning-- because they presumed to question the Government's consistent policy of allowing Wall Street banksters to commit crimes that devastate our communities and families-- then they have lost any claim to possess the consent of the governed for such unconstitutional violence. When they go on to give the military power (in the N.D.A.A.)to sieze U.S. civilians, on U.S. soil and hold them indefinitely without trial, they have chosen to turn their back, not only on the U.S. Cnstitution, but on the fundamental foundational freedom of habeas corpus that underlies the tradition of Anglo-American common law-- and was in existence for centuries before the American Revolution of the 18th century against the limited monarchy of Great Britain.
I've been very impressed here in NYC by the relative tolerance New Yorkers display towards one another. Most NYPD officers are also careful to avoid making racist and sexist stereotypes the basis of their world-view. Sadly, the hierarchy of the NYPD demands that their officers aggressively invade the privacy rights of folks who live in poor and predominantly minority neighborhoods. Here's the statistics for 2010: over half a million (600,601)New Yorkers were deemed so dangerous, that their 4th amendment expectations of privacy were violated and they were searched on suspicion of carrying a weapon. So, did the expert sleuthing of New York's finest take hundreds of thousands of guns off the street? Well, not exactly. In fact, less than 0.14% of these "stop and frisks" resulted in the discovery of a firearm. Now, I'm not an expert on statistics, but these results don't suggest a very high level of intelligence gathering on the part of the NYPD before they decide to rob a citizen of his or her rights to privacy. An economist friend of mine suggests that a success rate of less than 0.14% is actually worse than you would expect from a completely random search process. How can this be? The searches aren't random at all. In fact 87% of all New Yorkers who suffered the humiliation of being stopped and frisked by the NYPD were black or latino. Now, what the racist policies of the NYPD has actually accomplished is to breed mistrust and resentment in many communities around the city, depriving hard-working cops of the opportunity to get useful information from people that is so essential to their proper function of keeping people safe. Meanwhile, white criminals (especially those who can afford to dress in a middle-class style) can wander the streets carrying arms with impunity. They know that the odds of the cops stopping and frisking a white guy, with a suit and briefcase, are very small, indeed.
This might be merely a bit puzzling and not so tragic if the racist paradigms of the NYPD top brass didn't too often create the sort of horrific outcome that just occurred in the Bronx a couple of weeks ago. A hopped up undercover narcotics officer, having broken into the home of an unarmed teenager, shot this teenager dead in the presence of the young victim's grandmother and six-year-old brother. Does anyone expect this little six year old to grow up with a healthy and trusting attitude towards law enforcement? When a man breaks in your home and shoots your brother dead for no reason at all, it is only natural that you should regard the organiztion who employs that man as lacking any moral legitimacy. This is especially true in this particular instance, where the only crime the police allege this unarmed teenager may have committed is that of buying a small quantity of marijuana, merely a misdemeanor offense under NYC laws.
walk on: a lot of christians don't care about poor people: What I hear from evangelicals a lot is that it is the church's job, not the government's, to care for the poor. I would dispute the either/o...
Gov. Scott Walker To Use Foreclosure Settlement Money To Balance His Budget, Not Help Homeowners: pYesterday, 49 states joined the federal government in announcing a $26 billion settlement with five of the nation’s biggest banks over the banks’ foreclosure fraud abuses. The money from the settlement is meant to aid homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure or who find themselves underwater, meaning they owe more on their mortgage than [...]/p
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Education released a comprehensive, nationwide evaluation of American schools Monday indicating that attempts to teach absolutely anything to these little shits is just a huge waste of everybody's time.
"We remain committed to providing every student in the country with access to a high-quality education," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, adding that good schools are a key component to the success of American democracy. "But to be honest, none of that matters. We're not talking about promising young scholars here—we're talking about a bunch of fucking animals."
"We've basically flushed $11,000 down the toilet for every single one of these little bastards," Duncan continued. "Not to mention 18 years of my life."
The study, which analyzed the effectiveness of both public and private schools, found that efforts to enlighten these terrors on the subjects of math, history, grammar, and science are as productive as slamming your head into a goddamn brick wall. The research also confirmed that the unbearable shits, who take everything for granted, consistently piss away each learning opportunity they're given.
"When I first started teaching, I would see the smiling faces in my classroom and get excited about nurturing their young minds," said Melanie Whitman, 35, a first-grade teacher quoted in the report. "Now I can't look up from my desk without wanting to puke at the sight of all those little psychopaths."
Secretary Duncan said the study is the first to provide detailed evidence in support of the theory that third-grader Scott Kriesel is a complete fuck-up and perhaps even the living incarnation of Satan.
According to the report, billions of dollars in federal resources have been spent to modernize classrooms and improve teacher training, even though the little brats spend their entire days carving profanities into desks, shouting at whoever's in charge, and refusing to sit down, shut up, and actually learn something for once.
In addition, research suggests that school boards across the nation have grown tired of fighting to obtain funding for brand-new textbooks only to have the miserable fucks just deface them all with ejaculating penis drawings on the first day of class.
When asked if charter schools might help solve some of the problems faced by public education, Deputy Education Secretary Anthony W. Miller told reporters the data indicated any difference they made would amount to jack shit.
"Some charter schools perform better than their public counterparts, some don't," Miller said. "You can't change the fact that any school, no matter how it's funded, is ultimately just another type of building to contain these goddamn monsters for seven hours a day."
Miller added that more involvement from home was not the answer, either, as the little shits tend to have shithead parents who just make everything worse. The only findings from the study that provide a glimmer of hope, he said, are student absenteeism and dropout rates, which continue to increase.
"Christ, I dedicated my career to my students, actually thinking I could make a difference in their lives," middle-school teacher Joan Kubickers said Monday. "If I'd gone into public relations, I'd be making six figures by now. And at a PR firm, I bet I wouldn't have to worry about my tires getting slashed in the parking lot."
"Well, I have to go," she added. "The fucking hyenas in my third-period class await."
The Department of Education study comes on the heels of a survey last month that found 90 percent of all elementary school students resent being taught by pathetic losers who couldn't get a decent job in the real world.
Tom Tomorrow, with his usual brilliance, captures the zeitgeist in this recent cartoon:
An alert reader shared this humorous response of a 1%er to the newly aroused consciousness of the 99%. It is very fitting that this piece, by John Kenney, appeared in the classiest of all 1%er (and 1%er wannabee) journals, the venerable New Yorker:
In 2000, in Bush v. Gore, the Rehnquist Court, by a 5-4 margin, called off vote-counting by the state of Florida and determined the outcome of a presidential election in favor of one lucky Texan.
In 2010, in Citizens United, the Roberts Court, by a 5-4 margin, declared that private corporations have a First Amendment right to engage in unlimited campaign spending and likely altered, for as long as anyone can see, the outcome of every major contested election in the country in favor of CEOs and Republican consultants who bundle their money.
The Supreme Court stole one election and sold off the rest of them.
I had the somewat unusual distinction of graduating college in 1984. At that time, as I recall, many political observers felt obliged to take stock of how far we in the developed world had "progressed" towards George Orwell's dystopia, imagined in his famous novel set in that year. The year was chosen by Orwell in 1948 by merely flipping the 4 and 8. This was supposed to make us feel better about our dubious honor of becoming the "class of '84." I remember breathing a sigh of relief that, according to intelligent observers, we had only moved part of the way towards Orwell's dark vision-- and, according to the most optimistic at least, we might never get there in our lifetimes.
Even the miseries of Reagan's second term couldn't shake my generation's firm belief that the U.S. would never slide into a totalitarian regime. The collapse of the Soviet bloc, was, except for hard-core Stalinists, generally taken as evidence that humanity was sailing off on a new course, away from the harsh realities of our parents' experiences fighting fascism abroad and McCarthyism at home. Sure, President Reagan's firing of the air-traffic controllers was very disturbing to those of us concerned with workers' rights, but we were confident that organized labor would begin to recover some power with the election of Bill Clinton. How much we wanted to believe President Clinton's assurances that NAFTA would turn out to help working Americans after some initial dislocations! Yet some of us noticed right away that even Mexican labor wasn't sufficiently cheap for the global capitalist elites. "Outsourcing" jobs to Bangladesh, Vietnam, and wherever else men, women, and children would work for less than three dollars a day, proceeded at a tremendous clip. Don't worry, class of '84, a new golden age of plentiful hi-tech careers was upon us! Those of your neighbors and friends with less education could retrain and find good work at computer help desks and other fun places like that. And, for a few years in the '90s, there were Americans happily answering phones for Apple, I.B.M., and Microsoft. By the end of the decade, however, these jobs too had been "outsourced."
Well, O.K., the American middle class was firmly under the heel of the global capitalists: wages were falling, and folks were leveraging their home equity to take on massive debt and keep consuming at accustomed levels. Vague worries that things were going south were replaced with very specific outrage over the Supreme Court's coronation of President Bush II before all the Florida votes were counted. At least we could still speak our minds freely and travel without undue restrictions. Right?!?9/11 and the Patriot Act changed all that. Before long, once proud Americans were meekly accepting unnecessary and ridiculous humiliations in their daily lives. Soldiers with machine guns at airports, train-stations, bus terminals. Grin and bear it! 3-oz. maximum tube of toothpaste, take off your shoes and your belt, look "foreign?" then follow me, Abdul! Long-cherished 1st Amendment, and 4th Amendment rights were quickly thrown aside in the new "war on terror." Indeed, we were told, we should be terrified, and our taxes should be spent to bomb cities in Iraq so that we'd be "safer." Don't like killing innocent, men women, and children? Sorry, but we can't avoid "collateral damage" in the struggle against "islamofascists." The terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is killed, yet we don't even pause in our worldwide "war on terror." Could it be that killing thousands of innocents throughout the globe might be creating new generations of terrorists? Don't ask that question, Ulysses, your facebook posting privileges might be revoked...
2012 dawns with a new "indefinite detention" policy the law of the land. The military can take you and throw away the key with no questions asked. Quaint notions of innocence before proof of guilt, due process, habeas corpus, freedom and liberty are destroyed overnight. Here's how George Orwell had Winston paint the picture in Chapter 3 of 1984:
Our friends at mockpaperscissors.com hit another one outta da pahk:
Indiana governor ends attempt to limit protest at statehouse
Good news for all my Hoosier friends!!
