Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Ed Schultz: The Economic State of the Middle Class is Tied to Union Membership

March 03, 2011 10:40 PM
By Heather
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As Ed Schultz rightly pointed out on his show tonight, if you're not a member of a union and you don't think union membership has anything to do with your own economic prosperity, think again. As unions go, so goes the middle class in America.

Our friends over at Think Progress posted the same chart Ed had up tonight on where we're headed here -- GRAPH: As Union Membership Has Declined, Income Inequality Has Skyrocketed In The United States:

p>Across the country, right-wing legislators continue their attack on labor unions, claiming that they are saving their states money. Yet in waging these anti-labor campaigns, these politicians are ignoring one very simple fact: unions were a major force in building and sustaining the great American middle class, and as they declined, so has the middle class. As CAP’s Karla Waters and David Madland showed in a report they first published this past January, as union membership has steadily declined since 1967, so too has the middle class’s share of national income, as the super-rich have taken a larger share of national income than any time since the 1920s:

As they noted, it's not the only factor that has led to the severe income inequality in the United States, but it is certainly one of them, and unions are the last organized segment in America pushing back against so many policies that have been terrible for American workers. They're not just defending decent wages and benefits and protections in the workplace.

And one final note here on Ed Schultz and the coverage on his show for the last month or so since these protests first started in Wisconsin: I just want to thank him for shining a spotlight on what’s going on in Wisconsin and in other states and for giving the labor movement in this country a voice on cable television. The only place we’ve seen that is with some of MSNBC’s prime time and no one else has been doing what Ed has with getting out there with the protesters and with highlighting a lot of the local voices in Wisconsin. Good job, Ed.

And somehow you managed to do it without bringing on Ron Christie or some other right-wing hack to get their opinion on what’s going on with labor right now. Imagine that. I sincerely hope this is the type of journalism you’re going to continue to do instead of having two talking heads arguing with each other that inform your viewers about nothing that’s going to improve our economy or get Americans back to work, or keep our labor unions from being busted.

I was really upset when MSNBC let Keith Olbermann go, but he’s moving on and seems happy with the change and I do get Current TV here, so I plan on watching and recording his show once he’s back on the air and I’m getting over his leaving MSNBC even though it still irks me. My husband refuses to even watch the network at all now that he’s gone.

One of the things Ed acknowledged when he moved to the later time slot was that he was lucky enough to pick up Olbermann’s staff. I think it’s been good for his show to have them working with him. Keep up the good work Ed on behalf of labor and the working class in America and thank you to the staffers left from Countdown for giving him a hand as well.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/ed-schultz-economic-state-middle-class-tie

The Buying and Selling of the Pentagon (Part I)

Wednesday 30 March 2011
by: Dina Rasor, t r u t h o u t | Solutions

For the last seven weeks, we have been running Solutions columns on how to fix the Pentagon. With the DoD budget ballooning again and again over the past 40 years and the news yesterday that we have already spent $600 million in the first week in defending Libya from the air, there appears to finally be some movement to look into what is wrong with our defense spending. We have fired 191 cruise missiles at a cost of $288 million alone ($1.5 million per missile) - just one illustration on how we have spent too much for our weapons, and the Pentagon has admitted that it is unauditable and cannot successfully track most of its procurement money.

There was story yesterday by Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg Government that, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO):

About one in three major US Defense Department weapons programs since 1997 have had cost overruns of as much as 50 percent over their original projections ...

The overruns, found in 47 of 134 programs included in a study by the US Government Accountability Office, were enough to trigger a law that requires congressional notifications and potential termination. Only a single program has been terminated during that review process - the Bell Helicopter Textron $6.78 billion Army Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, the GAO said.

What the GAO is not saying is that these are the overruns that the government knows about because there are many contractor and DoD program manager accounting tricks that hide overruns, including putting the extra expense in other programs that are not so closely monitored. Defense contractors and their buddies in the Pentagon are as good at hiding or deflecting overruns and manufacturing problems as General Electric is at dodging taxes.

I could go on for many more paragraphs about the problem and cite years and years of reports of fraudulent, wasteful and ineffective contracting, but most informed readers (especially Truthout readers) have heard of these horror stories for decades.

So, I wanted to concentrate and pull back the layers of problems and try to get down to basic incentives that would allow this to go on for generations of military and DoD civilian personnel. Each round of exposes triggered legislative reforms that were just reforms on paper, which were ignored by the bureaucracy, or real reforms that were deformed by a bureaucracy skilled in loopholes and slow rolls with few in the Congress or various administrations unwilling to commit to true oversight.

I don't believe that the US can make real changes to DoD procurement until we change the financial incentives of the individuals who work in this corrupt system. All other reforms can be deformed, and anyone who does not go along with this system, i.e. the Boy Scout types, are pushed out and most often have their careers destroyed if they don't go along with it. In this column, I will define the problem with the incentives for the people who work in this DoD/contractor system, and in next week's column, I will suggest tough solutions to change the very base of incentives for DoD personnel and the defense contractors.

For those who are interested in digging deeper on how this system got its start since World War II, I would suggest reading journalist Andrew Cockburn's excellent essay in the "Pentagon Labyrinth" called "Follow the Money."

Since I started working on reforming the Pentagon in 1979, I have found one of the most corrupting problems has been the revolving door, the insidious practice where DoD and Congressional personnel go to work for defense contractors or start work at defense contractors and move in and out of the government positions using their influence and inside knowledge to maximize the profits of the defense industry. There have been many attempts to curb this process such as making DoD officials register where they working after leaving the DoD and putting in one- or two-year cooling off periods where they cannot attempt to influence the government in programs that they worked in, but most of these reforms have been ignored or deformed. When Congress passed a law requiring that DoD keep a list of who went through the revolving door, the DoD decided that the list was not to be made public.

There have been decades of reports by the GAO on the problems of the revolving door, hearings by Congress and reports in the media with very little effect. As I wrote about in a Solutions column a few weeks ago, the revolving door with our officer corps is the worst because when senior officers retire with their military pensions and sell their souls to a defense contractor for money, it is devastating to the morale of the junior officer corps. The younger officers who don't believe in this corrupting practice get out of the service, and those who stay have to accept the undue influence of former officers to the detriment of national defense.

Thomas Amlie, while working within the Air Force, wrote the best explanation I have seen on the corrupting pressures with our officers, in a 1983 memorandum to his superiors. Dr. Amlie was the inventor of the Sparrow missile and had been the director of Naval Weapons Laboratory at China Lake. I included part of his memorandum in my 1985 book, "The Pentagon Underground":

The major problem with having a military officer in charge of procurement is his vulnerability. It turns out that not everyone can make general or admiral and our "up or out" policy forces people to retire. The average age of an officer at retirement is 43 years. Counting allowances, a colonel has more take home pay than a US Senator. At the age of 43, he probably has kids in or ready for college and a big mortgage and can't afford a large cut in his income. Besides, he is at the peak of his intellectual powers, is emotionally involved and doesn't want to quit. We throw him out anyway, no matter how good a job he is doing. Many of these officers, particularly the good ones who have spent most of their careers flying aircraft, operating ships or leading troops, do not have the skills which are readily marketable in the civilian sector. This nice man then comes around and offers him a job at 50k-75K [1983 dollars] per year. If he stands up and makes a fuss about high cost and poor quality, no nice man will come to see him when he retires. Even if he has no interest in a post-retirement job in the defense industry, he is taking a chance by making a fuss. The "system" will, likely as not, discover a newly open job in Tule, Greenland; Adak Alaska; or some other garden spot for which he and only he, is uniquely qualified. Thus, his family, as well as his career, suffers. To their everlasting credit, many fine officers have made a fuss anyway and suffered the consequences.

This is not the precarious situation that we should be putting our officers in and this practice is worse when our generals and admirals also go through the revolving door. I have spent many years trying to get the public, the media and members of Congress who want to curtail this damaging practice to understand that the defense contractors are not necessarily hiring and paying these officers and civilian personnel for influence peddling that they will do in the future, but instead, are hiring and rewarding them for what they did while they were in government service for the contractors. The rewards of the job are for "services rendered" to the contractors, such as helping to hide overruns and handing out waivers and change orders to help out malfunctioning contractors so they don't have to pay the costs to fix their own mistakes. The problem is that the high-level officers begin to see themselves as on the same team as the contractor and their success relies on the contractors' power and influence in the system.

This was revealed to me in a very startling way in the early 1980s when I was the director of the Project on Military Procurement (now Project on Government Oversight, POGO, where I still serve as treasurer and a member of the board of directors.) I received a call from one of my sources that he had some important documents for me. He was a source that was helping me with investigating the push to buy another run of the notorious C-5 cargo plane.

The first production run of the C-5A cargo plane was one of the worst overrun and technical failures that the Air Force had ever produced, but now Lockheed, the contractor for the C-5A, is pushing for another generation of this plane disaster, the C-5B. The Air Force had picked another plane for the replacement of the C-5A in 1981 to be built by McDonnell Douglas, but by 1982, Lockheed had pushed hard enough to change that decision and the DoD and Air Force fell behind the idea of making the C-5B and reversed their decision. It was widely suspected that Lockheed was able to turn the DoD and the Air Force around from their original decision because Lockheed needed a bailout because of their past failures. There were other potential planes for the job, such as the 747 cargo plane (hated by the Air Force brass because it was a commercial plane, but Boeing gave the Air Force an unsolicited proposal to use 747s for military cargo) and KC-10. We were examining the technical data and the costs of these other options to the C-5, especially given the history of the program under Lockheed.

Once the Air Force fell behind the new C-5B, they became one with Lockheed in pushing it in the media and the Congress. Usually this is done under the radar where the government helps the contractor lobby the Congress, but keeps their fingerprints off the dirty work. However, my source nervously handed me a thick document through the window of my car when I pulled up to see him on a Washington corner. He, uncharacteristically, said little and furtively walked away. Once I opened the document, I could see why. It was a lobby plan for the C-5B that coordinated the lobbying efforts of the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed, giving each group assignments and commingling their efforts so that they were virtually one. We knew that this had happened before, but I never thought anyone was dumb or arrogant enough to write it all down. Besides showing Lockheed's hold and power over the DoD and the Air Force, it was and is illegal for the executive branch to use appropriated funds to actually lobby the Congress. In the past, the executive branch and the DoD would have legislative liaisons, which were a fig leaf cover for lobbying because they claimed that they were just supplying needed information to the Congress. However, this time the government was caught as close in bed to the contractor as you can get.

The document was a 96-page computerized printout that gave various tasks to the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed. It was a coordinated effort that planned to use such "heavy hitters" as four-star generals, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, the mayor of Atlanta, the secretary of the Air Force, the deputy secretary of the DoD and even President Reagan. There was very little emphasis on the substantive issues of which cargo plane would work best for delivering supplies to the troops, but rather, schemes on how to use pork barrel and horse trading to influence the Congress for the benefit of Lockheed's program.

One task had Lockheed writing up a draft for the secretary of defense to present to justify spending money to buy Lockheed's C-5Bs and the secretary of defense signed it and sent it to the top Armed Services committees. Another task was to have the Air Force and the DoD to get outside military organizations such as the American Legion and National Defense Council to lobby for the C-5B. Government agencies are not supposed to seek lobby support from outside groups.

Another task had Lockheed putting together strange political bedfellows to make sure that Lockheed got the C-5B, which was to be built in their plant in Marietta Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. They got Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta and former civil rights champion, to work the Congressional Black Caucus to vote for the C-5B because he was told that the plane would bring 8,500 jobs to the area. It worked because major members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the plane. In the same task, Lockheed also had other members of Congress, including conservatives like Newt Gingrich, whose district was near the plant, lobby for the plane because of the jobs. The Air Force was tasked with taking pictures of the C-5 holding several helicopters and giving the photos to Lockheed so they could use them in full-page ads in major newspapers such as The Washington Post.

Probably the most grievous task that was in the lobby plan was for the Air Force and Lockheed to put the squeeze on the general who was in charge of the Military Airlift Command (MAC). The lobby plan said that the head of MAC, Gen. Jim Allen, prepared testimony to Congress for a hearing on airlift, but it was not strong enough for the C-5. It was well known that MAC was reluctant to have more C-5s, so his testimony was tempered to look at all the potential candidates for the new cargo plane. The Congress wanted to hear from this general because he was from the command that would be using this plane, yet when he arrived in town, his statement had to be "purified" - even being a four-star general did not allow him to speak freely to the Congress. A few years later, after a speech I gave on the C-5B lobby plan, an Air Force major told me that he had been an aide to General Allen during the controversy and that the general was very bitter about the interference with his testimony. This is exactly the problem I am concerned about: the forced corruption of a general, who did not have the integrity to testify truthfully, and the impression of this corrupt system on his junior officers. This type of corruption of the system went on for 96 pages in this document.

After we leaked this lobby plan to the press, the DoD was unapologetic and claimed it was the normal order of business. One of the excerpts from The Washington Post:

Air Force Lt. General Kelly H. Burke, who is responsible for the proposed C5 program, said yesterday: "You're just wrong if you think this is a highly unusual happening. Anytime you get competing views, it's customary for the government to work with those contractors whose views are congruent with the president's ... I do not want to sound platitudinous, but all you're seeing is democracy in action. This is the way the system is supposed to work.

In the uproar over this leaked lobby plan, Congress asked the GAO to investigate the government using its funding to lobby the Congress in lock step with a contractor. The GAO did a very thorough job and found that laws were broken. They sent evidence to the Reagan Justice Department for possible criminal and civil cases against various DoD and Air Force employees, but nothing was ever pursued.

So, you may be wondering why I dredged up all this information from the 1980s. One reason is that the C-5 lobby plan was a unique look into the system that has not been replicated (after this plan leaked, I am sure no contractor was dumb enough to ever write down their lobby efforts with the DoD again). Another is that I have spent several weeks exploring these same problems of revolving doors and the power of the defense contractors' money and influence on the DoD civilian personnel and officer corps, and have found that, in the past 25 years, there has been little change and fewer remedies that have curbed this system. In fact, as the DoD budget has risen to unprecedented heights since World War II and defense companies have merged to become very large entities, the corruption and undue influence on individuals who work for the DoD has gotten worse. I believe that until you change the daily incentives for the people who are responsible for the day-to-day workings in the DoD, nothing will change.

So, next week, in part two of this column, I will lay out what I believe are strong changes that need to happen. Many may believe that we can't get such tough measures enacted, but we must get control of a system that gives us missiles that are $1.5 million a pop and generations of other overpriced weapons that produce money and jobs for defense contractors and their DoD minions, but do not protect our troops or our country.

http://www.truth-out.org/the-buying-and-selling-pentagon-part-i68883

Here’s reason for us to fear fear itself

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

OK, put your books away. We’re having a pop quiz.

Below are four quotes. Each is from one of two sources: the Bible or the Koran, although, just to make things interesting, there’s also a chance all four are from one book. Two were edited for length and one of those was also edited to remove a religion-specific reference. Your job: identify the holy book of origin. Ready? Go:

1) “. . . Wherever you encounter [non-believers], kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post . . .”

2) “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

3) “If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ . . . do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death.”

4) “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”

All right, pens down. How did you do?

If you identified the first quote as being from the Koran (9:5) and the other three as originating in the Bible (Matthew 10:34, Deuteronomy 13:6-9, Numbers 31:17-18), I congratulate you on that degree in theology. If I have guessed correctly, most people will not have found it easy to place the quotes in their proper books. If I have guessed correctly, most people will have found a certain thematic similarity in them.

Yes, there is a point here: I wish people would stop cherry-picking warlike quotes from the Koran to “prove” the evil of Islam. You see this stuff all over the web. Just a few days ago, some anonymous person, angry with me for defending “Fascist/Nazi Islam” the writer says is trying to kill us all, sent me an e-mail quoting Koranic exhortations to violence to prove that Islam is a “religion of hate and murder.”

As rhetorical devices go, it is a cheap parlor trick, a con job to fool the foolish and gull the gullible and for anyone who has spent quality time with the Bible, its shortcomings should be obvious.

If not, see the pop quiz again. The Koran is hardly unique in its admonitions to take up the sword.

It is not my intention here to parse any of those troubling quotes. Let us leave it to religious scholars to contextualize them, to explain how they square with the contention that Islam and Christianity are religions of peace. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that, while both Christian and Muslim scholars will offer that context and explanation, only Christians can be assured of being taken at their word when they do.

Christians get the benefit of the doubt. Muslims get Glenn Beck asking a Muslim Congressman to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

Because Christianity is regarded as a known — and a norm. Muslims, meantime, have been drafted since Sept. 11, 2001, to fulfill the nation’s obsessive, historic, paranoiac and ongoing need to rally against an enemy within. We lost the Commies, but along came the Islamo-fascists. The names change. The endless capacity for irrational panic remains the same.

As in people who send out e-mails insisting upon the rightness of holding over a billion people — that bears repeating: over a billion people — responsible for the actions of, what . . .? A few hundred? A few thousand?

Some of us use lies, exaggerations and rhetorical gobbledygook to instill in the rest of us that irrational panic they breathe like air. Yes, it is only sensible to fear the threat we face from terrorism. But panicked, irrational people are capable of anything.

Might be wise if we chose to fear that, too.

http://www.islamophobiatoday.com/2011/03/30/here%E2%80%99s-reason-for-us-to-fear-fear-itself/

Cornel West and the fight against injustice

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/rizkhan/2011/03/201132863311584728.html

The Peak Oil Crisis: Edging Towards Recession

By Tom Whipple
30 March, 2011
Falls Church News-Press

As oil prices edge ever higher, more people are expressing concern about what this phenomenon is doing or could do to economic recovery. The conventional wisdom used to be that, in the U.S., whenever total national spending on oil products exceeded four percent of GDP the country went into recession. Elaborate charts have been produced showing how this happened in four of the recessions over the last 40 years. In 1974, 1981, 1991, and 2008 oil prices rose to levels anywhere from 4.5 to 9 percent of GDP just prior to the U.S. economy going into recession.

Only the recession caused by the dot.com bubble of 2001 did not involve unusually high oil prices. Three of the price spikes --1974, 1981, and 1991-- came as the result of disruptions to the oil supply from the Middle East, while the 2008 spike is now thought to have been caused by the demand for oil getting ahead of available supply. Each of these price spikes and subsequent recessions was followed by a drop in U.S. demand for oil. During the 1974, 1991, and 2001 recessions, oil demand dropped by about a million barrels a day (b/d). The 2008 recession cut U.S. demand by roughly two million b/d and the recessions of the early 80's cut demand by four million b/d.

So where do we stand in in the early spring of 2011? First, demand in the U.S. has bounced back about half way towards the 2007 high of over 21 million b/d from the winter of 2008-2009 low of about 18.5 million b/d. For the world as a whole however, consumption has recovered all the way back to a new high of 89 million b/d in February. This rebound has been so rapid that there again are concerns about demand outrunning supply. Prior to the outbreak of protests in the Middle East, the International Energy Agency (IEA) really had to stretch to come up with a scenario whereby steadily increasing demand from Asia and the oil producing states could be satisfied without a demand- and economy- killing price spike. The IEA's current scenario has the Chinese slowing the rate of increase in their demand for oil to half what it was last year and for the Saudis to use some of their spare capacity to satisfy whatever growth there is in 2011 for oil.

This scenario just might have worked out except for the Middle East uprisings and the fact that thus far in 2011 Beijing does not appear to be reducing the rapid increase in its demand for imported oil as much as necessary. With virtual cessation of oil exports from Libya likely for some time, the supply/demand situation has once again become extremely tight. Now the Saudis, helped by a couple of the other Gulf producers, are said to have increased production by 600,000 - 800,000 b/d to compensate for the lost Libyan production. The trouble was that much of the spare production capacity being used to replace the lost Libyan oil was the same spare capacity that was supposed to keep oil prices from spiking later this year.

The Saudis may still have more spare capacity that can be brought into production whenever the markets demand it - at least this is what they keep telling us. The organizations that are supposed to keep track of such things - International Energy Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy are for now agreeing with this claim.

In recent days, however, we have been starting to see doubts being raised by the major financial newspapers and some large financial institutions as to whether this rosy scenario of a combination of increased OPEC production and slower Chinese growth really portrays the rest of 2011.

With U.S. consumers burning about 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year, a $1 per gallon increase in gasoline prices drains $140 billion that might otherwise go for discretionary spending. In addition, another $140 billion or so would be drained from indirect consumer spending through higher prices for almost everything that has an oil component in its price. This is starting to sound like real money.

Most commentators employed by the financial press or financial service firms now are telling us that it will now take $120 a barrel oil over an extended period to wreak real harm to our economy. They quickly add that while oil prices may touch this price they are unlikely to stay there long enough to hurt economic recovery. If you are looking for a real optimist, then you might like Professor Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard who told an oil industry conference recently that it will take $160-$180 a barrel oil to drag down the economic recovery.

So there you have it: some analysts think our economic problems started when oil surged past $86 a barrel a ways back while others say "no, it is twice that much." In the meantime oil in London, which now is widely considered the real global benchmark price, has been hovering around $115 a barrel for the last two weeks, gasoline in California is now above $4 a gallon and consumer confidence is hitting recent lows. It's looking like we will have an interesting summer.

Tom Whipple is a retired government analyst and has been following the peak oil issue for several years.

http://www.countercurrents.org/whipple300311.htm

Losing Our Way

By BOB HERBERT
Published: March 25, 2011

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.



This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html?_r=4

On NBC, the missing story about parent company General Electric

By Paul Farhi, Tuesday, March 29, 8:24 PM

It’s the kind of accountability journalism that makes readers raise an eyebrow, if it doesn’t raise their blood pressure first. General Electric Co., reported the New York Times last week, earned $14.2 billion in worldwide profits last year, including $5.1 billion in the United States — and paid exactly zero dollars in federal taxes.

The front-page story drew widespread commentary in newspapers and on many Web sites. ABC News and Fox News, among others, were all over it.

But the story was conspicuously absent from the reportage of one news organization: NBC.

During its Friday broadcast, “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” had no time to mention that America’s largest corporation had essentially avoided paying federal taxes in 2010. Or its Saturday, Sunday or Monday broadcasts, either.

Did NBC’s silence have anything to do with the fact that one of its parent companies is General Electric?

NBC News representatives say that it didn’t. “This was a straightforward editorial decision, the kind we make daily around here,” said Lauren Kapp, spokeswoman for NBC News. Kapp declined to discuss how NBC decides what’s news or, in this case, what isn’t.

But to others, NBC’s silence looks like something between a lapse and a coverup. The satirical “Daily Show” on Monday noted that “Nightly News” had time on Friday to squeeze in a story about the Oxford English Dictionary adding such terms as “OMG” and “muffin top,” but didn’t bother with the GE story.

Ignoring stories about its parent company’s activities is “part of a troubling pattern” for NBC News, said Peter Hart, a director at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a liberal media watchdog group that often documents instances of corporate interference in news. He cited a series of GE-related stories that NBC’s news division has underplayed over the years, from safety issues in GE-designed nuclear power plants to the dumping of hazardous chemicals into New York’s Hudson River by GE-owned plants.

What’s more, Hart notes, NBC News has covered corporate tax-avoidance stories before — that is, when they didn’t involve GE. All three networks’ news divisions, according to Hart, have become reliable sources of publicity for their parents’ other corporate interests, doing news stories about upcoming sporting events or new TV shows carried on their own networks.

“It’s very curious,” Hart said. “Imagine if a different company were involved. If you changed the name to Citibank or Goldman Sachs, would NBC be interested in the story then? I suspect they would be.”

NBC’s news division didn’t avert its eyes entirely. The subject came up briefly on Rachel Maddow’s Friday-night program on MSNBC (“Why lower taxes when companies like this are already paying nothing?” she asked). Another MSNBC prime-time host, Lawrence O’Donnell, was sharply critical (“Shocking,” he called it). The subject was also raised during a panel discussion Friday on a CNBC program hosted by Larry Kudlow.

But those programs have a fraction of the audience of NBC’s top-rated nightly newscast or its leading Sunday public-affairs program, “Meet the Press,” which also didn’t delve into the subject. The MSNBC and CNBC shows also likely have less credibility than NBC’s venerable newscast and public-affairs program.

News organizations often wrestle with how to report on their own mistakes and those of their parent companies. ABC and Fox, for example, have been chided by critics over the years for glossing over unflattering news about their parent companies, the Walt Disney Co. and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., respectively.

The Washington Post has received its share of criticism for failing to disclose its corporate interests at times. However, it has often reported its own bad news, from its quickly ditched plan to host closed-door “salons” for government officials and big-money customers in 2009 to a recent series of plagiarized articles by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.

News outlets should “fight like hell” to cover their own dirty laundry because failing to do so hurts the organization’s credibility, said Kelly McBride, an ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute, a journalism-education institution.

“If people in your audience are savvy enough to raise the question of why you’re covering your own parent company differently than another company,” she said, “then it doesn’t matter what the answer is. You’ve undermined your credibility. The problem for any news organization is death by a thousand daggers.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/on-nbc-the-missing-story-about-parent-company-general-electric/2011/03/29/AFpRYJyB.html

Debt, Austerity and How to Fight Back

Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West
March 17, 2011

Editor's note: On Tuesday, April 5, hundreds of schools and community groups will participate in a teach-in on debt, austerity and how people are fighting back. From 2–3:30 pm (EST) a national teach-in will be streamed live from New York City, followed by local teach-ins and strategy discussions around the country. Read the call to action by Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West, check out the organizing guide and join the movement by attending or hosting a teach-in near you. Please see www.fightbackteachin.org for more information.

Wall Street Banks, American corporations and their political allies have declared a one-sided war on the American people. This war is being waged at our schools and colleges, the workplace and in our communities.

Today, Americans are working harder and earning less while corporate profits soar. As homeowners, consumers and students we see our wealth being stripped away by banks. Our government plunges into debt waging trillion-dollar wars. Meanwhile, our infrastructure erodes and climate change proceeds unchecked. Schools, daycare centers, senior citizen facilities, clinics, parks and firehouses are starved for funds so that corporations and the rich can get billions in tax breaks!

Corporate America’s unprovoked assault on working people has been carried out by manufacturing a need for fiscal austerity. We are told that there is no more money for essential human services, for the care of children, or better public schools, or to help lower the cost of a college education. The fact is that big banks and large corporations are hoarding trillions in cash and using tax loopholes to bankrupt our communities.

Spending on social needs is not the reason governments at all levels are facing massive budget short falls. Our debt and deficit problems are a direct result of corporate tax rollbacks, and the extortionist policies of banks and financial institutions that are engaged in a coordinated and massive wealth transfer from the American people to their own coffers.

The courageous actions by the citizens in Wisconsin are an inspiring defense of the core values of this country: a civil society based on freedom of association, ensuring that our communities have high quality public services—education, public safety and support for our elderly and most vulnerable—along with good jobs for all. The outpouring of support nationally shows the possibilities for challenging deepening economic inequality and political marginalization of the majority of the American people.

We are on the cusp of a great movement to resist and roll back that corporate domination by banks, energy companies and war profiteers. To join that movement and escalate the activism planned in the days, weeks and months ahead we are organizing a “National Teach-in on Debt, Austerity and How People Are Fighting Back.” The live web-streamed teach-in will be held on Tuesday, April 5, 2011, at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, beginning at 2 pm (EST). Admission is free. Speakers from schools and communities around the country will be hosted by moderators Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West in New York City through a live webcast that you can join by organizing a teach-in on your own campus.

HOW TO ORGANIZE A PARTICIPATING TEACH-IN ON YOUR CAMPUS

Please join us in organizing this event and building a progressive social movement to fight the destructive power of corporate greed. College campuses around the country will be linked to the New York City teach-in via the Internet. Anyone with a connection can participate. After the web cast, each campus will have its own discussion of how students can join with unions and community organizations to escalate their own local campaigns.

It’s easy to take part. All you need to do is:

Reserve a room with WIFI or an Ethernet connection to receive the webcast feed, and to make sure that you have audiovisual capability to make it available to the audience. The room reservation for Tuesday April 5, 2011, should be for several hours across the afternoon (or starting at 11:00 am Pacific Coast Time). Allot time in your reservation for setting up and testing equipment and your Internet connection and to clean up afterward.

Identify a person who will take charge of the webcast hook-up from your end.

Identify a moderator, even if only to welcome people before the webcast.

Publicize the event. Use social media and seek coverage from local media including newspapers, student papers, radio stations and television.

Organize a few people to help set up and clean up afterwards.

And then add your own teach-in to the national program:

Invite local speakers and activists to address national or local topics following the webcast.

Identify local actions and organizing efforts around student debt, home foreclosures, predatory lending and other destructive actions by banks, increases in college tuition, the Dream Act, cuts in public services, daycare cutbacks, teacher lay-offs, attacks on unions etc. in which students and other community members can participate.

Seek co-sponsorship from student groups, local labor unions, churches and local activist organizations.

Prepare educational materials for distribution at the event and available online. Include information about national, state and local efforts opposing austerity and budget cuts.

Publicize the event—again.

As you develop your plans, please contact us for technical details about how to connect to the live webcast from New York City and that so we can help connect you to others in your area also planning events. Please see www.fightbackteachin.org.
Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West
March 17, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/159309/debt-austerity-and-how-fight-back

Back at You, Glenn Beck

Stephen Lerner
March 29, 2011

As an organizer, I go to a lot of meetings, panels and discussions and often leave feeling like I’m caught in the movie Groundhog Day, where I am reliving the same discussions and debates over and over again, and wondering if they hold any relevance for anyone else. That’s why I was so surprised when my secretly taped comments about the need to challenge Wall Street and corporate power using direct action, delivered on March 19 at the Left Forum in New York City, set off a right-wing firestorm.

A funny thing happened on the way home from the forum. Overnight I was transformed by Glenn Beck into an all-powerful agent of “economic terrorism.” Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz called for a federal investigation of me, and right-wing blogs claimed that my comments revealed a vast conspiracy to take over the country and the economy.

What did I say that led Beck to spend two nights attacking me and defending big banks and Wall Street CEOs?

I think I may have found part of the answer in what disgraced former Wall Street stock analyst Henry Blodget admitted when he echoed Beck’s wild theories on Business Insider. Describing my remarks, he wrote, “Many Americans will undoubtedly sympathize with and support them.”

So that was it: Beck, right-wingers and Wall Street sympathizers went ballistic because they knew the ideas I talked about are far from being a secret leftist conspiracy; in fact, they’re in sync with the thinking of most Americans. In my talk, I raised a very simple yet powerful idea: that homeowners, students, citizens and workers should make the same practical decisions Wall Street and corporate CEOs make every day—they should reject bad financial deals.

Beck and Wall Street are terrified that regular Americans will begin to challenge the double standard that allows one set of rules for the rich and another for the rest of us. They are petrified of the growing understanding, among people of diverse political backgrounds, that our country isn’t broke; that the tiny elite at the top has manipulated the economic crisis it created to grow even richer and more powerful while the rest of us suffer the consequences; and that Wall Street and corporations, sitting on record profits, are holding the country hostage, essentially threatening a capital strike if they don’t get further tax and regulatory breaks.

As long as Wall Street and the superrich feel secure and confident, they have no reason to negotiate a fair deal with the rest of us. Only by creating uncertainty and instability for them—by disrupting unfair business as usual—can we build the strength to challenge their stranglehold on our economy and our democracy.

But I don’t think it was just my theorizing about power relationships and the economy that set off such a frenzy. It was the prospect that average Americans could take a series of concrete and practical steps, including direct action and civil disobedience, to make Wall Street pay for the trillions it stole from us. Ordinary Americans have the power and the opportunity to go on offense right now—with the immediate goals of keeping millions of people in their homes and raising revenue for cities and states to save jobs and critical services.

Here’s how we can start:

§ Homeowners and students can stop paying unfair debt. If growing numbers of homeowners and students organize toward a loan strike—threatening to refuse to pay their toxic mortgages and student loans unless banks agree to negotiate lower rates—it could force banks to modify loans and provide relief to our families.

§ Citizens can demand that our governments stop doing business with bandit banks. Local governments conduct trilliions in business with Wall Street banks. That leverage can be used to force the banks to pay their fair share in taxes, renegotiate high-cost deals that are bankrupting taxpayers with astronomical interest rates, and stop foreclosures by reducing mortgage principals.

§ Public employees can use their collective bargaining power to protect taxpayer dollars. Teachers, nurses and other public employees can go to the bargaining table armed with solutions that would save billions, like renegotiating the toxic interest rate swaps that are costing taxpayers at least $1.8 billion a year nationally. Swaps were supposed to save taxpayers money, but they backfired when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates after the financial crash to help the banks. Now, as taxpayers deal with devastating cuts, the banks are using these swaps to suck millions out of government coffers. Imagine public employees voting to strike in order to pressure the city or state to use its power to protect taxpayers and critical services while also stopping foreclosures and stabilizing the housing market and tax base.

So let’s give Wall Street, Glenn Beck and the right something to be scared about. It’s time to use our collective power to challenge the economic and political stranglehold they have on our country.

http://www.thenation.com/article/159547/back-you-glenn-beck?page=full

Wikileaks Reader: An Index

By: fiver2011 Tuesday March 29, 2011 1:47 pm

too many links to repost...just go to the site!

http://my.firedoglake.com/fiver2011/2011/03/29/wikileaks-reader-an-index/