Weak Dollar Helps Whom?

Paul Krugman tells us,

“a fall in the dollar . . . wouldn’t be a terrible thing and might actually help the economy.”

By help, he means help U.S. workers work longer hours for less buying power, to better compete with third-world workers.

With help like this, who needs enemies?

Krugman does make the point, “the unemployed don’t hire lobbyists,” the root of the government’s inaction to correct the long-term unemployment situation.

The American people do need to hire public-interest lobbyists—on each and every one of the issues that wealth hires lobbyists for.

Robber Barony Is Back

http://topincomes.g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/#Graphic:
select:
United States
1917-2009
Average Incomes
bottom 90% average income - including capital gains

Shows the submerged 90% of us earn the same (per family) in real terms as we did in the late 1960s. Yet the typical family now has more wage earners, working more hours.

Same site, select
Top Income Shares
top .01% - including capital gains

Shows the hunting animals eating the entire carcass except during 1942-1981, when we had effective antitrust law, labor law, and progressive taxation.

In only these forty years was the average family income of the top .01% "only" 165 times the average family income.  Before 1942 and after 1981, the rich took a much larger share.  In 2010 it was 462 times the average and increasing.  (If only the top .01% earned anything, their share would be 10,000 times the average.   That the one family in 10,000 now takes nearly 5% of all the income, is appalling.)

The rich get their income not for what they do, but for what they own.  They claim to be "job creators."  In truth, the only job creator is a customer, who buys something.  We have to get money back in the hands of those who spend it--the nonrich.  When the only people with money to spend have all the stuff they can use, the economy collapses.  These booms and busts happened regularly up through the Great Depression.  It was political action that transformed the working class into the middle class, avoiding the booms and busts.  Deregulation, detaxing the rich, eroding worker rights, free trade, since 1981 are bringing back the bad old days of many serfs, one lord.  Only political action can reverse the trend.  We have to restore antitrust laws, restore workers' rights, establish fair trade not free trade, tax the rich.

Norway has a much fairer balance of power between employees and employers, partly due to nationwide collective bargaining.  U.S. labor laws have been eroded since they were enacted in 1935, by anti-labor court decisions and anti-labor legislation.  Now, management can ignore labor agreements and labor law without serious consequences.

Stand Up to Our President

Paul Krugman opines that Obama should stand up to Republicans.

Unfortunately, as with Clinton's disastrous free-trade policies, Obama promotes cuts to the safety net that a Republican president would not be able to get past a Democratic congress.  Obama, like Clinton, has been very much a Republican president.

Obama's preparedness to make a whole range of compromises will be at the expense of the 99%.

It is we who must stand up to our president.  We have to prevent him from selling us down the river.

Moral war?

Every so often someone applauds what he calls a "moral" war, as Krugman does once again here: "the Civil War and World War II are the two great moral wars of our history, and they should be remembered with pride."

Once again, I have to respond:

The Civil War was never about slavery. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."--Lincoln Lincoln preserved the union to preserve its power. Shame on you, Professor Krugman, for calling Lincoln's war moral. You know better. If Lincoln had permitted the states to dissolve the union, we would not have the power to do the great evil we have wreaked in every small country we've meddled in since the end of WWII.

We entered WWII to punish the Japanese, who attacked our war-making capability in the Pacific. We prided ourselves in fighting the evil Hitler. In beating him, we became him. The list of countries the U.S. has attacked with our military, CIA, gifts and sales of weapons, gifts of money for weapons and military . . . is almost endless. The tail of war profiteering has wagged the dog of U.S. policy since Eisenhower succeeded in his quest, begun in WWI, to create the military-industrial complex he warned us of too late. "I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."--Mohandas Gandhi The enemy is not an evil dictator. The enemy is evil itself. We do not win by doing evil.

--TomRW

The Choice (video)

Terrific effort by Lee Stranahan calling on President Obama to do the right thing.

Progressives in Revolt

Paul Krugman today outlines President Obama's "trust problem."

On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat who talks of “bending the curve” but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform. Mr. Obama’s explanations of his plan have gotten clearer, but he still seems unable to settle on a simple, pithy formula; his speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee....

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

Progressives in revolt. Count me in. This progressive is drawing her line in the sand, since Obama seems to lack the will to do so. I insist on real, substantive reform, a plan that will ensure that Americans are no longer denied care on the basis of some profit-monger's bottom line. And yes, Obama definitely has a trust problem.

Glenn Greenwald made an excellent case on Wednesday that Obama & Co., not being big, hapless dummies, are going about this reform process in a way so as to get exactly the bill they want, that is, exactly the bill the health insurance industry wants, while ensuring that that industry's support stays solidly with the Democrats. There's no other reasonable explanation for the administration's casual, milquetoast, give-away-the-farm approach to health care reform.

Today, Greenwald outlines the administration's strategy further:

This is the mindset of Rahm Emanuel: The only calculation that matters is maximizing political power. The only "change" that's meaningful is converting more Republican seats into Democratic ones. A legislative "win" is determined by whether Democrats can claim victory, not by whether anything constructive was achieved. The smart approach is to serve and thus curry favor with the most powerful corporate factions, not change the rules to make them less powerful....

All that matters is that we beat the Republicans and we should do anything to achieve that, including serving corporate donors to ensure they fund Us and not Them. [emphasis in original]

But that isn't what Obama pledged he would do when he campaigned. He repeatedly vowed he would do the opposite -- that he would reject that thinking and battle aggressively against domination by what he called "the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few" who have "run Washington far too long" -- and he convinced millions of people that he was serious, people who, as a result, became fervent devotees to his cause. Those are the people who New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently said have been "punked by Obama" because it is precisely those same interests who continue to be the prime beneficiaries and masters of Washington behavior during the Obama presidency.

I am indeed feeling punked, as Rich so succinctly put it. And I'm furious. I'm not altogether surprised, but I am dismayed at how readily and transparently Obama has gotten in bed with the corporate behemoths who treat this country like their own personal all-you-can-eat buffet. This is most assuredly not the change I voted for.

I will fight this status-quo-loving pandering-to-money politics as hard as I can, regardless of whether it's coming from the Reps or the Dems. I am sick to death of a system that's stacked against ordinary Americans, enriching the already fabulously wealthy and leaving the average working stiff in the muck. The enormous gulf between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen ominously.

Our current wealthcare system is a travesty and a horror that affects every single ordinary person in this country. Eighteen thousand U.S. citizens die every year because they don't get adequate health care. As Johann Hari of the Independent says, "That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year." And then there are those, either uninsured or underinsured, who are bankrupted and ruined because they happened to get sick. Many of these are the people who are then forced to foreclose on their mortgages.

The insurance companies are having your American dream for lunch. They not only deny people coverage on the basis of "preexisting conditions"; they deny care to those who are "covered" based on the insurance company's assessment of what is "necessary." It's you and your doctor who should be deciding what's "necessary," not some insurance company bean-counter hack.

We are in the midst of a full-blown health care emergency in this country, a disaster the equivalent of six 9/11s every year, and Obama and Rahm want to give away the farm to the monsters responsible for this debacle. Don't let them. Keep pushing and pushing. Channel your rage. And don't back down.