He voted for special interests in Financial Reform Legislation.

He voted against extending unemployment insurance benefits during this time of joblessness.

Conclusion: Man of the people, not so much.

The bill also would have supplied a $16 billion boost in Medicaid funding for states, which would mean about $500 million for Massachusetts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That figure is lower than an earlier proposal, which would have supplied a $24 billion boost, or $760 million for Massachusetts. It also includes a variety of tax changes, and money for summer jobs programs.

This is money that could have gone directly into our local economy. The amount of pain this Republican No vote is going to cause our citizens is incalculable.

More on this story here here and here

By the end of this week, 903,000 long-term unemployed who otherwise would have received benefits will have missed checks. By the end of next week that number will reach 1.2 million.

This vote by our elected representatives demonstrates a lack of or ineffective planning on how to deal with this economic catastrophe. The question (How Do I Survive?) comes through loud and clear in the 900+ comments to this story. What’s your answer to the question?

read the rest of the story…

“When you put people out of work, you cripple the quality of life of their entire families. When you start dismantling the public schools and driving teachers from the classrooms, you damage — and in many instances cripple — the lifetime prospects of untold numbers of pupils. When you undermine a recovery that is as fragile as this one, which is as fragile as a crate of eggs, you undermine the economic health of the entire nation.”

If think of yourself as caring, thoughtful, and patriotic, then contact your elected representative’s and tell them to continue support for stimulus funding.

Read the full story…

Citigroup Plutonomy Report Part 1.pdf
Citigroup Plutonomy Report Part 2.pdf

Thank you Bill.

Bill Moyers: Plutocracy is not an American word but it’s become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly “bang the drum on plutonomy.”

And bang they did, with an “equity strategy” for their investors, entitled, “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer.” Here are some excerpts:

“Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper…[and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years…”

“…the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US– the plutonomists in our parlance– have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US…[and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.”

“…[and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. [Because] the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact.”

And so they were, before the great collapse of 2008. And so they are, today, after the fall. While millions of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, the plutonomists are doing just fine. In some cases, even better, thanks to our bailout of the big banks which meant record profits and record bonuses for Wall Street.

Now why is this? Because over the past 30 years the plutocrats, or plutonomists — choose your poison — have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. Remember that Citigroup reference to “market-friendly governments” on their side? It hasn’t mattered which party has been in power — government has done Wall Street’s bidding.

Don’t blame the lobbyists, by the way; they are simply the mules of politics, delivering the drug of choice to a political class addicted to cash — what polite circles call “campaign contributions” and Tony Soprano would call “protection.”

This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. According to a study from the Pew Research Center last month, nine out of ten Americans give our national economy a negative rating. Eight out of ten report difficulty finding jobs in their communities, and seven out of ten say they experienced job-related or financial problems over the past year.

So it is that like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy.

Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs.

Via, http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/

by Zachary Roth via TPM

In the wake of last month’s Citizens United ruling, a powerhouse Washington lobbying firm is informing its corporate clients on how they can use middlemen like the Chamber of Commerce to pour unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns, while maintaining “sufficient cover” to avoid “public scrutiny” and negative media coverage.

A “Public Policy and Law Alert” on the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling, prepared by two lawyers for K&LGates and posted on the firm’s site last Friday, notes that, thanks to disclosure rules, corporations could alienate their customers by spending on political campaigns — especially because they could become the target of negative media coverage.

Numbers 1 thru 9 provide analysis, Number 10 is the instructions.

There has been a lot of talk about the financial crisis over the past year and a half, and I obviously think that will remain an important subject, at least until we have a truly reformed financial system. Preventing the next financial crisis should be high on our society’s priority list. But as the months and years wear on, I suspect we will see more articles like Don Peck’s recent 8,000-word article in The Atlantic, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America.”

Peck’s article is not about what caused the recent crash and recession, but what its societal consequences will be. And the article is almost unremittingly bleak. Even before 2008, we had already lived through a decade of stagnant median income and sluggish job growth; the recession pushed some unemployment levels, such as the underemployment rate (people out of work, working part-time for economic reasons, or too discouraged to look for work) to levels not seen since the Great Depression. It’s not particularly clear where growth will come from, as manufacturing remains in decline, services are becoming increasingly outsourceable, and other countries take the lead in the most plausible major new industry (alternative energy). According to Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps, “the new floor for unemployment is likely to be between 6.5 percent and 7.5 percent (for several reasons, including “a financial industry that for a generation has focused its talent and resources not on funding business innovation, but on proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, and arcane financial engineering”).

The societal implications that Peck sees are worse than the mere numbers would imply. Young people who graduate into recessions never catch up with cohorts around them that graduate into better economic conditions, partly due to risk aversion, partly because they move up more slowly and get tagged as underperformers. Unemployment also changes people:

“Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, has found that in young adults, long bouts of unemployment provoke long-lasting changes in behavior and mental health. ‘Some people say, “Oh, well, they’re young, they’re in and out of the workforce, so unemployment shouldn’t matter much psychologically,”‘Mossakowski told me. ‘But that isn’t true.’”

The effects of unemployment go beyond, and last longer than, not having money.

“Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in the U.K., and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. . . . Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth.”

Some of the results show up quickly: “Last March, the National Domestic Violence Hotline received almost half again as many calls as it had one year earlier; as was the case in the Depression, unemployed men are vastly more likely to beat their wives or children.”

I think this means that we need to think of employment not merely as a determinant of GDP, but as an independent good in itself. Furthermore, there are sound economic reasons why we should care not just about the overall unemployment level, but about unemployment levels in specific sub-groups (such as men in inner cities), since unemployment has obvious negative externalities.

The recession may also be reinforcing the long-term trend toward inequality in American society. Recessions typically reduce income inequality in the short term, since the rich gain much of their income from investments, which drop faster than wages in a market crash. But the tougher labor market could increase the advantage that people have coming from the upper class: “Princeton’s 2009 graduating class found more jobs in financial services than in any other industry,” Peck reports.

My initial thought was that the financial crisis and recession might have a salutary effect because the middle class, faced with serious economic insecurity, might start worrying more about economic security (and identifying more with the poor and working class), instead of thinking that individual initiative alone would make them rich. I still think this is possible. Unfortunately, it seems to be unlikely. Peck cites economic historian Benjamin Friedman, who “argues that both inside and outside the U.S., lengthy periods of economic stagnation or decline have almost always left society more mean-spirited and less inclusive, and have usually stopped or reversed the advance of rights and freedoms.” The mechanism for this is simple: although some people may react to economic insecurity by realizing that their interests lie with labor rather than capital, other people will react by blaming their misfortune on immigrants, or minorities, or Jews, or gays, or — this being America — the government.

The only solution, says Peck, is a making “the return to a more normal jobs environment an unflagging national priority.” A more normal jobs environment seems like the bare minimum of a solution to me, and he would probably agree. But even that represents a shift from our current political center of gravity, where people think the medium-term deficit is a bigger problem than jobs.

Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers

Click to download the PDF of this Report

By Kathy Ruffing and James R. Horney via cbpp.org

If not for the tax cuts enacted during the Presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that began during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.

While President Obama inherited a bad fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s deficit problem. But we should all recognize how we got where we are today.

The rest of the story

To see the full video click the photo or here.

To get the full transcript of the event click here.

by Dante Atkins via Daily Kos: State of the Nation

The year 2006 was shaping up to be a good one for Democrats. The toxic combination of George W. Bush and the corruption and cronyism of the Republican Congress was brewing a perfect storm that seemed to be pointing to Democratic victories in areas where they might not otherwise be expected. And nowhere was that more true than in the Mountain West.

In this land of big sky, rugged earth, and independent spirits, Democratic candidates were not only on the verge of winning big in the competitive areas such as Colorado and Montana, but they were also fighting hard in the deepest of red areas: strongly conservative states such as Wyoming and Idaho. The prevailing wisdom was that these areas preferred Republicans because voters demanded less government interference in their lives and thus tended to side with the small-government conservatives against big-government “tax-and-spend” liberals.

It was in this context that on October 2 of that year, Markos Moulitsas e-penned an editorial in an unlikely place: the electronic version of the libertarian publication CATO, appropriately dubbed CATO Unbound. In his essay, “The Case for the Libertarian Democrat,” Moulitsas quoted a then-pseudonymous Daily Kos diarist to explain the common cause then forming between those with libertarian ideals and those with a progressive vision:

As hekebolos further noted, defense contractors now have greater say in what weapons systems get built (via their lobbyists, blackmailing elected officials by claiming that jobs will be lost in their states and districts if weapons system X gets axed). The energy industry dominates the executive branch and has reaped record windfall profits. Our public debt is now held increasingly by private hedge funds. Corporations foul our air and water. They plunder our treasury.

This list, I’m sure, could be added to. Oil and oil services companies can even dictate when and how the most powerful nation on earth decides to go to war. A cabal of major corporate industry is, in fact, more powerful than the government of the most powerful nation on earth–and government is the only thing that can stop them from recklessly exploiting the people and destroying their freedom.

That, in essence, is why I am a Democrat, and why my original blog post on libertarian Democrats struck a chord with so many. We cherish freedom, and will embrace any who would protect it. But that necessarily includes, in this day and age, the government.

(Click for the rest of the story) It’s worth your time, IMO.