various verbiage

More PROOF of sustained economic inequality… from Economist Magazine no less! The ‘Wall Street Journal’ of Britain!!

Here’s the sum total of what OccupyWallStreet is protesting against:

Wages as Percent of Economy

Real Wages are at their lowest in 50yrs+, while corporate profits are at their highest… -&- the top tax brackets at their lowest.

But don’t take it from me– here’s a whole PAGE full of charts, from BUSINESS INSIDER… not a bastion of ‘Liberalism’, far from it.

Details:

• Unemployment is still at highest level since the Great Depression
  this is the lowest percentage of Americans with jobs since the early 1980s
• Corporate profits are higher than they’ve been since the 1950s.
• CEO pay is now 350X the average worker’s, up from 50X from 1960-1985.
• CEO pay has skyrocketed 300% since 1990. Corporate profits have doubled. Average “production worker” pay has increased 4%. The minimum wage has dropped.
• After adjusting for inflation, average hourly earnings haven’t increased in 50 years.
• The top 1% of American wage earners are hauling in a bigger percentage of the country’s total pre-tax income than you have at any time since the late 1920s.
• US now ranks 93rd in the world in “income equality.” China’s ahead of us. So is India. So is Iran.
• Social mobility in this country is also near an all-time low.
• The top 1% of Americans own 42% of the financial wealth in this country. The top 5%, meanwhile, own nearly 70%.
• The richest 20% pay 64% of the total taxes. Of course, that’s because they also make most of the money: 59.1%

BUSINESS INSIDER…

BREAKING: #OCCUPY WINS! Bloomberg backs down!

After Bloomberg said ‘I agree with the Protester’s right to assemble’
Then Bloomberg said ‘It’ll be a ‘temporary’ evacuation to clean the park’
Then the details came out: ‘New Rules’ would be posted, prohibiting people sitting or laying down in the park, etc
Then MoveOn collected 300k signatures

Then THIS Happened:

Over & over the media says, “@OccupyWallStreet has no coherent demands”.
Well, maybe they should use that vaunted journalistic ‘better-than-bloggeres’ ability & do a little RESEARCH.

But they won’t- just like not a single major MSM outlet is on record estimating how many protesters there are…
Yeah, you’ve gotta go to GERMANY to get an estimate!
Congrats MSM Mental Midgets– every single time 100 TeaParty ppl gather, they get wall-to-wall coverage; hell, Fox News sends Hannity out on Lear Jet!

So- here’s the FACTS:
Der Spiegel: “During a demonstration on Saturday it has more than 700 of 1500 protest-learns arrested.” link.

And heres the COHERENT DEMANDS from OccupyWallStreet:

1. CONGRESS PASS HR 1489 REINSTATING GLASS-STEAGALL ACT.
2. USE CONGRESSIONAL AUTHORITY AND OVERSIGHT TO ENSURE APPROPRIATE FEDERAL AGENCIES FULLY INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE WALL STREET CRIMINALS
3. CONGRESS ENACT LEGISLATION TO PROTECT OUR DEMOCRACY BY REVERSING THE EFFECTS OF THE CITIZENS UNITED SUPREME COURT DECISION
4. CONGRESS PASS THE BUFFETT RULE ON FAIR TAXATION SO THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE & CLOSE CORPORATE TAX LOOP HOLES AND ENACT A PROHIBITION ON HIDING FUNDS OFF SHORE.
5. CONGRESS COMPLETELY REVAMP THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
6. CONGRESS PASS SPECIFIC AND EFFECTIVE LAWS LIMITING THE INFLUENCE OF LOBBYISTS AND ELIMINATING THE PRACTICE OF LOBBYISTS WRITING LEGISLATION THAT ENDS UP ON THE FLOOR OF CONGRESS.
7. CONGRESS PASSING “Revolving Door Legislation” LEGISLATION ELIMINATING THE ABILITY OF FORMER GOVERNMENT REGULATORS GOING TO WORK FOR CORPORATIONS THAT THEY ONCE REGULATED.
8. ELIMINATE “PERSONHOOD” STATUS FOR CORPORATIONS (Sorry Mitt Romney)
9. RE-ESTABLISH THE PUBLIC AIRWAVES IN THE U.S. SO THAT POLITICAL CANDIDATES ARE GIVEN EQUAL TIME

link.

Pretty Damn Coherent, right there…

The 2008 financial crisis and the prolonged economic downturn has eviscerated Alan Greenspan’s ‘Consumption Defense’ (ie, ‘Even though inequality as measured in dollars is growing, when measured in dishwashers, microwaves and clothes dryers it’s decreasing’) as ruthlessly as it has burst the credit bubble that allowed the middle class to feel richer than it was.

Income inequality is today a fact of life, as essential to doing business as the rate of inflation:

Proctor & Gamble executives study the Gini co-efficient, a technical measure of income inequality, to divine what is happening to their erstwhile middle-class consumer base, and have decided the best strategy is to give up on the center and to market instead to the top and the bottom.

Citigroup advises investors to design their portfolios around income inequality. It calls this strategy the “Consumer Hourglass Portfolio” and has created an index of companies that serve the rich and the poor while avoiding the vanishing middle.

Once income inequality has become a tool for marketing executives and stock pickers it becomes pretty hard to deny. But we can still argue over what is causing it…

More here

Perfectly said:

Barack Obama’s betrayal will resonate in history long after he has become just another name on the over-priced celebrity speaker circuit. It is a betrayal of far more than the youthful idealists and loyal progressives who put him in the White House.

Obama has unmoored the Democratic Party from its foundations — philosophical and electoral. No longer is it an expression of the persons, programs and ideas that crystallized with the New Deal and which dominated the country’s politics for sixty years. Its future is that of ad hoc assemblage of hustlers and special interests whose sole claim to govern will be that it is not the amalgamated Tea/Republican Party.

Obama, by this Oedipus-like act of patricide, has also betrayed the country that voted for an enlightened leader with a social conscience – a country in desperate need of the opposite to the fate he has laid on us.
More…

1) Worker productivity & economy has risen steadily for past 35 years
Yet worker salaries have held steady, if fallen.
2. People still ‘have’ more, b/c
a) women now work
b. people work more hours, *lots* more hours
c. For years ppl used their ‘house ATM’, & now they’re max’ing their credit cards
3. Meanwhile, the share of $$ to the richest has risen astronomically
a) our country profiles like a Banana Republic
b. while some disparities in the other top-30 world economies, USA has by far worst disparity
c. OUR OWN CITIZENS, RICH & POOR, REPUBLICAN & DEMOCRAT, DON’T WANT THIS DISPARITY:
(1) when polled, they think the disparity is much less
(2) when asked what kind of economic distribution is ‘equitable’, they choose #’s that look like Sweden!!
(3) They Agree that Gov’t Deficit & Debt are massive problems, & ASSUME that we need to cut Services… but when they find-out that top companies pay NEGATIVE TAXES– they’re INFURIATED.

4. This is not Happenstance
a) it’s predicted, even by Adam Smith
b. it’s aided & abetted by tax code, tax incentives, even ‘consumption easements’ designed specifically to aid the top 1/10% of the richest Americans
c. cf “Plutonomy Memos”: the very richest Americans *want* this disparity, & know their ‘weak spot’– “that the ppl can vote”. & thus they spend MASSIVE amounts of $$ to persuade ‘the masses’… NOT b/c they’re ‘generous’, but b/c it’s a GOOD INVESTMENT. Note: Yes the Rich & Corp’s donate to Dems as well as Repubs– but at a factor of 1/5!!!

5. This is not Inevitable, nor Permanent
a) Country after Country, Culture after Culture has fought this
b. We did this ourselves in our own country:
(1) Great Depression: 24% Unemployment, soup lines & ppl starving everywhere
(2) Gov’t put ppl to work; FDR recognized & fought-back against the massive heated propaganda thrown by corporatists: “I welcome their hatred!”
(3) Progressive Taxation, strong union laws, trust-busting, etc reined-in the monopolization of wealth, & Social Security began the social safety net
…& NONE OF THOSE THINGS ‘DROVE THE RICH TO QUIT’, LEAVE, ‘GO GALT’, OR ‘QUIT INOVATING’… Let-alone ‘BANKRUPTED THEM’. No- they simply worked harder, & thrived.

—————

Nuff said.

Update: And the Tea-Baggers are Taking Credit for the downgrade!! I suppose when interest rates rise, inflation rises, their mortgage payments rise, & their paychecks fall (& everything costs more)– that won’t have anything to do with the Debt Ceiling, & everything to do with ‘Democratic Spending’.

I first studied Nuclear Power back in 9th grade, when I came across Helen Caldicott’s 1978 screed, Nuclear Madness. In it she made the following points:

1. Nuclear power is ridiculously unsafe
2. Nuclear power is ridiculously inefficient
3. Nuclear power is ridiculously toxic
4. Nuclear power is ridiculously expensive

   -& the kicker-

5. Nuclear power creates Nuclear Bombs

I was horribly shocked, and quite convinced. But hey- I was in 9th grade, so WTF did I know?

Well, it turns out, this Medical Doctor had done her homework… so much so, that both Australia and New Zealand declared themselves “nuclear free zones”, & continue to create international incidents by denying US Battleships & Aircraft Carriers access to their harbors.

How’s that? Well, it turns-out:

1. Despite decades of blandishments, nuclear power is in fact considered by nature “unsafe”. When 60 Minutes interviewed the head of France’s Nuclear Energy Ministry, asking about how “safe” nuclear energy was, they were expecting blandishments about that very question… but to her credit, the Minister was honest. “Of course not. Nuclear power can never be safe. We do the best we can”. And the point being– sure, lots more people die daily from Coal use: from mining, to the lung problems caused by the smog when it burns… But in the end, no conceivable coal-based calamity could cause Chernobyl, nor Fukushima Daiichi, “second only to the Chernobyl accident in its severity“. Period. Full-stop. Have you seen what Chernobyl still looks like twenty years later?. And if Fukushima Daiichi continues to lose control of Reactors 1 &/or 3, we could have another stream of very similar horrific results…
2. Nuclear power is ridiculously inefficient: Would you believe, that the ‘modern’ nuclear plant is basically a steam engine? We’re harvesting amazingly powerful nuclear reactions, by letting them BOIL WATER??!!! And before you say “so WTF”, consider: the very best ‘teakettle’ exothermic reaction is at best 30% efficient, and in fact almost never achieves that efficiency… but at a rate of $6 Billion per reactor… which takes a minimum of 10 years to build, and even when in ‘perfect’ operation, needs to be taken-down every six months for a FULL YEAR of rebuilding… and then still have a ‘normal life’ of only a few decades. So after all that $$, time, etc investment, you get energy right? Yes, but also… Toxic Waste:
3. So- we have our ‘Teakettle power-plant’ process, kinda like coal, right? But lots more expensive, lots more finicky, are typically offline more than online, -&- don’t have a very long lifespan. No biggie– they’re still good investments, right? Which is why the Government still spends hugely to support them, & oil companies invest heavily in them (still)? Here’s the Problem: TOXIC WASTE. Even in a ‘perfectly operating plant’, all that ‘heated-up water’ becomes TOXIC WASTE, along with the metal water-containers, hundreds of miles of pipe per plant, and oh wait, the nuclear fuel itself. And we’re not talking coal-type ‘toxic waste’, ie dump it in a pond & it kills some ducks. We’re talking “Toxic Avenger”-style toxic waste, dump it in a pond & kill every single life-form (see “Chernobyl” pictures above)… for literally HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Even after the catastrophe of the ‘dust bowl’ in the mid-west, some of that soil is starting to come-back. In Chernobyl? One word: NEVER.
4. Nuclear power is ridiculously expensive: $6 Billion per plant. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!!! Where’s all the ‘Free Market’ Tea-Party Libertarians[sic], Grover Norquist & his “Americans for Tax Reform”, Koch neo-Birchers & their ilk?!! NOT ONE NUCLEAR PLANT WOULD EVER BE CREATED IF THE GOVERNMENT DIDN’T MASSIVELY SUBSIDIZE ITS CONSTRUCTION, OPERATION, ON-GOING MAINTENANCE, SPENT-FUEL DISPOSAL, & EVENTUAL DECOMMISSION COSTS. No other form of power gets such a ‘hands-on’ handout from the Government. Which is probably why Big Oil and their enablers like Halliburton are heavily invested in Nuclear Power– historically, they have never lost their ability to ‘feed at the taxpayers trough’. Hello Taxpayers– THAT’S OUR MONEY BEING SPENT ON NUCLEAR POWER!!! DON’T WE HAVE A SAY IN THAT?!!

   -& the kicker-

5. Nuclear power is irretrievably wedded to Nuclear Bombs: Helen Caldicott took amazing amounts of ridicule for this statement… despite doing an amazing amount of research, interviewing nearly every prominent nuclear physicist of her day, she was still pilloried by the media, and everyone else. But know what? SHE WAS RIGHT. Now, nearly thirty years later, the big ‘open secret’ re nuclear power is– yes, with a reasonably straightforward refining step, nuclear waste can be refined into ‘weapons-grade’ uranium. Sure, it’s extremely inefficient, & prohibitively expensive… so in USA we don’t usually do it (& instead, most-often just leave ‘spent fuel rods’ laying-around in ‘cooling ponds’ outside of nuclear reactors… & oh yeah, outside of the containment vessels as well)… But consider the case of countries who don’t have easy access to nuclear fuel– remember all the brouhaha about Saddam & ‘yellow-cake’? He wanted nuclear power, & nobody would sell it to him. Or how about all the brouhaha re. Iran & it’s nuclear power efforts? You know why Israel wants to bomb those plants, right? Because within six months of their operation, Iran would have accumulated enough fissionable uranium to create a bomb. And why do we know this? Because when India bought its first nuclear power plant from Canada in the early 70′s, India was able to explode it’s first nuclear bomb in 1974… shocking the world, & the CIA who had claimed it would “take them decades to get the fuel”. Whoopsie, guys– should have asked your nuclear scientists. Canada, in a bit of embarrassment, “stopped nuclear dealings with India”. Gee, thanks.

BUT WHO NEEDS ALL THAT?!!
Ever hear of a ‘dirty bomb’? Just grab a glob of nuclear waste, stuff it in a suitcase with some C4- walla. Nuclear fallout everywhere, people dying and buildings forever uninhabitable. A terrorist wet dream. And hey- no need to even ‘find’ the spent fuel rods– just go digging in the ‘containment pools’ outside every single one of every single nuclear power plant in the USA, both in-operation and ‘decommissioned’!! Heck- crash a fricking 747 into them– the original design specs of those iconic nuclear towers were to withstand a 747 strike… and thank god for that. But nobody ever thought the ‘temporary containment pools’ would still contain spent fuel rods decades later (60 YEARS LATER?!!):

Thousands of tons of deadly reactor cores at San Onofre stand as the most concentrated lethal hazard anywhere in California, except of course, a similarly-sized and situated hot pile at Diablo Canyon, and a few much smaller piles scattered in several other places around the state. link

Want the NRC’s version?

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind. link

And consider– REGULAR NUCLEAR MATERIAL IS EXTREMELY RARE IN NATURE!!! WE HAVE CREATED THIS PROBLEM COMPLETELY OURSELVES!! This is NOT like coal, which is already there, & can get lit on fire underground for decades…

And when even the LA Times (not even remotely a ‘liberal rag’) agrees: Peter Bradford, a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission member, made this comparison in a statement: “Counting on new nuclear reactors as a climate change solution is no more sensible than counting on an un-built dam to create a lake to fight a nearby forest fire.”

But none of that’s my Favorite Nuclear Disaster.
Here’s my favorite:
Picture a heady conclave of Big Oil/Extractive types, pooling mind-share & big bucks with the Koch Brothers’ array of astroturfing fake grassroots organizations. What’s their newest propaganda? Something anti-union? Anti-regulation? Anti-Global Warming science? Anti-Clean Air Act? No– (queue Twilight Zone music): THEY’RE ARGUING THAT NUCLEAR POWER IS ‘GREEN’!!!!
Calling Nuclear Power ‘Green’ because it “reduces Carbon” is like calling cyanide a ‘diet pill’ because it ‘reduces fat’. Yeah, gets rid of ‘thirty pounds of unsightly fat’, right off at the neck.

For anyone who doesn’t understand– there has never been a successfully tested, robust ‘solution’ for nuclear waste. Every single idea, from burying it underground, burning it at sea (Thank-you France! and Thank-you Greenpeace for your ongoing documentation of the massive sea-life die-offs occurring behind the French ‘nuke disposal’ ships to this day…), glassification, burying it in salt mines (cf Yucca Mountain boondoggle), or even ‘shooting it into the sun’ (no joke- this was expensively investigated during President Reagan’s term)… NONE OF THEM MAINTAIN CONTAINMENT SANS LEAKAGE FOR EVEN A SMALL FRACTION OF THE HALF-LIFES OF THE NUCLEAR MATERIAL.

Which is probably why the US Army has been shooting it all over Iraq and Afghanistan. “Depleted uranium“.

God. Save. Us.

Here’s how it will happen:

1. Repubs Cut social programs -&- as many regulations as possible. Cut EPA. Eliminate Sesame Street(?!!). Cut Clean-Energy & Infrastructure (high-speed rail, etc, and the associated 100k+ jobs in development(!!))
2. Obama rolls-over, &/or makes equally controversial cuts [cf cutting heating oil subsidies to the poor, in one of the coldest winters on record!!]
3. Repubs threaten to Shut-down the Gov’t, by refusing to raise the Debt Ceiling, if they cannot get MORE cuts out of Obama. And thus, either:
   -> Repeat (#2) — Most Probable.
   -> Gov’t Shutdown — ie, “Obama grows a pair” scenario. Extremely Improbable.
4. Social Security, Medicare, &/or Gov’t payroll checks are slashed, & possibly delayed for weeks as well.
5. SOCIAL UNREST… eg “Old Fogies with Guns” on the march.

& lest you don’t ‘think it can happen here’-
This EXACT SAME PLAYBOOK happened during Clinton’s watch, with Speaker Newt Gingrich.
However that time, the President actually stood fast, didn’t make too-major cuts, and Gingrich actually shut-down the Gov’t. Since checks were just delayed, unstead of slashed, the social unrest wasn’t too bad…

But this time? It’s ALREADY HAPPENING!!!

…just check-out those links above…

Hello Americans– we have $Trillions to invade Iraq, but we’re going to sit-by and watch our own citizens FREEZE TO DEATH, during one of the worst Winters in the last 20years….
…and instead, we’re going to KILL SESAME STREET.
…this would be appalling, if it was Dadaist Theatre… But no, this is OUR GOVERNMENT.