OCCUPY WALL STREET

[AtLast]

It feels like nothing that ever begins as a fair and honest enterprize ever escapes some form of corruption in the US. Unions are no exception. And I believe that they do not play as significant roll in worker's rights and treatment as they did during the Industrial Age- very different set of safety variables, for example. There are many very wealthy union "bosses" that really don't differ much than the Wall Street tycoons.

On the other hand, there exist labor unions, especially public employee unions that remain honest and truely on the side of employees. Also, it isn't a good idea to judge all standing trade unions by their national organizations- local shops have their own personalities and sense of justice.

Talk to some former Detroit assembly-line workers about the role of unions and job loss- and their stories are not always on the side of the union. many feel that unions played a large role in the decline of jobs because they did push wages and benefits out of bounds. Although, I have a problem with this in terms of the "Big 3" being "public" corporations that pay dividends to stock holders over and above the difference between gross receipts and obligations (including payrolls). Those "profits" we hear about are after all costs of doing business are paid and far and above a usual and customary profit margin that a private, independent business calculates and is required (by law) to stay within. The public corporations do not have the same rules to adhere to.

[Dominique]

I waited with baited breath for the oganizational meeting of Occupy Pgh.
Much to my disappointment, I found out quickly how involved the unions wanted to be. They arranged for the sign paintings to take place at the union halls. They were setting up the Parade. I wasn't liking this. I didn't want to be a voice of the union. The unions were a big reason the Steel mills are no longer here and the entire reason coal mining hasn't been here for 25 years. I almost walked away.

However, the organizers of Occupy Pgh (appreciative of the unions help)
also didn't want this to be a union statement and somehow, someway, the semblance of Occupy took place and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Opportunism, just what I have grown to dislike about unions, in general,taking selfish advantage of circumstances with little regard for principles.

[Toughy]

As a veteran, I am looking to figure out which of the many military credit unions I will join. I did take what money I have out of Wells Fargo. I am stuck with Wells Fargo because I need a bank in New Mexico as well as in Oakland. However, I can move my money every month to a credit union.

Any military/veterans out there who can make a credit union recommendation?

[Corkey]

Originally Posted by Toughy

As a veteran, I am looking to figure out which of the many military credit unions I will join. I did take what money I have out of Wells Fargo. I am stuck with Wells Fargo because I need a bank in New Mexico as well as in Oakland. However, I can move my money every month to a credit union.

Any military/veterans out there who can make a credit union recommendation?

go to iBelong.org to figure out which cu you like best and fits your needs.

[Toughy]

I am not a fan of unions for a myriad of reasons. Most have to do with the mandatory monthly dues regardless of work status, as well as calling for strikes when there is a no strike clause in the agreements.

I do however vehemently support collective bargaining.

If anyone wants to hear a union story and how much that particular union hated my outspoken ass....I will tell the story....blah blah blah no strike clause....dishonest....blah blah blah...liquor store clerks in WA.....teamsters will support not delivering booze in a state controlled booze enviornment??? blah blah blah.....attempted recruitment as a union organizer over rusty nails in a bar with men in 1000 dollar suits and me in boots and levis.....blah blah blah.......

However much like my opinion on abortion I am radically different today...well most days until I remember union dues (on a 20-30 hour work week) of 11 bucks per 2 week pay period....in the 70's.

Unions are corrupted by money in exactly the same way politicians are corrupted by money.

[atomiczombie]

George Carlin nailed it when he talked about bankers:

[CherylNYC]

I'm having trouble with all this union bashing. There are corrupt politicians, corrupt CEOs, welfare cheats, corrupt U.S. Army Officers, people on disability who have no actual disability, and there are corrupt unions and/or union reps. If it's possible to steal money from a government program or to violate the trust of people whose money you manage, someone will find a way to do so. To say 'I'm not a fan of unions because they can be corrupt' is a lot like saying we should abolish welfare or disability payments because there are welfare/disability cheats. It's myopic to ignore the greater good because someone is cheating somewhere.

I belong to two unions. While the first union I joined isn't quite overrun with pervasive corruption, it is a hotbed of cronyism and is a perfect picture of how the good ol' boy network still works it's magic. I actually have evidence that two business agents sold out the contract at a theatre where I worked about 25 yrs ago. Even with all that, this union has the power to sit down at the table with very wealthy and powerful producers/managers to get and keep a decent middle class wage for it's members, as well as providing health insurance, pension and other benefits. We're freelancers. There is NO WAY that I or any of the other people I worked with in that jurisdiction could EVER have gotten any of the above for ourselves. If the union wasn't sitting at the bargaining table we would have been paid like crap, would have never received overtime payment, would have no official days off, would not have health care coverage, or a pension to retire with. How can I be so sure of this? Because I didn't always have a union card. The difference between the wages I was able to earn plus the benefits for which I became eligible once I had a union card, and how I lived before I was represented by this union, even with it's questionable ethical standing, is astonishing. I say that as someone who has no family connections whatsoever, and as someone who only was allowed to become a member because that union was under court order to allow women in. Yeah, they sucked in a lot of ways, just like corporate culture would have sucked and would have kept my female ass out of every position except the housekeeping staff had they been allowed.

I haven't worked in that jurisdiction since 1990. I was able to join a related union that represents scenic artists, and never looked back. I get paid by the hour to be a sculptor. Not only do I get pension benefits, a 401k, a safety specialist who shows up to make sure we're not getting poisoned and health insurance, I make an even better hourly wage. Once again, none of us would have had the smallest chance of negotiating these pay scales, working conditions, or benefits packages on our own. Frankly, I wouldn't even know where to start negotiating benefits. The formulae are waaaaay too complex. My specialty is sculptural scenery, not managing funds and benefits. And guess what? This union is freakin' squeaky clean. Not one of the people in leadership positions in this union has even the whiff of corruption or of cronyism around them. Even those who have emotional disagreements with the leadership about some issue or other never think to accuse anyone of corruption, because there just isn't any. This union once had a suspect business agent in the mid 1990s and we were were all pretty disgusted. Frankly, if it was true his corruption was incredibly minor compared to my previous union, and he looks like an angel compared to your average corporate shark. But everyone else in a leadership position in this union is so darned ethical that he looked bad enough to be heaved out.

For those who think that unions are no longer needed, consider Wallmart. 'Nuff said. And once again drawing from personal experience, unions continue to set the industry standard even when they don't have jurisdiction in that workplace. A major entertainment company that I'll only refer to as Mauschwitz has a pervasive anti-union corporate culture. But their in-house artists benefit greatly from the gains our union has made. They routinely get offered any new benefit which our union secures for our membership. Why? Because the Mauschwitz Corporation knows that they can only keep their artists from joining us by making sure that they get nothing less than we do. The next time you're tempted to bash unions, stop and ask yourself if Ford/Chrysler/GM wouldn't immediately start paying Wallmart wages and imposing Wallmart conditions if they were allowed abrogate their union contracts and obligations.

OK. I'm done now.

[Bard]

just a chime on the unions. I am not a member of our union because I am a first line supervisor. I support our Union because my guys need the protection but I worry that will the union show up if the guys need them they already had to swich to a diffrent due to corruption. I belong to the FOP and that gives me support. As a police officer we need the union protection

[Toughy]

I don't see Union bashing. I see pointing out that Unions are not perfect and there are long-standing issues that Unions have never addressed.

I still completely and totally support collective bargaining.....the real point of Labor Unions. I have huge issues with bad ethics........signing an agreement with a no-strike clause and then going on strike. Union bosses getting paid full salaries while folks on strike are missing house payments. Union bosses dumped in cement. It's not all myth.

None of that is Union bashing. It's simply pointing out the reality. I cannot, with any kind of ethics, rant and rave about money in politics, corruption, inequitable salary ranges from top to bottom, and all the other blah blah blah without calling Unions to task also. Unions do the same things. Unions should be forced to clean up their act. We need them to be ethical if they are going to be a viable force for social change. They need to put their money where their mouth resides....and posters are not money....

As I said.....not a big fan of standing labor unions, but a die-hard unflinching supporter of collective bargaining.

[Corkey]

While I have never belonged to a union, and have never needed to, the cronyism in some unions is rampant, such as the longshoreman's union which an ex of mine belonged to. They did nothing for her when she was injured on the job. So while some may have need, I would question wether or not they actually do any good for the money one spends.

[Cin]

It is interesting how many articles I've read lately with some reference or other to morality.

Pre-Occupied with Fairness: The Moral Crisis of Modern Capitalism
Wednesday, 11/9/2011 - 12:19 pm by John Paul Rollert

There’s no good explanation for why Wall Street continues to suck up vast amounts of money except that there is a flaw in the system itself.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were not immune to the news of Steve Jobs’s passing. “A ripple of shock went through our crowd,” Thorin Caristo, a leader of the movement’s web outreach, told the Associated Press. He later called for a moment of silence from the stubborn assembly at Zuccotti Park, and the 99% paid tribute to an exceptional member of the other club.

The gesture failed to move some. National Review’s Daniel Foster envisioned “viscera of a thousand heads exploding from the sheer force of cognitive dissonance,” while conservative columnist Michelle Malkin said that the protesters honoring Jobs’s life and work “without a trace of irony” provided the “teachable moment of the week.” The lesson, it seems, is that one cannot critique capitalism without also rejecting every single capitalist, a conclusion that is not only logically flawed but one that was famously rejected by William F. Buckley, Jr., the ideological avatar of the modern conservative movement and a founder of the National Review.

In a column written just a few years before his death, Buckley condemned what he called the “institutional embarrassments” of capitalism, CEOs whose enormous compensation packages defy the gravitational pull of poor stock performance. Buckley was no equalitarian, and he drew a contrast between the “executive plunder” reaped by certain CEOs and the allowances that may be made for the likes of a Thomas Edison. Were such a person alive today, he said, “it would be unwise to cavil at any arrangement whatever made by a company seeking his services exclusively.”

Unwise, but more importantly, unwarranted, for at the heart of Buckley’s argument is an appeal to fairness. It does not seem unreasonable that a Thomas Edison, or a Steve Jobs, be paid a lot more than the rest of us. But when it comes to people who not only fail to create value, but actually supervise its destruction, it seems outrageous that they should make more over a long lunch than most people make in an entire year. Or, as Buckley puts it, “What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous.”

To be clear, were he still with us today, Bill Buckley would not be occupying Wall Street. His aim was to save capitalism from itself, and he would likely chide the protesters for trying to save us from capitalism. Still, the sense of moral outrage that infuses his column — aptly titled “Capitalism’s Boil” — is not altogether different from that expressed by the weather-weary demonstrators. Doubtless, there are some who want to uproot capitalism altogether and replace it with some other system for distributing scarce goods, but one suspects that most who have turned out are simply looking to air the familiar grievances of the financial crisis (joblessness, soaring poverty, crushing debt) and shame those on Wall Street who cashed in on a crisis they helped create.

The same may be said with even greater confidence for the support the movement is enjoying across the country. It is not the case that a nation of closet communists has finally found a voice; rather, the protesters have come to embody a common sense that something is wrong with American capitalism — that the system simply isn’t working. In this respect, the focus on Wall Street is both apt and overbroad. Overbroad because, if you brush the complex instruments that precipitated the financial crisis, you won’t find the fingerprints of every banker on Wall Street. Apt because the success of the financial sector as a whole not only defies the experience of the last few years, but the story of the American middle class for over three decades.

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Paul Krugman has famously called this period The Great Divergence. “We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared,” he said in the inaugural post of his New York Times blog. “Between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.” During the same period, the percentage of the nation’s wealth held by the top 1% grew from 20.5% in 1979 to 33.8% in 2007. These trends have helped to set the U.S. apart from other developed countries in terms of wealth inequality. According to the C.I.A World Fact book, the U.S. currently ranks 39th in unequal wealth distribution, edging out Cameroon and Iran but just behind Bulgaria and Jamaica. By contrast, the UK comes in at 91st place, with Canada 102nd and Germany 126th.

The financial sector doesn’t tell the whole story of growing inequality, but it certainly plays a central role. As Simon Johnson described its meteoric rise in a 2009 essay for The Atlantic:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The inequality within the financial sector is more striking still, with the most successful managing directors taking home enough to buy and sell a brace of lowly associates. Again, the numbers speak for themselves: In 1986, the highest paid CEO on Wall Street was John Gutfreund of Salomon Brothers, who made $3.1 million. In 2007, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made just short of $68 million.

To be sure, Americans have always had a high tolerance for economic inequality, particularly compared with their European peers. The quintessential American tale is still the rags to riches story, and for Democrats and Republicans alike, ‘class warfare’ is an accusation to be rebutted, not an open call to arms. Indeed, as the unlikely tribute to Steve Jobs attests, even for those who are willing to roundly object to the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us, the problem is not inequality per se, but giving a satisfactory account for it. As Bill Buckley well understood, economic systems have to give a moral account of who wins, who loses, and why, particularly insofar as those systems are shaped by democratic choices. It is not hard to give a compelling account for why someone like Steve Jobs grows far richer than the rest of us — his success tends to vindicate capitalism, not undermine it — but the same may not be said for the financial sector in general. The problem isn’t that the average banker doesn’t work hard (the hours are grueling) nor that his work isn’t essential to helping maintain a modern, civilized society (it is); the problem is that the same may be said for an ER nurse or a sixth grade teacher, and it isn’t immediately clear why one should make 10 times as much as the other.

Buckley said of the CEO pay packages he so despised that “extortions of that size tell us, really, that the market system is not working,” meaning that the free market, left to its own devices, does not allow for such gross distortions. This is certainly the account conservatives prefer when they try to explain Wall Street’s inordinate success. According to them, anti-competitive regulations, cheap money from the Fed, and the cozy relationship between the big banks and Washington have allowed the financial sector to prosper not because of capitalism, but despite it.

To liberals, this sounds ridiculous. After 30 years of lower taxes, freer trade, weaker unions, and a general trend toward deregulation, the idea that growing inequality and Wall Street’s exceptional success somehow defy the natural tendencies of capitalism is an astonishing exercise in wishful thinking. The forces of the free market alone may not explain these trends, but they seem hardly at odds.

Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been faulted for not taking explicit sides in this dispute, but like Buckley in his column, the aim of their protests is not policy prescription, but moral persuasion. When your house is on fire, you don’t stand around wondering whether faulty wiring or an arsonist is to blame. You raise a hue and cry until your neighbors fill the street.

[atomiczombie]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

It is interesting how many articles I've read lately with some reference or other to morality.

Pre-Occupied with Fairness: The Moral Crisis of Modern Capitalism
Wednesday, 11/9/2011 - 12:19 pm by John Paul Rollert

There’s no good explanation for why Wall Street continues to suck up vast amounts of money except that there is a flaw in the system itself.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were not immune to the news of Steve Jobs’s passing. “A ripple of shock went through our crowd,” Thorin Caristo, a leader of the movement’s web outreach, told the Associated Press. He later called for a moment of silence from the stubborn assembly at Zuccotti Park, and the 99% paid tribute to an exceptional member of the other club.

The gesture failed to move some. National Review’s Daniel Foster envisioned “viscera of a thousand heads exploding from the sheer force of cognitive dissonance,” while conservative columnist Michelle Malkin said that the protesters honoring Jobs’s life and work “without a trace of irony” provided the “teachable moment of the week.” The lesson, it seems, is that one cannot critique capitalism without also rejecting every single capitalist, a conclusion that is not only logically flawed but one that was famously rejected by William F. Buckley, Jr., the ideological avatar of the modern conservative movement and a founder of the National Review.

In a column written just a few years before his death, Buckley condemned what he called the “institutional embarrassments” of capitalism, CEOs whose enormous compensation packages defy the gravitational pull of poor stock performance. Buckley was no equalitarian, and he drew a contrast between the “executive plunder” reaped by certain CEOs and the allowances that may be made for the likes of a Thomas Edison. Were such a person alive today, he said, “it would be unwise to cavil at any arrangement whatever made by a company seeking his services exclusively.”

Unwise, but more importantly, unwarranted, for at the heart of Buckley’s argument is an appeal to fairness. It does not seem unreasonable that a Thomas Edison, or a Steve Jobs, be paid a lot more than the rest of us. But when it comes to people who not only fail to create value, but actually supervise its destruction, it seems outrageous that they should make more over a long lunch than most people make in an entire year. Or, as Buckley puts it, “What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous.”

To be clear, were he still with us today, Bill Buckley would not be occupying Wall Street. His aim was to save capitalism from itself, and he would likely chide the protesters for trying to save us from capitalism. Still, the sense of moral outrage that infuses his column — aptly titled “Capitalism’s Boil” — is not altogether different from that expressed by the weather-weary demonstrators. Doubtless, there are some who want to uproot capitalism altogether and replace it with some other system for distributing scarce goods, but one suspects that most who have turned out are simply looking to air the familiar grievances of the financial crisis (joblessness, soaring poverty, crushing debt) and shame those on Wall Street who cashed in on a crisis they helped create.

The same may be said with even greater confidence for the support the movement is enjoying across the country. It is not the case that a nation of closet communists has finally found a voice; rather, the protesters have come to embody a common sense that something is wrong with American capitalism — that the system simply isn’t working. In this respect, the focus on Wall Street is both apt and overbroad. Overbroad because, if you brush the complex instruments that precipitated the financial crisis, you won’t find the fingerprints of every banker on Wall Street. Apt because the success of the financial sector as a whole not only defies the experience of the last few years, but the story of the American middle class for over three decades.

Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s news, delivered straight to your inbox.

Paul Krugman has famously called this period The Great Divergence. “We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared,” he said in the inaugural post of his New York Times blog. “Between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.” During the same period, the percentage of the nation’s wealth held by the top 1% grew from 20.5% in 1979 to 33.8% in 2007. These trends have helped to set the U.S. apart from other developed countries in terms of wealth inequality. According to the C.I.A World Fact book, the U.S. currently ranks 39th in unequal wealth distribution, edging out Cameroon and Iran but just behind Bulgaria and Jamaica. By contrast, the UK comes in at 91st place, with Canada 102nd and Germany 126th.

The financial sector doesn’t tell the whole story of growing inequality, but it certainly plays a central role. As Simon Johnson described its meteoric rise in a 2009 essay for The Atlantic:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The inequality within the financial sector is more striking still, with the most successful managing directors taking home enough to buy and sell a brace of lowly associates. Again, the numbers speak for themselves: In 1986, the highest paid CEO on Wall Street was John Gutfreund of Salomon Brothers, who made $3.1 million. In 2007, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made just short of $68 million.

To be sure, Americans have always had a high tolerance for economic inequality, particularly compared with their European peers. The quintessential American tale is still the rags to riches story, and for Democrats and Republicans alike, ‘class warfare’ is an accusation to be rebutted, not an open call to arms. Indeed, as the unlikely tribute to Steve Jobs attests, even for those who are willing to roundly object to the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us, the problem is not inequality per se, but giving a satisfactory account for it. As Bill Buckley well understood, economic systems have to give a moral account of who wins, who loses, and why, particularly insofar as those systems are shaped by democratic choices. It is not hard to give a compelling account for why someone like Steve Jobs grows far richer than the rest of us — his success tends to vindicate capitalism, not undermine it — but the same may not be said for the financial sector in general. The problem isn’t that the average banker doesn’t work hard (the hours are grueling) nor that his work isn’t essential to helping maintain a modern, civilized society (it is); the problem is that the same may be said for an ER nurse or a sixth grade teacher, and it isn’t immediately clear why one should make 10 times as much as the other.

Buckley said of the CEO pay packages he so despised that “extortions of that size tell us, really, that the market system is not working,” meaning that the free market, left to its own devices, does not allow for such gross distortions. This is certainly the account conservatives prefer when they try to explain Wall Street’s inordinate success. According to them, anti-competitive regulations, cheap money from the Fed, and the cozy relationship between the big banks and Washington have allowed the financial sector to prosper not because of capitalism, but despite it.

To liberals, this sounds ridiculous. After 30 years of lower taxes, freer trade, weaker unions, and a general trend toward deregulation, the idea that growing inequality and Wall Street’s exceptional success somehow defy the natural tendencies of capitalism is an astonishing exercise in wishful thinking. The forces of the free market alone may not explain these trends, but they seem hardly at odds.

Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been faulted for not taking explicit sides in this dispute, but like Buckley in his column, the aim of their protests is not policy prescription, but moral persuasion. When your house is on fire, you don’t stand around wondering whether faulty wiring or an arsonist is to blame. You raise a hue and cry until your neighbors fill the street.

Great article. Can you please provide the link to where it's published on the net? Thanks.

[greeneyedgrrl]

Originally Posted by AtLast

On the other hand, there exist labor unions, especially public employee unions that remain honest and truely on the side of employees. Also, it isn't a good idea to judge all standing trade unions by their national organizations- local shops have their own personalities and sense of justice.

i worked as a public employee... and our union was seiu (huge corporation that is taking over monterey bay and in my experience has not had the workers best interest in mind and has been in the midst of controversy on more than one occasion). maybe we're the exception and not the rule... but i suspect this is happening all over.

[Cin]

It’s a matter of morality.

The Right loves to spout off about morals, about the morality behind their leadership. Perhaps, finally, the rest of us have figured out it’s all a sham and a scam. There’s nothing moral about what they do to the majority.


The War Against the Poor
Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Financial Morality
By Frances Fox Piven

We’ve been at war for decades now -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed -- until now.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

By making Wall Street its symbolic target, and branding itself as a movement of the 99%, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the “morals” issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behavior, or the personal behavior of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp.

Now, in what seems like no time at all, the fog has lifted and the topic on the table everywhere seems to be the morality of contemporary financial capitalism. The protestors have accomplished this mainly through the symbolic power of their actions: by naming Wall Street, the heartland of financial capitalism, as the enemy, and by welcoming the homeless and the down-and-out to their occupation sites. And of course, the slogan “We are the 99%” reiterated the message that almost all of us are suffering from the reckless profiteering of a tiny handful. (In fact, they aren’t far off: the increase in income of the top 1% over the past three decades about equals the losses of the bottom 80%.)

The movement’s moral call is reminiscent of earlier historical moments when popular uprisings invoked ideas of a “moral economy” to justify demands for bread or grain or wages -- for, that is, a measure of economic justice. Historians usually attribute popular ideas of a moral economy to custom and tradition, as when the British historian E.P. Thompson traced the idea of a “just price” for basic foodstuffs invoked by eighteenth century English food rioters to then already centuries-old Elizabethan statutes. But the rebellious poor have never simply been traditionalists. In the face of violations of what they considered to be their customary rights, they did not wait for the magistrates to act, but often took it upon themselves to enforce what they considered to be the foundation of a just moral economy.

Being Poor By the Numbers

A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call “the poor” who struggle to survive in the shadow of the overconsumption and waste of that top 1%.

Some facts: early in 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 14.3% of the population, or 47 million people -- one in six Americans -- were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children. Indeed, more than half of all children younger than six living with a single mother are poor. Extrapolating from this data, Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution estimate that further sharp increases in both poverty and child poverty rates lie in our American future.

Some experts dispute these numbers on the grounds that they neither take account of the assistance that the poor still receive, mainly through the food stamp program, nor of regional variations in the cost of living. In fact, bad as they are, the official numbers don’t tell the full story. The situation of the poor is actually considerably worse. The official poverty line is calculated as simply three times the minimal food budget first introduced in 1959, and then adjusted for inflation in food costs. In other words, the American poverty threshold takes no account of the cost of housing or fuel or transportation or health-care costs, all of which are rising more rapidly than the cost of basic foods. So the poverty measure grossly understates the real cost of subsistence.

Moreover, in 2006, interest payments on consumer debt had already put more than four million people, not officially in poverty, below the line, making them “debt poor.” Similarly, if childcare costs, estimated at $5,750 a year in 2006, were deducted from gross income, many more people would be counted as officially poor.

Nor are these catastrophic levels of poverty merely a temporary response to rising unemployment rates or reductions in take-home pay resulting from the great economic meltdown of 2008. The numbers tell the story and it’s clear enough: poverty was on the rise before the Great Recession hit. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty actually increased for the first time on record during an economic recovery. It rose from 11.7% in 2001 to 12.5% in 2007. Poverty rates for single mothers in 2007 were 49% higher in the U.S. than in 15 other high-income countries. Similarly, black employment rates and income were declining before the recession struck.

In part, all of this was the inevitable fallout from a decades-long business mobilization to reduce labor costs by weakening unions and changing public policies that protected workers and those same unions. As a result, National Labor Board decisions became far less favorable to both workers and unions, workplace regulations were not enforced, and the minimum wage lagged far behind inflation.

Inevitably, the overall impact of the campaign to reduce labor’s share of national earnings meant that a growing number of Americans couldn’t earn even a poverty-level livelihood -- and even that’s not the whole of it. The poor and the programs that assisted them were the objects of a full-bore campaign directed specifically at them.

Campaigning Against the Poor

This attack began even while the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s was in full throttle. It was already evident in the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, as well as in the recurrent campaigns of sometime Democrat and segregationist governor of Alabama George Wallace. Richard Nixon’s presidential bid in 1968 picked up on the theme.

As many commentators have pointed out, his triumphant campaign strategy tapped into the rising racial animosities not only of white southerners, but of a white working class in the north that suddenly found itself locked in competition with newly urbanized African-Americans for jobs, public services, and housing, as well as in campaigns for school desegregation. The racial theme quickly melded into political propaganda targeting the poor and contemporary poor-relief programs. Indeed, in American politics “poverty,” along with “welfare,” “unwed mothers,” and “crime,” became code words for blacks.

In the process, resurgent Republicans tried to defeat Democrats at the polls by associating them with blacks and with liberal policies meant to alleviate poverty. One result was the infamous “war on drugs” that largely ignored major traffickers in favor of the lowest level offenders in inner-city communities. Along with that came a massive program of prison building and incarceration, as well as the wholesale “reform” of the main means-tested cash assistance program, Aid to Families of Dependent Children. This politically driven attack on the poor proved just the opening drama in a decades-long campaign launched by business and the organized right against workers.

This was not only war against the poor, but the very “class war” that Republicans now use to brand just about any action they don’t like. In fact, class war was the overarching goal of the campaign, something that would soon enough become apparent in policies that led to a massive redistribution of the burden of taxation, the cannibalization of government services through privatization, wage cuts and enfeebled unions, and the deregulation of business, banks, and financial institutions.

The poor -- and blacks -- were an endlessly useful rhetorical foil, a propagandistic distraction used to win elections and make bigger gains. Still, the rhetoric was important. A host of new think tanks, political organizations, and lobbyists in Washington D.C. promoted the message that the country’s problems were caused by the poor whose shiftlessness, criminal inclinations, and sexual promiscuity were being indulged by a too-generous welfare system.

Genuine suffering followed quickly enough, along with big cuts in the means-tested programs that helped the poor. The staging of the cuts was itself enwreathed in clouds of propaganda, but cumulatively they frayed the safety net that protected both the poor and workers, especially low-wage ones, which meant women and minorities. When Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office in 1980, the path had been smoothed for huge cuts in programs for poor people, and by the 1990s the Democrats, looking for electoral strategies that would raise campaign dollars from big business and put them back in power, took up the banner. It was Bill Clinton, after all, who campaigned on the slogan “end welfare as we know it.”

A Movement for a Moral Economy

The war against the poor at the federal level was soon matched in state capitols where organizations like the American Federation for Children, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Institute for Liberty, and the State Policy Network went to work. Their lobbying agenda was ambitious, including the large-scale privatization of public services, business tax cuts, the rollback of environmental regulations and consumer protections, crippling public sector unions, and measures (like requiring photo identification) that would restrict the access students and the poor had to the ballot. But the poor were their main public target and again, there were real life consequences -- welfare cutbacks, particularly in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, and a law-and-order campaign that resulted in the massive incarceration of black men.

The Great Recession sharply worsened these trends. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the typical working-age household, which had already seen a decline of roughly $2,300 in income between 2000 and 2006, lost another $2,700 between 2007 and 2009. And when “recovery” arrived, however uncertainly, it was mainly in low-wage industries, which accounted for nearly half of what growth there was. Manufacturing continued to contract, while the labor market lost 6.1% of payroll employment. New investment, when it occurred at all, was more likely to be in machinery than in new workers, so unemployment levels remain alarmingly high. In other words, the recession accelerated ongoing market trends toward lower-wage and ever more insecure employment.

The recession also prompted further cutbacks in welfare programs. Because cash assistance has become so hard to get, thanks to so-called welfare reform, and fallback state-assistance programs have been crippled, the federal food stamp program has come to carry much of the weight in providing assistance to the poor. Renamed the “Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program,” it was boosted by funds provided in the Recovery Act, and benefits temporarily rose, as did participation. But Congress has repeatedly attempted to slash the program’s funds, and even to divert some of them into farm subsidies, while efforts, not yet successful, have been made to deny food stamps to any family that includes a worker on strike.

The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.

The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping -- and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.

[Cin]

It is in the best interest of the 1% to keep us divided along any lines available. We are encouraged to divide ethnically and religiously and we have always been taught to look below us on the socio-economic scale for the cause of any financial difficulties we might encounter. Now we are being encouraged to consider an intergenerational division. Whatever it takes to keep us divided and at each others' throats

Here they come again with a new approach to get at Social Security. And since income greater than $90,000 is not subject to Social Security taxation I can feel comfortable making the claim that the money comes from the 98%. And not just SSI will be at risk if they succeed in turning us against ourselves. This new report, as well as some purposely misleading articles I have read recently, will supply ideal fodder to encourage changes in Medicare. Or reforms as they will be called. Unfortunately the “reforms” sought after will do nothing to lower the cost of healthcare and instead redirect more of the burden onto the backs of seniors.

Check out this article about a new and very misleading report.


Pew Report on Young-Old Wealth Gap is Misleading and Divisive; Could Fuel Intergenerational Class War


Those gunning for Social Security are already using the study to divide the "other 99 percent."

http://www.alternet.org/economy/1530...ss_war/?page=3

[Kätzchen]

I've been rather quiet lately, but with good reason: I like to take my time in processing whether information presented is in the best interest of those who are affected most by social inequality. I want to use my power wisely and to help faciliate, participate in the orchestration, and unite of the voice of the many who suffer egregious conditions of social inequality (at an OWS movement level).

I want to say thank you so much to the author of this thread (AZ), the collective voice of members who contribute toward the ongoing conversation in progress and to Miss Tick - who recently posted an article published by the organization called The Pew. I respect the authorship of articles from The Pew because of neutral scientific process that is inductive, quasilateral by design and inspects highly dialogical process in dialectical fashion. SoOoOOoOo, Kudos to The Pew!!!

I leave tonight for a national conference to present my graduate work on the Aristotelian canon of Memoria: Connecting Elie Wiesel’s voice to modern day accounts of whose voice counts most toward a credible accounting of the intelligentsia, the legitimatia, of memory. The same rubric of methodology in pedagogic form is, in my opinion, crucial to the OWS movement and already I see a way, as a Communication scholar, to connect present day accountings of whose voice counts most in OWS public discourse. The elements of indexicality & iconicity of the OWS movement points solidly toward the current trained incapacity of a US-centric condition - the disparity between those who have and those who have not (+/- variables of sets of data which may or may not be completely accurate due to reporting mechanisms that do not capture all sets of data needed for this process due to human based parameters within, currently held and socially constructed, human policy, etc.).

Here at home, in the paper (was it yesterday or the day before?) our Mayor, Sam Adams, has been instrumental in diffusing and redirecting and reassessing on a 24/7 basis in support of OWS and although there are not as many people participating in the first weeks of the movement, we still have people devoted to the cause -- they actually chained themselves to a barrel with bike locks! I stop by daily and visit with people and support this cause, whether it's first thing in the morning or on my way home.

Please know I appreciate each and every one of you here who have the time and energy to keep this conversation moving and igniting the hearts of those who have yet to find ways to support this cause.

*Thank You, to each and every one of you*

~D

[Cin]

I found this article to be humorous and horrifying in equal measure.


The 1% Are the Very Best Destroyers of Wealth the World Has Ever Seen

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt
by George Monbiot

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes. [(Illustration by Daniel Pudles)] (Illustration by Daniel Pudles)

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots' labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

[Cin]

I just came across this video. It's from Oakland but I just saw it for the first time on Common Dreams today. It would be funny if it wasn't so horrible.