Setting the Record Straight: Correcting Myths About Independent Voters

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Setting the Record Straight: Correcting Myths About Independent Voters

Alan I. Abramowitz, Senior Columnist July 7th, 2011

There they go again. The presidential campaign season is barely under way but already pundits and pollsters are making misleading claims about independent voters and the role they play in presidential elections. Here are some of the things you’ve probably read or heard in recent weeks:

• Independents make up the largest segment of the American electorate.

• Independent voters are up for grabs in 2012.

• Whichever party wins a majority of the independent vote will almost certainly win the presidency.

These beliefs about the crucial role of independent voters in presidential elections have become the conventional wisdom among the Washington commentariat, reinforced by groups like “No Labels” and “Third Way” that try to promote centrist solutions to the nation’s problems. Recently, the Pew Research Center provided additional support for this theory with a report claiming that independents constitute a rapidly growing and diverse group of voters who swing dramatically back and forth from election to election.
It sounds convincing, but when it comes to media commentary about independent voters, you shouldn’t believe everything you read or hear.

It’s true that independents are a diverse group. But that’s mostly because the large majority of independents are independents in name only. Research by political scientists on the American electorate has consistently found that the large majority of self-identified independents are “closet partisans” who think and vote much like other partisans. Independent Democrats and independent Republicans have little in common. Moreover, independents with no party preference have a lower rate of turnout than those who lean toward a party and typically make up less than 10% of the electorate. Finally, independents don’t necessarily determine the outcomes of presidential elections; in fact, in all three closely contested presidential elections since 1972, the candidate backed by most independent voters lost.

Let’s start with the claim that independents make up the largest segment of the American electorate. That’s true only if you lump all independents together including those who don’t vote and those who lean toward a party. In 2008, according to the American National Election Study, independents made up 40% of eligible voters but only 33% of those who actually voted. Moreover, of that 33%, only 7% were true independents with no party preference. The other 26% were leaners.

And what about those independent leaners? Fully 87% of them voted for the candidate of the party they leaned toward: 91% of independent Democrats voted for Barack Obama while 82% of independent Republicans voted for John McCain. That 87% rate of loyalty was identical to the 87% loyalty rate of weak party identifiers and exceeded only by the 96% loyalty rate of strong party identifiers.

It’s hardly surprising that the vast majority of independent leaners voted for their party’s presidential candidate in 2008. The evidence from the 2008 ANES in the following chart shows that independent Democrats and Republicans held very different views on major issues — views that were very similar to those of their fellow partisans. Independent Democrats were more liberal than weak Democrats and about as liberal as strong Democrats while independent Republicans were less conservative than strong Republicans but just as conservative as weak Republicans.

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Chart 1. Liberalism of party identifiers and leaners in 2008

Source: 2008 American National Election Study

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These results suggest that the high level of support given by independent leaners to their own party’s presidential candidate was not due simply to a short-term preference for that candidate over his opponent but instead reflected longer-term ideological and policy preferences. Based on this evidence, independent leaners are unlikely to be “up for grabs” in 2012. Regardless of who wins the Republican presidential nomination, we can expect the overwhelming majority of independent leaners, like the overwhelming majority of strong and weak identifiers, to remain loyal to their party because they strongly prefer their party’s policies to the opposing party’s policies.

Finally, no matter how independents vote in the 2012 presidential election, their preferences will not necessarily determine the winner. If the election is close, it is entirely possible that the candidate chosen by most independents will lose the overall popular vote.

Based on the national exit polls, that’s what happened in each of the last three presidential elections that were decided by a margin of less than five points.
In 1976, most independents voted for Gerald Ford but Jimmy Carter won the overall popular vote. In 2000, most independents voted for George W. Bush but Al Gore won the overall popular vote (despite losing the Electoral College). And in 2004 most independents voted for John Kerry but George W. Bush won the overall popular vote.

In a close election, a candidate with an energized and unified party base can sometimes overcome a deficit among independent voters. That doesn’t mean the candidates should ignore independents, but it does mean that unifying and energizing their own party’s base is just as important as appealing to the independents.

The Precariat: A Precarious Proletariat

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the precariat

noun [singular] informal

a social group consisting of people whose lives are difficult because they have little or no job security and few employment rights

'John Harris meets low-paid and insecure workers in Swansea and London caught in a race to the bottom, and hears about the rise of the precariat.'

The Guardian 16th February 2011

 

In the tough economic climate of 2011, the reality of budget cuts, job insecurity and diminished employment rights has been captured in a new socio-economic term, the precariat. The precariat describes a social class of people whose lives are 'precarious' because their employment situation provides them with very little or no financial stability.

the emergence of the precariat is thought to be a direct result of employment policies in our modern, global economy

The emergence of the precariat is thought to be a direct result of employment policies in our modern, global economy. New, international labour markets, significantly expanding the available workforce, have weakened the position of workers and strengthened the position of employers. Increasingly, workers are in jobs which are part-time and/or temporary, have unpredictable hours, low wages and few benefits such as holiday or sick pay. This means that employers can follow what demand dictates and simply strike people off if work is not available, and are also not obliged to pay anyone that isn't actually working. Workers lives are in turn 'precarious', because their income is never guaranteed – sickness and changes in the job market could threaten their employment and land them in a position of financial insecurity.

The term precariat has recently hit the spotlight in relation to the economic situation in the UK. It's been argued that government cuts in public spending and Prime Minister David Cameron's call to maintain a 'flexible and dynamic labour market' have made the term relevant across all sections of society. As budgets have been cut, so the axe has fallen on public sector jobs. The consequences are bleak, with any new jobs likely to be insecure, and rising unemployment forcing wages and/or working conditions even further downward. 'Flexibility' has often been interpreted as an increased reliance on agency staff, who rapidly come and go, and are employed on inferior terms. Such factors, exacerbated by the cost of living rising much faster than average pay, mean that a growing proportion of British workers could be deemed members of the precariat.

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Background – the precariat

The term precariat dates back to the 1980s, when French sociologists used it to define unprotected, temporary workers as a new social class. It also exists as a term in French (précariat), Italian (precariato) and German (Prekariat), with shifts in meaning determined by the time, place and social context in which it is used. In Britain, the term was recently brought into the public eye by Guy Standing, an economics professor from the University of Bath, who uses it in the title of his forthcoming book: Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury 2011).

Precariat is a blend of adjective precarious and noun proletariat, a word used to describe working-class people as a social group. Proletariat has its origins in Latin proletarius, which denoted a person who had no wealth in property and whose only way of serving the state was by producing offspring.

Stemming from a wave of opposition to economic globalization, there's also some evidence for a related neologism precarity, a noun describing 'a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare'. Precarity is most commonly associated with workers who leave their home country to compete for low-paid retail and service jobs.

We're Number ... 2? Are Americans in Denial About the Country's Decline?

AlterNet.org

VISIONS  

Nation of Change / By Dean Baker

We're Number ... 2? Are Americans in Denial About the Country's Decline?

China is rapidly passing us by. But Americans - and their leaders - refuse to come to terms with what this means for our future.

May 1, 2012  |  

 

 

 

Politicians in the United States must ritualistically assert that the United States is and always will be the world's leading economic, military and political power. This chant may help win elections in a country where respectable people deny global warming and evolution, but it has nothing to do with the real world.
Those familiar with the data know that China is rapidly gaining on the United States as the world’s leading economic power. According to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), China’s economy is currently about 80 percent of the size of the U.S. economy. It is projected to pass the United States by 2016.

However, there is a considerable degree of uncertainty about these numbers. It is difficult to accurately compare the output of countries with very different economies. By many measures China is already well ahead of the United States.
It passed the U.S. as the world’s biggest car market in 2009. In most categories of industrial production it is far ahead of the United States and it is a far bigger exporter of goods and services. The number of people graduating college each year with degrees in science and engineering far exceeds the number in the United States. And China has nearly twice as many cell phone and Internet users as the United States.

China still has close to half of its population living in the countryside. The living standard of the 650 million people living in rural areas is much lower than in urban areas and also much more difficult to measure. The main reason that living standards are difficult to gauge is that prices are much lower in rural areas.

A new study that carefully examined China’s prices and consumption patterns concluded that it is far wealthier than the widely used data indicate. According to this study, China’s economy may already be as much as 20 percent larger than the U.S. economy. Furthermore, even if its growth rate slows to the 7.0 percent annual rate that many now expect, China’s economy may be close to twice the size of the U.S. economy in the span of a decade.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions about the future of the U.S. and China in international relations. Regardless of whether or not China’s economy is bigger than the U.S. economy, it clearly does not exercise anywhere near as much influence internationally. China’s leaders have been content to let the U.S. continue to play the leading role in international bodies and in dealing with international conflicts, intervening only where it felt important interests were threatened.

This pattern should not be surprising since the United States was slow to assert itself internationally, even though by every measure it was the world’s pre-eminent power following World War I. The result was that for the next quarter century, the United Kingdom ended up imagining itself to be far more important to the world than it actually was. Perhaps the United States is doomed to play a similar role.

The growing power and influence of China will have both positive and negative aspects. On the negative side, democracy in the United States, even with the corrupting impact of money on politics and the abuses of freedom carried out in the name of the War on Terrorism, still presents a better political model than one-party rule in China.

Fortunately, China has shown no interest in trying to impose its political system elsewhere. For this reason the ascendency of China may not pose a threat to the spread of democracy elsewhere. (Of course, in spite of its ideals, the United States has hardly been a consistent supporter of democracy in other countries.)
The growing power of China has already increased the options available to many countries in the developing world. Since China can provide far greater amounts of capital than the IMF, World Bank, and other U.S.-dominated institutions, it provides developing countries with an important alternative. They need not adopt policies to appease these institutions to weather economic storms.

One area in which China’s policy can have an enormous impact is intellectual property. The rules on patents and copyrights that the United States has sought to impose on the rest of the world are incredibly wasteful. This is most apparent in prescription drugs, where patent monopolies allow companies to charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars for drugs that would sell for $5-$10 in a free market.

Not only do patents make cheap drugs incredibly expensive, they also lead to bad medicine, as huge patent rents encourage drug companies to lie and cheat to sell more of their drugs. It’s rare that a month passes when we do not hear of a scandal where a drug company concealed information about the safety or effectiveness of its drugs.

Of course the problems with the U.S. system of intellectual property go well beyond drug patents. Patents in high tech are primarily about harassing competitors. The difficulty of enforcing copyrights in the Internet Age has led to absurdities like the Stop Online Piracy Act.

China does not itself enforce intellectual property with the same vigor as the United States. Rather than following the United States blindly and impose the same sort of archaic and inefficient system domestically, China could do the world an enormous service if it would promote alternative mechanisms for supporting research and creative.

It’s clear that the rise of China will lead to many changes around the world. Political leaders in the United States will no doubt catch up with the reality of the new U.S. position in the world – probably about the time that they accept global warming and evolution.

Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the new book, The End of Loser Liberalism?

Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide

AlterNet.org

GRITtv / By Laura Flanders and Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide

We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility.

May 4, 2012  |  

 

 

 

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US.  His new book, Occupy, published in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series by Zuccotti Park Press brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn.

From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact.

We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility – in worker co-operatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a different way of living.

We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24.

LF: Let’s start with the big picture. How do you describe the situation we’re in, historically?

NC: There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it’s a period of close to global stagnation. In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it’s low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift — a striking shift — from production to financialization.

The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it’s austerity in the midst of recession and that’s guaranteed to be a disaster. There’s some resistance to that now. In the US, it’s essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration. It’s a subtext of what happened in Cartagena [Colombia] last week with the conflict over the drug war. Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course;) the US wants to maintain it.  An interesting story.  There seems to me no easy way out of this….

LF: And politically…?

NC: Again there are differences. In Europe there’s an dangerous growth of ultra xenophobia which is pretty threatening to any one who remembers the history of Europe…  and an attack on the remnants of the welfare state. It’s hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-recession policy as anything other than attack on the social contract. In fact, some leaders come right out and say it. Mario Draghi the president of the European Central Bank had an interview with the Wall St Journal in which he said the social contract’s dead; we finally got rid of it.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it’s  been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it’s over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas. It was understood by the ad industry in 2008 -- they gave Barack Obama their marketing award of the year.  This year it’s barely a pretense.

The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a traditional political party. It’s in lockstep obedience to the very rich, the super rich and the corporate sector. They can’t get votes that way so they have to mobilize a different constituency. It’s always been there, but it’s rarely been mobilized politically. They call it the religious right, but basically it’s the extreme religious population. The US is off the spectrum in religious commitment. It’s been increasing since 1980 but now it’s a major part of the voting base of the Republican Party so that means committing to anti-abortion positions, opposing women’s rights…  The US is a country [in which] eighty percent of the population thinks the Bible was written by god. About half think every word is literally true. So it’s had to appeal to that – and to the nativist population, the people that are frightened, have always been… It’s a very frightened country and that’s increasing now with the recognition that the white population is going to be a minority pretty soon, “they’ve taken our country from us.” That’s the Republicans. There are no more moderate Republicans. They are now the centrist Democrats. Of course the Democrats are drifting to the Right right after them. The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues and that’s not their concern.

LF: You describe Occupy as the first organized response to a thirty-year class war….

NC: It’s a class war, and a war on young people too… that’s why tuition is rising so rapidly. There’s no real economic reason for that. It’s a technique of control and indoctrination.  And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.

LF: Are comparisons to Arab Spring useful? 

NC: One point of similarity is they’re both responses to the toll taken by the neo lib programs. They have a different effect in a poor country like Egypt than a rich country like the US. But structurally somewhat similar. In Egypt the neoliberal programs have meant statistical growth, like right before the Arab Spring, Egypt was a kind of poster child for the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund:] the marvelous economic management and great reform. The only problem was for most of the population it was a kind of like a blow in the solar plexus: wages going down, benefits being eliminated, subsidized food gone and meanwhile, high concentration of wealth and a huge amount of corruption.

We have a structural analogue here – in fact the same is true in South America –  some of the most dramatic events of the last decade (and we saw it again in Cartagena a couple of weeks ago) Latin America is turning towards independence for the first time in five hundred years. That’s not small. And the Arab Spring was beginning to follow it. There’s a counterrevolution in the Middle East/North Africa (MENAC) countries beating it back, but there were advances. In South America [there were] substantial ones and that’s happening in the Arab Spring and it has a contagious effect – it stimulated the Occupy movement and there are interactions.

LF. In the media, there was a lot of confusion in the coverage of Occupy. Is there a contradiction between anarchism and organization? Can you clarify? 

NC: Anarchism means all sort of things to different people but the traditional anarchists’ movements assumed that there’d be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.  Actually, one piece of the media confusion has a basis because there really are two different strands in the occupy movement, both important, but different.

One is policy oriented: what policy goals [do we want.] Regulate the banks, get money out of elections; raise the minimum wage, environmental issues. They’re all very important and the Occupy movement made a difference. It shifted not only the discourse but to some extent, action on these issues.

The other part is just creating communities — something extremely important in a country like this, which is very atomized. People don’t talk to each other. You’re alone with your television set or internet. But you can’t have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call “secondary organizations,” places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don’t do it alone. The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation.  Communities like that are really important. And maybe that’s what’s causing the media confusion…because it’s both.

LF: Is that why the same media that routinely ignores violence against women, played up stories about alleged rape and violence at OWS camps? 

NC: That’s standard practice. Every popular movement that they want to denigrate they pick up on those kind of things. Either that, or weird dress or something like that.  I remember once in 1960s, there was a demonstration that went from Boston to

Washington and tv showed some young woman with a funny hat and strange something or other.  There was an independent channel down in Washington – sure enough, showed the very same woman. That’s what they’re looking for. Let’s try to show that it’s silly and insignificant and violent if possible and you get a fringe of that everywhere.

To pay attention to the actual core of the movement  — that would be pretty hard. Can you concentrate for example on either the policy issues or the creation of functioning democratic communities of mutual support and say, well, that’s what’s lacking in our country that’s why we don’t have a functioning democracy – a community of real participation. That’s really important. And that always gets smashed.

Take say, Martin Luther King. Listen to the speeches on MLK Day – and it’s all “I have a dream.” But he had another dream and he presented that in his last talk in Memphis just before he was assassinated.  In which he said something about how he’s like Moses he can see the promised land but how we’re not going to get there. And the promised land was policies and developments which would deal with the poverty and repression, not racial, but the poor people’s movement. Right after that (the assassination) there was a march. [King] was going to lead it. Coretta Scott King led it. It started in Memphis went through the South to the different places where they’d fought the civil rights battle and ended up in Washington DC and they had a tent city, Resurrection Park and security forces were called in by the liberal congress. The most liberal congress in memory. They broke in in the middle of the night smashed up Resurrection Park and drove them out of the city. That’s the way you deal with popular movements that are threatening…

LF: Thinking of Memphis, where Dr. King was supporting striking sanitation workers, what are your thoughts on the future of the labor movement? 

The labor movement had been pretty much killed in the 1920s, almost destroyed. It revived in the 1930s and made a huge difference. By the late 1930s the business world was already trying to find ways to beat it back. They had to hold off during the war but right after, it began immediately. Taft Hartley was 1947, then you get a huge corporate propaganda campaign a large part if it directed at labor unions: why they’re bad and destroy harmony and amity in the US.  Over the years that’s had an effect. The Labor movement recognized what was going on far too late. Then it picked up under Reagan.

Reagan pretty much informed employers that they were not going to employ legal constraints on breaking up unions (they weren’t not strong but there were some) and firing of workers for organizing efforts I think tripled during the Reagan years.

Clinton came along; he had a different technique for breaking unions, it was called NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement.] Under NAFTA there was again a sharp increase in illegal blocking of organizing efforts. You put up a sign – We’re going to transfer operations to Mexico…  It’s illegal but if you have a criminal state, it doesn’t make a difference.

The end result, is, private sector unionization is down to practically seven percent. Meanwhile the public sector unions have kind of sustained themselves [even] under attack, but in the last few years, there’s been a sharp [increase in the] attack on public sector unions, which Barack Obama has participated in, in fact. When you freeze salaries of federal workers, that’s equivalent to taxing public sector people…
LF: And attacks on collective bargaining? 

NC: Attacks on collective bargaining in Wisconsin [are part of] a whole range of attacks because that’s an attack on a part of the labor movement that was protected by the legal system as a residue of the New Deal and Great Society and so on.

LF: So do unions have a future? 

NC: Well, it’s not worse than the 1920s. There was a very lively active militant labor movement in the late part of the 19^th century, right through the early part of 20^th century. [It was] smashed up by Wilson and the red scares. By the 1920s right-wing visitors from England were coming and just appalled by the way workers were treated. It was pretty much gone. But by 1930s it was not only revived, it was the core element of bringing about the New Deal. The organization of the CIO and the sit-down strikes which were actually terrifying to management because it was one step before saying “O.K. Goodbye, we’re going to run the factory.” And that was a big factor in significant New Deal measures that were not trivial but made a big difference.

Then, after the war, starts the attack, but it’s a constant battle right though American history. It’s the history of this country and the history of every other country too, but the US happens to have an unusually violent labor history. Hundreds of workers getting killed here for organizing at a time that was just unheard of in Europe or Australia…

LF: What is the Number One target of power today in your view? Is it corporations, Congress, media, courts? 

NC: The Media are corporations so… It’s the concentrations of private power which have an enormous, not total control, but enormous influence over Congress and the White House and that’s increasing sharply with sharp concentration of  private power and escalating cost of elections and so on…

LF: As we speak, there are shareholder actions taking place in Detroit and San Francisco. Are those worthwhile, good targets? 

NC: They’re ok, but remember, stock ownership in the US is very highly concentrated. [Shareholder actions are] something, but it’s like the old Communist Party in the USSR, it would be nice to see more protest inside the Communist Party but it’s not democracy. It’s not going to happen. [Shareholder actions] are a good step, but they’re mostly symbolic. Why not stakeholder action? There’s no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders.

LF: But you hear it all the time that under law, the CEO’s required to increase dividends to shareholders. 

NC: It’s kind of a secondary commitment of the CEO. The first commitment is raise your salary. One of the ways to raise your salary sometimes is to have short-term profits but there are many other ways. In the last thirty years there have been very substantial legal changes to corporate governance so by now CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That’s one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They’re similar societies and it’s bad enough there, but here we’re in the stratosphere. ] There’s no particular reason for it. Stakeholders — meaning workers and community – the CEO could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought to be management but why does there have to be management?  Why not have the stakeholders run the industry?

LF: Worker co-ops are a growing movement. One question that I hear is  — will change come from changing ownership if you don’t change the profit paradigm?  
NC: It’s a little like asking if shareholder voting is a good idea, or the Buffet rule is a good idea. Yes, it’s a good step, a small step. Worker ownership within a state capitalist, semi-market system is better than private ownership but it has inherent problems. Markets have well-known inherent inefficiencies. They’re very destructive.  The obvious one, in a market system, in a really functioning one, whoever’s making the decisions doesn’t pay attention to what are called externalities,effects on others. I sell you a car, if our eyes are open we’ll make a good deal for ourselves but we’re not asking how it’s going to affect her [over there.] It will, there’ll be more congestion, gas prices will go up, there will be environmental effects and that multiplies over the whole population. Well, that’s very serious.

Take a look at the financial crisis. Ever since the New Deal regulation was essentially dismantled, there have been regular financial crises and one of the fundamental reasons, it’s understood, is that the CEO of Goldman Sachs or CitiGroup does not pay attention to what’s calledsystemic risk. Maybe you make a risky transaction and you cover your own potential losses, but you don’t take into account the fact that if it crashes it may crash the entire system.  Which is what a financial crash is.

The much more serious example of this is environmental impacts. In the case of financial institutions when they crash, the taxpayer comes to the rescue, but if you destroy the environment no one is going to come to the rescue…

LF: So it sounds as if you might support something like the Cleveland model where the ownership of the company is actually held by members of the community as well as the workers… 

NC: That’s a step forward but you also have to get beyond that to dismantle the system of production for profit rather than production for use. That means dismantling at least large parts of market systems. Take the most advanced case: Mondragon. It’s worker owned, it’s not worker managed, although the management does come from the workforce often, but it’s in a market system and they still exploit workers in South America, and they do things that are harmful to the society as a whole and they have no choice. If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.

Markets also have a very bad psychological effect. They drive people to a conception of themselves and society in which you’re only after your own good, not the good of others and that’s extremely harmful.

LF: Have you ever had a taste of a non market system — had a flash of optimism –– oh this is how we could live? 

NC: A functioning family for example, and there are bigger groups, cooperatives are a case in point. It certainly can be done. The biggest I know is Mondragon but there are many in between and a lot more could be done. Right here in Boston in one of the suburbs about two years ago, there was a small but profitable enterprise building high tech equipment.  The multi-national who owned the company didn’t want to keep it on the books so they decided to close it down. The workforce and the union, UE (United Electrical workers), offered to buy it, and the community was supportive. It could have worked if there had been popular support. If there had been an Occupy movement then, I think that could have been a great thing for them to concentrate on. If it had worked you would have had  another profitable, worker-owned and worker managed profitable enterprise. There‘s a fair amount of that already around the country. Gar Alperovitz has written about them, Seymour Melman has worked on them. Jonathan Feldman was working on these things.

There are real examples and I don’t see why they shouldn’t survive. Of course they’re going to be beaten back. The power system is not going to want them any more than they want popular democracy any more than the states of middle east and the west are going to tolerate the Arab spring… .They’re going to try to beat it back.

LF: They tried to beat back the sit-in strikes back in the 1930s. What we forget is entire communities turned out to support those strikes. In Flint, cordons of women stood between the strikers and the police. 
NC: Go back a century to Homestead, the worker run town, and they had to send in the National Guard to destroy them.

LF: Trayvon Martin. Can you talk for a few minutes about the role of racism and racial violence in what we’ve been talking about?  Some people think of fighting racism as separate from working on economic issues. 

NC: Well you know, there clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what’s happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking. You take a look at the history of African Americans in the US. There’s been about thirty years of relative freedom. There was a decade after the Civil War and before north/south compact essentially recriminalized black life. During the Second World War there was a need for free labor so there was a freeing up of the labor force. Blacks benefitted from it. It lasted for about twenty years, the big growth period in the ‘50s and ‘60s, so a black man could get a job in an auto plant and buy a house and send his kids to college and kind of enter into the world but by the 70s it was over.

With the radical shift in the economy, basically the workforce, which is partly white but also largely black, they basically became superfluous. Look what happened, we recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That’s the history of African Americans – so how can any one say there’s no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it’s worse than that…

LF: Talk about media. We often discern bias in the telling of a particular story, but I want you to talk more broadly about the way our money media portray power, democracy, the role of the individual in society and the way that change happens. …

NC: Well they don’t want change to happen….They’re right in the center of the system of power and domination. First of all the media are corporations, parts of bigger corporations, they’re very closely linked to other systems of power both in personnel and interests and social background and everything else. Naturally they tend to be reactionary.

LF: But they sort of give us a clock. If change hasn’t happened in ten minutes, it’s not going to happen. 

NC: Well that’s a technique of indoctrination. That’s something I learned from my own experience. There was once an interview with Jeff Greenfield in which he was asked why I was never asked ontoNightline.  He gave a good answer. He said the main reason was that I lacked concision. I had never heard that word before. You have to have concision. You have to say something brief between two commercials.

What can you say that’s brief between two commercials? I can say Iran is a terrible state. I don’t need any evidence. I can say Ghaddaffi carries out terror.  Suppose I try to say the US carries out terror, in fact it’s one of the leading terrorist states in the world. You can’t say that between commercials. People rightly want to know what do you mean. They’ve never heard that before. Then you have to explain. You have to give background. That’s exactly what’s cut out. Concision is a technique of propaganda. It ensures you cannot do anything except repeat clichés, the standard doctrine, or sound like a lunatic.

LF: What about media’s conception of power? Who has it, who doesn’t have it and what’s our role if we’re not say, president or CEO. 

NC: Well, not just the media but pretty much true of academic world, the picture is we the leading democracy in the world, the beacon of freedom and rights and democracy. The fact that democratic participation here is extremely marginal, doesn’t enter [the media story.]  The media will condemn the elections in Iran, rightly, because the candidates have to be vetted by the clerics. But they won’t point out that in the United States [candidates] have to be vetted by high concentrations of private capital. You can’t run in an election unless you can collect millions of dollars.

One interesting case is right now. This happens to be the 50^thanniversary of the US invasion of South Vietnam – the worst atrocity in the post war period. Killed millions of people, destroyed four countries, total horror story. Not a word. It didn’t happen because “we” did it. So it didn’t happen.

Take 9-11. That means something in the United States. The “world changed” after 9-11. Well, do a slight thought experiment. Suppose that on 9-11 the planes had bombed the White House… suppose they’d killed the president , established a military dictatorship, quickly killed thousands, tortured tens of thousands more, set up a major international  terror center that was carrying out assassinations , overthrowing governments all over the place, installing other dictatorships, and drove the country into one of the worst depressions in its history and had to call on the state to bail them out  Suppose that had happened? It did happen. On the first 9-11 in 1973.  Except we were responsible for it, so it didn’t happen. That’s Allende’s Chile. You can’t imagine the media talking about this.

And you can generalize it broadly. The same is pretty much true of scholarship – except for on the fringes – it’s certainly true of the mainstream of the academic world.  In some respects critique of the media is a bit misleading [because they’re not alone among institutions of influence] and of course, they closely interact.

Former Air America Radio host, Laura Flanders is the host and founder of GRITtv with Laura Flanders, a daily talk show for people who want to do more than talk. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso, 2004) and Blue GRIT: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (Penguin Press, 2007). A regular contributor on MSNBC, Flanders has appeared on shows from Real Time with Bill Maher to The O’Reilly Factor. Flanders is the editor of At the Tea Party: The Wing Nuts, Whack Jobs and Whitey-whiteness of the New Republican Right… and Why we Should Take it Seriously (October 2010, OR books). For more information, go to LauraFlanders.com or GRITtv.org.

There Is a Plague Loose Upon the Land

There Is a Plague Loose Upon the Land

by David Macaray / May 4th, 2012

Most states in the union have laws against “gouging.”  Broadly speaking, gouging is defined as the practice of arbitrarily raising prices on necessary goods, such as milk, bottled water, baby food, baby formula, bread, etc., in response to civil emergencies (riots, martial law) or natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, tornadoes).

For example, an anti-gouging law would prohibit the owner of a neighborhood convenience store, in the wake of a massive earthquake, from tripling or quadrupling the price of drinking water.  This consumer-protection device is one more instance of a benevolent government’s vital role in regulating the so-called “free market.”  What could be fairer?

However, there are market fanatics out there who abhor these anti-gouging laws.  One of their arguments is the reliable, time-honored appeal to the “slippery-slope.” This argument maintains that if we allow the government to interfere with the sacrosanct Law of Supply and Demand, if we give it the power to approve or disapprove of a sticker price, the next step will be rigid restrictions on how much profit we’re entitled to make, and the next step after that will be transforming us from the Land of Opportunity into a communist state.

Another argument is that, even in a grave emergency—say, in the aftermath of a major earthquake, with roads buckled, buildings collapsed, gas lines and water mains broken—the free market, in its genius, can be counted upon to automatically make the necessary “corrections,” because competing stores will adjust their prices accordingly, in order to attract customers (as if “comparison shopping” will continue unimpeded).

But this gouging issue transcends retail commerce.  The case can be made that what’s been happening in the collective bargaining process over the last couple of decades (actually going all the way back to the Reagan administration) is a form of gouging—not in the statutory sense, of course, where laws are being broken, but in the sense of businesses taking unfair advantage of a customer’s distress (with the “customer” in this case being the American worker).

Management’s embrace of the aggressive, take-it-or-leave-it approach to contract negotiations is tantamount to a neighborhood store ripping us off by quadrupling the price of baby food following an earthquake.  To the objections of an outraged consumer, the greedy store owner replies, “If you don’t want the baby food, don’t buy it.”  To the objections of the labor union representing the employees, the greedy company replies, “If you don’t like working here—if you’re unhappy here—quit.”

A perfect example of this scorched-earth policy can be seen at the Caterpillar plant in Joliet, Illinois, where, just a few days ago, on May 1, more than 700 Caterpillar employees (members of the International Association of Machinists) went on strike to protest a substandard contract being forced down their throats.

Why would a healthy company do that?  Why would a healthy company choose to grind a loyal, efficient workforce into the ground?  For the same reason a store owner, in the absence of anti-gouging legislation, charges $5.00 for a bottle of water that, only a day earlier, had sold for $1.25.  Because they can.
It’s certainly not a question of being able to “afford” a decent contract. 
Caterpillar is the world’s largest maker of mining and construction equipment, diesel engines, and industrial gas turbines. They are enjoying record profits.  In 2011, the company generated more than $60 billion in revenue, and in the first quarter of 2012 has already made $1.5 billion in profits.  So successful are they, CEO Doug Oberhelman was granted a 60-percent compensation increase in 2011, putting him a shade under $17 million.

Again, why is this highly profitable company squeezing their workers?  Why are they playing hardball?  Short answer:  Because they can.  Because—with jobs scarce, with the economy fragile, with fear still in the air—they believe they have the workers on the run.  And it’s happening all across the country as more and more corporations are waking up to the realization that now is the opportune time to gouge the worker.

Those Joliet IAM members have the right idea, and they deserve our admiration.  The only way to induce a stubborn company to bargain in good faith is by denying them the opportunity to earn that money and make those profits, and the only way to do that is by employees withholding their labor.  Shut ‘em all down.

David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author (It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor), was a former union rep. He can be reached at: dmacaray@earthlink.net. Read other articles by David.

This article was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2012 at 8:00am and is filed under Unions.

The Looting Of America: The Federal Reserve Made $16 Trillion In Secret Loans To Their Bankster Friends And The Media Is Ignoring The Eye-Popping Corruption That Has Been Uncovered

The American Dream

Waking People Up And Getting Them To Realize That The American Dream Is Quickly Becoming The American Nightmare

The Looting Of America: The Federal Reserve Made $16 Trillion In Secret Loans To Their Bankster Friends And The Media Is Ignoring The Eye-Popping Corruption That Has Been Uncovered

A one-time limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has uncovered some eye-popping corruption at the Fed and the mainstream media is barely even covering it.  It turns out that the Federal Reserve made $16.1 trillion in secret loans to their bankster friends during the financial crisis.  You can read a copy of the GAO investigation for yourself right here.  These loans only went to the "too big to fail" banks and to foreign financial institutions.  Not a penny of these loans went to small banks or to ordinary Americans.  Not only did the banksters get trillions in nearly interest-free loans, but the Fed actually paid them over 600 million dollars to help run the emergency lending program.  The GAO investigation revealed some absolutely stunning conflicts of interest, and yet the mainstream media does not even seem interested.  Solid evidence of the looting of America has been put right in front of us, and yet hardly anyone wants to talk about it.

Many Americans have a hard time grasping just how large 16.1 trillion dollars is.  It is an amount of money that is almost inconceivable.  It is more than the GDP of the United States for an entire year.  It is more than the U.S. government has spent over the last four years combined.

The Federal Reserve was just creating gigantic piles of cash out of thin air and throwing them around with wild abandon.

One of the only members of Congress that has wanted to talk about the GAO audit has been U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.  The following is a statement about this audit that was taken from his official website....

"As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world"

So precisely who got this money?

Well, a recent article on Raw Story named some of the big Wall Street banks that got some of this money....

Out of all borrowers, Citigroup received the most financial assistance from the Fed, at $2.5 trillion. Morgan Stanley came in second with $2.04 trillion, followed by Merill Lynch at $1.9 trillion and Bank of America at $1.3 trillion.

But it just wasn't U.S. banksters that were showered with nearly interest-free loans.  It turns out that approximately $3.08 trillion went to foreign financial institutions all over Europe and Asia.

So who in the world gave the Federal Reserve permission to bail out financial institutions all over the world?

Nobody did.

But under our current system the Federal Reserve doesn't have to get permission.  They literally get to do whatever they want.

On his website, Senator Sanders expressed his outrage over these foreign loans....

"No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president"

So should we expect Congress to approve legislation that would reduce the power of the Fed?

Of course not.

We all know that is not going to happen.

The Federal Reserve is run like a dictatorship.  They get to do what they want and nobody can stop them.

Not only did the Fed dish out over $16 trillion in secret loans to their friends, but they also paid their bankster friends over 600 million dollars to help them do it.
According to the GAO, the Federal Reserve paid $659.4 million to the very financial institutions which caused the financial crisis to help the Fed manage all of these emergency loans.

Can anyone say "conflict of interest"?

Not only were the banksters raking in trillions in secret loans, they were also paid to help run the lending process.

Wow.

So why isn't the mainstream media talking about this?

That is a very good question.

But wait, there is more.

It turns out that many Fed officials had very large investments in the financial institutions that were receiving these secret loans.

So what was done about all of the conflict of interest issues that arose?
According to Senator Sanders, "the Fed provided conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans."
Oh, everyone was given waivers.

Apparently corruption is okay if we just get everyone to sign a bunch of forms.
The following is one example of a conflict of interest that occurred during this lending program that Senator Sanders noted on his website....

For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed's board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed.  Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed's emergency lending programs.

This is a classic case of the foxes watching the hen house.

It was the banksters that caused the financial crisis.  They were the only ones that the Federal Reserve helped.  In fact, the Federal Reserve ended up having the banksters basically run the entire emergency lending program as Senator Sanders noted on his site....

The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.  The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates.

If you were not outraged by that, then you need to read it again.
What the banksters have been getting away with is absolutely mind blowing.
So will changes be made to make sure that something like this never happens again in the future?

Well, the GAO has recommended that significant changes should be made.
But as mentioned above, the only one that gets to tell the Federal Reserve what to do is the Federal Reserve.

According to the Washington Post, the Federal Reserve is promising to "strongly consider" the recommendations of the GAO....

The Fed’s general counsel, Scott Alvarez, said in a letter responding to the GAO’s audit that officials will “strongly consider” the recommendations.

Most Americans do not realize that the Federal Reserve is not actually part of the federal government.  It is a privately-owned central bank that is not accountable to anyone.

But most Americans still believe that the Fed is a government agency.
The truth is that the Federal Reserve is about as "federal" as Federal Express is.
In another article about the Federal Reserve, I noted that the Federal Reserve has even admitted that it is not an agency of the federal government in court....

In defending itself against a Bloomberg request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Reserve objected by declaring that it was "not an agency" of the U.S. government and therefore it was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Basically, an unaccountable private monopoly creates our money, sets our interest rates, regulates our banking system and makes secret loans to whoever they want.

The Federal Reserve has more power over our economy than any other institution and nobody can overrule any decisions that they make.
Does that sound very "American" to you?

Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, it has been systematically destroying the wealth of America through constant and never ending inflation.
The U.S. dollar loses more value every single year.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, what you could buy for $1.00 in 1965 will cost you $7.17 today.

Sadly, the devaluation of our money is actually accelerating.  That is one reason why we are seeing precious metals soar right now.

Not only that, but the Federal Reserve was also designed to be a perpetual government debt creation machine.

Do you know how money is created in this country?

Normally, more money is only created when more debt is created.

What this sets up is a never end spiral where the amount of money and the amount of debt are continually increasing.

Most Americans believe that we could solve the government debt problem if we could just control spending.

But that is not the case.

The Federal Reserve system was designed to get the U.S. government into constantly increasing amounts of debt and this is exactly what has happened....

The U.S. government will never fix the national debt problem as long as it participates in the Federal Reserve system.

Founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson tried to warn us about the danger of central banking.

Jefferson strongly believed that when the federal government borrows money in one generation that must be paid back by future generations it is equivalent to theft....

And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Not only that, Thomas Jefferson actually said that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a complete ban on all government debt....

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

Of course we did not listen to Thomas Jefferson, did we?
Now we have gotten ourselves into one fine mess.

If the federal government shut down the Federal Reserve system, started issuing debt-free money and established a new system based on sound financial principles we might have a chance of turning this thing around.

But if we continue on the path that we are currently on, we are going to experience a financial disaster of unprecedented magnitude.  We have piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and a day of reckoning is approaching.

Our founding fathers tried to warn us about this, but we thought that we were so much smarter than them.

Now we get to suffer the consequences of our foolishness.

How "Real America" Was Utterly Screwed by Political and Economic Elites

AlterNet.org

ECONOMY  

Salon / By Alex Pareene

How "Real America" Was Utterly Screwed by Political and Economic Elites

The crumbling of once-great institutions isn't to blame for middle-class decline and anger.

April 24, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: shutterstock

 

 

Ron Fournier, the editor in chief of the National Journal, and reporter Sophie Quinton have a story on hard times in Muncie, Ind., as a microcosm of the failure of American institutions as a whole.

It’s a good piece. It’s even an “important” piece, in the sense that the cloistered elites who run the country could learn something of the reality of life out in the country at large if this piece makes it to their desks. D.C.-based news organizations should report from “the rest of America” more often, because in Washington mass foreclosures and double-digit unemployment are usually seen as abstract problems slightly less pressing than the fact that Social Security will, decades from now, pay out slightly more than it takes in. (Joe Klein, who is basically a buffoon, returned from his stunt “2010 road trip” sounding suddenly much less buffoonish. Getting outside the bubble is often instructive.)

The piece is bookended by the story of Johnny Whitmire, a guy who was unceremoniously dropped from the rolls of the middle class by the Very Serious People In Charge of Things. His wife lost her state job. They fell behind on their mortgage. He applied for the Obama administration’s mortgage modification program. His modification was canceled, Citi billed him for back payments, and his home was foreclosed on. Then he got a bill for not cutting the grass at the home his bank seized, because banks keep foreclosed homes in the names of their former owners to avoid liability issues.

So, Whitmire is angry. And he has every right to be.

Whitmire is an angry man. He is among a group of voters most skeptical of President Obama: noncollege-educated white males. He feels betrayed — not just by Obama, who won his vote in 2008, but by the institutions that were supposed to protect him: his state, which laid off his wife; his government in Washington, which couldn’t rescue homeowners who had played by the rules; his bank, which failed to walk him through the correct paperwork or warn him about a potential mortgage hike; his city, which penalized him for somebody else’s error; and even his employer, a construction company he likes even though he got laid off. “I was middle class for 10 years, but it’s done,” Whitmire says. “I’ve lost my home. I live in a trailer now because of a mortgage company and an incompetent government.”

Whitmire’s life was ruined by a few specific “institutions”: Mitch Daniels and the Indiana Republican Party, the finance industry as represented by the bank that decided to screw up his paperwork and seize his home, and the Obama administration, which failed spectacularly on mortgage modification efforts for a variety of reasons.

The piece as a whole lays blame for the sorry state of affairs in Muncie at the crumbling of institutions — church, school, government — but Whitmire is actually a victim of elites. It’s elite consensus that loan modifications have to be limited and difficult for homeowners in order to preclude “moral hazard” and save banks from having to overexert themselves. Mitch Daniels, a leading GOP presidential contender among George Will-style Republicans, slashed state payrolls, in the name of fiscal responsibility. The sorts of people who pay for National Journal subscriptions are actually responsible for this guy’s life going to hell.

Fournier and Quinton’s piece goes on to describe the decline in various Muncie institutions: the mainline Protestant church dying as a corporate-inspired Megachurch thrives outside of town, some local government scandal involving improperly cast absentee ballots and an arrogant one-term mayor. The schools are apparently awful, in part because of elite-mandated testing regimes, more Daniels budget cuts, and, of course, because many of their most motivated students have been redirected to private-run and publicly funded charter schools. (Though as usual the awfulness of the public schools is simply stated — there’s no data or anything.)

But if we want to talk about how things got so bad for formerly middle-class people like Whitmire, the culprit is basically the financialization of our entire system of capitalism and the crippling of the labor movement; the slow death of the Mainline Protestant tradition doesn’t really enter into it. Whitmire was screwed by a venal bank and betrayed by an administration that gave venal banks way too much leeway to screw people.

The National Journal advertises that their piece on “the solution” will run next, but I’m not entirely convinced they’ve nailed down “the problem.”

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene