"Citigroup College" has a vulgar ring to it

It doesn't sound any better to name the college after Mr. and Mrs. Sandy Weill, the Citigroup billionaires. NPR reported this story. Sandy and Joan Weill wanted to give $20 million to a struggling small college in upstate New York. The one condition was that the college be renamed after them. How modest the rich are!

How did we get here? Colleges are starved for a reason: the college age population is poorer than ever after three decades of declining middle class incomes. Colleges rely more and more on part time professors who are very poorly paid. Many need public assistance to make ends meet. That is poor advertising for the idea of college, and putting a billionaire's name on the college's football jerseys won't erase it.

The tax deduction given for a donation should be less if your “gift” demands naming rights, or if something is named after you. Maybe the naming should cancel the deduction altogether. There are ways of placing a dollar value on the publicity value of naming an institution after oneself. How much do corporate brands pay to put their name on major league venues? They don’t do it out of public spiritedness. They do it for crass reasons of value. If thousands of college football fans wear your name on their chest and more thousands of graduates put your name in the back window of their car, each iteration of this publicity should subtract from your tax deduction. At some point the institution should be able to demand you pony up more money or be free to remove your name. Maybe cash-starved public institutions should publish the petty-minded negotiations the “donors” engaged in over the size of their name and it’s prominence. It would be good to know exactly how starved for attention rich people can be.

The rich people who give generously because they believe in it far outnumber the ones who are greedy for praise. Most who give to their alma mater do so with a sense of humility, recognizing that the names of the people they learned from are far more important than the names of the rich people who paid their salaries. Better still, name the college after a philosopher who influenced centuries of humanity. He or she never got rich from the search for knowledge. Naming a college after a billionaire suggests that wealth accumulation is the best measure of a civilization. That is a bad message to send young people who are going to school. Why worship the few who become rich by keeping the rest of us poor

The Unfair Economy

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been in the news recently for enforcing inhumane work conditions not seen since the days of the Spanish galley slave.

The LATimes has an excellent write up about it.

The 1% tell us how to live and how hard to work. They create the economy the rest of us endure. They evade taxes like billy-o and we get to pay for them, or learn to live without good roads and decent schools.

Gyrations in the stock markets terrify the rest of us, but the 1% go shopping (as the NYTimes reported recently). Market instability that worries us they see as opportunity to buy up bargain shares. They profit from volatility. It is their environment of choice, they create it, it profits them enormously (as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine has explained) but they don’t have to experience it. Their lives are serene and insulated.

Desirable places to live like London, Paris and New York are the setting for a vast new wave of social cleansing, quietly deporting the poor and inviting the rich in.

Reported in the Guardian.

And in a Guardian opinion piece.

Curbed reports how social cleansing is being carried out in New York.

The New York Daily News reports how, in many cases, the new multimillion dollar pieds a terre are seldom inhabited, so the poor and the working classes are being pushed out just in case some rich people would like to spend a weekend in the city.

Pulitzer Prize winning economics reporter David Cay Johnston has this explanation of how the 1% play the American economy and tax system like a violin.

The rich are not like you and me. Why do we cater to them? Why do we walk in the street so they can enjoy the sidewalk? Why do we vacate our cities for their convenience? Why do we pay their taxes for them? Why do we do what they tell us at work and in the voting booth? Are we their slaves? Possibly. By choice, apparently.

The Final Sorting

We are distorting the way our economy works, refashioning and refitting it to serve fewer people and thereby cutting more people out of it. The rich are behaving in a completely predictable way. The more we pay them the more they want, and every desire is quickly turned into a basic need.

(I wrote about this over a decade ago and nobody thought it was worth discussing.)

For the rest of us every basic need is redefined an expensive option, a remote "maybe", something we’re not entitled to.

It’s gotten to the point where the word “entitlement" is used as a pejorative term. We, who work for a living, are no longer entitled to anything. And the small minority of people who own for a living are entitled to everything.

We need to relearn what history taught us. We can allow people to grow rich, but being rich must bring obligations too. (Here's a good history lesson about this from the Washington Post. Anybody remember Magna Carta? We should have learned something from how England created its democracy.)

The bad old days were barely a century ago. (Does anyone remember the Ludlow Massacre?) We earned a better living standard the hard way. Our parents and grandparents got fed up and changed things. They organized, and elected a president who believed they had the right to be organized. That has been undone since.

In the past thirty years this has all been taken away and we have let it be taken away.

6 WalMart heirs worth as much as 30% of all Americans

From Salon comes this news: six wealthy WalMart heirs aren't just "rich" they are worth as much as the bottom 30% of the American population combined.

I will pause to let your head get around that obscene statistic. Six people who don't need to work for a living are worth more than 90 million working class people combined.

Why are rich people a protected species?

What's worse is that poorest 30% of Americans are forced by circumstances to shop at WalMart. Sadly the poor don't see ironies and the rich find them amusing.

A friend just sent me this piece from The Nation, detailing how uncharitable old Mr. Walton was, and how his heirs, while philanthropic, tend to be generous towards PACs and front groups who do what the Walton family wants, to help make the Walton family even richer. Even self-serving "generosity" is tax deductible, so in a sense we are all doing the Waltons' bidding. Concentrated wealth is a positive evil.

Vast Income Inequality Has Its Fans

When each new economics report comes out telling us that the extremely rich have again taken more of the pie and more of the people who do the work are falling into poverty, Wall Street's paid apologists go on TV and lend pithy quotes to columns for the Wall Street Journal.

These apologists are wrong but they manage to hide behind a lot of manipulated data. It isn't unfair to compare their song and dance to one of those three card monte tricksters on street corners, the guys who always win your money. The very rich always win because they use the same kinds of tricks. The money gets manipulated out of working people's pockets into the pockets of the people who win the game. Is it still theft when it's billions of dollars instead of tens and twenties? Let's just say it's complicated enough that it's harder to prosecute. The New Republic's Timothy Noah and Jonathan Chait and economist Brad Delong explain it much better than I do.

MarketWatch: The rich continue to get much richer while everyone else is poorer.

Business Insider: The middle class was losing ground even when the economy was good.

Business Week: the social contract is unraveling in developed countries because of extreme income inequality.

From the Guardian: looking at the data. It isn't pretty, unless you are one of the handful of lucky winners. Imagine a lottery that rewarded winners with money stolen from you...

Think conservatives are pro family? This Guardian writer says "think again".

If you think poverty is all right as long as you have your health, consider that the poorer you are the shorter your lifespan. This BBC report shows this is even true in the UK where access to healthcare isn't restricted to people of means as it is in the US. Is this pro-life? No, it's only pro-life for the wealthy.

The Atlantic has the charts and graphs. Having had personal experience with their rigorous fact checking department I know they are reliable.

Want to see where the big money is? Look here, at the website of the Paris School of Economics.

Words for Your Wall Street Placards

I wrote these as part of an unpublished ad campaign eight years ago. Some of them appeared on placards in the hands of a group called Billionaires for Bush, an elite troupe of mature lefties who showed up at Bush rallies in tiaras and furs, some of them in drag, screaming like teenagers at a Justin Bieber concert. Sad to say, the slogans are still relevant, still ironic. I'm not against capitalism, but it used to belong to all of us.


FREE THE RICH
Vote Republican

FOREIGN CHILDREN MAKE THE BEST SHOES
Vote Republican

JESUS PREFERRED RICH PEOPLE
Vote Republican

Get a cool job parking Bentleys
Vote Republican

Make believe you’re Rich
Vote Republican

Trick. Cheat. Win.
Vote Republican

HELP WANTED:
gardener,
chauffeur,
upstairs maid.
Vote Republican

EAT CAKE
Vote Republican

TAXES ARE FOR LITTLE PEOPLE
Vote Republican

We know best
Vote Republican

Wealthiness is next to Godliness
Vote Republican

Money belongs to the rich
Vote Republican

Your kids would rather inherit money than clean air
Vote Republican

WE OWN YOU
Vote Republican

Enron demonstrates the beauty of an unregulated marketplace
Vote Republican

Heads I win
Tails you lose
Vote Republican

"Goldman Sachs rules the world"

Stock trader Alessio Rastani had a moment of remarkable candor on the BBC last week.

"For most traders we don't really care about having a fixed economy, having a fixed situation, our job is to make money from it. Personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession. When the market crashes... if you know what to do, if you have the right plan set up, you can make a lot of money from this."

"This is not a time right now for wishful thinking that governments are going to sort things out. The governments don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world," said Rastani.

He expressed an eager hope that the economy would crash in the next year because it was going to make him very rich. These are the people who will control events. Unless we restore some of the regulations removed by the last four presidents prior to Obama. One good idea would be to place a tiny transaction tax on share trading.

"...a tax of just 0.05 percent (one twentieth of one percent) levied on each stock, bond, derivative or currency transaction would be aimed at financial institutions’ casino-style trading, which helped precipitate the economic crisis. Because these markets are so vast, the tax could raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year globally for cash-strapped governments and could increase development aid."

It might also help limit the large financial speculators who buy thousands of shares for split seconds and then sell them, forcing the markets quickly up or down in massive computer driven gyrations. Those gyrations are making traders rich because they earn fees for every transaction. These traders profit from a panicked market. They profit from inadequate public information, from their own prior information or inside information, from asymmetries of information and from broad insecurities and public worries.

Barbara Ehrenreich has a very good piece in the Washington Post. How strange it is to live in a country where most people are hurting, worried and living at their limits but the rich are treated like a special protected class. It's worth reading and sharing.

"...consider Daphne Guinness, profiled at length in this past week’s New Yorker, who is apparently best known for wearing clothes, which she draws from a wardrobe of 2,500 garments, 450 pairs of shoes and 200 handbags. On the day she was interviewed, she wore a high-collared, presumably bespoke shirt by uber-designer Alexander McQueen, “a pave diamond brooch,” silver sheaths on two of her fingers and “custom-made sparkly silver Mary Janes, with a three inch platform under the toe” — not the heel, the toe. Well, to each her own, but she might as well walk around Manhattan wearing a sign saying “My husband stole your pension.”" The super rich are flaunting again because they've been rebranded by the Republicans as "Job Creators"––without creating any jobs. Their money isn't invested in factories or employees but luxury goods.

But anyone or any party that takes the side of the poor against the rich or the powerless many against the powerful few will find he has powerful enemies. Money puts people in office and guess where the money is. Meanwhile we have a large powerful political and media apparatus devoted to the aid and protection of the very rich: the Republican Party, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the entire Murdoch operation, and most of talk radio.

Violent Suppression of Peaceful Wall Street Protesters

Lawrence ODonnell gives a rightly angry eight minutes to analyzing the brutality police are meting out to protesters in the Wall Street Occupation movement. He does a judicious and intelligent job of it.

International Business Times posted this short video. Captured from the street, it illustrates the smug amusement of the haves for the hapless on the street below. Drinking champagne and laughing, as if they know the police are working for them.

From the Nation, a welcome rebuke to the New York Times' embarrasingly biased article. The Times sent a columnist instead of a reporter and she casually cherry picked a few odd protesters, using them to discredit the whole movement and its grievances. I've not seen a balancing story from the Times. The Guardian has, so far, done the best job of covering the protests. Here's a good piece in the Guardian by Amy Goodman.

Class Warfare or The Social Contract

Today's must read is Paul Krugman's column. Here's an excerpt:

"Republicans claim to be deeply worried by budget deficits. Indeed, Mr. Ryan has called the deficit an “existential threat” to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy — who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future — should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat. Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else. And that, in case you’re wondering, is what real class warfare looks like."

The cry of Class Warfare has worked well for Republicans for many years. It's worked even better for their clients. Especially the very rich, who own for a living instead of working, whose incomes have been multiplied by five while working people's incomes have been flat or declined. Working people's incomes have measurably declined against rising costs of healthcare, housing, tuition and food. But the rich are fine. The rich are protected by a whole political party.

Taxes on income from stock sales and money manipulation, which is how the rich "earn" their money, have declined. Millions made by buying and selling shares in fractions of a second as they rise and fall are taxed at a rate that's roughly half of what working people pay for their eight, ten, twelve hour days. Fair? Fair doesn't enter into it. The preferable tax rates for financial manipulation are the Republican sacred cow, the Republican golden calf. Voting against them is therefore "class warfare".

The Social Contract is a phrase the Republicans don't use very much. It raises the notion of obligation. Rich people get rich by mastering the art of accounting and accounting dislikes obligations. Obligation is a cost that subtracts from profit. Obligations avoided make the shareholder richer and the executive stock options fatter. So the idea of obligations to others in society is foreign to them. People who live outside their balance sheets don't exist, and people who weigh on their balance sheets are a problem to be avoided.

This is the sad result of forty years of "BusinessThink" in our politics. Owners––stockholders––are valued over workers because of how profits are accounted. There should always be three loyalties in business, but American BusinessThink has abandoned two of them: the customers and the employees. The rest of society was jettisoned long ago.

We need to be reminded what The Social Contract is. It's what our nation was founded on. Adam Smith, the architect of capitalism, wrote about it, but the users of his architecture have managed to forget the most important parts of what he wrote, the parts they find it convenient to forget, just as they forget the inconvenient parts of the Bible and the Constitution. Remind yourself by reading Krugman's column today.

Show You Care

This short video will have you reaching for your credit card and a box of Kleenex. Adopt A Job Creator...Why didn't I think of that?

Show you care by helping those who need your help the least. That's the American way. Recently at least.

Middle Class Fear is the GOP's Best Weapon

Middle class worry has worked very effectively for the Tories in the UK, as this piece from the Guardian explains. In England, David Cameron, the Conservative leader who has been sacrificing programs for the working and middle class in order to protect the perks and benefits of the super-rich, is privately glad riots have broken out in London and Manchester. The violence takes his corrupt bargain with Rupert Murdoch, tabloid baron and owner of FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal, out of the news. And it also gins up the worries of an already worried middle and working class, people who feel insecure about their jobs are more pliable when violence threatens everything they've earned

Meanwhile, in this country, Republicans are delivering exactly the economy they want, as this article from Alternet.org explains. Stagnant, insecure, fragile, panicky. They love it. Fearful people are more obedient and more easily fooled. People working their brains out trying to stay even aren't as likely to ask hard questions. They are more likely to watch the propaganda programming on FoxNews that juices their fears and directs them not at the causes but at each other.

I've been pushing the word "HOARDING" as it pertains to the trillions corporations and super rich investors are sitting on. Is it any different than hoarding food in a famine or water in a drought? I'm glad to see the word is being properly applied.

Another article, by a professor at UC Santa Cruz, with useful charts and graphs, explains the poisonous asymmetry in the American economy. Imbalance causes instability. On a fundamental level, worried workers make poor consumers. What ought to worry Main Street is that the Big Boys don't care much about America. Their toast is buttered by growing prosperity in other countries. How patriotic is that?

Let's Worship the "Job Creators"

(What jobs?)

I read in the New York Times today how the very rich are spending their money. (No recession there.)

Is this how "job creators" "create jobs"?

(I'd love to know which premium PR consultant the GOP hired to rebrand the filthy rich.)

So instead of taxing rich people we tax the middle class and the working poor. What jobs are created? Jewelers? Couturiers? Expensive pedicurists?

And there is this worrisome article from Reuters about how cuts in infrastructure spending is hurting us. Instead of needed infrastructure spending (which would employ a lot of people, who would pay taxes) we get spending on $9000 sequinned tweed outfits and $50,000 tennis bracelets.

Instead of repairing roads that are falling apart and bridges that are falling down, we can comfort ourselves that a few very rich people are able to buy more fabulous new outfits and expensive foreign cars. To add to the closets and garages-full they already own. What jobs? No jobs. They don't need jobs.

Springtime for Millionaires

From Mother Jones, and from many non-partisan sources, a lot of useful visuals and diagrams describing what has happened to the middle class. Who stole our prosperity? Guess.

The best way to eliminate the deficit would be to pay all Americans better instead of restricting prosperity to the top one percent. This would make us all better taxpayers, better consumers. We would all feel more secure.

In the past forty years, since Reagan declared "morning in America", only the very few at the top of the income graph have seen an increase in income against the rising cost of living. To borrow a phrase from a popular musical, it was Springtime for Millionaires when Reagan began the reign of Reaganomics. It ended the broad prosperity begun by FDR and continued by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. Reaganomics stole from the many to enrich the few. Robin Hood in reverse. So why do people revere him?

Feed the Rich

Where did all the tax cut money go? It went into very few pockets and from there to emerging markets where it is busy creating low-wage jobs and a future of non-American economic power. Why would those tax cuts create jobs here when the big plan was to ship the work somewhere cheaper, someplace without the nuisance safety regulations, and workers' rights and benefits? In another era this strategy would have been called UnAmerican, but it's hard to call a party unAmerican when they are wrapped in the flag.

You can read Krugman every week, or Joseph Stiglitz every once in a while, to get a sharp mature assessment of the GOP bullshit. But sometimes it's interesting to go at the b.s. one talking point at a time, like economist Brad DeLong does, and see how quickly the right wing arguments fall apart. And they do. Sadly, it takes a brain and a bit of patient thought to see how fragile the GOP material is.

The GOP arguments fall apart because they are saying one thing while carefully planning something completely different. At moments of contradiction you will usually see John Boehner burst into tears, which is a helpful distraction. The Republicans have their game plan and it doesn't do most of us any good. It wasn't meant to.

Their strategy is to make sure the economy screws most of us over and hands the fruits of that screwing over to the handful of people up top. The plan is to streamline the narrowest possible delivery of wealth. Efficiency for the very few. This is the economy they want. This is the economy they planned. An overseas economy of underpaid, eager, frightened people with no rights. A Dickensian economy, a Scrooge economy. If it makes Americans angry the Republicans are assuming that most will blame Obama. To make sure of that, there is talk radio and Fox"News".

A Republican Economy

This is a Republican economy. This is the economy they wanted.

This is where the money is going.

The money that would have hired people and created jobs and got money flowing through this economy to pay the mortgages and the grocery bills and the gas bill and the electricity and the middle class taxes, is instead being fed to the executive suite. This has been the pattern for the past few decades, and that is why the economy is flat.

How the Rich Became the Uber Rich (but no explanation about how we helped them to it.)

How the Middle Class Became the Underclass (but no explanation of how we voted for this to happen.)

The point is it's all driven by public policy, which is driven by money in politics, which was re-legalized by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court, who pushed every single de-regulation they could, which the super-rich demanded and paid for with campaign contributions and extortion tactics, it also got us a free predatory economy which the rich also wanted, which plundered working Americans' savings, which made the economy more unstable, which led to the financial collapse of 2008.

Are you happy now? Reagan's dreams have come true. The Republicans are ecstatic.

If you want evidence that the very very very rich are in control. Look at spending.

And do they have to carry their share of the load? No. Their money gives them license to evade taxes, and the middle class can't continue picking up the slack, which is why we have a deficit, which is why they'd like us to profitize Medicare and Social Security. Which would make things infinitely worse. Is this a solution?

Instead of listening to the attractive, expensively dressed "reporter" on some market-watch program, who probably gets his or her "scoops" by buying lunches for Wall Streeters, listen to a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who's covered this story honestly and aggressively for decades.