Michael Hudson: The War on Pensions – The US Budget Anti-Pension Law

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Yves Smith

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.”

On the Senate’s last day in session in December, it approved the government’s $1.1 trillion budget for coming fiscal year.

Few people realize how radical the new U.S. budget law was. Budget laws are supposed to decide simply what to fund and what to cut. A budget is not supposed to make new law, or to rewrite the law. But that is what happened, and it was radical.

Wall Street’s representatives in Congress – the Democratic leadership as well as Republicans – took the opportunity to create an artificial crisis. The press called this “holding the government hostage.” The House – backed by the Senate – said that it would shut the government down at some future date if two basic laws were not changed.

How Congress Has Already Cut Your Social Security Benefits

(Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from a new book, “Social Security Works! Why Social Security Isn’t Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All,” published by The New Press, 2015, all rights reserved. Order a copy here [4].)

By Nancy J. Altman, Eric R. Kingson

It’s not widely recognized, but Social Security is gradually weakening. Still the most important source of retirement income for the vast majority, Social Security benefits have been chipped away, and will be roughly 24 percent lower for workers born after 1959.

Here’s why.

In 1983 Congress passed legislation that included significant reductions in benefits. Very importantly, the 1983 legislation raised Social Security’s full retirement age from age 65 to 67, a change that is still being phased in. The 1983 amendments set the Social Security “full retirement age” at 66, gradually phased in for those born in 1943 through 1954. It will then gradually increase to age 67, fully phased in for those born after 1959.

David Cay Johnston: The success of Obamanomics

What’s not to like about the economic record of this president?

By a host of measures, the U.S. economy has done exceptionally well under President Barack Obama. So why does he receive such poor approval ratings, especially from the most prosperous and economically conservative Americans?

The investor class should be thrilled. Under Obama, the Dow has risen an astonishing 126 percent, to a record high of 18,030. Under President George W. Bush, the index fell by a quarter, from 10,587 to 7,949.

Guess Who's Watching The Hen House?

posted by DownWithTyranny

During the election, we talked a bit about how the CIA and other spy agencies worked hard to insert their own operatives into Congress as members, with the object of getting control over oversight of their own agencies. There were some successes (William Hurd in Texas) and some failures (Kevin Strouse and Bobby McKenzie) but electing Members of Congress isn't the only way the National Security State can keep control of their shit. This week, investigative journalist Lee Fang, writing for Republic Report, exposed another: high-paid lobbyists being hired by Intelligence shills to run the oversight committees. How about... Blackwater in charge? - See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/01/guess-whos-watching-hen-house.html#sthash.zUoSYacA.dpuf

Blaming Parents, and Other Neoliberal Pastimes

Emmett Rensin, David Shor

The State of California believes the following things to be true: first, that reading to children will make them smarter. Second, that parents ordinarily disinclined for reasons of time or temperament from this activity may be won over by means of thirty-second radio spots. These are strange beliefs, but they are not uncommon.

Too Small to Fail, a nonprofit nominally led by Hillary Clinton, believes the same. Among the organization’s many laudable efforts to improve early childhood health and education is a less laudable (but no less costly) attempt to use advertisements to convince poor parents to read to their children. This, the group claims, will bolster kids’ intelligence, and thereby their tests scores, and thereby their futures. Chicago has a similar program. Their slogan: “Take time to be a dad.”

These efforts will fail. Not because PSAs and chipper radio spots won’t conjure quality reading time in the schedules of parents rushing from a 5 p.m. quitting time to the start of a 6 p.m. second shift (although they won’t, of course), but because reading to children, even young children, will not necessarily make them smarter.

Murdoch, Scaife and CIA Propaganda

Special Report: The rapid expansion of America’s right-wing media began in the 1980s as the Reagan administration coordinated foreign policy initiatives with conservative media executives, including Rupert Murdoch, and then cleared away regulatory hurdles, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The Reagan administration pulled right-wing media executives Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife into a CIA-organized “perception management” operation which aimed Cold War-style propaganda at the American people in the 1980s, according to declassified U.S. government records.

Although some records relating to Murdoch remain classified, several documents that have been released indicate that he and billionaire Scaife were considered sources of financial and other support for President Ronald Reagan’s hard-line Central American policies, including the CIA’s covert war in Nicaragua.

What's left of our schools once the Midas cult moves on?

by Tom Sullivan

What happens to America and its children once investment gurus decide the K-12 market is no longer the place to invest money? When education is no longer the Big Enchilada? When they dump their charter schools back on the states? Or raze them to build condos?

Those who have followed the school deform movement know that standing just behind parents expressing genuine concern for their children are investors. Millionaires and billionaires are targeting public education for the same reason banksters pimped mortgage loans. For the same reason Wall Street tried to privatize Social Security. For the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks.

No, China does not hold more than 50 percent of U.S. debt

By Glenn Kessler, December 29, 2014

At a recent gathering of fact checkers sponsored by the American Press Institute, George Washington University assistant professor Emily Thorson presented some interesting data concerning policy misperceptions held by the American public — perceptions which are common among both liberals and conservatives.

Among the incorrect beliefs held with conviction, no matter the party: China holds more than 50 percent of the U.S. debt; there is no time limit for benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, commonly known as welfare; salaries for all members of Congress is a bigger part of the federal budget than salaries for all members of the military. In other words, these were beliefs not colored by partisanship. (The welfare answer is fascinating given that President Bill Clinton in 1996 signed a bipartisan bill that cut off benefits at 60 months.)

We Forgot To End Poverty

Poverty remains at record highs. Is that because welfare reform failed, or because it succeeded all too well?

BY Chris Rhomberg

In September, the Census Bureau released the latest figures on poverty in America. You may not have noticed, because the report made barely a ripple in the media or the midterms. It showed that from 2012 to 2013, the overall poverty rate fell by half a percentage point, to 14.5 percent—the first statistically significant decline since 2006.

The modest turnaround might be cause for hope, but poverty still remains well above the pre-Great Recession rate of 12.5 percent in 2007. In raw numbers, 45.3 million people lived below the poverty threshold in 2013. That’s close to the peak of 46.2 million in 2010, the greatest number in the more than 50 years the government has tracked the data.

New G20 Rules: Cyprus-style Bail-ins to Hit Depositors AND Pensioners

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Ellen Brown

On the weekend of November 16th, the G20 leaders whisked into Brisbane, posed for their photo ops, approved some proposals, made a show of roundly disapproving of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and whisked out again. It was all so fast, they may not have known what they were endorsing when they rubber-stamped the Financial Stability Board’s “Adequacy of Loss-Absorbing Capacity of Global Systemically Important Banks in Resolution,” which completely changes the rules of banking.

Russell Napier, writing in ZeroHedge, called it “the day money died.” In any case, it may have been the day deposits died as money. Unlike coins and paper bills, which cannot be written down or given a “haircut,” says Napier, deposits are now “just part of commercial banks’ capital structure.” That means they can be “bailed in” or confiscated to save the megabanks from derivative bets gone wrong.

'A Terrible Idea': The Full Failure of E-Voting, E-Counting, 'Open Source' and Internet Voting [VIDEO] Or, 'The British Version of Me'...

Posted By Brad Friedman On 22nd December 2014

This guy, Tom Scott of Computerphile, is right on the money in every respect, when it comes to electronic voting --- be it via touch-screen computers, paper ballot optical-scan systems or, God forbid, Internet Voting. If I was British, and younger, and better looking, and smarter, this would be me...

(link to a video posted at bradblog)

After almost 11 years at this, it's great to see that at least a few folks are finally getting it. While many understand some of the problems of e-voting, too many still think those probs can be solved with "paper trails" or "open source systems" or Vote-by-Mail or, somehow, even Internet Voting (via phone, tablet or elsewhere). Scott clearly understands, and smartly explains in the short video above, why the problems of electronic voting and tabulating cannot be solved by any of those methods, no matter how much many otherwise well-intentioned folks may wish they could be.

Dean Baker: New Year's Resolutions: Ten Ways to Combat Upward Redistribution of Income

The big gainers in the last three decades (a.k.a. the 1%) like to pretend that their good fortune was simply the result of the natural workings of the market. This backdrop largely limits political debate in Washington. The main difference is that the conservatives want to keep all the money for themselves, while the liberals are willing to toss a few crumbs to the rest of the country in the form of food stamps, health care insurance, and other transfers.

While the crumbs are helpful, the serious among us have to be thinking about the unrigging of the economy so that all the money doesn't flow upward in the first place. Here are 10 ways in which we should be looking to change the structure of the market in 2015, so that all the money doesn't flow to the 1%.

The Future the US Budget Foretells

The key drafters of the U.S. Constitution may have had dreams of a government to “promote the general Welfare” but that goal has long since been lost to factionalism and special interests, a reality that is growing worse as money increasingly buys American politics, as Lawrence Davidson describes.

By Lawrence Davidson

I can make high-probability predictions for 2015 and the near-beyond without the benefit of a crystal ball, tarot cards or tea leaves. The only thing that I need is a list of items from the new 2015 U.S. federal budget. Here are some of my forecasts and the budget items that make them so highly probable:

–There will be more deadly truck-related accidents than necessary on the nation’s highways in 2015. That means more deaths, injuries, highway delays, stress and frustration. How do I know? Because the 2015 budget rolls back the safety requirement that truckers need to get more rest between driving assignments.

[...]

–Either in 2015 or soon thereafter there will be another major banking crisis requiring the outlay of enormous sums of public money to avert economic meltdown. How do I know? Because the 2015 federal budget rolls back the requirement, put in place after the last financial crisis, that forced the trading of derivatives to be done by corporate entities separated from the banks and not covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Company.

Democracy Under Threat-- Or Is It Already Too Late?

posted by DownWithTyranny

Saturday morning I woke up bright and early and feeling chipper. I tweeted an upbeat statement about Bernie Sanders' likely presidential run: Just once before we pass on, shouldn't we have a president NOT owned by Big Business & Wall St.? It's still up to us http://bit.ly/1rr7eOe. And then I started thinking about the implications of the "It's still up to us" phrase. Is it? I revisited an interview Tom Hartmann had done (above) a few months ago with Martin Gilens, Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Gilens was on Hartmann's show because he co-authored, along with Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University a controversial new study, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. What Gilens and Page have put forward in their study is that American democracy has slowly become weaker and weaker as an all-powerful and very determined oligarchy has taken complete control of the country's decision making processes. These people didn't want to see another FDR running the country and they were determined to create a system to prevent it. They already owned the Republican Party-- which did not work for them in stopping the rise of Roosevelt-- and they set about to take over the Democratic Party, almost entirely achieved now. More than that, they have used their wealth to infiltrate and capture every aspect of the decision making process, from state government and mass media to all the crucial flex points where consequential decisions are made. - See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/12/democracy-under-threat-or-is-it-already.html#sthash.h9bfOBIV.dpuf

The Victory of ‘Perception Management’

Special Report: In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pioneered “perception management” to get the American people to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome” and accept more U.S. interventionism, but that propaganda structure continues to this day getting the public to buy into endless war, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

To understand how the American people find themselves trapped in today’s Orwellian dystopia of endless warfare against an ever-shifting collection of “evil” enemies, you have to think back to the Vietnam War and the shock to the ruling elite caused by an unprecedented popular uprising against that war.

While on the surface Official Washington pretended that the mass protests didn’t change policy, a panicky reality existed behind the scenes, a recognition that a major investment in domestic propaganda would be needed to ensure that future imperial adventures would have the public’s eager support or at least its confused acquiescence.

How States Are Redistributing the Wealth

By David Sirota

In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was lambasted for supposedly endorsing policies of wealth redistribution. The right feared that under an Obama presidency, Washington would use federal power to take money from some Americans and give it to others. Yet, only a few years later, the most explicit examples of such redistribution are happening in the states, and often at the urging of Republicans.

The most illustrative example began in 2012, when Kansas’ Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a landmark bill that delivered big tax cuts to high-income earners and businesses. Less than two years after that tax cut, the state’s income tax revenues plummeted by a quarter-billion dollars—and now Brownback is pushing to use money for public employees’ pensions to instead cover the state’s ensuing budget shortfalls.

The Future of Financial Reform: Conceiving the Financial System of the 21st Century

by Jay Pocklington on December 22, 2014

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England (BoE) and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), may well be the man of the hour. When he gives a speech entitled “The Future of Financial Reform” as he recently did at the Monetary Authority in Singapore, people listen.

In his remarks, Carney emphasized curbing bankers’ compensation. It is little surprise that these particular remarks made all the headlines – this is kind of news the public has been waiting for. The fact that bankers received a record $140 billion in 2009 after banks received bailouts should enrage anyone. However, Carney offers a more subtle and nuanced understanding of the modern financial system and does not simply repeat populist anti-banker sentiments. As the head of the Bank of England he is at the forefront in conceiving a financial system for the 21st century – how to regulate it to make it safe and fair, and make it serve the needs of the real economy.

The Gap Between the Rich and the Rest of Us Is The Widest It's Been In 30 Years. Here's One Reason Why.

Lots of Americans don't have bank accounts.

—By Erika Eichelberger | Fri Dec. 26, 2014 6:15 AM EST

The wealth gap between the richest 20 percent of Americans and everyone else is the widest it's been in three decades, according to a report released last week by the Pew Research Center. Many factors contribute to this great divide: tax rates on the rich have been falling for decades; the Great Recession decimated the assets of a lot of low- and middle-income folks; and technology is replacing workers. One often-overlooked factor, though, is that 16.7 million poor Americans don't have a bank account. Lack of access to this basic financial tool cramps poor Americans' ability to prove credit-worthiness and build assets, and forces them to rely on expensive alternative financial services, trapping them in a cycle of debt and instability.

Even this organic advocate thinks African farmers need herbicide

By Nathanael Johnson on 24 Nov 2014

Why aren’t agroecological techniques farming spreading faster among poor farmers? If you are a farmer in the rural part of an undeveloped country, where it’s hard to get synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, and genetically modified seeds, it only makes sense to turn to a form of agriculture that eschews those things. Instead of requiring technological inputs, agroecology and organic farming require skills — which are free and non-proprietary. Organic farming also builds up the organic matter in the soil, which helps it catch and hold moisture; that’s especially important in semi-arid lands without irrigation infrastructure.

So why don’t we see organic production raising developing rural areas out of poverty? I’ve seen two possible explanations: Big Agribusiness is sabotaging the nascent growth, or farmers aren’t getting the training they need.

I see the first explanation all the time, but I don’t see evidence.

The simple move Obama could make to strengthen the rest of us

You're working more hours and not getting paid for them. We can fix that -- and put more people to work. Here's how

Paul Rosenberg

“The economy” in the abstract is doing relatively well, with strong job growth, a booming stock market, and rising GDP. But the American people aren’t feeling it—and Democrats have paid a serious political price as a result—simply because the concrete, individual experience is quite different. Raising the minimum wage is one way to get at the problem—but for a problem that big, it’s a limited line of attack. There are millions of Americans making well more than the minimum wage, yet still doing much worse than their similarly situated parents did a generation ago.

“So what’s changed since the 1960s and ’70s?” progressive billionare venture capitalist Nick Hanauer asked in Politico back in November. “Overtime pay, in part,” he answered: “Your parents got a lot of it, and you don’t. And it turns out that fair overtime standards are to the middle class what the minimum wage is to low-income workers: not everything, but an indispensable labor protection that is absolutely essential to creating a broad and thriving middle class.”