Austerian doctrine states that if we can get the deficit down even during periods of economic slowdown and massive unemployment, we shall see an economic upturn. So far this hasn’t happened anywhere on earth. (There are some claims that two former states of the Soviet Union have done okay with it. I don’t believe that. If you want to, that’s okay. It’s just that I don’t go to the former Soviet Union for my economic data.)
But they have managed to move the economy. Their philosophy has resulted in the destruction of 2.2 million jobs and that’s only in the United States. Ideas move the world, and here we have solid evidence that bad ideas can move the world in the wrong direction.
Josh Silver: Discovered: A Cure for Political Corruption
This is the strategic foundation of Represent.Us, the campaign in support of the American Anti-Corruption Act. The campaign was launched November, 2012 by the organization I run. Along with the voucher proposal, the Act would:
1) Prevent members of congress from soliciting and receiving contributions from any industry or entity they regulate;
2) Prohibit all fundraising during Congressional working hours;
3) Apply the existing $5,000 PAC contribution limit to superPACs based on the fact that they are coordinating with candidates in contradiction of the Court’s rationale (this is a potent solution to Citizens United-created spending);
4) Close the revolving door between Capitol Hill and the lobbying industry by extending the waiting period to 5 years for members and their senior staff;
5) Expand the definition of and register all lobbyists to prevent them from skirting the rules;
6) Limit the amount that lobbyists can contribute to $500, instead of the current $2,500;
7) Disclose all contribution “bundling”;
8) Strengthen the Federal Election Commission’s independence, as well as the congressional ethics enforcement process;
9) Clamp down on 501c organizations’ political spending; and 10) make all political spending fully transparent as proposed in the current DISCLOSE Act.
Why must the Act take on so many issues? This strategy recognizes that the influence of money in politics is endemic to our current system of government. We cannot fix this by patching the holes in democracy through which money seeps in. We are already flooded. We have to recognize that the influence of money has changed the way our lawmakers think about what is possible. It shapes institutions, limits expectations, and constrains the options for decision-makers. Real change must come with a comprehensive approach that reconfigures the incentives, the pressures, and the circumstances for public governance to reflect more directly the democratic interests of the people.
I think Josh Silver has some good ideas here. But whatever you think of these particular ideas, I suspect you will agree that the system is broken and no longer serves the public interest. The infusion of money, political speech according to a truly wacky Supreme Court, has drowned out the voices of the American people and left us as helpless political onlookers. It’s time for change.
In its Opinion, the Court side-stepped the issue and refused to make a ruling on whether foreign corporations would be able to influence our political process by funding election ads. Instead, the Court stated that there is no need to answer the question, and referred to the fact that 2 U.S.C 441(e) bans contributions and expenditures by foreign nationals. This may be true, but the operative word in 441e is “nationals”. How can this Court say that the question of whether foreign organizations can influence our Nation’s political process is best answered by 441e when 441e applies only to foreign nationals or individuals, and not corporations? This creates a loophole for foreign corporations. It will be interesting to see what foreign corporations will do to capitalize on this blunder by the Court.
To give proper deference to legislatures, the Court could have ruled on a narrow issue. In Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party (2008), the Court had emphasized judicial restraint by stating that courts should not “formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be applied.” However, without regard for judicial restraint, the Court in this decision “operates with a sledge hammer rather than a scalpel when it strikes down one of Congress’ most significant efforts to regulate the role that corporations and unions play in electoral politics. It compounds the offense by implicitly striking down a great many state laws as well.”
This ruling will “cripple the ability of ….. Congress and the States to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process.” Justice Stevens quotes Burroughs v. United States (1934), “To say that Congress is without power to pass appropriate legislation to safeguard … an election from the improper use of money to influence the result is to deny to the nation in a vital particular the power of self protection.” Therefore, both federal and state legislatures should be allowed to pass laws that regulate corporate political spending.
“They’re the Birthers of Fracking.” A Conversation with Josh Fox.
Earlier this week, a group of House Republicans were treated to a screening of FrackNation—a KickStarter’d documentary that aims to debunk the Oscar-nominated, fracking-skeptical Gasland. I reported a bit on the screening (which ended with free DVDs for attendees) and reviewed the movie, paying notice to how filmmaker Phelim McAleer appeared to frazzle Gasland director Josh Fox. Early in the film, McAleer shows up at a Q&A with Fox and asks him why his movie didn’t explain that methane has been in some water supplies for years, and that shocking video of water being lit on fire wasn’t as shocking as it looked. Fox asks for McAleer’s credentials and calls the question “irrelevent.” McAleer, duly inspired, makes a movie.
It’s a bit much, says Fox. “I gave the guy, not knowing who he was, a long, academic answer,” he explains. “I’d just gotten off the plane, and I just found out somebody robbed my house! I wasn’t thinking about it in a media context, and unfortunately there was nobody else in the room taping. So they pulled a kind of Shirley Sherrod thing where they completely misrepresented the Q&A session.”
Since making Gasland, Fox has become a sought-after speaker and activist for the anti-fracking movement. With that comes criticism, and with that occasional, judicious pushback against the allegation that the water-on-fire scene is misleading. “I’d been asked the same questions before, and answered them before,” says Fox. “I’ve been part of something like 250 debates around the U.S. and the world. At almost every one, some oil and gas shill says something like this. They’re the birthers of fracking. This argument about biogemic and thermogenic gas is one of the things that the oil and the gas industry brings up as a distraction. Both biogenic and thermogenic gas can be released by drilling, and the industry says so.”
White House Grants Aaron Swartz’s Wish: Taxpayer-Funded Research Will Be Free
Aaron Swartz, a well-known Internet activist who killed himself last month, believed that information should free, not digitized and put behind pay walls.
“The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations,” he once wrote.
The Obama administration just granted his wish — at least as it pertains to research funded by taxpayers.
The White House directed federal agencies on Friday to make the results of federally-funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication. The new policy came “>after more than 65,000 people signed a petition asking for expanded public access to the results of studies paid for by taxpayers.
“Americans should have easy access to the results of research they help support,” John P. Holdren, the president’s senior advisor on science and technology, said in a memo announcing the new open-access policy.
Well, it’s something but it can become so much more. Swartz wanted to free up information for the use of all mankind. This is a step in the right direction. We can build a world of free information free of corporate or government control. We owe it to Aaron to fight hard for a better Internet, a better world.
What They Really Think About Us | homophilosophicus
Surviving the post-apocalyptic landscape that Ireland has become in the wake of the Celtic Tiger is difficult enough for most people. The economic downturn and the past number of lean years and a governmental programme of austerity have exposed the serious divisions in Irish society. The years of plenty have spawned no small number of Tiger Cubs who feel no shame in flaunting their wealth and privilege in the faces of those who have been most affected by recession and hard times. As economic depression speeds the transfer of wealth from the working poor to the idle wealthy the mood of triumphalism in Ireland’s bourgeoisie reaches fever pitch. All the while the class war moves on from one middle class offensive to another: cheap ‘reality’ television shows depicting the fecklessness of the working classes, the publication of one ‘rich list’ after another, and the continual and propagandistic highlighting of social welfare fraud in the lowest economic brackets of Irish society. At no time since the Great Famine has the inequalities in this society been as acutely felt as they have these past few years. The poor have been despoiled of any platform from which to defend themselves as the attacks against them become ever more comprehensive and savage. Yet right in the heart of this darkness a red rag is waved before the bull. A young and wealthy woman was caught on video ranting and raving about the ‘losers’ who worked for minimum wage, and how she was ‘too rich’ for them.
Hubris is pride on a cosmic scale, and that is what we have here. I’ve heard this kind of thing myself. And, of course, here in the United States, we can see Honey Boo Boo on television, an American we can only understand through subtitles, a savage caricature of lower class Americans, who apparently doesn’t even realize she is being made sport of. I have heard those well off say the most amazing things about the unemployed, the poor and the homeless. They never seem to find it in their hearts to consider them fellow Americans but merely find them wanting in every regard.
But there is a just God, and there will be a reckoning in this world or the next.
On one level, the question of whether benefit cuts lead to higher income inequality is simple to answer. Poorer people are more likely to claim benefits, ergo cutting benefits has less effect on people with high incomes – and from the 2010 Emergency Budget to the 2012 Budget, there were £19bn of net cuts due by 2014-15.[1] Prof John Hills, the former chair of the National Equality Panel, calculates that £1000 of deficit reduction spread equally over all benefits and services will cut incomes of the poorest fifth by 12%, but less than 1% for the richest fifth.[2] In contrast, deficit reduction through equal rises across all taxes has roughly the same effect (a 3.5% reduction) on all.
However, the answer becomes more complex when we see the different ways that deficit reduction can be enacted. Both benefit cuts and tax rises can be particularly targeted on the poor or rich; the Coalition can point to greater means-testing of Child Benefit as a benefits cut that is not targeting poorer people. (This ignores the long-term political impacts of cutting universal benefits, (Baumberg, 2012)). David Cameron has therefore argued (back in March 2009) that “fiscal responsibility needs a social conscience, or it is not responsible at all.”
One can begin to unpack Lim Ewe Ghee’s logic by questioning if the hard earned innovations that triumph in a market economy, by virtue of the wealth they generate, do in fact serve us better.
For one, there are a lot of things a free market economy would welcome that is profitable without necessarily improving society as a whole. Cigarettes are widely purchased and consumed without leading to improvements in anyone’s health or finance. Whatever virtues there may be of having, among other things, pornography, prostitution or firearms in the open market cannot be confirmed purely on the basis of their potentially high demand.
How and why such things can be said to “serve humanity” must take into consideration a host of other factors, above and beyond what market forces or individual whims suggest.
One can extend that line of thinking to even more basic goods. The genetic modification that now routinely goes into the manufacturing of our everyday meats and vegetables has all to do with the necessity of rapid production in a competitive profit driven food economy.
The motivation in such cases is not the happiness, well-being or health of others, but the size of the product and the speed and quantity of production. So by that logic, it does not matter that the meat we eat is injected with cancer causing chemicals so long as an edge is gained by the producer to triumph in a rapidly competitive market.
Aaron Swartz at a Boston Wiki Meetup (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Aaron Swartz is Dead
Aaron Swartz suicide: Prosecutors have too much power to charge and intimidate people for their crimes. – Slate Magazine
The underlying point Boyd is making, I think, is that the government doesn’t understand hackers and isn’t good at distinguishing between miscreant vigilantes like Swartz who are trying to free information systems and profit-driven or diabolical hackers who are trying to bring down those systems. That’s when an expansive law like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act becomes dangerous. Prosecutors persuaded of their own righteousness, and woodenly equating downloading a deliberately unprotected database with stealing, lose all sense of proportion and bring in the heavy artillery when what’s in order is a far more mild penalty.
I’d like to tell you that the prosecutorial overreach that took place in Swartz’s case rarely happens. But that’s not true. There are many principled prosecutors who only bring charges they believe they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But there are also some who bring any charge they can think of to induce a defendant who may be guilty of a minor crime to plead guilty to a major one. These cases usually are hard to call attention to: They’re not about innocence, easy and pure. They’re about the muddier concept of proportionality. If any good at all can come from Swartz’s unspeakably sorrowful death, maybe it will be how this case makes prosecutors—and the rest of us—think about the space between guilt and innocence.
There are some real villains here. The federal prosecutor, Carmen M. Ortiz and, of course, MIT.
I’m disgusted by the government’s and MIT’s actions in the case. There is nothing that Swartz did that was worthy of a day in prison much less 35 years of prison time. MIT did everything they could to actively push the case while giving the public the impression that they weren’t. Nice try, but the simple fact is, that without MIT’s heavy cooperation, the government would have had great difficulty making a case at all.
A few days ago, the government decided not to prosecute HSBC, a bank, that laundered nine billion dollars of money for drug cartels but they were pursuing a case against a man who “stole” documents that should have been accessible to the public for free, a man who sought no monetary profit at all.
James Pilant
I find these remarks by Lawrence Lessig to be dead on point:
Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.
For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”
This is the most shocking news for the Computer and Internet industries, a deafening blow for all those campaigners who demand internet freedom and for technology enthusiasts in general. Aaron Swartz is dead. Worst still is the fact that he has committed suicide. As the web mourns the demise of a computer prodigy whose body of work had very few parallels, the injustice done to him by the US prosecution and the MIT is very visible and very disheartening, and that’s putting it mildly.
Aaron was facing criminal charges for stealing more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service. And if found guilty he faced 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine. But then he was also the face of the struggle against US laws of SOPA and PIPA as well as other government imposed sanctions that threatened to restrict internet freedom and which have been opposed by all major internet organizations including Google and Wikipedia.
A lot of people close to Aaron smelled foul play on the part of the US prosecution and the MIT because even JSTOR decided not to press charges against Aaron.
The Guardian quoted the statement given by Aaron’s family, “Aaron’s death in not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”
As Aaron said, ” Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” It is really painful to see someone brilliant – in fact, an enfant terrible going by what Aaron had done in a span of handful years – heeding to Plato’s injunction, “The punishment suffered by the wise who refuse to take part in Government, is to suffer under the Government of bad men”, ” making an attempt to change the modern powerful structures, go down.
RIP.
P.S : One of the talks by Swartz How to Get A Job Like Mine, basically his personal story, bookmarked in my folder some time back, is a real classic with “just the facts.”
As I wrote a while ago, the feds decided to push for internet censorship via their last best hope: the free markets.
Big telecom companies are coming up with their own means by which to wipe certain people with certain ideas off the “internets”. I guess it’s payback for all that retroactive immunity they got from the Bush and Obama administrations when they could have been sued out the ying yang for allowing the feds to spy on us.
The idea is basically this: Verizon will tell it’s customers when someone files a claim against them for copyright infringement. Verizon will give their users “x” amount of warnings then reduce their internet speed to something like a dial-up connection which will basically take them off the web for all intents and purposes.
As Aaron pointed out in a lecture he gave a year or so ago, the use of the ubiquitous “copyright infringement” charge is a dangerous and sweeping tool to use to shut down certain people. Everything is copyrighted by someone out there and the laws governing how much of what one can use are mirky at best.
Verizon claims they will set up a review panel with the American Arbitration Association and if you pay them $35 bucks they will review your case and find in favor of Verizon.
I find it very odd that Aaron just happened to take his own life when Verizon was about to launch this new SOPA/PIPA program of theirs own their own customers. I also find it odd that he was going to try his hacking case in court which would have brought tons of negative publicity down on JSTOR, portraying them as the guardians of knowledge for the elites.
There are two things that have really struck me this week: Osborne’s proposals to make real term cuts to welfare and the impending arrival of a new royal baby. To my mind these things are inextricably linked. Before you ask this isn’t bourn of too many mince pies and mulled wine before Christmas.
We are increasingly living in a polarised society of haves and have nots. The Tories are trying to weave a narrative that pits ‘strivers’ against ‘scroungers’. However, our attitude to the news of a royal baby to me shows how confused our attitude to the state and state provision has become. The British Monarchy is a cornerstone of our social structure but one that is arguably funded by the public purse. Currently, the monarchy receives 15% of Crown Estate income amounting to about £200 million a year. Debatably this land isn’t private land but land kept in trust for the public. Further, there are myriad costs of running the monarch including security and special occasions such as the Jubilee celebrations. While the public subsidy for the monarchy has been subject to trimming, few have expressed anything but delight at a new addition to ‘the firm’.
This piece doesn’t seek to make the case for a Republic but instead to probe why we can express unreserved joy at the impending royal birth and simultaneous disgust at so called scroungers and their families. Osborne’s decision to increase welfare benefits by 1%, under the rate of inflation will mean real term cuts for many. One of the groups who will be adversely affected by these cuts are mums (and dads for that matter) who will be hit by below inflation rises to child benefits and working tax credits. This has been termed the mummy tax by Labour. The term seeks to highlight the impact of Osborne’s tax cut on real families who rely on these benefits to work and support their families.
The author, Sara Ibrahim, works in law like me. I find her juxtaposition of royal family and welfare recipients to be clever and I recommend you read it in full.
The problem of haves and have nots is not a purely British phenomenon. The United States has increasingly become two societies with different laws, expectations and responsibilities for the different classes. Single mothers with three convictions for marijuana possession can wind up with fifteen years in prison while bankers who launder nine billion dollars in drug money are unprosecuted.
Business ethics under these circumstances become more and more a matter for humor. Business ethics cannot exist in a moral vacuum. There has to be support from the press, the church and the state. Having two societies moving in different directions complicates that support and promotes the moral vacuum.
There maybe some of my readers who may find some justification for very large differences in income. But is it so easy to justify two standards of law, one for the great mass of Americans and another for the one percent?
There’s nothing new about the attempt to divide “benefit claimants” from deserving working people. Tough settlements for the welfare system have long been justified by claims to be cutting largesse from an undeserving poor. But neat categories like these have long been confounded by reality, and changes in the welfare system over the past 20 years have made them all but nonsensical. As Resolution Foundation analysis shows, 60% of the chancellor’s benefit squeeze hits working households. Whatever the rhetoric, it’s so-called strivers that bear the brunt of the cuts.
Why is the formula of “skivers and strivers” showing signs of age? One reason is Labour’s system of tax credits, which changed welfare by supporting low and middle income working households – the group the chancellor claims to be talking to. Tax credits themselves were in part a political move, to change the debate about welfare and poverty. But they also reflected new economic realities: childcare costs had soared, and many parents, particularly women, could not afford to work. Meanwhile, low pay had crept up to epidemic levels. For the one in five working people who now earn below £7.50 an hour, in-work support is vital.
Plenty of political announcements made at this time of year are little more than conference fodder. They grab a headline and a round of applause and that’s the last we hear of them. But George Osborne’s proposals to cut another £10bn from welfare don’t fall into that category. They were buried in the detail of previous policy statements and it was only a matter of time before they bubbled to the surface. Conference season is the ideal time because it allows some posturing against the modern folk devil – the feckless scrounger.
We only have media reports of Osborne’s speech at the moment, and we’ve no idea what’s going on behind the scenes, but a key element to this story is going to be how it plays out within the Coalition.
Clearly the New Victorians of the Conservative party are full-speed ahead for cutting welfare, with a strongly Malthusian undertone that if we lose a few scroungers along the way through starvation then that’ll save us a bit of money.
At the Autumn Statement we were told that the Chancellor is increasing spending on infrastructure whilst cutting spending on welfare. Such statements are confusing “infrastructure” for “lumps of rock”.
There are two reasons that you would increase spending on infrastructure. The first is that you believe that the spending itself will be good for the economy: the money will create jobs, the newly employed people will buy new things, shops will employ more people, etc.
The second reason might be that you believe that the underlying framework of your system could be more efficient. The classic example would be that late trains cost people time working, so you invest in better train lines.
However, in practice, I see very little notable difference between what Osborne sees as ‘welfare’ and what he sees as ‘infrastructure’ – other than who it is for. What the Chancellor calls infrastructure, I could call corporate welfare.
Although the world is sadly marked by “hotbeds of tension and conflict caused by growing instances of inequality between rich and poor, by the prevalence of a selfish and individualistic mindset which also finds expression in an unregulated financial capitalism,” as well as by various forms of terrorism and crime, I am convinced that “the many different efforts at peacemaking which abound in our world testify to mankind’s innate vocation to peace. In every person the desire for peace is an essential aspiration which coincides in a certain way with the desire for a full, happy and successful human life. In other words, the desire for peace corresponds to a fundamental moral principle, namely, the duty and right to an integral social and communitarian development, which is part of God’s plan for mankind. Man is made for the peace which is God’s gift.
Pope Slams Capitalism, Inequality Between Rich And Poor In New Years Message
I do not believe that the headline is an accurate description of the Pope’s brief statement. The Pope says “unregulated financial capitalism.” It would appear to me we are talking about unregulated financial markets and there is probably a veiled reference to the banking scandals of 2012.
I have read a good deal about Catholic Social Doctrine but had never considered it anti-capitalistic. I had certainly noted it as being extremely hostile to free market fundamentalism but I don’t mistake that belief system for capitalism.
Maybe the headline was just meant to attract readers to click in on it, but I think what the Pope says about our current financial system is worth reflecting on.
“The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy” or simply “free economy.” But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. …
What grasped my total interest and attention was his just attack on unrestrained capitalism without any ethics. He wrote, “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty. “ As someone who has been concerned with anarcho-capitalism (an economic system that destroys government regulation of the economy, and creates anarchy within the global economic system) I think the Pope’s comments on capitalism is timely.
The conscious deregulation of the economy that started during the Reagan administration in the U.S. reached its climax during President George W. Bush’s tenure and has brought the global economic chaos the world is in at the moment. Their bankrupt economic theory of the market policing itself, has proven to be as hollow as their dreams of making trillions of dollars without manufacturing anything.
The pope said economic models that seek maximum profit and consumption and encourage competition at all costs had failed to look after the basic needs of manyThousands of peace marchers carrying rainbow banners released balloons in cold St Peter’s Square as the pope spoke.
A longer version of the Pope’s annual message was sent to heads of state, government and non-governmental organizations on December 14th.
Reuters reports that in that message “the Pope called for a new economic model and ethical regulations for markets, saying the global financial crisis was proof that capitalism does not protect the weakest members of society.”
The pope said economic models that seek maximum profit and consumption and encourage competition at all costs had failed to look after the basic needs of many and could sow social unrest.
Seal of the United States Social Security Administration. It appears on Social Security cards. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
From the Huffington Post, authored by Sabrina Siddiqui and Mike McAuliff.
The chained CPI works by assuming that when the price of a product, such as beef, gets too high, consumers don’t keep paying the higher prices. Instead, the model predicts they will switch to something cheaper, such as chicken, keeping their cost of living lower and leading to a lower rate of inflation, as measured by the chained CPI. The lower rate of inflation would mean a downward adjustment in cost of living, and thus stingier benefits.
The cuts would start small, but wind up costing beneficiaries thousands of dollars over time, which is why Democrats have traditionally fought the idea.
But Pelosi wrapped both her arms around it Wednesday, insisting she does not regard it as a “cut.”
“No, I don’t,” she told reporters. “I consider it a strengthening of Social Security, but that’s neither here nor there.”
Later in the article, there is this quote:
That logic, however, is only ever applied to entitlement programs that have their own revenue streams. Nobody would attempt to argue that the military was strengthened by cutting its budget, or that education was strengthened by slashing funding for it.
Social Security was created in the 1930s to combat elderly poverty. It worked: Giving money to older Americans made them less poor. Shrinking benefits would correspondingly lower their standards of living.
“Strengthen the Program?” Since Social Security has the resources to be fully paid up until 2038 if the American economy grows at about a 2% rate I don’t understand why there is a crisis. Why are we penalizing the elderly by reducing already budgeted and paid for benefits? Is it ethical?
No, it’s not. Those people on benefits and people who have paid into the system deserve what they have paid for. This is a form of theft. If the program were in fiscal trouble, this would be a different matter but it is not.
What’s going on here? The federal government pays out more money than it takes in on taxes on every program but social security. So by what logic, is social security a legitimate target for budget cuts?
Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison (Minn.) said Tuesday that one part of a potential deal to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” is actually “a stealth way to give people less” and that he and other members of the House Progressive Caucus won’t vote for any plan that includes it.
“It’s a bad idea and it’s a stealth way to give people less,” Ellison told HuffPost Live host Alyona Minkovski. “And, so we’re saying we’re not gonna do it. It is a benefit cut — and here’s the real problem with it being a benefit cut: It would be absolutely horrible if it were a benefit cut but the cut was designed to extend the life of Social Security and to make the program more solvent. But that’s not why they’re doing it. They’re doing it so that they can preserve somebody else to have a tax cut and to not raise taxes on the top 2 percent.”
From the web site, aluation – (This is a strong comment, and I would like you to go to the site and read it in full.)
Commenter extraordinaire anne at Economist’s View posted a very helpful brief from Alan Barber and Nicole Woo of the CEPR on the disaster that a switch to the chained CPI poses for those dependent on Social Security, and less obviously, on the middle class in general.
The chained CPI attempts to reflect consumers’ behavior in response to prices as well as prices themselves — specifically the fact that people change their buying habits when prices rise. When beef prices increase, they buy less steak and more chicken, etc.
A switch to this CPI would thus slow benefits growth. But would it accurately reflect retirees’ living costs? Apparently not.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been maintaining an experimental CPI for elderly Americans for about 30 years now. It’s found that the index rises somewhat faster than the CPI-W, mainly because seniors spend a greater share of their budgets on health care, housing and, to a lesser extent, heating oil.
The average gap between the indexes isn’t great for any one year, but it mounts up over time. Switch to an index that rises more slowly than the CPI-W and the gap between living costs and benefits increases.
The reality is that, like much of what comes out of Washington, the “Chained-CPI” concept is neither new nor more accurate. This chain-weighted concept is just another step in a series of steps that began in 1980 aimed at changing the CPI concept from one that measures the cost of maintaining “a constant standard of living” to measuring, really, not much at all, as I will explain later. The real purpose of altering the methodology is twofold: 1. To reduce the reported increase in inflation for political reasons; and 2. To lower future federal budget costs of Social Security, Medicare and government pensions by lowering the COLA adjustments without having to haveCongress vote for those or the administration sign it into law. Just note, however, what class bears the biggest burden of this – seniors and retirees.
International Joint Statement | International Student Movement
International Joint Statement
Around the world over the past decade students, pupils, teachers, parents and employees have been protesting against the increasing commercialization and privatization of public education, and fighting for free and emancipatory education.
Many of us use the International Student Movement as a self-managed platform initiated to exchange information, to network and to co-ordinate protests at both the international and the global levels. Since the ISM platform was initiated in November 2008 various global days and weeks of action were coordinated.
We strive for structures based on direct participation and non-hierarchical organization through collective discussion and action. Anyone who identifies with the struggle against the privatization of public education, and for free and emancipatory education can join and participate on as well as shape the platform!
The following aims unite us worldwide:
What are we struggling against?
The effects of the current economic system on people and education systems:
→ tuition fees or any form of fees which exclude people from accessing and equally participating in education
→ student debt
→ public education aligned to serve the (labour) market;
► The so called Bologna-Process (as with its counterparts around the world) is aimed at implementing education systems that primarily train people in skills serving the labour market. It promotes the reduction of costs for training a person, shortens the length of time spent studying, and produces underqualified workforces.
→ turning education into a commodity as part of the commodification of all aspects of life
→ the significant and increasing influence of business interests on basic budgets for public education
→ the significant and increasing budget cuts on public education worldwide
→ the privatisation of public funds through the subsidisation of private educational institutions
→ the commodification and exploitation of labor within educational institutions
We stand against discrimination and exclusion within any educational institution based on:
→ socio-economic background, for instance by charging fees so that people with less money can’t participate equally
→ nationality
→ performance and academic record
→ political ideologies and activities
→ gender
→ sexual orientation
→ religion
→ ethnic background
→ skin colour
We stand against the prioritisation of research towards commercially valuable patents rather than open knowledge freely available to all
→ Public educational institutions are increasingly forced to compete for private sponsorships to do (basic) research; at the same time private funds tend to be invested into research promising to be profitable, leading to a decline in funding for areas of research which may be important but not deemed economically lucrative. Educational institutions and participants are evaluated on the basis of economic profitability and often compete to receive additional public funding based on this criteria.
We stand against the prioritisation of income-generating research grants ahead of education and basic research
Activities for the army within educational institutions:
→ no research specifically for military purposes
→ no recruiting and advertising activities for the army
What are we struggling for?
CONTENT:
→ free and emancipatory education as a human right. Education should primarily work for the emancipation of the individual, which means: being enabled to critically reflect and understand the power structures and environment surrounding him-/herself. Education must not only enable the emancipation of the individual but society as a whole
→ education as a public good serving public interests
→ academic freedom and choice: freedom to pursue any educational discipline
ACCESS:
→ free from monetary mechanisms of payment by participants and any kind of discrimination and exclusion and therefore freely accessible to all individuals
→ sufficient funding for all public educational institutions, whether they are deemed profitable or not
STRUCTURE:
→ all educational entities/institutions should be democratically structured, meaning direct participation from below as a basis for decision making processes
Why on the local and global level?
The impacts of the current global economic system create struggles worldwide. While applying local pressure to influence our individual local/regional politics and legislation, we must always be aware of the global and structural nature of our problems and learn from each other’s tactics, experiences in organizing, and theoretical knowledge. Short-term changes may be achieved on the local level, but great change will only happen if we unite globally.
Education systems worldwide do what they are intended to do within the economic and state system(s): select for, train and create ignorance and submission. We unite for a different education system and a different life.
We stand united against any sort of repression by governments worldwide directed at people involved in the struggle for free and emancipatory education.
The following groups and individuals support this statement, pledge to spread it, and to get actively involved in efforts to network and unite education activist groups worldwide in the future.
Wish to support this statement by having your (group) name listed below? Just send an e-mail to: united.for.education@gmail.com
Students around the world have many common interests. In many nations, austerity policies are damaging the social fabric including education. That kind of investment in a nation’s future is the last place one should look for broad cuts.
I have watched in horror as our college students are priced out of many educational options, saddled with enormous debts when they do go to college and in a poorly regulated market are often overcharged for degrees with little use.
I believe that education is the bedrock value for a civilized society with a view toward future generations. We must look to our children’s future.
Financing education on the backs of our students is an American innovation. We transfer what used to be a common burden, a common investment, into personal debt. It is a national tragedy.
But also we see a constant drumbeat for an education suited only for the job market. That is only one element of the educational process. We who teach are also in the business of creating critical thinkers, good citizens and human beings who can live full lives with an appreciation of art, culture and history.
In 1841, European student went to the barricades and fought for a more just society. Ever since students have been in the forefront of challenging society to live up to its highest values.
I believe in the future. I believe in it not because of the continuing horror of American politics but because I teach students that I believe in, that I have faith in, and that I am willing to trust the future of this nation with.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.