Charles M. Blow at The New York Times rips wealthy Americans view of the poor in How Expensive It Is to Be Poor:
Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released a study that found that most wealthy Americans believed “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
This is an infuriatingly obtuse view of what it means to be poor in this country — the soul-rending omnipresence of worry and fear, of weariness and fatigue. This can be the view only of those who have not known—or have long forgotten—what poverty truly means. […]
Allow me to explain, as James Baldwin put it, a few illustrations of “how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
First, many poor people work, but they just don’t make enough to move out of poverty — an estimated 11 million Americans fall into this category.
Yohuru Williams at
The Progressive writes
What Would Martin Say?
This year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in US history. It also has marked a renewed push by the proponents of corporate education reform to dismantle public education in what they persist in referring to as the great “civil rights issue of our time.” The leaders of this effort, including US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, are fond of appropriating the language of the civil rights movement to justify their anti-union, anti-teacher, pro-testing privatization agenda. But they are not social justice advocates. And Arne Duncan is no Reverend King.
More pundit excerpts can be found below the fold.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times laments how facts don't matter in America's policy-making anymore because of Hating Good Government:
It’s now official: 2014 was the warmest year on record. You might expect this to be a politically important milestone. After all, climate change deniers have long used the blip of 1998—an unusually hot year, mainly due to an upwelling of warm water in the Pacific—to claim that the planet has stopped warming. This claim involves a complete misunderstanding of how one goes about identifying underlying trends. (Hint: Don’t cherry-pick your observations.) But now even that bogus argument has collapsed. So will the deniers now concede that climate change is real?
Of course not. Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.
Lawrence Summers in a
Washington Post op-ed explains why he thinks policymaking elites meeting in Davos this year should
Focus on growth for the middle class, without one word about how the international ruling class has spent 35+ years engineering the destruction of the middle class:
The most challenging economic issue ahead of us involves a group that will barely be represented at this week’s annual Davos summit: the middle classes of the world’s industrial countries. As the Center for American Progress’s Inclusive Prosperity Commission, which I co-chaired with Ed Balls, the top economic official in Britain’s Labor Party, concludes in a new report, nothing is more important to the success of industrial democracies than sustained increases in wages and living standards for working families.
Amid the focus on global finance, geopolitics and the moral imperative to help the world’s poor, no one should lose sight of the fact that without substantial changes in policy, the prospects for the middle class globally are at best highly problematic. […]
[T]he capacity of our economies to sustain increasing growth and provide for rising living standards is not assured on the current policy path. The United States is often held out as a model, and indeed its performance has been strong by global standards. The United States has enjoyed growth of about 11 percent over the past five years. Of this, standard economic calculations suggest that about 8 percent can be regarded as cyclical, resulting from the decline in the unemployment rate. That leaves just 3 percent over five years as attributable to growth in the economy’s capacity. Even after our recovery, the share of American men age 25 to 54 who are out of work exceeds that in Japan, France, Germany and Britain.
Alexandra Bradbury at
In These Times writes
We Need Less Work, Not More:
I keep getting these emails from the Laborers union: “The Keystone XL Pipeline isn’t just a pipeline, but a lifeline to good, family-supporting jobs.”
In the labor movement we’re supposed to be for anything that creates more paid work. But here’s some heresy for you: I think we need less work.
Senators who voted against the pipeline in November, the union says, threw away a chance to “unlock millions of work hours,” and instead “killed thousands of jobs.”
Is the Senate “killing jobs?” Maybe. Meanwhile, jobs are killing us. […]
These jobs could kill us all. Working less isn’t just a humane goal—it’s a planetary necessity.
Trevor Timm at
The Guardian fumes that
Obama and Cameron’s ‘solutions’ for cybersecurity will make the internet worse:
The current state of the US and UK governments’ ass-backwards approach to cybersecurity was on full display this week—culminating with British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Obama meeting to discuss the issue at the White House on Friday. When it comes to cybersecurity, it seems the UK and US want to embrace every crazy idea except what we know actually works.
The UK’s Cameron suggested earlier in the week he wants to outlaw certain forms of encryption, which could potentially lead to some of the world’s most popular messaging apps (like iMessage and WhatsApp) being banned in the UK. That speech had been ridiculed from all angles for the past few days, with various experts labeling it a nightmare for Internet security—on par with authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China—and economically devastating for the British information technology industry.
Meanwhile, the White House has proposed a huge expansion of penalties under the highly-controversial law that was used to prosecute Reddit co-founder and privacy rights advocate Aaron Swartz. If passed, the administration’s proposal could further criminalize mundane Internet activity—for example, potentially allowing for a ten-year jail sentence for sharing your HBO GO password—all to supposedly target foreign hackers that the law would likely never reach.
Yasmin Alibhai Brown at
The Independent writes
Inequality is threatening to tear our democracy apart, yet the Government is only encouraging it:
Christ drove out the money makers from the old temple in Jerusalem. Here, they are welcomed, given free rein and warm hugs by HMRC and our governments. Now the London Eye has been taken over by Coca-Cola, which has to be the final insult.
These indulgences are, we are told, essential, because without profit makers economies would collapse. Their extreme wealth leads to better living standards for all. That, it turns out, is a myth or illusion or downright lie. Bankers, investors, the upper classes and big businesses rake it in while the rest of humanity is damned.
Last December the BBC brought us three programmes on Tatler, the rag read by those who spend £10,000 on a pair of cufflinks. This week the broadcaster gave us The Super-Rich and Us, written and presented by the astute Jacques Peretti, who previously made The Men Who Made us Fat and The Men Who Made us Spend.
The documentary exposed the wolves and their pampered families, their sense of entitlement, self-pity and disdain.
John Nichols at
The Nation writes
Obama’s Smart Economic (and Political) Calculus: Tax the Rich:
With an eye toward addressing income inequality, the president will use his State of the Union Address to propose new taxes and fees on very rich people and very big banks. In any historical context, the tax hikes and fees are “modest." But after a period of absurd austerity and slow-growth economics (in which all the sacrifices were made by working families, while all the advantages accrued to very rich families and very big banks), Obama’s move is as important as it is necessary.
At a point when there is broadening recognition of the social and economic perils posed by income inequaliy, the president is talking about taking simple steps in the right direction. Congress is unlikely go along with him, but the American people will—Gallup polling finds that 67 percent of likely voters are dissatified with income and wealth distrution in the United States. And as this country prepares for the critical presidential and congressional elections of 2016, the president’s clarifying of the terms of debate on taxes becomes vital.
David Sirota in his syndicated column published at
Truthdig writes
The Windy City’s New Gift to Big Campaign Donors:
On its face, Chicago’s municipal pension system is an integral part of the Chicago city government. The system is included in the city’s budget, it is directly funded by the city, and its various boards of trustees include city officials and mayoral appointees. Yet, when it comes to enforcing the city’s anti-corruption laws in advance of the Chicago’s closely watched 2015 municipal election, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is suddenly arguing that the pension funds are not part of the city government at all.
The counterintuitive declaration came last month from the mayor-appointed ethics commission, responding to Chicago aldermen’s request for an investigation of campaign contributions to Emanuel from the financial industry. The request followed disclosures that executives at firms managing Chicago pension money have made more than $600,000 worth of donations to Emanuel. The contributions flowed to the mayor despite a city ordinance—and an executive order by Emanuel himself—restricting mayoral campaign contributions from city contractors.
Karen Klein at the
Los Angeles Times writes
What California Indians lost under Junipero Serra, soon to be saint:
Is there a word for the extinction of cultures? Not the people of those cultures, but the cultures themselves?
I ask because one of the notable consequences of the California mission movement founded by and overseen by Father Junipero Serra was the loss of various Native American cultures, to the point where many Indian groups cannot now get tribal recognition. It seems odd that Pope Francis, known for his cultural sensitivity and appreciation for diversity, has chosen to confer sainthood on Serra, who played such a big role in obliterating indigenous culture in coastal California. […]
Because the missions mixed different Native American groups together and forced all of them to give up much of their cultural identity, many of these groups cannot meet the requirements of continuous cultural and geographical identity required to be federally recognized tribes, with the many benefits such recognition bestows. It’s one of the most painful ironies in California history — robbed of their culture by white missions the first time, and then, because of that first theft, robbed by the U.S. government a second time.