Fox News says: Obama criminalizes dissent. WATCH

URGENT! OBAMA Signs Anti-Protest Bill - FREE SPEECH & Protest will get you JAIL TIME!

The First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from infringing upon the freedom of speech, the freedom of association and the freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Speech is language and other forms of expression; and association and petition connote physical presence in reasonable proximity to those of like mind and to government officials, so as to make your opinions known to them.

The Declaration of Independence recognizes all three freedoms as stemming from our humanity. So, what happens if you can speak freely, but the government officials at whom your speech is aimed refuse to hear you? And what happens if your right to associate and to petition the government is confined to areas where those of like mind and the government are not present? This is coming to a street corner near you.

Certain rights, like thought and privacy and travel, can be exercised on their own. You don't need the government to cooperate with you; you just need to be left alone. Other rights, like those intended to influence the political process, require that the government not resist your exercise of them. Remember the old one-liner from Philosophy 101: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make any noise? Here's the contemporary version of that: If you can criticize the government, but it refuses to hear you, does your exercise of the freedom of speech have any value?

When the framers of the Constitution wrote the First Amendment, they lived in a society in which anyone could walk up to George Washington or John Adams or Thomas Jefferson on a public street and say directly to them whatever one wished. They never dreamed of a regal-like force of armed agents keeping public officials away from the public, as we have today. And they never imagined that it could be a felony for anyone to congregate in public within earshot or eyesight of certain government officials. And yet, today in America, it is.

Last week, President Obama signed into law the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. This law permits Secret Service agents to designate any place they wish as a place where free speech, association and petition of the government are prohibited. And it permits the Secret Service to make these determinations based on the content of speech.

Thus, federal agents whose work is to protect public officials and their friends may prohibit the speech and the gatherings of folks who disagree with those officials or permit the speech and the gatherings of those who would praise them, even though the First Amendment condemns content-based speech discrimination by the government. The new law also provides that anyone who gathers in a "restricted" area may be prosecuted. And because the statute does not require the government to prove intent, a person accidentally in a restricted area can be charged and prosecuted, as well.

Permitting people to express publicly their opinions to the president only at a time and in a place and manner such that he cannot hear them violates the First Amendment because it guarantees the right to useful speech; and unheard political speech is politically useless. The same may be said of the rights to associate and to petition. If peaceful public assembly and public expression of political demands on the government can be restricted to places where government officials cannot be confronted, then those rights, too, have been neutered.

Political speech is in the highest category of protected speech. This is not about drowning out the president in the Oval Office. This is about letting him know what we think of his work when he leaves the White House. This is speech intended to influence the political process.

tags: free speech news 2012 bill obama protest hr347 arrest charges secret service felony year in jail 1st amendment president congress no zones ban right to we the people judge andrew napolitano fox 829speedy human rights alex jones infowars protection civil liberty vote ron paul

Our Unrepresentative Representation

Sunday, 18 December, 2011 08:28 Written by Dr. Art Kamm

Summary
The Occupy Wall Street movement has reason to protest.  Special interest-driven deregulation policy was at the heart of the recent economic collapse.  It has been the “99%” that has paid the price for this policy failure with lost employment, devalued housing prices, retirement accounts being cut in half, and increased levels of poverty while the wealthiest in America continued to do well.  A valid question is why our elected representatives are not working together to put a stop to failed policy that has been so damaging to the majority of Americans.  This article will examine the disproportionate number of the wealthy who hold elected office in Washington and the conflict of interest they face in setting policy versus their own financial interests as well as the special interests that finance their campaigns.  And it will explore an incentive that politicians have to stay in office where they can act on non-public information to their own financial benefit.  It examines the issue of whether our Congress has become ‘Our Unrepresentative Representation’.
Policy Was at the Heart of the Great Recession
Alan Greenspan, who presided over the Federal Reserve for 18 years before stepping down in 2006, was one of our nation’s leading voices for deregulation.  He was considered an economic sage whose words affected market direction and, as noted by Bob Woodward, was celebrated as the “Maestro” (ref).   Yet, it was a humbled Alan Greenspan who admitted before Congress in 2008 that his belief in deregulation had been shaken (ref).  ”Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief” he relayed to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  Henry Waxman, chair of the committee, asked “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”  Mr. Greenspan’s responded “Yes, I’ve found a flaw…I’ve been very distressed by that fact”.
When the Fed cut interest rates to near record lows from 2001 until mid-2004, housing prices climbed far faster than inflation or household income giving rise to concerns of a speculative bubble in both home prices and construction that would go bust; concerns that were ignored and calls for tighter regulation on subprime mortgages and other high risk mortgages were resisted.  Republican lawmakers tried to blame the mortgage meltdown on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac claiming that Democratic lawmakers blocked measures to reform the companies.  Greenspan disagreed placing far more blame on Wall Street companies that bundled subprime mortgages into pools and sold them as mortgage backed securities.  He stated that demand for these securities was so high that Wall Street companies pressured lenders to lower their standards and produce more “paper” (note the impact of repealing Glass-Steagall below).  Mr. Greenspan stated “The evidence strongly suggests that without the excess demand from securitizers, subprime mortgage originations (undeniably the source of the crisis) would have been far smaller and defaults accordingly far lower”.
A 2008 report published by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) agreed with Mr. Greenspan’s testimony.  The report concluded that the financial crisis originated from distortions and incentives created by policy actions and identified 2004 as being critical to causality (ref).
Quoting from that report:
“In 2004 four time specific factors came into play. (1) the Bush Administration ‘American Dream’ zero equity mortgage proposals became operative, helping low-income families to obtain mortgages; (2) the then regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), imposed greater capital requirements and balance sheet controls on those two government- sponsored mortgage securitisation monoliths, opening the way for banks to move in on their “patch” with plenty of low income mortgages coming on stream; (3) the Basel II accord on international bank regulation was published and opened an arbitrage opportunity for banks that caused them to accelerate off-balance-sheet activity; and (4) the SEC agreed to allow investment banks (IB’s) voluntarily to benefit from regulation changes to manage their risk using capital calculations under the ‘consolidated supervised entities program’. (Prior to 2004 broker dealers were supervised by stringent rules allowing a 15:1 debt to net equity ratio. Under the new scheme investment banks could agree voluntarily to SEC consolidated oversight (not just broker dealer activities), but with less stringent rules that allowed them to increase their leverage ratio towards 40:1 in some cases.) The combination of these four changes in 2004 caused the banks to accelerate off-balance sheet mortgage securitisation as a key avenue to drive the revenue and the share price of banks….
“When OFHEO imposed greater capital requirements and balance sheet controls on Fannie and Freddie, banks that had been selling mortgages to them faced revenue gaps and an interruption to their earnings. Their solution was to create their own Fannie and Freddie look-alikes: the structured investment vehicles (SIVs) and collateralised debt obligation (CDOs). The influence of the controls affecting Federal Mortgage Pools and the corresponding response in private label RMBS is shown in Figure 2 [see report]. This new surge of RMBS caused by the Fannie- Freddie regulator was picked up much too late by Bank regulators to take effective action. ”
In the context of the above it is important to note some other deregulation (also, failure to regulate) policy decisions.  The banking industry had been seeking repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act since at least the 1980′s and it occurred in 1999 (ref).  Glass-Steagall was legislation that was put into place following the Great Depression that, amongst other things, separated commercial from investment banking to remove the conflict of interest inherent to an institution controlling both a commercial bank and an investment bank (note Greenspan’s testimony that investment banks were pressuring commercial lenders to issue more “paper”, i.e. risky mortgages, because of the high demand for mortgage-backed derivatives).  Also, there was CFTC’s failed attempt at regulating and bringing transparency to OTC derivatives in the late 1990′s thus allowing the market for those financial instruments to grow unregulated for the next ten years (ref).  These instruments, backed by risky assets, were at the heart of such dramatic failures as Bear Sterns and AIG.  And there was tax policy that contributed to pushing more income and wealth into a small sliver of our population when our economy is 70% personal consumption.


Reference for above figure (ref)
In both instances where 1% of our population held up to 24% of this nation’s income (prior to the Great Depression and Great Recession) our country experienced a severe economic downturn (ref).
Above figure from Krugman (ref).
And who paid the price for these failed policies?  It was those in what has been called the “99%” by the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Their purchasing power not keep pace with the growth of the economy.

Their homes losing value (most often the middle class’s key investment).  Their retirement accounts being cut in half.  And jobs disappearing as corporations cut back on expense to maintain profitability.  And this pain is being experienced while the richest of Americans quintupled their income during the heart of the Great Recession (ref) and millionaire households (the “1%”) hold a sum of wealth equivalent to almost three times the size of our national economy that is anticipated to double within the next decade as money makes money at historically low tax rates (ref).  And income from that wealth (dividends and capital gains) is not subject to payroll tax that supports programs that the rest of America depends on during their senior years (Social Security and Medicare).
And yet the drumbeat of deregulation and tax policy largely benefitting the wealthiest continues.  We continue to hear that it is not smart to tax our ‘job creators’; yet job creation in large part was anemic during 4 year periods where ‘trickle down’ policy was in place (ref).

* Total Non-Farm Payroll expressed in millions
The money we borrowed to support the tax benefit to the wealthiest (the debt being assumed by America’s taxpayers and future generations) went to support both ‘Wall Street’ and high growth business interests abroad (ref).  We continue to hear that regulation is stifling business, and yet it was deregulation of the financial industry that was at the heart of the financial crisis as noted by both Mr. Greenspan’s testimony as well as the OECD report (see above).  We continue to hear about privatizing Social Security; this after we have witnessed the level corporate risk taking that lead to the financial crisis Mr. Greenspan said left him in ‘shocked disbelief’.  And with an estimated 45,000 Americans dying each year (ref) (including over 2000 military veterans) due to a lack of access to essential care, those who are denied coverage are required to pay tax to support the healthcare benefits of our elected officials, the same officials who are accepting large sums of money from special interests opposed to universal coverage.
And there is question about the emotion underlying the Occupy Wall Street movement?
With these failed policies having caused so much pain for much of America, a fair question is why our elected representatives are not working together in putting a stop to this. They are after all our elected representation.  It is difficult to dismiss that many our elected officials face a conflict of interest regarding their charge to represent ‘the people’ versus their own financial self-interests as well as the special interests that carry them to office. This article will examine the disproportionate number of the wealthy who hold elected office in Washington and the conflict of interest they face in setting policy versus their own financial interests as well as the special interests that finance their campaigns.  And it will explore an incentive the wealthy have had for staying in office where they can act on non-public information to their own financial benefit.  It will explore whether our Congress has become our ‘unrepresentative representation’.

Unrepresentative Representation

Disproportionate Wealth
The Senate has been called a millionaires club (ref) with about half of its members holding that status.  In 2009 244 members of Congress were millionaires – 138 Republicans and 106 Democrats (ref).   However, a picture is worth a thousand words.  The following graphics were sent to me by one of my readers:


A significant imbalance exists (around 40- to 50-fold) regarding the number of millionaires holding elected office in Washington versus the general public.  The median American family had a net worth of $96,000 in 2009 per the Federal Reserve Board while the median net worth for members of the US House of Representatives and Senate was $725,000 and $2.4 million, respectively (ref).  The reference provides a list of the 20 wealthiest members of Congress based on 2009 reports, 10 Republican and 10 Democrats, with Representative Darrell Issa (R-California) holding the top spot with an average net worth of over $300 million dollars.

Special Interest Contributions
There is a high correlation between candidate spending and winning elected office (ref).  In the 2010, candidate spending correlated to success in 85% of House races and 83% of Senate races.  And historically the correlation has even been greater; in 2004; 98% of House seats and 88% of Senate seats went to the candidates who spent the most.  Why does this correlation exist?  Because candidate exposure is expensive.  Elections are won by the expensive tactic of manipulating high probability voters through repeated messaging over TV during prime time hours (information obtained from a political consulting group during my exploration of a Senate run).  The average cost of winning a Senate seat was $8.28 million in 2010 and $1.09 million for a House seat (ref).
Most self-financing candidates faltered in the 2010 cycle and significant investments from outside groups helped to elect more than 200 federal candidates.  ”In two-thirds of races where outside groups spent at least some money on advertisements and other political communications, the dollars spent supporting the winner, coupled with amounts spent opposing the loser, exceeded dollars spent supporting the loser or attacking the winner..” (ref).
As a candidate can not raise near enough within their own district to support an election effort, the vast majority of campaign contributions come from outside sources.  What follows for Representative Issa’s campaign contributions (Jan 2005 – Dec 2007) holds true for most elected officials.  Only 5% of his contributions came from within his district; 54% ($674,370) came from outside his state and 94% ($1,173,693) came from outside his district (ref).  The largest sum of out-of-state contributions came from the Washington DC area where special interest lobbying groups operate.

Conflicting Interests
Personal Wealth vs Tax Policy
Regarding the disproportionate number of the wealthy holding elected office, consider tax policy, especially capital gains and dividends.  Capital gains in the 1970′s were taxed at 35% (ref) and have since been lowered to the current 15% rate (ref).  Capital gains and dividends comprise a disproportionate amount of the income for the wealthy and, as Warren Buffet has noted, is responsible for the lower net income tax paid by the wealthiest (ref).  Additionally, this income is not subject to payroll tax that supports Social Security and Medicare, programs that much of America depends on in their later years.  The president’s plan to raise taxes may include a change in how capital gains are taxed (ref).   Consider that the richest 0.1% of Americans pay 44 percent of all capital gains taxes and the richest 1% pay 68% of that tax.  The bottom 80% of Americans account for less than 3% of all capital gains taxes paid.  About 40% of members of the US House of Representatives and nearly half of all US senators reported capital gains in 2009 (ref).  Many of the GOP presidential candidates have suggested eliminating the capital gains tax all together (ref).  Increasing the tax rate on capital gains, which largely affects the wealthiest and which would help reduce the federal deficit, would directly affect 176 members of the House and 48 US senators (ref).  I submit that many in our Congress face a conflict of interest between their own financial self-interests versus policy that could help reduce our federal deficits to the benefit of our future generations.
Campaign Financing vs Representation
The conflict that exists for politicians whose campaigns are financed largely by money raised outside their districts is apparent and expressed in their behavior.  A few examples are provided below.
During the healthcare reform debate it was found that more that a dozen lawmakers placed comments into the Congressional record that were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by lobbyists working for Genentech (ref).  This was caught because the remarks made by multiple lawmakers lined up word for word.  Genentech’s PAC had made financial contributions to many House members including some who filed statements into the Congressional Record.  Although the head of Genentech’s Washington office claimed that “there was no connection between the contributions and the statements”, company employees had been among the hosts at fund-raisers for some of those lawmakers.  Additionally there is the example of senator Joe Lieberman’s behavior during that debate.  Consider his position of opposing a public option after he had reportedly accepted $427,644 from insurance companies since 2005 including at the time a recently received sum of $65,200 from Aetna and its employees (ref), this after tax payer money supports his own healthcare benefits.
Consider the attempts to raise taxes on the wealthiest of Americans to help reduce deficits.  A recent poll (ref) showed nearly three-quarters of Americans (including two-thirds of Republicans) favoring such a measure as well as the evidence that when such policy was in place in the 1990′s our country had a strong economy and was paying down its debt.  So a reasonable question is how does 100% of the Republican elected representation in the senate oppose a tax increase when up to two-thirds of their party constituents agree with an increase.  Consider that behavior in light of a substantial level of funding for Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS reportedly coming from a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls “bitterly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats – and endorsed by the Obama administration – to increase the tax rates on compensation that hedge funds pay their partners” (ref).  These hedge fund moguls and other wealthy donors contributed tens of millions of dollars (to protect their interests) that helped to secure big GOP victories in the 2010 midterm elections.
Consider CFTC’s Brooksley Born’s failed attempt to regulate and bring transparency to OTC derivatives in the late 1990′s (ref).  These are the financial instruments that were at the heart of dramatic corporate and fund failures that sparked the market collapse at the start of the Great Recession.  In 1998, ten years before the economic crisis, a hedge fund (Long Term Capital Management, LTCM) was near collapse and had used these instruments to leverage $5 billion into more than $1 Trillion while doing business with 15 of Wall Streets largest financial institutions.  At that time the President’s working group was informed that the entire American economy hung in the balance and the Fed intervened to avert the crisis.  Although the attempt to regulate was portrayed as a battle of ideologies between Born (Keynesian) and Greenspan/Rubin (Austrian and neoconservative laissez faire), Wall Street lobbying efforts proved to be powerful.  ”Under heavy pressure from the financial lobby, legislation prohibiting regulation of derivatives by Born’s agency was passed by the Congress”.  This paved the way for ten years of unregulated growth of a market that was highly profitable to Wall Street and ultimately harmful to much of America.

Incentives (Insider Trading)
As reported by 60 Minutes (ref) “members of Congress and their aides have regular access to powerful political intelligence, and many have made well-timed stock market trades in the very industries they regulate”.  Essentially, there is no law prohibiting Congress from ‘Insider Trading’, something that is a criminal offense for corporate insiders.  Consider, for example, the closed door meetings between Congressional leaders and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke where lawmakers were being warned that a global financial meltdown could occur within a few days.  These meetings were so secretive that cell phones and Blackberries were confiscated beforehand to prevent leaks.  Literally the day following one such meeting, Alabama representative Spencer Bachus (who was at the time the ranking Republican member on the House Financial Services Committee and now its Chairman), bought option funds that would go up in value if the market went down.  So although publicly he took the position of trying to keep the economy from cratering, he was privately betting that it would.  Consider that it was Congress that enacted financial deregulation policy, and a ranking committee member who supported such policy could act on insider information to profit from its failure while much of America suffered the consequences of its failure.
Before retiring, Congressman Brian Baird (Washington) spent six unsuccessful years trying to get his colleagues to to prohibit insider trading in Congress and establish rules governing conflicts of interests.  Despite outcries from the offices of Democratic Congresswoman Pelosi and Republican Speaker Boehner following the airing of the 60 Minutes report (both were questioned publicly by Steve Kroft about their involvement in the practice), at least 93 members of Congress have signed on as cosponsors of the Stock Act and for the first time the bill has been introduced in the Senate.

Discussion
Republic, Lost
Harvard law professor, Lawrence Lessig, is author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – And a Plan to Stop It”.  A point he made in interview (ref) is that the OWS movement has it wrong when it refers to the 99%.  Lessig points out that only 0.05% of America max out Congressional campaign contributions, and only 0.26% give more than $200.  As money provides access to government, it is not OWS’s 99%, but rather the 99.95% that is denied access.  He points out that as 30 – 70% of a politician’s time is spent in fundraising, they become dependent on the funders rather than the people (and it is only worse now as the Citizen’s United ruling gives corporations the rights of a person).  Politicians are therefore responding to a small sliver of our society.  And he notes that politicians also extort business for financial gain by demanding corporate participation in campaign fundraising to get what it wants.
In a separate interview (ref) Dr. Lessig makes the point that in 1980 98% of financial assets traded in our economy were subject to the normal rules of transparency, anti-fraud requirements, and basic exchange-based rules of the New Deal.  By 2008, 90% of traded assets were traded invisibly because they were not subject to such obligations.  But what concerns him is what happened after 2008.  After “every independent analyst had said there was a link between the structure of deregulation and the collapse (and he mentions Greenspan’s Congressional testimony),…Wall Street was able to blackmail the Democrats and the Republicans into handing them essentially a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card and effect no fundamental change in the architecture of our financial system”.

The Real Cost of Poverty: Lost American Lives
But the real cost of this special interest-driven policy failure is in the staggering number of American lives it has claimed.  The latest census shows that 1 in 2 Americans have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income (ref).  ”The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families”.  However, what is not discussed is that one of the consequences of poverty is that it claims lives.
As I wrote in a previous article on income/wealth inequality as a moral crisis for this country (ref), a study conducted by Columbia University’s School of Public Health estimated that in 2000 875,000 deaths could be attributed to a cluster of social factors bound up with poverty and income inequality (ref).  The Great Recession has caused an increase in poverty and applying the 2000 mortality rate in the Columbia University report to the number of Americans currently living in poverty an estimated 1,228,169 Americans died in 2009 from the effects of poverty and income inequality (ref).



This estimated annual increase of more than 350,000 lost American lives due to poverty since 2000 (of which failed policy has contributed) dwarfs the total 4484 US military fatalities incurred over the entire course of the Iraq War (ref).  This staggering loss of American lives due to the consequences of poverty is never part of the political dialog and our news sanitizes the picture of poverty in our country.

Consider that Congress just reached a deal that would prevent yet another threatened government shutdown by including a cut of $3.5 billion for low-income heating and utility subsidies (a cut of about 25%) while maintaining the Bush era tax cuts largely favoring the wealthiest.  In striking such a deal, our Congress has placed a higher value on special interest-driven policy than the lives of American citizens – and that does represent a moral crisis for our country.

Beware this Boy
A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite seasonal stories.


In writing the above this holiday season I was reminded of Scrooge saying that if the poor are to die then “they had better do it and decrease the surplus population”.  I could hear the voice of the Marley’s ghost screaming at Scrooge that “Mankind was my business”.  I could see the Ghost of Christmas Present revealing the two wretched children to Scrooge, the girl being ‘Want’, the boy being ‘Ignorance’ and saying to Scrooge: “Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

Really not a bad time of year to reflect on what has happened to our Congress.  We must erase the writing on the brow of ignorance.   We must not allow our Congress to remain Our Unrepresentative Representation.

http://www.artonissues.com/2011/12/our-unrepresentative-representation/

50 Economic Numbers From 2011 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/50-economic-numbers-from-2011-that-are-almost-too-crazy-to-believe

Even though most Americans have become very frustrated with this economy, the reality is that the vast majority of them still have no idea just how bad our economic decline has been or how much trouble we are going to be in if we don't make dramatic changes immediately.  If we do not educate the American people about how deathly ill the U.S. economy has become, then they will just keep falling for the same old lies that our politicians keep telling them.  Just "tweaking" things here and there is not going to fix this economy.  We truly do need a fundamental change in direction.  America is consuming far more wealth than it is producing and our debt is absolutely exploding.  If we stay on this current path, an economic collapse is inevitable.  Hopefully the crazy economic numbers from 2011 that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.
At this time of the year, a lot of families get together, and in most homes the conversation usually gets around to politics at some point.  Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help you share the reality of the U.S. economic crisis with your family and friends.  If we all work together, hopefully we can get millions of people to wake up and realize that "business as usual" will result in a national economic apocalypse.

The following are 50 economic numbers from 2011 that are almost too crazy to believe....

#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty.
#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be "low income" or impoverished.
#3 If the number of Americans that "wanted jobs" was the same today as it was back in 2007, the "official" unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent.
#4 The average amount of time that a worker stays unemployed in the United States is now over 40 weeks.
#5 One recent survey found that 77 percent of all U.S. small businesses do not plan to hire any more workers.
#6 There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then.
#7 Since December 2007, median household income in the United States has declined by a total of 6.8% once you account for inflation.
#8 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006.  Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.
#9 A Gallup poll from earlier this year found that approximately one out of every five Americans that do have a job consider themselves to be underemployed.
#10 According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.
#11 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs.  Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.
#12 Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job.  In July, only 81.2 percent of men in that age group had a job.
#13 One recent survey found that one out of every three Americans would not be able to make a mortgage or rent payment next month if they suddenly lost their current job.
#14 The Federal Reserve recently announced that the total net worth of U.S. households declined by 4.1 percent in the 3rd quarter of 2011 alone.
#15 According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.
#16 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages.  According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married.  Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.
#17 The U.S. Postal Service has lost more than 5 billion dollars over the past year.
#18 In Stockton, California home prices have declined 64 percent from where they were at when the housing market peaked.
#19 Nevada has had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation for 59 months in a row.
#20 If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.
#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18 percent of all homes in the state of Florida are sitting vacant.  That figure is 63 percent larger than it was just ten years ago.
#22 New home construction in the United States is on pace to set a brand new all-time record low in 2011.
#23 As I have written about previously, 19 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 are now living with their parents.
#24 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
#25 According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980.  Today they account for approximately 16.3%.
#26 One study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.
#27 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.
#28 The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#29 It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be 558.2 billion dollars.
#30 The retirement crisis in the United States just continues to get worse.  According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.
#31 Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.
#32 According to a study that was just released, CEO pay at America's biggest companies rose by 36.5% in just one recent 12 month period.
#33 Today, the "too big to fail" banks are larger than ever.  The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.
#34 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.
#35 According to an analysis of Census Bureau data done by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth for households led by someone 65 years of age or older is 47 times greater than the median net worth for households led by someone under the age of 35.
#36 If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.
#37 A higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty (6.7%) than has ever been measured before.
#38 Child homelessness in the United States is now 33 percent higher than it was back in 2007.
#39 Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent.
#40 Sadly, child poverty is absolutely exploding all over America.  According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.
#41 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
#42 In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income.  Today, government transfer payments account for more than 18 percent of all income.
#43 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits.  Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.
#44 Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP.  Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.
#45 For fiscal year 2011, the U.S. federal government had a budget deficit of nearly 1.3 trillion dollars.  That was the third year in a row that our budget deficit has topped one trillion dollars.
#46 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.
#47 Amazingly, the U.S. government has now accumulated a total debt of 15 trillion dollars.  When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.
#48 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.
#49 The U.S. national debt has been increasing by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day since the beginning of the Obama administration.
#50 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

Of course the heart of our economic problems is the Federal Reserve.  The Federal Reserve is a perpetual debt machine, it has almost completely destroyed the value of the U.S. dollar and it has an absolutely nightmarish track record of incompetence.  If the Federal Reserve system had never been created, the U.S. economy would be in far better shape.  The federal government needs to shut down the Federal Reserve and start issuing currency that is not debt-based.  That would be a very significant step toward restoring prosperity to America.

During 2011 we made a lot of progress in educating the American people about our economic problems, but we still have a long way to go.

Hopefully next year more Americans than ever will wake up, because 2012 is going to represent a huge turning point for this country.

Signs Point to a Coordinated National Program to Try and Unoccupy Wall Street and Other Cities

Police State Tactics: Signs Point to a Coordinated National Program to Try and Unoccupy Wall Street and Other Cities

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/900

Tue, 11/15/2011 - 18:27 — Anonymous

by: 

Dave Lindorff

The ugly hand of the federal government is becoming increasingly suspected behind what appears to be a nationwide attempt to repress and evict the Occupation Movement.
Across the country in recent days, ultimatums have been issues to groups occupying Portland, OR, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, Dallas, TX, Atlanta, GA, and most recently New York, NY, where the Occupation Movement began on September 17. The two most recent eviction efforts, in Oakland and New York, have been the worst.
The police attacks have had a lot in common. They have been “justified” based upon trumped up pre-textural claims that the occupiers are creating a health hazard, or a fire hazard, or a crime problem, generally on little or no evidence, or there has been a digging up of obscure and constitutionally questionable statutes, for example laws outlawing the homeless. Then the police come in, usually in dead of night, dressed in riot gear and heavily armed with mace weapons, batons, plastic cuffs and tear gas, or even assault rifles in some cases and so-called flash-bang stun grenades--all weapons to be used against peaceful demonstrators.
So violent has been the response that some returned veterans have condemned the police for using weapons and tactics that are not even permitted by occupying troops in war-torn countries.
“We definitely feel, especially in a movement like this that has arisen so quickly in a number of cities, that there will be a coordinated national effort to try and shut it down,” says Heidi Bogosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, which has been playing a key role providing legal services to the new movement.
“We see the scapegoating of these movements, the attacks at night, and in general tactics designed to terrorize and to scare protesters away. I can’t see this as anything other than centrally coordinated.”
One indication of that coordination may have been a conference call among 18 city mayors which was confirmed by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan in a radio interview on San Francisco station KALW. Dan Siegel, an Oakland attorney who worked as an advisor to Quan, but who resigned in disgust after Oakland police and law enforcement personnel from a number of surrounding jurisdictions brutally drove occupiers there out of their park using tear gas, supposedly non-lethal ammunition (bean bags and rubber bullets) and flash-bang grenades in a night-time raid in the early hours of November 14, says that phone conference call took place, significantly, while Quan was in Washington, DC.
Remember this image: it's the national police state on the march
Shortly afterwards, on Oct. 25, Quan authorized the first brutal police assault on Occupy Oakland. It led, among other things, to the critical wounding of Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran who was among the protesters, and was hit in the forehead by a police tear gas cannister fired at close range.
Who organized that critical conference call? Was it Quan or one of the other mayors, or was it someone in the federal government? Siegel says he doesn’t know, and Quan isn’t saying.
But both Siegel and Boghosian say they strongly suspect federal involvement in the planning of the recent spate of police violence against occupiers. Says Siegel, “It’s only logical to assume that the ‘Fusion Centers’ are involved, especially after the Oakland occupiers shut down the port in Oakland.”
Some 72 Fusion Centers, located around the US and funded by the US at a cost of half a billion dollars, are a post 9-11creation of the new Homeland Security Department. Bringing the FBI together with local law enforcement departments, they both collect and share domestic intelligence, and can serve as command centers to direct local law enforcement in helping implement national law enforcement goals. There are also many Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which directly link the FBI with urban police departments.
Says Boghosian, “What we are seeing here is the Miami model, with various levels of law enforcement, local, state and federal, all at work. It would be shocking if federal law enforcement were not seeing this occupy movement now as a national security threat.”
Mara Veheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild’s National Mass Defense Committee, based in Washington, agrees. “These crackdowns on the occupation movement certainly appear to be part of a national strategy to crush them,” she says. “We haven’t yet found overt evidence of federal involvement, but the fact that in rapid succession local authorities have taken action raises the specter of coordination.”
She adds, “There is absolutely no legal justification for the involvement of the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in this movement. These demonstrations are not terrorist activities, and police should not be treating them as such, yet all over the country the police are treating the protesters as if they are criminals. The similarity of the response everywhere to the movement makes it appear that there is a coordinated strategy.”
Meanwhile, Siegel, now back in private practice, says that since the riots that followed the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART transit cop, who shot Grant fatally in the head after he had been arrested, subdued and handcuffed for a turnstile jumping violation, federal law enforcement officials have been observed actively involved in police activities in the Oakland area.
Some Oakland residents have reported seeing federal vehicles and possibly also National Guard equipment during the police actions against occupation demonstrators, too, though National Guardsmen can only be legally activated by a governor, and California Gov. Jerry Brown, a former mayor of Oakland, has not publicly issued any such order.
Rick Ellis, a journalist with the Minneapolis office of the news outlet Examiner.com, is reporting that an unidentified US Justice Department official has confirmed what Boghosian, Siegel and Veheyden-Hilliard say they suspect is the case: that each of the recent brutal police evictions and attacks on occupation groups “was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.”
Ellis writes, “According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.”
According to an AP story published early Wednesday, mayors and city leaders in as many as 40 cities were communicating about coordinating an attack on the occupy movement. Again, this hardly seems like it was on their own initiative.
Given how things have played out, it certainly looks like the suspicions were correct, and that Ellis’s source is telling the truth.
President Obama has a lot to answer for. So do the mayors who have been overseeing the repressive operations locally.

Occupy Wall St. to a Bank in the Public Interest: M Hudson/The Real News

Michael Hudson: A public option in banking will be a structural answer to the power of finance

Always the Bankers’ Whore Obama’s New Populist Fakery by MICHAEL HUDSON

Always the Bankers’ Whore

Obama’s New Populist Fakery

by MICHAEL HUDSON

The seeds for President Obama’s demagogic press conference on Thursday were planted last summer when he assigned his right-wing Committee of 13 the role of resolving the obvious and inevitable Congressional budget standoff by forging an anti-labor policy that cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and uses the savings to bail out banks from even more loans that will go bad as a result of the IMF-style austerity program that Democrats and Republicans alike have agreed to back.

The problem facing Obama is obvious enough: How can he hold the support of moderates and independents (or as Fox News calls them, socialists and anti-capitalists), students and labor, minorities and others who campaigned so heavily for him in 2008? He has double-crossed them – smoothly, with a gentle smile and patronizing pattern talk, but with an iron determination to hand federal monetary and tax policy over to his largest campaign contributors: Wall Street and assorted special interests. The Democratic Party’s Rubinomics and Clintonomics core operators, plus smooth Bush Administration holdovers such as Tim Geithner, not to mention quasi-Cheney factotums in the Justice Department.

President Obama’s solution has been to do what any political demagogue does: Come out with loud populist campaign speeches that have no chance of becoming the law of the land, while more  quietly giving his campaign contributors what they’ve paid him for: giveaways to Wall Street, tax cuts for the wealthy (euphemized as tax “exemptions” and mark-to-model accounting, plus an agreement to count “income” as “capital gains” taxed at a much lower rate).

So here’s the deal the Democratic leadership has made with the Republicans. The Republicans will run someone from their present gamut of guaranteed losers, enabling. Obama to run as the “voice of reason,” as if this somehow is Middle America. This will throw the 2012 election his way for a second term if he adopts their program – a set of rules paid for by the leading campaign contributors to both parties.

President Obama’s policies have not been the voice of reason. They are even further to the right than George W. Bush could have achieved. At least a Republican president would have confronted a Democratic Congress blocking the kind of program that Obama has rammed through. But the Democrats seem stymied when it comes to standing up to a president who ran as a Democrat rather than the Tea Partier he seems to be so close to in his ideology.

So here’s where the Committee of 13 comes into play. Given (1) the agreement that if the Republicans and Democrats do NOT agree on  Obama’s dead-on-arrival “job-creation” ploy, and (2) Republican House Leader Boehner’s statement that his party will reject the populist rhetoric that President Obama is voicing these days, then (3) the Committee will wield its ax to cut federal social spending in keeping with its professed ideology.

President Obama signaled this long in advance, at the outset of his administration when he appointed his Deficit Reduction Commission headed by former Republican Sen. Simpson and Rubinomics advisor to the Clinton administration Bowles to recommend how to cut federal social spending while giving even more money away to Wall Street. He confirmed suspicions of a sellout by reappointing bank lobbyist Tim Geithner to the Treasury, and tunnel-visioned Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve Board.

Yet on Wednesday, October 4, the president tried to represent the OccupyWallStreet movement as support for his efforts. He pretended to endorse a pro-consumer regulator to limit bank fraud, as if he had not dumped Elizabeth Warren on the advice of Geithner – who seems to be settling into the role of bagman for campaign contributors from Wall Street.

Can President Obama get away with it? Can he jump in front of the parade and represent himself as a friend of labor and consumers while his designated appointees support Wall Street and his Committee of 13 is waiting in the wings to perform its designated function of guillotining Social Security?

When I visited the OccupyWallStreet site on Wednesday, it was clear that the disgust with the political system went so deep that there is no single set of demands that can fix a system so fundamentally broken and dysfunctional. One can’t paste-up a regime that is impoverishing the economy, accelerating foreclosures, pushing state and city budgets further into deficit and forcing cuts in social spending.

The situation is much like that from Iceland to Greece: Governments no longer represent the people. They represent predatory financial interests that are impoverishing the economy. This is not democracy. It is financial oligarchy. And oligarchies do not give their victims a voice.

So the great question is, where do we go from here? There’s no solvable path within the way that the economy and the political system is structured these days. Any attempt to come up with a neat “fix-it” plan can only be suggesting bandages for what looks like a fatal political-economic wound.

The Democrats are as much a part of the septic disease as the Republicans. Other countries face a similar problem. The Social Democratic regime in Iceland is acting as the party of bankers, and its government’s approval rating has fallen to 12 percent. But they refuse to step down. So earlier last week, voters brought steel oil drums to their own Occupation outside the Althing and banged when the Prime Minister started to speak, to drown out her advocacy of the bankers (and foreign vulture bankers at that!)

Likewise in Greece, the demonstrators are showing foreign bank interests that any agreement the European Central Bank makes to bail out French and German bondholders at the cost of increasing taxes on Greek labor (but not Greek property and wealth) cannot be viewed as democratically entered into. Hence, any debts that are claimed, and any real estate or public enterprises given sold off to the creditor powers under distress conditions, can be reversed once voters are given a democratic voice in whether to impose a decade of poverty on the country and force emigration.

That is the spirit of civil disobedience that is growing in this country. It is a quandary – that is, a problem with no solution. 

All that one can do under such conditions is to describe the disease and its symptoms. The cure will follow logically from the diagnosis. But the role of OccupyWallStreet is to diagnose the financial polarization and corruption of the political process that extends right into the Supreme Court, the Presidency, and  Obama’s soon-to-be notorious Committee of 13 once the happy-smoke settles from his present pretensions.

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

The Fed's $16 Trillion Bailouts Under-reported

Image by telmo32 via Flickr

The media’s inscrutable brush-off of the Government Accounting Office’s recently released audit of the Federal Reserve has raised many questions about the Fed’s goings-on since the financial crisis began in 2008.

The audit of the Fed’s emergency lending programs was scarcely reported by mainstream media – albeit the results are undoubtedly newsworthy.  It is the first audit of the Fed in United States history since its beginnings in 1913.  The findings verify that over $16 trillion was allocated to corporations and banks internationally, purportedly for “financial assistance” during and after the 2008 fiscal crisis.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) amended the Wall Street Reform law to audit the Fed, pushing the GAO to step in and take a look around.  Upon hearing the announcement that the first-ever audit would take place in July, the media was bowled over and nearly every broadcast network and newspaper covered the story.  However, the audit’s findings were almost completely overlooked, even with a number as high as $16 trillion staring all of us in the face.

Sanders press release, dated July 21st, stated:

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

The report serves as a clear testimony of the Fed’s emergency action plan to bailout foreign corporations and banks in a time of crisis, but the GAO reportdoes not berate the Fed; rather, it provides a lucid explanation of where the money was allocated and why.

According to The Washington Post, “The GAO report did not condemn the Fed’s actions, it simply illuminated them.  The GAO also recommended that the Fed make clearer and more rigorous its policies for hiring independent contractors to manage investment programs.”

A wider investigation of the Fed is due on October 18th, which will provide more thorough details.   The GAO report said that the Fed issued “conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans.”  The audit will inspect the “conflicts of interest” and the inner-workings of the Fed’s emergency-lending programs.

For Sanders, one thing is clear: “The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just CEOs on Wall Street.”

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