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Tag: economic inequality
How Corporate Bamboozlers Intend To Widen Inequality In America

How Corporate Bamboozlers Intend To Widen Inequality In America

The basic problem facing the corporate and political powers that want you and me to swallow their Trans-Pacific Partnership deal is that they can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure.

But that reality hasn’t stopped their PR campaign, pitching their “salad” as good and good for you! For example, a recent article touted a study blaring the happy news that TPP will increase real incomes in the U.S. by $133 billion a year. Even if that were true (and plenty of other studies show that it’s not), it’s a statistic meant to dazzle rather than enlighten, for it skates around the real bottom line for the American public: An increase in income for whom?

In the past 15 years or so, and especially since 2008, it’s been made perfectly clear to the workaday majority of people that the corporate mantra of “income growth” benefitting everyone is a deliberate lie. Practically all of the massive annual increases in U.S. income, which every worker helps produce, now gushes up to the richest 1 percent, with millionaires and billionaires (the richest 10 percent of 1-percenters) grabbing the bulk of it.

Economists have a technical term for this: “stealing.” TPP is written specifically to sanction and increase the robbery of the many by the world’s moneyed few, including provisions that give additional incentives to U.S. manufacturers to ship more of our middle-class jobs to places such as Vietnam with wages under $1.23 an hour (or around $155 a month).

The article opened with this sunny headline: “Trade Pack Would Lift US Incomes, Study Says.” Sounds like a dandy deal! But wait, a study by whom? Four paragraphs down into the story, we’re finally told that this analysis of TPP’s impact comes from the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Fine, but who’s behind that? We’re not told, even though that information is key to understanding the upbeat interpretation of the TPP trade scheme. Readers would likely be less reassured by the positive spin if they knew that the Peterson Institute is largely funded by the major global corporations that would gain enormous new power over consumers, workers, farmers, our environment and the very sovereignty of America if Congress rubber stamps this raw deal. In fact, many of the multinational giants financing the institute were among the 500 corporate powers that were literally allowed to help write the 2,000-page agreement they’re now trying to shove down out throats — including Caterpillar, Chevron, IBM, GE, Deere & Company, General Motors and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Oh, and what about this Peterson guy — is he some sort of unbiased scholar? Hardly. Pete Peterson is a Wall Street billionaire, one of the 400 richest people in the country, and the founding chairman of his eponymous institute. He’s also a reactionary, anti-government, anti-public-spending ideologue who was Nixon’s commerce secretary. Hailed by the establishment as one of “the most influential billionaires in U.S. politics,” he uses that influence (and his fortune) to demonize such for-the-people programs as Social Security and to push policies to further enrich and enthrone the billionaire class over the rest of us. TPP would be his ultimate political coup against us commoners.

We don’t need any institute to tell us who would benefit from TPP. All we need to know is that it was negotiated in strict secrecy with global corporate elites while we consumers and workers were locked out. Remember, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Don’t be bamboozled by glittery studies. TPP was written by and for the superrich to further enrich themselves at our expense, exacerbating the widening gulf of inequality in America. For information and action tips, go to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch at www.citizen.org/trade.

Photo: An employee of a money changer holds a stack of U.S.  Dollar notes before giving it to a customer in Jakarta, October 8, 2015. REUTERS/Beawiharta

At Urban League Meeting, 2016 Candidates Talk Race, Inequality, ‘Black Lives Matter’

At Urban League Meeting, 2016 Candidates Talk Race, Inequality, ‘Black Lives Matter’

Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Bernie Sanders, and two other 2016 presidential candidates spoke Friday morning at the National Urban League’s annual conference, discussing U.S. race relations, the Black Lives Matter movement, and economic and racial inequality, while also trading policy jabs with their political opponents.

“Race still plays a significant role in determining who gets ahead in America and who gets left behind,” Clinton said, speaking before the conference’s largely black audience. “And yes, while that’s partly a legacy of discrimination that stretches back to the start of our nation, it is also because of discrimination that is still ongoing.”

In recent days, some candidates have received criticism for seeming to miss the purpose of the Black Lives Matter movement — which is to highlight how U.S. society, government, and police regularly disregard black lives, seen most clearly in the several deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of the police; and to declare unequivocally that racism has tangible and fatal effects. The main Democratic contenders have been slammed for saying “All Lives Matter,” or some version of that phrase, which critics argue diminishes the message and meaning of “Black Lives Matter.”

At the Urban League conference, Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley attempted to refine his earlier statements, telling attendees that as mayor of Baltimore, “Every year we buried 300 young black men who died violent deaths on our streets — and black lives matter.”

The former mayor and Maryland governor said the next president will need to “improve and reform our criminal justice system.” And he had some policy ideas: “Reduce mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent crimes. Repeal the death penalty. Invest in re-entry programs for convicts. Better equip communities to deal with mental illnesses.” And the big one: “We must improve policing, and the way we police the police.”

Clinton also spoke about how issues of economic and racial inequality continue to play out in the lives of black Americans, citing how black people receive “disproportionately longer sentences” than white people, and are “three times more likely to be denied a mortgage loan,” The Associated Pressreported.

Targeting Jeb Bush by mentioning the name of his SuperPAC and campaign slogan, Clinton said, “I don’t think you can credibly say that everyone has a ‘right to rise’ and then say you’re for phasing out Medicare or for repealing Obamacare. People can’t rise if they can’t afford health care.”

She also criticized Bush’s “skepticism over a federal minimum wage and his policies as Florida governor to end affirmative action in college admissions,” according to The New York Times.

Addressing the conference attendees, Bush cited his record on improving Florida schools as governor and said that Democrats “have failed to fix the education system,” Reuters reported. “For a half-century, this nation has pursued a war on poverty and massive government programs, funded with trillions of taxpayer dollars. This decades-long effort, while well intentioned, has been a losing one,” Bush said.

He also ticked off a few other political bona fides: As Florida governor, Bush said “he ordered the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol, raised the number of black judges, and tripled the state’s hiring of minority-owned businesses.”

Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders spoke about his campaign’s core message: the need to address income inequality. Relating it to racial inequality, Sanders told conference attendees how a black high-school graduate, age 17 to 20, faces a 51 percent unemployment rate, compared to a white graduate at 33 percent, and a Hispanic graduate at 36 percent. “That is unacceptable,” Sanders said of the greater barriers in the job market faced by black youth.

On racial inequality, prisons, and policing, Sanders said, “Blacks are in prison at six times the rate of whites.” He added that cities and the country need to move in the direction of community policing.

“Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Samuel DuBose. We know their names. Each of them died unarmed at the hands of police officers or in police custody,” Sanders said. “Violence and brutality of any kind, particularly at the hands of law enforcement sworn to protect and serve their communities, is unacceptable and won’t be tolerated.”

Calling for criminal justice reform, Sanders said, “Black lives do matter and we must value black lives.”

Republican candidate Dr. Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who is the only black contender in the presidential race, also spoke at the conference. “There was racism,” Carson said, recalling being the only black student in his 8th grade class. “There still is. And there always will be … as long as there are people with small brains and evil forces to stimulate them.”

“What do you do about it?” he asked.

Sticking to his conservative, bootstraps ideology, Carson said, “The person who has the most to do with what happens to you in life is you. It’s not somebody else. It’s not the environment. They can’t stop you. And once I developed that mindset, I stopped listening to all the naysayers and the people who were telling me that I was a victim.”

While Clinton, Sanders, and O’Malley each invoked the Black Lives Matter movement in their remarks, Carson and Bush did not.

The Urban League is a national civil rights organization “dedicated to economic empowerment in order to elevate the standard of living in historically underserved urban communities.” The 2015 conference is taking place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from July 29 to August 1.

Friday evening, the Urban League conference will feature a town hall plenary titled, “Saving Our Sons and Daughters: Black Lives Matter.”

Photo: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the National Urban League’s conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, July 31,2015. REUTERS/Andrew Innerarity 

Bernie Sanders Bites Back on #BlackLivesMatter

Bernie Sanders Bites Back on #BlackLivesMatter

When Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley were onstage at the progressive activism conference Netroots Nation on July 18, they were interrupted by #BlackLivesMatter protesters, who asked them to say the names of black women who had died in police custody, a reference specifically to Sandra Bland, who had died of an apparent suicide on July 13 after being jailed for a minor traffic violation three days earlier.

Sanders, who has a history of involvement in the civil rights movement dating back to the 1960s, was criticized for appearing callous and condescending.

“Black lives, of course, matter…but if you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK,” he said as protesters booed and shouted, while he transitioned to his stump speech on economic inequality.

Although both O’Malley and Sanders were seemingly caught off guard, in the aftermath they began incorporating the protesters’ questions and assertions into their rhetoric.

O’Malley apologized shortly after the incident.

Sanders went on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday to respond. He said that, to him, #BlackLivesMatter and economic injustice are intertwined, calling them “parallel problems.”

“We have to end institutional racism, but we have to deal with the reality that 50 percent of young black kids are unemployed, that we have massive poverty in America, that we have an unsustainable level of income and wealth inequality,” he told Chuck Todd on July 26.

“As Martin Luther King told us, we have to address both.”

Sanders, as mayor and then governor of a predominantly white state, would theoretically have an advantage with his 50-plus years of civil rights activism. Despite his bona fides, he has never needed to court a black vote — a fact he’s acknowledged. And that’s where the disconnect occurs.

As Barrett Holmes Pitner, a black journalist for The Daily Beast who interned for Sanders over a decade ago explained, his messaging has little appeal to black voters and, because he comes from a tiny white state, most don’t even know who he is. “…[B]lack voices question his credibility because he has never needed to prove himself to this community. Being a champion of civil rights within a bastion of white America holds little sway with black voters.”

But now it’s time to try.

On Meet the Press, Sanders affirmed his support for what the protesters stood for.

“The issue they raised is actually a very important issue…This is an issue of concern that I strongly share,” he said, though he rejected the notion that institutional racism and inequality were two separate issues, which is the crux of the debate among many activists.

As Ryan Cooper argues in The Week, race and class are not independent of each other:

Being poor is a known factor in about every social ill. Blacks do commit more crime than whites on a per capita basis, but this is largely explained by a poverty rate that is nearly three times greater. Thus, poor neighborhoods suffer both a lot of crime and crushingly heavy policing. When they are arrested, poor people often can’t afford bail, or to hire a decent attorney, leaving them defenseless before the incarceration machine.

Poverty means constant stress and exhaustion as people struggle to balance critical needs on a tight budget — and its disadvantage is transmitted through time. Family income is tightly correlated with children’s test scores, chance of college attendance, and future class position. Money, quite simply, is power.

And it’s power that the activists are fighting against; entrenched interests that have historically dismissed their concerns. That’s why #BernieSoBlack, a hashtag mocking Sanders’ comments at Netroots Nation, trended last week.

Incorporating the language of #BlackLivesMatter seems to be Sanders’ next move on this front. In addition to attending the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — a black civil rights organization whose first president was Dr. King — over the weekend, he toured Louisiana, which has the second largest black population in the country, holding rallies and fundraisers. But while he’s got the momentum among mostly white liberal voters, blacks — and other minorities — are still waiting to see if he can effectively understand them.

Photo: Bernie Sanders at Netroots Nation, July 18, 2015. yashmori via Flickr

The War On Poverty Then And Now

The War On Poverty Then And Now

It’s been 50 years since the late Michael Harrington published the Other America, about poverty in the wealthiest country in the world (that’s us folks). In many ways, according to Sasha Abramsky of the Nation Institute, we still have the same problems and worse. The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives “shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty.”