February 11, 2018: Rescumlican Fraud, Useful Bludgeon, Economic Sabotage

“Rest assured, whatever the Rescumlicans say they are, they aren't.”

----from “The Quotations of Chairman Joe”

Economist Paul Krugman, about whom Caesar Disgustus has nothing but contempt and is, therefore, worth reading, wrote an opinion published in Friday's New York Times about the fraudulence that now permeates the party of Lincoln. (1)

In 2011, as the country was reeling from the financial meltdown occurring under the last Rescumlican maladministration, Paul Ryan and his Rescumlicans “issued a report full of dire warnings about the dangers of budget deficits. 'The United States is facing a crushing burden of debt,' it declared, warning of a looming fiscal crisis that might soon 'capsize' the economy”.(2)

The Scums then went about refusing to raise the debt ceiling creating financial and political turmoil “effectively blackmailing President Barack Obama into cutting spending on domestic programs.” (3)

My daughter once told me that she wanted to study economics. I told her to ask the department at the university if they taught Keynesian economics pointing out that if they did not, then the department was staffed with a faculty that simply does not understand the subject. I had been introduced to Keynes in high school and the lessons were reinforced in my college instruction. Of late, the conservatives have been waging war upon John Maynard Keynes citing the fraudulence of Milton Friedman and, following corporate sponsorship at many of the business schools in this country, the error has spread into the media whereupon the idiot wrong have adopted the mantra.

Keynes famously taught that during recession the government should run deficits so that purchasing power would rise fueling production and recovery. With recovery comes increased government revenue which, as the economy improves over time, leads to reduced deficits and then surplus. Government should run deficits in time of recession, surplus in time of prosperity.

But the 'deficit hawks', about whom the Rescumlican Party claims a monopoly have, it has become apparent, never met a surplus they didn't hate and never met a deficit they didn't love—except, of course if the deficits occur under Democratic presidents. It is worth noting, as a side note, that the only budget surpluses ever achieved since World War II have been under Democratic presidents. Lyndon Johnson left Nixon a budget surplus in 1969, and Bill Clinton's budget surpluses during the last years of his presidency.

The budget deficit that caused Ryan and his 'hawks' such animated histrionics was 1.09 trillion in 2012 (4). “This week Republicans, having just enacted a huge tax cut, cheerfully agreed to a budget deal that, according to independent experts, will push next year's deficit up to 1.15 trillion—bigger than in 2012. True, this won't quite match 2012's red ink as a percentage of G.D.P., but this time none of the deficit will be a result of a depressed economy.” (5)

Indeed the economy, now at near full employment, is performing at such a level as to cause the Fed to increase interest rates in an attempt to dampen down economic activity lest that great bug-a-boo inflation once again emerges from under the collective bed.

Krugman points out that with unemployment at about 8 per cent there were sound reasons to run deficits in 2012, now with near full employment at about 4 per cent we should be nearly balancing the budget, if not creating a budget surplus and paying down the debt—as Clinton had done at the end of his business cycle. But as, in 2001, when the scums returned to power, the first casualty is fiscal responsibility. It is worth noting that the deficits under 'Ol Two-Cows' George W. Bush were created two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center. Indeed by June 2001, Bush had instituted—you guessed it—tax cuts, mostly on the wealthy, and made them retroactive to January 1 of 2001 so the scums could later claim that Clinton's last budget had left the scums with a deficit (the first fiscal budget of any incoming administration is the one passed in the last year of the outgoing administration. Hence, Disgustus' fiscal and economic policies do not take effect until his second year in office, laying false his claim that he is responsible for, for instance, low unemployment).

Indeed, Krugman points out that the Rescumlicans were never sincere concerning deficit spending. How do we know this? “It was obvious, even at the time, to anyone who looked at their fiscal proposals. These proposals always involved giant tax cuts for the wealthy—funny how that worked—offset by savage cuts in social benefits. Even so, assertions that deficits would go down depended entirely on assuming lots of revenue from closing unspecified loopholes and huge savings from cutting unspecified government programs. In other words, even at the peak of their deficit-hawk posturing, all Republican really had to offer was redistribution from the poor to the rich” (6).

The deficit scare, as Krugman points out, prove a useful as a bludgeon with which the Rescumlicans would pummel Obama into cutting social and infrastructure rebuilding programs and hobble his presidency.

And, Krugman continued: “I don't think it's unfair to suggest that there was an element of deliberate economic sabotage. After all, Republicans weren't just vehemently opposed to fiscal stimulus; they were also opposed to monetary stimulus. Basically they were against anything that might help the economy on President Obama's watch” (7). Indeed, former Ohio Senator George Voinovich (Rescumlican) said, just before he died, that the Rescumlican senate caucus was ordered to oppose everything that Obama proposed, even if it hurt the country for Mitch McConnell was determined that Obama be a one-term president the country be damned.

“Now” Krugman rightly observes, “Obama is gone, and suddenly deficits don't matter.” (8)

“This is about Republican bad faith. Everything they said about budgets, every step of the way, was fraudulent. And nobody should believe what they say now.” (9)

Indeed, Disgustus pledged to eliminate the so-called “carried interest” loophole, where investors—especially real estate investors—get what amounts to a long term interest free loan, but the loophole is still there. Indeed, the last tax cut included nearly a half trillion dollars, over ten years, in tax benefits to real estate investors. This explains the enthusiasm overwhelmed Disgustus and why Senator Corker—who had vowed to oppose any tax measure that added a cent to the deficit—himself a real estate tycoon, was moved to support it. Not eliminated either were the loopholes in the tax code that rewards companies for outsourcing jobs overseas, indeed the latest Rescumlican creation created even more such loopholes. No they were never serious about this.

What this demonstrates is that once again Disgustus cannot be seen as an aberration. The animus of Disgustus toward all things Obama predates his arrival by 8 years. The same mendacity, the same resistance, motivated by an all-too-transparent racism as well as unlimited political expediency, was deeply entrenched well before the orange slime slithered up Pennsylvania Avenue.

“An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh'

Impeach and Imprison

______________________

1. Krugman, Paul. “Fraudulence Of the Fiscal Hawks” The New York Times. Friday, February 9, 2018. Page A25
2. ibid
3. ibid
4. ibid
5. ibid
6. ibid
7. ibid
8. ibid
9. ibid

January 11, 2018: Back to the Farm, Contradictory Assumptions, Protection from Themselves

“A republic rests upon the assumption that the sum total of individual ignorance equals mass wisdom; capitalism rests upon the assumption that the sum total of individual greed equals the greater good. Both assumptions are contradictory; both assumptions are false.”

                             ----from “The Quotations of Chairman Joe”

The year 1776 gave us two of the pillars of our republic, the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations”, the third being the Constitution of the United States 13 years later. While still mired in a slave economy, these documents served to lay the framework from which the United States would lay claim to both the emerging industrial order and the dawning democratic age.

It was during one of my visits to the 'farm' (1) that, confronted by my great uncle, my horizons concerning our often blind assertions, even our basic assumptions, began to be stretched.

I'd like to take credit for the inspiration of the above quote but it was during a conversation with my great uncle Lionel that my comfortable certainties were abruptly brought up short.

“Do you believe in democracy?” he asked.

“Of course I do”, was my predictable reply.

“What makes you think that the sum total of individual ignorance equals mass wisdom?” was his reply as he once again flashed his toothless smile.

To this query, I could muster no acceptable answer.

Here my ageing uncle would, in a short exchange, teach valuable life lessons; for not only did he succeed in jarring the foundations of a world-view that had been handed down by countless schoolmasters, but he taught me to question the very foundations of our common misunderstandings. It was a skill I quickly began to put to use as I would engage my peers and sometimes my elders in robust debates. It was a skill that led, in time to likewise question our fundamental economic assumptions leading, by degrees, to the quotation above, the first part of which is a variation of the question put to me by my great-uncle; the second is mine alone.

However, it would be years and much reading before I could fashion an answer to his direct question for the query put to me at the old farmhouse set me out in search of new answers to what were clearly fundamental contradictions. The journey would take me through countless history books, biographies, philosophers, and political economists. From Rousseau to Feuerbach, from Plato to Galbraith, from Jefferson to Roosevelt, from Marx to Nietzsche, and, finally, Madison's Federalist No. 10.

It was professor Lynn Mapes who put me on to “The Federalist Papers” and my friend Larry Hamp who, disgusted that in the wake of a marital separation and pending divorce found that I had given up reading, presented me with a boxed copy of the work. Therein I discovered that the founding fathers were indeed aware of these implicit contradictions and were clear-eyed and without illusions as to the difficulties involved in compensating, if not overcoming, them. The “Papers” opened my eyes to the degree to which those who met a Philadelphia were aware not only of the difficulties involved in determining, in Rousseau's words, “the will of the people”, but likewise the necessity of protecting said people from the “passions” that would inevitably sweep the country; in a word, protecting the people from said “will”, protecting the people from themselves. Accordingly, they set about establishing what they hoped would be certain safeguards to keep the population safe from the public's presumed “right to err”.

They did this by fragmenting governments, first fragmenting government vertically by creating a federation in which state and local governments were clearly distinct and, in some measure, independent of the national government and, secondly, horizontal in that the national government would be divided into three equal branches, the Legislative, the Judicial, and the Executive, each with distinct powers, each depending upon but separate from the others. In this way, it was held, no one man would be able to grab all the reigns of power and establish a tyranny.

But equally important the founders, remembering their English ancestry, quickly passed a “Bill of Rights” guaranteeing certain personal freedoms. Today Americans like to see these first ten amendments as rights protecting the individual from capricious governance but they are more than that, far more than that. For by protecting the Press, by protecting the Churches and prohibiting the state from the interference thereof, the amendments served to establish and protect institutions what would be and were intended to be, in professor John Kenneth Galbraith's term, 'countervailing powers”. Institutions beyond the reach of governments acting as independent checks upon the 'popular will'. Likewise protections against self-incrimination, unlawful searches and seizures and so on. The founders knew quite well the capricious nature of Rousseau's 'popular will' which can all to easily degenerate into a type of lynch mob.

They put other measures into place as well, the Electoral College, a feature we have become painfully re-acquainted within recent years. The Senate elected by the state legislatures of the several states, a feature that was changed in the early twentieth century as well as a senator's term of office lasting two years longer than that of a sitting president and only 1/3 of the Senate up for re-election during an election year. This would provide some greater measure of stability, further safeguards against the “passions of the moment”. The government was intended to be cumbersome, inefficient, slow. It was intended to be so as to protect the people from their passions, and, hopefully, give greater stability and therefore longevity to the experiment for the founders knew how short-lived republics tended to be. To protect the people from themselves...

Likewise with the emerging economic order. Federalist No.10 is a long essay by James Madison arguing for the adoption of the constitution. In it he forthrightly addresses Montesquieu's critique, citing historical examples such as the Greek City-States, Venice, and the Hanseatic League, that a republic covering a vast territory cannot long endure. Madison responded in No. 10 with the argument that precisely because the United State traversed so much territory that a certain stability would be ensured, arguing that such a republic would be too large and too complex, having too many interests for one group, one cabal, much less one man to dominate. In this document, Madison laid the foundations for what would become our “interest-group democracy” in which the various major interests would contend and, in the process, neutralize each other. It was a concept put to the test with sectional disputes leading to civil war in the 19^th century and the dominance of cartels during the 'Gilded Age' and our own. Moreover, Madison argued in another essay, the single most important reason to adopt the constitution was to regulate the economy. The constitution gave Congress broad power to do so. What became known as the 'commerce clause', gives Congress all the power that is 'necessary and proper' to regulate. The founders had no illusions crafting the best structure they could to protect the public from capricious and arbitrary rule as well as economic exploitation and rapine. To protect the people from the likes of Caesar Disgustus.

The lessons taught so long ago bear fruit.  To disagree and to know why is a mark of intelligence; but, perhaps more importantly, to agree and to know why is a mark of wisdom.  Setting one free of one's acquired certainties sets one on the path to understanding; for any 'truth' can only be discovered alone. Thank you my mentor. 

_________________

1. see December 15, 2010: Northwest of Custer, The Farm, Damn Democrats as well as November 5, 2011: Return to Custer, A Word about The Word, Pigs Breakfast.

September 13, 2015: Principle Prevaricator, Burnishing his Legacy, Disingenuous to Say the Least

 

“I'll tell you exactly why. I think that politicians—particularly now, in the aftermath of this crash—fear that anything they do will be held against them later if anything bad happens. Look at all the grief I got for signing the bill that ended Glass-Steagall. There's not a single, solitary example that it had anything to do with the financial crash. And in fact, a study done afterward said that the unified banks were actually slightly less likely to fail than either the commercial banks that overloaded on subprime mortgages, or the investment banks, like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and others.” (1)

Bill Clinton, the principle prevaricator and serial fornicator-in-chief, has recently been about the business of burnishing his legacy. Faced with criticism that actions taken by himself and his administration materially contributed to the economic crisis of 2007-08, Clinton has taken to defacing the historical record. First, as Wallace Turbeville, noted in his blog demos.org, “Owning the Consequences: Clinton and the Repeal of Glass-Steagall”:

“The financial crisis occurred because banks involved in trading had become massive, concentrated and interconnected in response to the repeal of Glass-Steagall’s separation…There were only five notable investment banks left in early 2008. Of those, two went down, a third (Merrill Lynch) survived only by a forced merger into Bank of America, and the fourth and fifth—Goldman and Morgan Stanley—were threatened with failure when they were converted overnight to universal banks. Converting to universal banks qualified them for FDIC insurance and the implicit support of the US government.  The facts, such as they are belie the spin, the massive financial institutions proved if anything more vulnerable and those that survived did so only with the help of massive federal bailouts.” (2)

But more importantly was the blanket statement that “there’s not a single, solitary example that it had anything to do with the financial crash."  Turbeville, who worked for Goldman Sachs and worked assiduously in the period leading up to repeal to save the New Deal law, thinks otherwise.  But even granting the validity of the former President’s assertions Clinton, perhaps intentionally, quite misses the point entirely.

Even if you grant the assumption that repeal didn’t cause the crash, repeal did, for the first time since Glass-Steagall was enacted in the 1930’s, produce a financial crisis.  That is, the recession and resulting dislocations put commercial banks at risk resulting in hundreds of banks closing down or selling out in a further concentration of economic power.  Wells Fargo purchased Wachovia, Guarantee Bank folded and was bought out by Compass Bank as two noted examples. 

It has amazed me, in recent years, how graduates of the most illustrious and celebrated universities in this country have been able to apply so limited a knowledge of our historical record.  Prior to the Great Depression, as any cursory student of American History will attest, economic recessions or depressions were consistently accompanied by financial crises, each worse than the preceding, finally ending with the denouement of 1929.   To remedy this the New Dealers built a firewall between commercial and investment banks so as to prevent the vicissitudes of Wall Street from eviscerating Main Street. The result was that for nearly 7 decades this country had experienced great prosperity punctuated by the occasional hard times as the ‘business cycle’ did its inevitable work.  At no time, however, did the hard times bring on a financial crisis threatening the very foundations of the banking system.   That, of course, changed.

One would have thought that, being a ‘Boomer’, and, therefore prone to short-term memory, that the Savings and Loan crisis in the late eighties would have sufficed to advise caution.  But no, spurred by the Conservatives and eager to establish a ‘legacy’ Clinton went about ‘triangulating’ the Middle Class by repealing one of the signature bulwarks of the New Deal.

Clinton apologists would have us believe that old Bill, too busy or too distracted by scandal, was somehow dragged into this, finally presented with a bill that was so overwhelmingly approved by both houses of congress as to be veto-proof.  This too is a besmirching of the historical record for as noted previously in these columns, once agreement was reached with the Republican majority, Clinton’s White House enthusiastically pushed the bill, declaring its passage upon signing to be one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed in decades.   Oh Bill was out there, alright, repeating the usual palaver that this was a dawn of a new age, and that the antiquated old rules didn’t apply anymore to the ‘new economy’.   Scoundrels always make those arguments as we serially come to believe that the old rules governing economics no longer apply.  When these arguments hold sway, you must believe that certain attempts at financial levitation are soon at hand.  And so it was.  It took about a decade, about the mean time for these things to fully mature and, as predictable as the rise of the morning sun, Wall Street was soon knocking at the door hat in hand. 

It is disingenuous to say the least for Clinton to parse the language, a propensity for which he has repeatedly demonstrated a remarkable talent. But with Hillary now on the hustings seeking the presidency in her own right, it is important for Clinton to burnish the record for Hillary, joined as she is at the hip, cannot put much distance between her candidacy and the legacy of the country’s first experiments with a Clinton in the White House.  To now own that legacy is the challenge, even if it means not letting the historical record get in the way.

--------
1.     http://www.demos.org/blog/9/11/15/owning-consequences-clinton-and-repeal-glass-steagall

2.     Ibid.

August 5, 2015: All-Dunn, Plumbing the Mendoza Line, New ‘Age of Shoddy’

For decades the threshold by which an athlete was judged competent to remain in Major League Baseball was determined by what became known as the ‘Mendoza Line’(1).  The standard was coined in 1979 by teammates Tom Paciorek and Bruce Bochte in honor of one Mario (Manny) Mendoza whose defensive skills were such that he played several years in the major leagues despite having a batting average hovering at or about .200.  This, the gods of baseball had determined, would be the absolute minimum offensive performance, the point at which one’s defensive skills however formidable could no longer justify one being in the lineup or on a major league roster.  As a struggling player’s batting average plummeted ever lower, the approach of the much feared ‘Mendoza Line’ would hang over the hapless ball player like the Grim Reaper waiting for that moment to call him ‘home’ and snatch him back to the corn fields of Iowa or snuff his career altogether.  No more.

With the advent of Free Agency and multi-year contracts, Major League Baseball has of late presented us with the proverbial ‘superstar’ free of the constraints of convention and not subject to the long established norms of the game.  I give to you as Exhibit One, one Adam Dunn.

Known as the ‘Big Donkey’, Dunn was acquired by the Chicago White Sox as a free agent in the off-season following the 2011 season.  Signing for a reported four-year 60 Million dollar contract (of which the Sox reportedly paid out 56 Million) Dunn struggled through the 2012 season hitting a paltry .159 in 496 plate appearances.  The following season he struck out a record 222 times in 649 plate appearances raising his average to .204. The “Sporting News”, making a mockery of sporting awards, promptly dubbed the ‘Big Donkey” 2013’s “Comeback Player of the Year”, perplexing future historians of the game as they ponder just how bad you have to be the previous year to win this honor with a batting average .004 points above the “Mendoza Line”.  Nevertheless the Texan clogged on.  In four years he hit a meager .201 for Chicago, striking out 720 times in 2187 plate appearances, or roughly 1/3 of the time.  As for the remainder he would, predictably by always going deep into the count, work a walk (321 of those over nearly 4 seasons); but more often than not hitting directly into a defensive shift as opposing teams would put the third baseman or shortstop over on the right side of the infield.  Dunn, always swinging for the fences would, if he got his bat on the ball at all, hit it into the defense or pop it up.  Saying that he was paid to hit home runs, he hit 106 of those in 4 years, many—all too many with the bases empty and when the additional run didn’t figure into a win or loss—the big oaf went about making a mockery of the game.

It cost Ozzie Guillen his job as Manager of the Sox.  Guillen had led the club to its first World Championship since “Pants” Rowland piloted the franchise in 1917, a feat which should have earned Ozzie a lifetime sinecure.  But as the club wound through the 2012 season with Dunn, in the middle of the lineup and striking out at a record pace, Guillen was unable to do anything about it.

You see at a cost of 12 million for the first year of his contract, Dunn was making a bit over $74,000 a game.  That’s about $8,250 per inning worked or, since he played mostly as a Designated Hitter, one would more accurately parcel it out by plate appearances or at-bats.  Assuming 4.2 plate appearances on average per game every time the ‘Big Donkey’ came up to bat it cost the club $17,619.00.  Paying a player this much money means that a manager no longer has the option to bench him, for no owner or General Manager is going to sit idly by and pay out that kind of money for an ‘asset’ that isn’t being used.  And so Sox fans had to endure nearly 4 long years of watching the big oaf.  By the time he left the team, mercifully traded to Oakland with a couple of months left on his contract, the White Sox had paid between 18 and 20 Million dollars’ worth of strike outs.

Moreover, when he did hit the ball it was predictably to the right side of the infield, weak grounders, pop-ups and fly balls hit right into the shifted defenses.  Rarely did he make plate adjustments to hit the ball to the now open left side or into the outfield down the left field line.  When he did to it, his average would rise but, after a few games, he would revert to old habits and the same old Dunn would return.  When ‘Hawk’ Harrelson, calling a televised game, would announce “Here’s Adam” it would send chills down the spine of any good Sox fan, much like fingernails scraping across a blackboard,

This is the conundrum in which the modern game finds itself. The Atlanta Braves had a similar experience signing Second Baseman Dan Uggla, the Yankees are presently paying Alex Rodriguez tens of millions as he presents the public with a meager .280 batting average.  Pitchers now routinely are paid as much as $5,000.00 per pitch!  Being a legal monopoly and confronted with ‘free agency’ and player unionization, the owners and players have made their deals with intent on passing the costs on to the consumer, resulting in skyrocketing ticket, parking and concession prices.  Meanwhile the quality of play continues to deteriorate as team play unravels, performance slumps, uniforms are worn improperly.  Today we witness in the sport the emergence of players from college programs and the minor leagues who simply have not mastered the fundamentals of the game.  They cannot make adjustments hitting at the plate, cannot bunt the ball, cannot field their positions properly, and make too many base-running mistakes.  Baseball has given us a ‘new age of shoddy’.

Ken Burns, in his television presentation of “Baseball” informs us that the sport has been central to the American Experience, playing major roles in establishing social norms from segregating to integrating American culture.  That it has.  What Baseball is presenting today is the example of what has gone terribly wrong with the economy and, by extension, the cultural norms.  Long established as a legal monopoly, baseball was able to function by oppressing its labor force.  With the coming of the Player’s Association and, more importantly, Free Agency the cork was removed from the bottle sending player compensation, profits, and costs through the roof.   Now it is quite impossible to imagine Major League baseball as being able to exist in anything other than a state-sponsored monopoly.  Oliver Wendell Holmes was quite right about that.  Another league in competition would surely likewise send the cost of labor skyrocketing, as it did when the old American Football League challenged the National Football League at its inception.  Professional sports, in order to function, nearly demand state protection.

It is one thing to have a monopoly or, for that matter, an oligopoly or cartel.  These do exist and, sometimes as with the municipal power plant, the water department, or local hospital are necessary.  But to have an unregulated monopoly leads to the kind of dysfunctions that produce the Adam Dunn’s of this world and a management left powerless to influence performance. The lack of regulation, as it did in the American Auto Industry leads to Shoddy. Lack of competition without regulation lead to complacency and decline.  We must have one or the other.

______________

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendoza_Line

(2) http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/d/dunnad01.shtml

                                                                                                                                 

June 21, 2015: American Psychosis, Cruel Hoax, Strangling the American Dream

The American belief that we are the most ‘blessed’ nation, and that we are number one by virtually any measure has been for some time now, complete nonsense.  Over the past three decades the cumulative effect of the disinvestment in our infrastructure, our workers, our education, has had an increasingly negative impact on the quality of life in these United States.  The full-throated cry of “We’re No. 1!” one hears at every campaign rally and sees at every political convention as well as the conservative movement’s blind assertions of ‘American Exceptionalism’ betray a growing psychosis in the American psyche.  A psychosis illustrated by the growing disparity between who we so steadfastly proclaim to be and who we actually are.  Increasingly, the ‘shining city upon a hill’, and the ‘land of opportunity’, is becoming mere illusion.  The promise that was once America has become a hollow echo, a cruel hoax.

Consider the numbers: Nicolas Kristof, writing in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, “We in the United States grow up celebrating ourselves as the world’s most powerful nation, the world’s richest nation, the world’s freest and most blessed nation.”  It is a delusion from which we need to disabuse ourselves.

In fact, according to Kristof, we rank 16^th among developed nations in “livability”, 70^th in health, and 39^th in basic education; 34^th in access to water, and sanitation and, thanks to the terrorist organization that is the NRA, 31^st in personal safety. “Even in access to cell phones and the Internet, the United States ranks a disappointing 23rd, partly because one American in five lacks Internet access.” 

“The Social Progress Index is a brainchild of Michael E. Porter, the eminent Harvard business professor who earlier helped develop the Global Competitiveness Report. Porter is a Republican whose work, until now, has focused on economic metrics.

“This is kind of a journey for me,” Porter told me. He said that he became increasingly aware that social factors support economic growth: tax policy and regulations affect economic prospects, but so do schooling, health and a society’s inclusiveness.

So Porter and a team of experts spent two years developing this index, based on a vast amount of data reflecting suicide, property rights, school attendance, attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, opportunity for women, religious freedom, nutrition, electrification and much more.

Many who back proposed Republican cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and public services believe that such trims would boost America’s competitiveness. Looking at this report, it seems that the opposite is true.

Ireland, from which so many people fled in the 19th century to find opportunity in the United States, now ranks 15th. That’s a notch ahead of the United States, and Ireland is also ahead of America in the category of “opportunity.”

Canada came in seventh, the best among the nations in the G-7. Germany is 12th, Britain 13th and Japan 14th.” (1)

Moreover, the distribution of wealth within each country produces some surprising results.  Comparatively, the United States in recent decades has not fared so well.  

“Overall, the United States’ economy outperformed France’s between 1975 and 2006. But 99 percent of the French population actually enjoyed more gains in that period than 99 percent of the American population. Exclude the top 1 percent, and the average French citizen did better than the average American. This lack of shared prosperity and opportunity has stunted our social progress” (1)

Clearly, it is long past time that we Americans reevaluate our estimation of ourselves, and reassess our position in the world; for we are no longer the champions of anything.  We are the world’s most powerful nation, but it is a hollow boast for our military power no longer rests on the world’s largest economic engine, but instead upon a growing mountain of debt.   It is also becoming increasingly clear that we are no longer that ‘shining city upon a hill’, that noble example beckoning the world to follow, but instead a humdrum run-of-the-mill contemporary society, struggling to adjust to the ‘new world order’.  To boldly declare that ‘we are number 1’ is to not only shout our ignorance from the ramparts and to display our confusions for all the world to see, but to betray a deep and growing psychosis wherein our collective self-image diverges and is increasing at variance with demonstrable reality.  Increasingly as the Friedmanesque conservative ideological imperative strangles the ‘American Dream”, it is imperative that the rest of the world does not follow. It is a rat-hole from which there may be no escape.  Look at the numbers.  
_______
(1).  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/opinion/were-not-no-1-were-not-no-1.html?_r=1

June 2, 2015: A Question of Balance, Risks of Monoculture, Every Man's Nation

Al Gore, in his book “Earth in the Balance”, talks about the risks of ‘monoculture’.   What he was referring to was the trend in the last century, within the agricultural industry, of reducing the number of strains of grain seeds as well as dedicating ever more acreage to the cultivation of the same species of plant.  As the former Vice President correctly points out, this leads to an ever greater vulnerability of the world’s food supply to pests and disease as insects and microorganisms mutate and adapt creating immunities to the world’s use of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides.  The less diversity the more unstable the food supply as, for instance, the Irish Potato Famine demonstrated in the mid 19^th century. Lest we assume that this was an isolated instance, the former vice president pointed to a situation in the late 20^th century in which the corn crops of the world were threatened and crisis narrowly averted by reverting to a strain of seed still in existence in Mexico that was introduced to stave off crop failure.  

Mr. Gore is right of course, demonstrating the ongoing process of evolution and change in which organisms mutate as they deal with civilization’s ongoing war on the ravages of nature.   Similarly the same process is at work as microorganisms mutate to deal with the ‘miracle drugs’ of the last century—antibiotics for instance—developing immunities to human efforts to hold various diseases at bay.

I bring this up because I suspect that the same principle is applicable to politics and economics.  That is the greater the ‘monoculture’ the more fragile and vulnerable it is to disruptions and change.  That the greater ‘integrated’ the global economy, the more vulnerable humanity becomes to economic crises, the less pliable and resistant our ‘new world order’ to challenge and change.   

I submit the example of the so-called ‘Asian Fever’ of the late 1980’s when the failure of markets, particularly in Singapore, Indonesia and Japan, created a regional recession, one in which it took Japan a decade to recover.  China, then far less integrated into the regional and world economy, survived the crisis emerging in a much stronger position precisely because it was then much more insulated from the contagion.  Both Peking and Washington, affected much less by the economic downturn were in a position to come to the aid of the region and help them recover.  The existence of ‘firewalls’ in the form of trade barriers, helps insulate economies from regional or, perhaps, global economic catastrophe; for the more dependent a country becomes on foreign trade the more vulnerable it is to the failures of foreign markets or decisions made by foreign governments and, increasingly, foreign financial institutions which may or may not heed sound economic or regulatory policies. 

Until recently foreign trade was seen as a good thing except, perhaps, among certain ‘mossbacks’ of the Republican party dedicated as they were to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.  But as with anything else when it becomes a mantra of the Republican Party it is perhaps time to re-assess the wisdom of pursuing a particular course of action.  So it is with ‘free trade’: when the Republicans adopt it as their own, it is time to stop and reconsider; for Republicanism has become a veritable criterion of value, whatever they propose is wrong, whatever they enact is deleterious to the body politic. 

For this reason one must see the emerging  “New World Order” famously heralded by G.W. “Pappy” Bush as a signature act of mendacity threatening not only the sovereignty of the nation-states, and therefore the ability of our elected representatives to function, but the very stability of the national economy making it increasingly vulnerable to the vicitudes of foreign actors. From currency manipulations, and failures to enforce environmental and labor standards and regulations, to the vicitudes of the impact of foreign investments and speculations, the world becomes ever more vulnerable to maladies originating in far-off lands over which each nation has little or no effective remedy or control.  The impact on global markets of the real-estate speculations in the United States in the first decade of this century is a notable example.  Where previously a major collapse, as in the ‘tulip mania’ in the 17^th century Netherlands produced hardship, it was by and large a regional phenomenon. (1)  Increasingly in the last century the threat has become global as the events of the 1930’s demonstrated.  We learned some lessons back then, foremost that it was wise to erect some firewalls.  Separating investment from commercial banks under the law known as the Glass-Steagall Act was one, as were laws reducing volatility in the markets by requiring that stocks and bonds be held for a period of time before they could be re-sold.  One by one we have been tearing down these firewalls in a headlong quest to free capital not understanding the lessons of history, having a notoriously short memory and no current experience with the awfulness of the consequences. 

While a certain level of foreign trade is necessary and even laudable, there comes a point at which it is counterproductive, creating huge global dislocations.  China, for instance, must generate enough money in foreign markets in order to purchase the energy and raw materials to drive its economic engine.  The same is true of the United States.  But it is one thing to engage in trade in order to generate enough foreign exchange in order to fuel the economy and quite another to make a fetish of producing for foreign markets.  With a billion and a quarter people it is unnecessary, for instance, for the Chinese to be producing automobiles for foreign markets.  If a company cannot reach economy of scale with a domestic market of this size, it has no justification for being in business.  The same holds true for most of the world’s corporations.  The countries of origin are usually large enough to provide adequate markets and these corporations should be limited to these markets; or at least regional markets.

What I am suggesting is that perhaps the ‘world economy’ would be much more secure if we were move to further restrict economic activity to national and regional frontiers, to adopt a more vigorous tariff regime, raising tariffs, at least marginally in order to slow down the headlong global expansions.  This, of course, would have to be considered industry by industry, as nations short of certain resources would have by necessity to import and export regionally and, perhaps, globally.  Today over a third of the 100 largest economies are not nation-states but corporations, answerable to no one except corporate management and the investment class. Nothing has replaced the nation-state as a regulator of these entities and the further integration of the world economy threatens to remove all environmental and regulatory controls creating a new order in which the multi-national corporations will be able to deal with the several nations the way that British Petroleum dealt with the United States during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; that is every man’s country will simply become a ‘colony’ to the great global economic combinations in the way that India was once the property of the East India Company. (2)  

There comes a point at which further integration of the world’s economy becomes counterproductive.  There comes a point at which further integration creates only greater vulnerability and the potential for a truly global economic catastrophe. There comes a point at which further integration creates only a greater threat of global colonization.   I suspect that we have reached that point and the fact that the modern Republican Party has adopted it as an article of faith tells me that it is so.

These too, Mr. President, are reason why we should resist the headlong mantra of globalization and opt instead to proceed with caution.

_______

1.See post dated March 8, 2008: Tulip Time, When Hands Outrun the Wisdom of the Mind,

             Castles in the Sand.

2.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

 

  

May 8, 2015: Work of Nations, Political Will, General Welfare

 

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, writing in an article published in the spring issue of “The American Prospect”, had these observations concerning the growing maldistribution of income in the United States.  Author of several books including “Work of Nations”, “Aftershock” and “Beyond Outrage”, Reich has also produced and narrated a film entitled “Inequality for all” wherein he graphically walks us through the changes wrought on the American economy transforming what he refers to as the ‘virtuous’ business cycle into an emerging, and terrifying, ‘vicious’ cycle.  The former Harvard economics professor and current professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkley in his own words:

“The Political Roots of Widening Inequality”

Friday, May 1, 2015

For the past quarter-century I’ve offered in articles, books, and lectures an explanation for why average working people in advanced nations like the United States have failed to gain ground and are under increasing economic stress: Put simply, globalization and technological change have made most of us less competitive. The tasks we used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.

My solution—and I’m hardly alone in suggesting this—has been an activist government that raises taxes on the wealthy, invests the proceeds in excellent schools and other means people need to become more productive, and redistributes to the needy. These recommendations have been vigorously opposed by those who believe the economy will function better for everyone if government is smaller and if taxes and redistributions are curtailed.

While the explanation I offered a quarter-century ago for what has happened is still relevant—indeed, it has become the standard, widely accepted explanation—I’ve come to believe it overlooks a critically important phenomenon: the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs. And the governmental solutions I have propounded, while I believe them still useful, are in some ways beside the point because they take insufficient account of the government’s more basic role in setting the rules of the economic game.

Worse yet, the ensuing debate over the merits of the “free market” versus an activist government has diverted attention from how the market has come to be organized differently from the way it was a half-century ago, why its current organization is failing to deliver the widely shared prosperity it delivered then, and what the basic rules of the market should be. It has allowed America to cling to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re “worth” in the market, without examining the legal and political institutions that define the market. The tautology is easily confused for a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid. Yet this claim has meaning only if the legal and political institutions defining the market are morally justifiable.

                                                         II

Most fundamentally, the standard explanation for what has happened ignores power. As such, it lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it.

The standard explanation has allowed some to argue, for example, that the median wage of the bottom 90 percent—which for the first 30 years after World War II rose in tandem with productivity—has stagnated for the last 30 years, even as productivity has continued to rise, because middle-income workers are worth less than they were before new software technologies and globalization made many of their old jobs redundant. They therefore have to settle for lower wages and less security. If they want better jobs, they need more education and better skills. So hath the market decreed.

Yet this market view cannot be the whole story because it fails to account for much of what we have experienced. For one thing, it doesn’t clarify why the transformation occurred so suddenly. The divergence between productivity gains and the median wage began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then took off. Yet globalization and technological change did not suddenly arrive at America’s doorstep in those years. What else began happening then?

Nor can the standard explanation account for why other advanced economies facing similar forces of globalization and technological change did not succumb to them as readily as the United States. By 2011, the median income in Germany, for example, was rising faster than it was in the United States, and Germany’s richest 1 percent took home about 11 percent of total income, before taxes, while America’s richest 1 percent took home more than 17 percent. Why have globalization and technological change widened inequality in the United States to a much greater degree?

Nor can the standard explanation account for why the compensation packages of the top executives of big companies soared from an average of 20 times that of the typical worker 40 years ago to almost 300 times. Or why the denizens of Wall Street, who in the 1950s and 1960s earned comparatively modest sums, are now paid tens or hundreds of millions annually. Are they really “worth” that much more now than they were worth then?

Finally and perhaps most significantly, the market explanation cannot account for the decline in wages of recent college graduates. If the market explanation were accurate, college graduates would command higher wages in line with their greater productivity. After all, a college education was supposed to boost personal incomes and maintain American prosperity.

To be sure, young people with college degrees have continued to do better than people without them. In 2013, Americans with four-year college degrees earned 98 percent more per hour on average than people without a college degree. That was a bigger advantage than the 89 percent premium that college graduates earned relative to non-graduates five years before, and the 64 percent advantage they held in the early 1980s.

But since 2000, the real average hourly wages of young college graduates have dropped. The entry-level wages of female college graduates have dropped by more than 8 percent, and male graduates by more than 6.5 percent. To state it another way, while a college education has become a prerequisite for joining the middle class, it is no longer a sure means for gaining ground once admitted to it. That’s largely because the middle class’s share of the total economic pie continues to shrink, while the share going to the top continues to grow. 

                                                         III

A deeper understanding of what has happened to American incomes over the last 25 years requires an examination of changes in the organization of the market. These changes stem from a dramatic increase in the political power of large corporations and Wall Street to change the rules of the market in ways that have enhanced their profitability, while reducing the share of economic gains going to the majority of Americans. 

This transformation has amounted to a redistribution upward, but not as “redistribution” is normally defined. The government did not tax the middle class and poor and transfer a portion of their incomes to the rich. The government undertook the upward redistribution by altering the rules of the game.

Intellectual property rights—patents, trademarks, and copyrights—have been enlarged and extended, for example. This has created windfalls for pharmaceuticals, high tech, biotechnology, and many entertainment companies, which now preserve their monopolies longer than ever. It has also meant high prices for average consumers, including the highest pharmaceutical costs of any advanced nation.

At the same time, antitrust laws have been relaxed for corporations with significant market power. This has meant large profits for Monsanto, which sets the prices for most of the nation’s seed corn; for a handful of companies with significant market power over network portals and platforms (Amazon, Facebook, and Google); for cable companies facing little or no broadband competition (Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, Verizon); and for the largest Wall Street banks, among others. And as with intellectual property rights, this market power has simultaneously raised prices and reduced services available to average Americans. (Americans have the most expensive and slowest broadband of any industrialized nation, for example.) 

Financial laws and regulations instituted in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929 and the consequential Great Depression have been abandoned—restrictions on interstate banking, on the intermingling of investment and commercial banking, and on banks becoming publicly held corporations, for example—thereby allowing the largest Wall Street banks to acquire unprecedented influence over the economy. The growth of the financial sector, in turn, spawned junk-bond financing, unfriendly takeovers, private equity and “activist” investing, and the notion that corporations exist solely to maximize shareholder value.

Bankruptcy laws have been loosened for large corporations—notably airlines and automobile manufacturers—allowing them to abrogate labor contracts, threaten closures unless they receive wage concessions, and leave workers and communities stranded. Notably, bankruptcy has not been extended to homeowners who are burdened by mortgage debt and owe more on their homes than the homes are worth, or to graduates laden with student debt. Meanwhile, the largest banks and auto manufacturers were bailed out in the downturn of 2008–2009. The result has been to shift the risks of economic failure onto the backs of average working people and taxpayers.

Contract laws have been altered to require mandatory arbitration before private judges selected by big corporations. Securities laws have been relaxed to allow insider trading of confidential information. CEOs have used stock buybacks to boost share prices when they cash in their own stock options. Tax laws have created loopholes for the partners of hedge funds and private-equity funds, special favors for the oil and gas industry, lower marginal income-tax rates on the highest incomes, and reduced estate taxes on great wealth.

All these instances represent distributions upward—toward big corporations and financial firms, and their executives and shareholders—and away from average working people.

                                                          IV

Meanwhile, corporate executives and Wall Street managers and traders have done everything possible to prevent the wages of most workers from rising in tandem with productivity gains, in order that more of the gains go instead toward corporate profits. Higher corporate profits have meant higher returns for shareholders and, directly and indirectly, for the executives and bankers themselves.

Workers worried about keeping their jobs have been compelled to accept this transformation without fully understanding its political roots. For example, some of their economic insecurity has been the direct consequence of trade agreements that have encouraged American companies to outsource jobs abroad. Since all nations’ markets reflect political decisions about how they are organized, so-called “free trade” agreements entail complex negotiations about how different market systems are to be integrated. The most important aspects of such negotiations concern intellectual property, financial assets, and labor. The first two of these interests have gained stronger protection in such agreements, at the insistence of big U.S. corporations and Wall Street. The latter—the interests of average working Americans in protecting the value of their labor—have gained less protection, because the voices of working people have been muted. 

Rising job insecurity can also be traced to high levels of unemployment. Here, too, government policies have played a significant role. The Great Recession, whose proximate causes were the bursting of housing and debt bubbles brought on by the deregulation of Wall Street, hurled millions of Americans out of work. Then, starting in 2010, Congress opted for austerity because it was more interested in reducing budget deficits than in stimulating the economy and reducing unemployment. The resulting joblessness undermined the bargaining power of average workers and translated into stagnant or declining wages.

Some insecurity has been the result of shredded safety nets and disappearing labor protections. Public policies that emerged during the New Deal and World War II had placed most economic risks squarely on large corporations through strong employment contracts, along with Social Security, workers’ compensation, 40-hour workweeks with time-and-a-half for overtime, and employer-provided health benefits (wartime price controls encouraged such tax-free benefits as substitutes for wage increases). But in the wake of the junk-bond and takeover mania of the 1980s, economic risks were shifted to workers. Corporate executives did whatever they could to reduce payrolls—outsource abroad, install labor-replacing technologies, and utilize part-time and contract workers. A new set of laws and regulations facilitated this transformation.

As a result, economic insecurity became baked into employment. Full-time workers who had put in decades with a company often found themselves without a job overnight—with no severance pay, no help finding another job, and no health insurance. Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan found that over any given two-year stretch in the two preceding decades, about half of all families experienced some decline in income.

Today, nearly one out of every five working Americans is in a part-time job. Many are consultants, freelancers, and independent contractors. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck. And employment benefits have shriveled. The portion of workers with any pension connected to their job has fallen from just over half in 1979 to under 35 percent today. In MetLife’s 2014 survey of employees, 40 percent anticipated that their employers would reduce benefits even further.

The prevailing insecurity is also a consequence of the demise of labor unions. Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars. By 2014, America’s largest employer was Walmart, and the typical entry-level Walmart worker earned about $9 an hour. 

This does not mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was “worth” four times what the typical Walmart employee in 2014 was worth. The GM worker was not better educated or motivated than the Walmart worker. The real difference was that GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union behind them that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members. And because more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union, the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they would be unionized if they did not come close to matching the union contracts.

Today’s Walmart workers do not have a union to negotiate a better deal. They are on their own. And because less than 7 percent of today’s private-sector workers are unionized, most employers across America do not have to match union contracts. This puts unionized firms at a competitive disadvantage. Public policies have enabled and encouraged this fundamental change. More states have adopted so-called “right-to-work” laws. The National Labor Relations Board, understaffed and overburdened, has barely enforced collective bargaining. When workers have been harassed or fired for seeking to start a union, the board rewards them back pay—a mere slap on the wrist of corporations that have violated the law. The result has been a race to the bottom. 

Given these changes in the organization of the market, it is not surprising that corporate profits have increased as a portion of the total economy, while wages have declined. Those whose income derives directly or indirectly from profits—corporate executives, Wall Street traders, and shareholders—have done exceedingly well. Those dependent primarily on wages have not.

 

                                                         V

The underlying problem, then, is not that most Americans are “worth” less in the market than they had been, or that they have been living beyond their means. Nor is it that they lack enough education to be sufficiently productive. The more basic problem is that the market itself has become tilted ever more in the direction of moneyed interests that have exerted disproportionate influence over it, while average workers have steadily lost bargaining power—both economic and political—to receive as large a portion of the economy’s gains as they commanded in the first three decades after World War II. As a result, their means have not kept up with what the economy could otherwise provide them. 

To attribute this to the impersonal workings of the “free market” is to disregard the power of large corporations and the financial sector, which have received a steadily larger share of economic gains as a result of that power. As their gains have continued to accumulate, so has their power to accumulate even more.

 Under these circumstances, education is no panacea. Reversing the scourge of widening inequality requires reversing the upward distributions within the rules of the market, and giving workers the bargaining leverage they need to get a larger share of the gains from growth. Yet neither will be possible as long as large corporations and Wall Street have the power to prevent such a restructuring. And as they, and the executives and managers who run them, continue to collect the lion’s share of the income and wealth generated by the economy, their influence over the politicians, administrators, and judges who determine the rules of the game may be expected to grow.

The answer to this conundrum is not found in economics. It is found in politics. The changes in the organization of the economy have been reinforcing and cumulative: As more of the nation’s income flows to large corporations and Wall Street and to those whose earnings and wealth derive directly from them, the greater is their political influence over the rules of the market, which in turn enlarges their share of total income. 

The more dependent politicians become on their financial favors, the greater is the willingness of such politicians and their appointees to reorganize the market to the benefit of these moneyed interests. The weaker unions and other traditional sources of countervailing power become economically, the less able they are to exert political influence over the rules of the market, which causes the playing field to tilt even further against average workers and the poor.

Ultimately, the trend toward widening inequality in America, as elsewhere, can be reversed only if the vast majority, whose incomes have stagnated and whose wealth has failed to increase, join together to demand fundamental change. The most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left, or between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground, and economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to its growing distress.”

[This article is from the spring issue of “The American Prospect.”] (1)

Two important points emerge from any study of economics.  The first is that all wealth is socially produced.  One simply cannot create wealth in a vacuum.  As an example if Bill Gates’ “Microsoft” corporation consisted of one employee—namely Bill himself—working out of the back of his garage the chances are near certain that he would find his business as being a part-time affair.  Certainly its net value would be measured perhaps in the thousands rather than the billions of dollars.  For real wealth to accumulate requires an infrastructure from which one can draw a skilled labor force and through which one can deliver goods and services.  Foremost it requires a society to which one can deliver the goods.  Wealth, accordingly, is recognition by that society of the value of the goods produced or the services rendered and the entrepreneur is, accordingly, recognized and rewarded with a economic and social medium called money.  Money being nothing more than a medium of social exchange, value for value.  It can be measured in gold (worthless to beings other than humans), oil (likewise) or some other commodity as in a barter system or, in more advanced economies in currency.  The very term ‘currency’ implies a social medium by definition.  Economists ranging from Adam Smith to Karl Marx are in agreement on these points; wealth is created by labor and distributed via social means.

The second point is the one the professor is here addressing and that is that how this wealth gets distributed is determined by the rules of the ‘game’, which, in turn, is determined by who writes the rules.  As noted above for the last 40 years the rules have been and are now being rewritten to favor wealth over work and to reward the most well-to-do at the expense of the larger society.  This is not happenstance it is intentional and just as was done in the heyday of the ‘Gilded Age’ the laws are increasingly bent to favor corporations who manage the wealth and punish the workers who create the wealth.

It wasn’t always this way, as Professor Reich reminds us in several of his publications.  Previously, during era’s of reform the country achieved a much more ‘balanced’ distribution of wealth so that it was really true when John Kennedy reminded us that a “rising sea raises all boats”.  Today, paraphrasing Kennedy, one would amend his observation to read “a rising sea raises all yachts”, everything else is disappearing beneath the waves as the middle class goes under.  

It follows from this that the way we distribute wealth is a consequence of Political Will; and as the Professor has pointed out the current obscenity that confronts America today could not be possible without changing the rules of the game, so it is clear that in order to restore the middle class the people must rise, organize and through political action rewrite the laws under which our economy will operate.  Until we organize politically and change the laws to enable workers to unionize, tax wealth at a greater rate than work (since work produces wealth in the first place), establish a strict regimen of economic and environmental regulations we will continue the headlong process of hollowing out not only the national economy but our very republic in the bargain; for a republic that does not serve the greatest needs of the greatest number fails in one of its most cherished goals.  That is why in the preamble to the Constitution our founding fathers charged this government with the task of, among other things, to ‘promote the general welfare’.    No republic worth the name can survive unless it meets the needs of its people. 

____________

1.      http://robertreich.org/post/117835755110