To Get Rich is Glorious”?

PLUTOCRACY, ENDLESS WAR and A DESTROYED PLANET

The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing a Bigger Slice of the Income Pie - They're Taking All Of It

…the wealthy are capturing more and more of the overall income growth during each expansion period. Notice the sharp drop in the bottom 90 percent's share of growth starting with the 1982-1990 period — thanks, Reaganomics! Not only that, but the bottom 90 percent actually saw their real income drop between 2009 and 2012.  More

 

America’s Deranged Security Agenda

HOW OBAMA AND CONGRESS BLEW IT ON CLIMATE AND WAR

Using his executive authority Monday and Tuesday, President Obama took two steps to combat dangerous forces that threaten the country…  While Obama’s notice to Congress of the escalation cited two congressional Authorizations to Use Military Force — the 2001 Afghan AUMF and the 2002 Iraq AUMF, AUMFs so old that a majority in each house of Congress was not there to vote on them – most experts deem that justification, particularly to cover Syrian bombing, dubious. Ultimately, the president is waging war on his own executive authority… While Mother Nature may not be making YouTube videos showing vicious beheadings of people, climate change is causing death and misery and extensive damage already. Even in the U.S… And yet, Obama has not used his executive authority to protect this country against the ongoing impact of climate change with nearly the scope or audacity he has used to fight terrorists who threaten our access to more fossil fuel resources.  More

 

Climate Crisis? That's Not News

If over 300,000 people march in New York City to demand action on climate change, does it make a sound? Not if you're watching the Sunday morning network chat shows.  The September 21 People's Climate March lived up to its billing as the largest climate change march ever, drawing a massive crowd to focus world attention to the climate emergency. Similar events happened in other major cities around the world. But the highest-profile discussion shows in the corporate media--ABC's This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday and Face the Nation on CBS--either did not know it was happening or didn't think it was important.   More

 

AMERICA OUT OF WHACK

Instead of promoting equality, public policy has left millions locked into lives of restricted opportunity while bestowing the benefits of growth on the very few. We know this and yet we let it continue. On Sept. 18, the Federal Reserve announced what sounded like good news: in the United States, “the net worth of households and nonprofits rose by $1.4 trillion to $81.5 trillion during the second quarter of 2014. The value of directly and indirectly held corporate equities increased $1.0 trillion and the value of real estate expanded $230 billion.”  Taking a somewhat longer view, the Fed reported that since 2000, household wealth in the United States has grown by $37 trillion — from $44.45 trillion to $81.49 trillion at the end of the second quarter of this year, but these spectacular gains in wealth are mostly benefiting upper-income Americans. Not only has the wealth of the very rich doubled since 2000, but corporate revenues are at record levels. From 2000 to the present, quarterly corporate after-tax profits have risen from $529 billion to $1.5 trillion. On an annual basis, growth was from $2.1 trillion to $6 trillion in annual after-tax profits. In 2013, according to Goldman Sachs, corporate profits rose five times faster than wages…  In 2001, what had been a slow decline in the share of total national income going to labor took a sharp downward turn that became a precipitous fall.    More

PAUL KRUGMAN: The Show-Off Society

…why had the elite moved away from the ostentation of the past? Because it could no longer afford to live that way. The large yacht, Fortune tells us, “has foundered in the sea of progressive taxation.” But that sea has since receded. Giant yachts and enormous houses have made a comeback. In fact, in places like Greenwich, Conn., some of the “outsize mansions” Fortune described as relics of the past have been replaced with even bigger mansions.  And there’s no mystery about what happened to the good-old days of elite restraint. Just follow the money. Extreme income inequality and low taxes at the top are back. For example, in 1955 the 400 highest-earning Americans paid more than half their incomes in federal taxes, but these days that figure is less than a fifth. And the return of lightly taxed great wealth has, inevitably, brought a return to Gilded Age ostentation… Human nature being what it is, it’s silly to expect humility from a highly privileged elite. So if you think our society needs more humility, you should support policies that would reduce the elite’s privileges.   More

 

WHY WE MARCH: Stepping Forth for a Planet in Peril

We don’t march because there’s any guarantee it will work. If you were a betting person, perhaps you’d say we have only modest hope of beating the financial might of the oil and gas barons and the governments in their thrall. It’s obviously too late to stop global warming entirely, but not too late to slow it down -- and it’s not too late, either, to simply pay witness to what we’re losing, a world of great beauty and complexity and stability that has nurtured humanity for thousands of years.  There’s a world to march for -- and a future, too. The only real question is why anyone wouldn’t march.  More

 

CHRIS HEDGES: The Coming Climate Revolt

We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible… The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton administration… If we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no capacity or desire to carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy into a black hole… If the response of the corporate state is repression rather than reform then our strategy and our tactics must be different. We will have to cease our appealing to the system. We will have to view the state, including the Democratic Party, as antagonistic to genuine reform. We will have to speak in the language of ... revolution.   More

 

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – Are You Feeling Safer Now?

 

Syria Becomes the 7th Predominantly Muslim Country Bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate

Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama—after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq.  The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: Empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason (indeed, recall that Obama bombed Libya even after Congress explicitly voted against authorization to use force, and very few people seemed to mind that abject act of lawlessness; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors).

It was just over a year ago that Obama officials were insisting that bombing and attacking Assad was a moral and strategic imperative. Instead, Obama is now bombing Assad’s enemies while politely informing his regime of its targets in advance. It seems irrelevant on whom the U.S. wages war; what matters is that it be at war, always and forever.  More

 

I despised Saddam’s police state, but U.S. wars set the stage for the Islamic State.

I’m mourning not just those who have died over the past decade, but for a country that I haven’t been able to recognize for a very long time… Until 1990, I never heard a mosque call for prayer. I almost never saw a woman covering her hair with a hijab. My mom wore make-up, skirts, blouses with shoulder pads and Bermuda shorts. She never covered her hair… I despised Saddam, but I don’t think an extremist group like the Islamic State would exist under his rule. Even if Saddam had gone crazy and killed a bunch of people, it wouldn’t be anywhere near the number who have died since he was overthrown. I see a civil war coming, and an Iraq divided into states… Sometimes, I watch old YouTube videos that show the way Iraq used to be. But the Iraq I loved and was proud of — the country I lived in before 1990 — doesn’t exist anymore. And I don’t see that changing in my lifetime.  More

How Many Wars is the US Fighting?

The White House spent much of last week trying to figure out if the word "war" was the right one to describe its military actions against the Islamic State… The problem is that our traditional definition of "war" is outdated, and so is our imagination of what war means.  World War II was the last time Congress officially declared war. Since then, the conflicts we've called "wars" — from Vietnam through to the second Iraq War — have actually been congressional "authorizations of military force." And more recently, beginning with the War Powers Act of 1973, presidential war powers have expanded so much that, according to the Congressional Research Service, it's no longer clear whether a president requires congressional authorization at all… So how many wars is the US fighting right now? Somewhere between zero and 134.   More