Occupy Oakland protesters at the Port of Oakland CC/Steve Rhodes

Tax policy may seem far from the passion of Occupy, but it is essential to this moral movement. We need to leverage this energy and engagement to start a national dialogue about the kind of society we want to live in, and how to get there. By reforming the capital gains tax, we will call upon the wealthiest Americans to pay more for essential economic stimulus and social programs.

At the same time that income equality is growing, states are slashing education and safety nets at unprecedented rates. This leaves the most vulnerable Americans without basic opportunities and protections. We need to channel more money to states to protect social services and reverse layoffs of public employees. We must invest in job training programs, particularly for high-growth sectors like health care workers and home weatherizers.

All of this requires money, and we need to ask the wealthiest Americans – who have benefited the most from the jobless recovery – to contribute more. Reforming taxes on capital gains, the profits from sales of stocks and other financial assets, will target the wealthiest without hurting the economy.

by Richard Wolf

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference 2011 in Washington, DC. Ryan, among other Republicans, has described Obama's deficit reduction plan as "class warfare." (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

Republicans and conservatives have done us a service by describing federal policies in terms of “class war.” But by applying the term only to Obama’s latest proposals to raise taxes on the rich, they have it all backward and upside down. The last 50 years have indeed seen continuous class warfare in and over federal economic policies.

But it was a war waged chiefly by business and conservatives. They won, as we show below, and the mass of middle-income and poor Americans lost. Obama’s modest proposal for tax increases on the rich does not begin a class war. On the contrary, it is a small, modest effort to reduce the other side’s class war victories.

Big business and conservatives have worked to undo the regulations and taxes imposed on them in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, an upsurge in labor union organization (the Congress of Industrial Organizations sweep across basic US industries) and in membership in both the socialist and communist parties gave Franklin Delano Roosevelt the support and the pressure to tax business and the rich. He took their money to pay for the massive federal hiring program (11 million federal jobs filled between 1934 and 1941) and to start the Social Security Administration etc. He regulated their business activities to try to prevent devastating capitalist depressions from recurring in the nation’s future.

Since the end of the Great Depression – and especially since the 1970s – the class warfare waged by business and its allies (most conservatives in both parties) was successful. For example, at the end of World War II, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. In contrast, today, for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it gets 25 cents in taxes on business. Business and its allies successfully shifted most of its federal tax burden onto individuals.

Carwill/Flickr

Now in its eleventh day, there has only just begun to be reports and discussion about the occupation of Wall Street in mainstream media. The reasons are related not to the organizational efforts of the occupiers or their lack of conviction or numbers, but to the relationship between our channels of information, our business and corporate sector and our politically empowered. This begs the question of if instead of Wall Street, the occupiers were gathered in Tehran or Sana, would the news of their demands and challenge of the status quo be included in our mainstream news headlines? The answer is yes. Although the American media did not create the protests or uprisings that comprised The Arab Spring, their attention to the social unrest in the Middle East undoubtedly stoked the determination and numbers of those participating in the protests that irrevocably changed the social and political landscape of the region. It is therefore the responsibility of critical and compassionate thinkers to spread the words and actions of the occupiers – most of whom are college age or in their early twenties and thus the future of the American economy and social fabric.

A protest of foreclosures in San Francisco. Credit: Creative Commons/Steve Rhodes.

I recently sold my home. It was the first home to sell in my neighborhood in 6 months. Now my realtor tells me there are amazing deals on the market, homes that are selling for 200,000 or 300,000 less than they were a couple of years ago. She tells me that virtually all the houses on the market are foreclosures and that great deals are available.

It’s not quite as bad as she describes but the housing report for July shows that just over 26% of homes sold in the Bay Area were foreclosures and that nearly 20% of all the homes sold were underwater. It’s like a fire sale or a “going out of business” sale. And that’s the problem, each of these homes represents a family that has lost its home, the biggest investment they would likely make for their entire lives. Now it’s gone, poof. We could explore the “whodunit” and why but many others are already following that trail. I’m interested in the emotional and spiritual impact that this dislocation inflicts on our lives and families.

This is the second half of a two-part series. Read the first part here.

Brian McLaren’s description of the problems humanity now faces is more accurate than we usually get from preachers, politicians and the mass media. But has he adequately clarified the institutional resistance that must be overcome to alter or abolish the Societal Machine that he says has become a Suicidal Machine. His largely realistic description of this Machine has a curious blind spot, which needs correction if we are to develop an effective counter-approach. His Christianity is a source of strength but also of limitation: Jesus lived in a social order radically different from ours, one that prevented him from seeing the problems we face today and developing solutions now open to us, if we can act collectively.

The Core of Jesus’ Vision

Ultimately, Jesus’ vision (and McLaren’s) is based on and limited by the idea of radical generosity. Generosity, like its opposite stinginess, is a question of distribution. It is closely related to (though somewhat different from) distributive justice, which is concerned with fairness in distribution. McLaren hardly mentions production except as the source of the goods we consume. Yet even the first “law” of Theocapitalism, Progress through Rapid Growth, is usually understood in terms of growth of production.

The modern system of production, the capital system, did not exist in premodern society; it did not exist in ancient Palestine, in the Roman Empire, or anywhere else for that matter before 1500.

by Richard Wolff

(Originally published on Truthout)

www.postonpolitics.com

The political posturing around the debt ceiling “crisis” was mostly a distraction from the hard issues. The hardest of those – underlying US economic decline – keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains and injustices that threaten to dissolve society. Its causes – two long-term trends over the last 30 years – help also to explain the political failures that now compound the social costs of economic decline.

The first trend is the attack on jobs, wages and benefits, and the second is the attack on the federal government’s budget. The first trend enables the second. A capitalist economy suffering high unemployment with all its costly consequences shapes a bizarre, disconnected politics. The two major parties ignore unemployment and the system that keeps reproducing it. They argue instead over how much to cut social programs for the people while they agree that such cutting is the major way to fix the government’s broken budget.

The first trend amounts to looting the US working class (the media softens that to “disappearing middle class”). Since the 1970s, real wages have been flat to declining, while productivity per worker has risen steadily. What employers give workers (wages) has remained the same while what workers produce for their employers (profits) rose. Workers and their families responded by working ever more hours and borrowing ever more money to get or keep the “American dream.” By 2007, they were physically exhausted, families emotionally stressed and deeply anxious about the debts that their flat real wages could no longer sustain. When the system crashed, zooming unemployment, further wage and benefit reductions and home foreclosures made everything still worse for most Americans.

by Richard D. Wolff

The national debt theatrics in Washington — posturing by both parties for the 2012 presidential election — do show the world how badly U.S. politics have become disconnected from economic realities. If indeed, the two parties play out this drama to the point of actually preventing the debt ceiling from being raised, it will block all sorts of government expenditures causing all sorts of damage to recipients of U.S. spending and to the reputation the U.S. has enjoyed as the safest, securest economy in the world. Let’s remember that the U.S. government — scheduled to spend $3.5 trillion this year, of which 43 per cent has to be borrowed — is the largest single buyer of commodities in the world (largest buyer of oil, military equipment, computers, etc.). Cutting back on U.S. government expenditures is just exactly what a crisis-ridden world economy does not need.

House Speaker John Boehner urges President Obama to cut spending during debt negotiations in Washington, July 2011. Credit: Creative Commons/SpeakerBoehner.

Nor does the U.S. need what apparently Obama and the Republicans have agreed to, namely significant cuts to spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those too will add to the downward economic pressures. Republicans are counting on the pain and suffering this crisis has wrought to provoke their supporters to vent their rage by denouncing government in general and Obama and the Democrats in particular. The Republicans try to position themselves as the anti-government champions who will at least make sure the government does not add extra taxes to everyone’s economic burdens. The Democrats attack the Republicans for protecting rich folks from higher taxes and promise that the cuts they would make to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be less than what the Republicans would do. Neither side explains why the national debt is high now, what the real options are to bring it down, and what the costs and benefits of those options would likely be. Doing that honestly risks offending corporate and rich donors who do not want all their benefits from the government tampered with. Neither party admits or deals with how the economic crisis since 2007 and the government bailouts of business that followed — and that both parties fully endorsed – produced the bulge in national debts everywhere. Instead, we get ideological slogans and endless posturing despite the real economic risks attached. Worse still, we get a consensus shared by Republicans and Democrats to respond to years of (1) tax reductions for corporations and the rich, (2) proliferating wars costing trillions, and (3) expensive corporate bailouts by refusing to deal with those issues and instead debating how much to cut benefits for retired workers and fellow citizens needing health insurance.

In the interests of a reality check, let’s take a step back and look at deficits and debt with some perspective.

by Jim Knapton

Fourteen trillion dollars is a lot of money. That is the size of our national debt. Someone said recently that if it were in five-dollar bills placed end to end, they would almost reach the moon. That’s what the USA owes the world, from the newest born to the oldest still with us: $40,000 each! Yet we’re at war in Afghanistan wasting billions on what? Fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda apparently. If we are the greatest military machine the world has ever known and they are a bunch of “desert derelicts” (quoting Mark Steyn’s delicate words in America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It), after a hundred months of conflict, why is President Obama “winding it down”? Isn’t it because we can’t afford it? In other words, thirty-six years since the end of the Vietnam War, haven’t we lost again?

I am sure President Obama doesn’t wish to see it that way. Motivated by pressure from the military-industrial complex, whose only interest is its own profit and expansion, “benign imperialism” – or what George W. Bush proclaimed as “ensuring democracy” – is the fool’s gold of our foreign policy. Worse still, it is the cornerstone of our self-made slide into an unimaginable economic black hole, brought on by our shameless waste of resources and feigned ignorance of our own internal corruption. Come to think of it, hasn’t weaponry become the only substantial export we have left?

At a time when people are suffering from the economic downturn, political battles are still raging over how to cut the budget and the nation is still involved in several wars, we believe our nation’s priorities need to change. FY 2011′s military budget is the largest since the end of World War II, even though the Cold War is over and there is no longer the threat of aggression from a major power. The purpose of the “Move the Money” conference is to help change our nation’s priorities by promoting the reduction of military spending by at least 25% and “Moving the Money” from nuclear weapons, their support systems and unnecessary defense items to humanitarian, social and environmental needs. Ultimately all nations will need to greatly reduce their military spending and eliminate nuclear weapons in order to address human needs and make the world safe for our children. Here’s the info:

When I first picked up Floodlines on assignment to write a review for Bitch magazine, I thought I knew something about what went down in New Orleans after Katrina, but after reading this firsthand account of surviving the storm, I realized I didn’t know much at all. It reminded me of the first time I read a leftist account of the history of Zionism. Only then did I realize how much the US mainstream media had framed my perception of Palestine by focusing on individual acts of violence by Palestinians taken out of context from the larger frame of Israeli state violence.

Similarly, while reading Floodlines, I was forced to confront how my understanding of New Orleans has been shaped by mainstream media reports that focused obsessively on individual acts of violence while ignoring the large-scale state violence imposed on mostly poor communities of color. I was moved by how Flaherty, a white journalist and organizer based in New Orleans, manages to tell a story that encompasses both the staggering injustice of structural racism and the inspiring grassroots activism of New Orleanians.

He juxtaposes first-hand stories of communities helping each other survive the storm with the mainstream media’s racist depictions of their struggles. For instance, while the media portrayed African American men in New Orleans mainly as criminals, Flaherty describes how, in the wake of abandonment by official rescuers, groups of working class African American men travelled through neighborhoods, rescuing people and delivering supplies in the first days after the storm. Meanwhile, African Americans who needed help were treated like criminals: the National Guard placed many of them in militarized evacuee camps and eventually forced them to leave the state.

Flaherty explains how such inequity continued throughout the so-called recovery efforts. Money did not go to the people and local community organizations who needed it. Instead, it flowed to corporations who profited from rebuilding contracts, security firms who made money from criminalizing the victims of the storm, and large-scale corporate charities with high overhead costs. As Flaherty describes, “living in New Orleans in the first years after Katrina, it was as if the sky were filled with money. I imagined it thirty feet up in the air, clearly visible, but out of reach” (121).

It’s a sad day in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon in less than two hours, our Republican Senators — after insisting for a month that their union-busting law was needed because the state was broke — separated the collective bargaining sections of the bill from the financial parts and then passed it. They no longer needed a Democratic Senator for a quorum, since the bill was no longer ostensibly about finances! They unmasked themselves with this political maneuver. Now everyone can see that it never was about the money. It was an attack on workers’ rights all along. And despite massive protests last night and today, the Republican Assembly passed the bill as well.

Many of us thought Republican legislators were shoving an undemocratic bill down our throats three weeks ago. But at least they gave us six days (a ridiculously short amount of time) to think and talk about it then. Yesterday’s two hours of discussion breaks that record by a yard. The upshot of all this is that 60 years of workers’ rights have been swept away using undemocratic methods for an undemocratic outcome (there will probably be a lawsuit about the tactics). This is especially hard to take, since polls show that anywhere from 65% – 74% of Wisconsinites believe that public workers should have the right to organize.

The Washington Post reports that according to a recent survey, “fully half of all whites without college degrees identify as Republicans or are GOP-leaning independents, and 42 percent call themselves conservatives, more than other groups.” How can this be? Why would presumably working class whites support the party of Big Business that favors outsourcing, benefit-cutting, and other policies that immiserate working people? Indeed, it was Republican policies that got us into this economic mess, and the GOP is currently trying to make things worse with their job-killing budget cuts and cold-hearted attempts to shred what little remains of the safety net. Is it time to revive the term “false consciousness”?

According to the article in the Post, “whites without college degrees also are the most apt to blame Washington for the problems, and are exceedingly harsh in their judgment of the Obama administration and its economic policies.” More specifically, the data reveal that 64% of whites without college degrees blame “the government in Washington” for the current economic situation, as compared to 52% of college-educated whites. Among non-college-educated whites, 37% think Obama’s economic program is making the economy worse (compared to 34% of college-educated whites) and 42% think it is having no effect (again compared to 34% of college-educated whites).

While on its face, this seems to bode ill for the possibility of creating a progressive movement, a closer look at the survey data reveals a less demoralizing picture of public opinion. While it’s true that 89% of whites blame “the government in Washington” for “the economic challenges facing this country today” either a lot (60%) or some (29%), 78% blame Wall Street institutions either a lot (48%) or some (30%). So while whites are more negative towards the federal government (89%) than blacks (73%) and Hispanics (71%), whites are also more negative towards Wall Street (78%) than blacks (68%) and Hispanics (64%). This is somewhat heartening for those of us who favor populism.

For most of the last decade, I lived in the crazy, cold, contradictory state that is Wisconsin. I wrote research papers in Madison, performed poems in Milwaukee, walked picket lines in Jefferson, organized student conferences in Eau Claire, led artistic workshops in Green Bay, spoke at my roommate’s wedding in Merrill, and went camping with my future wife at Black River Falls.

A big-city kid from the East Coast, I never fully got used to the overwhelming whiteness of Wisconsin – the winter, and yes, the people. But I eventually learned how to wear five layers in February, and that amidst the farms and abandoned factories, there was a working-class people with a strong populist ethic. As my freshman roommate from Wausau once told me, “Josh, I don’t follow politics. I just hate corporations.”

Fast-forward to 2011: the new Republican Governor, Scott Walker, has declared war on my old roommate and all Wisconsin workers. Under the guise of a budget deficit, Walker just put forth a bill that would destroy the unions that represent teachers, social workers, and over 100,000 public employees. He’s also making huge cuts to schools, health care, public transportation, and anything that actually helps people live.

Want more crazy? Walker ordered the National Guard to get ready to respond to a strike or any resistance to his plan. The last time Wisconsin called in the National Guard was way back in 1886, when they shot on a rally of Milwaukee workers advocating an 8-hour work day. Five unarmed workers were killed in the massacre.

We got word today that Borders was declaring bankruptcy. I’m the co-owner of a small business and a partner in a small publishing cooperative and I was wondering what would happen to all the books, DVDs, CDs, and other products Borders had “purchased” from publishers but hadn’t yet paid for. Would Borders return those products to us? Would they pay us if they wanted to keep the products? Or, would they hold onto them and sell them and get whatever money they could for them without ever having to pay us?

I’m betting you can guess the answer.

Although there are many great signs from John Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” one of my favorite ones has the following text:

Image from Rrenner

I HATE TAXES
But I like:  Roads,
Firemen, some cops,
traffic lights,
National Parks,
the Coast Guard,
various TLA’s, etc.
So I pay them anyway.

(In this context I’m guessing that TLA’s refers to “Three-Letter Acronyms”)

During this Thanksgiving season, that sign caused me to reflect on the old complaint – “I wouldn’t mind paying taxes if we actually got our money’s worth from them.”    Are the benefits we get from our taxes really worth what we pay?

Time for a little reflection on my life.  I wake up each weekday morning and drive to work on well maintained roads, to a nice job that is only possible because we have a suitably regulated economy that is comparatively free of corruption.    I received a great education thanks in large part to subsidies from various state and local governments.  My family and I have access to great medical care should we need it, and we have a virtually unlimited bounty of food available at incredibly cheap prices.  Most importantly and too often overlooked, we live with a sense of physical security and safety that must be incomprehensible to large segments of the world’s population. 

Much of this wonderful life style is the result of the hard work of many private individuals, but it would not be possible at all if it wasn’t for the collective government work and services enabled by the taxes we pay.  Is the life style I enjoy worth the taxes I pay?  I’m not advocating for a large tax increase here, but when I compare my situation to what it could be in other circumstances, I can’t help but conclude that my life style and my family’s safety would be a bargain at three times the cost.   For that I am grateful.

The New York Times has an interactive feature where you can go through and make the tough decisions on ways to eliminate the United States budget deficit. I just solved the problem. You can see the choices I made by clicking here.

Beyond armchair budgeting from folks like us, the Times also provides 16 experts with their opinions on ways to eliminate the deficit. Click here to read that article.

When you’re done, how about coming back here and sharing your thoughts about ways to eliminate the deficit (or if you’re someone who doesn’t think it needs to be eliminated, educate the rest of us on why you feel that way).

We had much to celebrate at “Earth Day at 40.” But, of course, we had much to concern us as well. The good news is that whenever we touched on “global weirding,” water rights, or any number of other environmental issues, someone at the conference offered ideas or solutions. These ranged from the most massive — a new electric grid across the United States — to the smallest and most local — digging up your lawn and planting raised beds with vegetables.

And there was even better news — we all left the conference fired up to make a difference! I’m just sorry we didn’t use that new-found energy to walk the few blocks to the capitol and demonstrate for the “Clean Energy Jobs” bill, which the Wiscsonsin legislature didn’t pass the next day!!!!

Author Margaret Atwood, Activist Robert Kennedy, Jr., Wilderness Society President William Meadows, UW-Madison History Professor William Cronon, and Gaylord Nelson’s daughter Tia Nelson, who is the executive secretary of the Wisconsin Board of Commisioners of Public Lands, all spoke, giving rousing speeches and words of warning (or were those words of “warming,” as I originally typed?). Almost all of these talks will be online at the Nelson Institute website in the next few weeks. I’ll let you know when. But until then, here are some highlights.

Gaylord Nelson, father of "Earth Day"

Spending the last two days at the “Earth Day at 40″ conference has made me proud to be a Wisconsinite. There are many reasons why Wisconsin gave birth to Earth Day forty years ago. But the most important can be summed up in four names: John Muir, Frederick Jackson Turner, Aldo Leopold, and Gaylord Nelson.

What an earth-loving tradition these four men created! John Muir — who grew up in Portage, Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin — went on to found the Sierra Club, help protect Yosemite Valley, and urge us all to passionately engage with wilderness. As opposed to Muir — who immigrated from Scotland — Frederick Jackson Turner was born in Portage, Wisconsin. Like Muir, he studied at the University of Wisconsin, to which he returned as a professor. He’s best known for his “frontier thesis,” which suggested that Americans were formed by their experiences on the frontiers of our continent. His insight that a people and their culture could only be understood in connection with the land they inhabit has proven pivotal to what became the environmental movement years later.

Permaculture for Starhawk is a practical application of Paganism. This is the link that connects the Goddess(es) and our vegetable gardens. The Goddess, as we know her within Wicca and other forms of Paganism, represents the cycles of birth – growth – death – decay – and regeneration, exactly the cycles that permaculture deals with in a more pragmatic way.

To say that the Goddess is sacred doesn’t mean you have to believe in something outside of yourself, according to Starhawk. It simply means that you need to shift your attitude towards viewing these natural cycles as amazing, even miraculous. Spiritually, we need to pay attention to how they’re happening around us all the time. They are the ways we connect with each other most deeply and with all other life forms on the planet. If we approach them with awe, reverence, and respect, these natural processes will lead us into ways of living and working that will create more health, abundance, beauty, and biodiversity as well as more joy and freedom on the planet. And if we don’t, Starhawk admonishes, we’ll get the mess we’re in today.