Progressive Opinion

The Obama Administration was correct to impose safeguards on tire imports

Steven Capozzola — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:31:12 -0700

AAM Director praises Obama Administration's decision to take safeguard action on surging tire imports from China.

Climate, Trade, Obama

Steven Capozzola — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:30:10 -0700

The House passed climate legislation last week, including a "border adjustment" provision to address China's unrestrained carbon emissions. President Obama criticized such a measure as "protectionist"-- but he's missing the point. If U.S. producers have to curb emissions, China must as well.

"Our Jobless Recovery"

Steven Capozzola — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:08:43 -0700

USW President Leo Gerard and New America Foundation's Leo Hindery have penned a strongly worded op-ed in The Nation that argues for a rebuilding of U.S. manufacturing.

In their conclusion, Gerard and Hindery offer a number of constructive proposals, including significant revisions to U.S. trade policy and ongoing support for Buy America policy.

In the Obama Era: Can We Think Big and Make the Changes We Really Need?

OurFuture.org Staff — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:30:48 -0700

Rush and Newt Are Winning

OurFuture.org Staff — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:15:03 -0700

Where Is The Outrage, Where Is The Debate?

OurFuture.org Staff — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:48:52 -0700

Politics tends to be reactive. Issues often aren’t issues until they make news. Media outlets and political candidates tend to speak out after disasters occur not before, even when that old handwriting is on the wall.

So it is with the financial crisis that seems to be toppling bank after bank, affecting company after company and threatening the global economy.

Many of us have been in denial about it perhaps because until now we were not directly affected or it seemed abstract. It has also been a slow-motion crisis building steam since the markets first melted down in August 2007.

What’s happened since has been unprecedented: a freeze-up of all credit, massive multibillion-dollar write-downs by brand name banks. Three-and-a-half million families faced foreclosure, and then one after another major financial dominos started toppling, triggering seven interest rate cuts and requiring infusions of capital in the hundreds of billions. Then Bear Stearns fell, followed now by the troubles at Lehman, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, etc.…

It doesn’t seem to be stopping, as a thousand banks are expected to fall. Words like “bailout” and “plunge protection” are becoming more common.

Oddly, all the economic pain and uncertainty leading up to what may still become a catastrophe had mostly been buried in the business section. They had been overlooked by both parties in their platforms and by both leading presidential candidates on the campaign trail.

Events are now forcing them to respond to the disaster, but the issues and choices we face are still not being discussed clearly.

Bloomberg News reported during the conventions that even as we confront the most serious economic crisis since the depression the reasons our economy is not working are not discussed.

Part of the problem is that media itself is not putting the issue on the agenda, asking candidates about it only in a breaking-news context. Rather than expose predatory subprime loans when Wall Street was riding high, many media outlets were carrying deceptive ads for lenders and credit card companies.

And even now as disaster threatens, the coverage is tepid, superficial and misleading, as the Marketwatch website argued:

“There was an absence of tough, in-your-face questions… But where was the skepticism or the sense of outrage by the media? We’re supposed to be the proxies for the public. When I saw television networks interview the (wo)man on the street during the crisis, I saw more emotion in the faces of ordinary citizens than in those of the journalists.”

The same thing must be said about presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. It won’t do for McCain to rail against fraud and corruption on Wall Street without someone pointing out that the Republicans have been in charge while all this is going on. It won’t do for Obama to mouth platitudes and make this into a partisan issue when many top Democrats, including his running mate, were on the wrong side during the debate on the 2005 bankruptcy bill.

I have been trying to rouse concern about this with a film “In Debt We Trust” exposing subprime loans and the role of Wall Street firms that profited on them, the regulators who turned the other way and the press that missed the story .

I have just followed up with a timely book, “PLUNDER: Investigating our Economic Calamity” (Cosimo) detailing the existence of a white-collar crime wave and a mass of victims who are losing their homes and their hope. Thirty-two publishers passed on it, many saying that I was exaggerating the depth of the problem. I wasn’t.

Even I have been shocked with the trillions of dollars that seem to being flushed down the drain, and the fact that some of the companies once considered the smartest of the smart managed to destroy themselves in the grip of greed.

So what do we do now?

l. Educate ourselves about how this system collapsed and about the need for both financial regulation and personal financial responsibility. We need to spark a national conversation about these issues.

2. Encourage the politicians we support to get away from symbolic stances and trivia and focus on our economic well being.

3. Insist that our media explains these structural problem and offers diverse perspectives on how to solve them—not just the same old pundits.

4. Demand a bill of economic bill of rights for all Americans that promotes fairness and equality. We must begin thinking about how to promote debt relief in America in the same way that Third World peoples have fought for it for years.

5. Back the campaign of the Institute for American Future to get these issues into our media and on to the agenda.

We have to stand up and be heard before—sounds stilly doesn’t it—it’s all gone!

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and is the author of PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo) now in online book stores.

Tackle Wealth Concentration

Sarah Anderson — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:37:32 -0700

Other contributors to this debate will no doubt highlight policy changes that would directly benefit working people, such as stronger labor laws, fair trade agreements, living wage laws, and increased investment in training and infrastructure. All of these are essential to make the economy work for working people. However, we also need to recognize that we are unlikely to achieve these goals as long as our country tolerates extreme levels of wealth concentration.

Not since the era of the robber barons have so few held such a large piece of our economic pie. America's top 0.01 percent of taxpayers have seen their collective income quadruple, after inflation, over the past two decades. Together, this ultra-rich class has 976 times as much income as the bottom 90 percent of U.S. society.During the late 1940s thru the 1970s, that ratio was around 200 to 1.

For working people, this is not merely symbolic. As long as so much economic power is concentrated in the hands of so few, the wealthiest will continue to have excessive influence over our nation’s political priorities. And until we seriously tax the holders of concentrated wealth, our government will lack the funding resources to meet social needs and build adequate infrastructure for the future. In short, we will never achieve economic justice for those in the middle to the bottom of our economic pyramid until we tackle wealth concentration at the top.

How can we do this? Previous generations pushed back against the robber barons of their day was by demanding tax fairness. And indeed, the acceleration of wealth concentration since the 1980s has tracked closely with an erosion of taxes on the ultra-rich. Throughout most of the mid-20th century, the top tax rate was just over 90 percent. The current top rate is 35 percent.

John McCain thinks the current tax system is just dandy. Barack Obama has proposed some changes in the right direction, but a bolder agenda is needed to reverse our second Gilded Age. A few recommendations:

Tax wealth the same as work: Why should someone pay a higher tax rate on income from actual labor than they do from investments (i.e., sitting back and letting money do all the heavy lifting)? America’s rich regularly realize vast amounts of this unearned income, through dividends, interest, and capital gains from trading stocks, bonds, and other forms of property. On these unearned dollars, they pay taxes at 15 percent, less than half the top rate on ordinary “earned” income. Obama has promised to increase the “capital gains” tax rate, but only to 20 percent.

Plug the loopholes for executives: The U.S. tax code is riddled with loopholes that allow top corporate and financial leaders to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. A recent study by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy found that five of these loopholes, all of which are the targets of Congressional reforms, cost taxpayers more than $20 billion per year. Obama has not yet endorsed all of these fixes.

A more progressive estate tax: Foes of the estate tax, our nation’s only levy on inherited wealth, are pushing to slash rates down to mere nuisance status. If they succeed, the last three decades of excess in Corporate America will turn into a skyscraper-high foundation for a new aristocracy that would have the wealth — and power — to frustrate progressive social change for generations to come. One Congressional proposal would preserve the estate tax and make it more progressive, by applying a 55 percent tax on fortunes greater than $10 million. Candidate Obama’s estate tax reform proposal would lose over $100 billion in revenue over the next decade by unnecessarily lowering rates and raising the amount of wealth exempted by the tax to $3.5 million.

Use the power of the public purse: By law, the U.S. government denies contracts to companies that practice race or gender discrimination in their employment practices. So why should we let our tax dollars go to companies that increase economic inequality? Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars flow annually to companies that pay their CEOs more for a day’s work than their workers make in a year. Even the rescue package for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac contains only loose controls over executive pay, stating that it must be “reasonable,” without defining the term. One bill pending in Congress, the Patriot Corporation of America Act, would be a step in the right direction. The bill would extend tax breaks and federal contracting preferences to companies that meet benchmarks for good corporate behavior. Among the benchmarks: not compensating any executive at over 100 times the pay of a company’s lowest-paid full-timer.

Raise the top income tax rate: In 2004, after exploiting loopholes, taxpayers who took home over $5 million paid an average of 21.9 percent of their incomes in federal tax. Back in 1954, the federal tax bite on taxpayers with comparable incomes averaged 54.5 percent. How much revenue could be raised by a significant tax hike on America’s highest incomes? If the top rate were raised to 50 percent on all income between $5 million and $10 million and 70 percent on income above $10 million, federal revenues in 2008 would jump $105 billion — and the nation’s richest 0.1 percent would still be paying less in taxes than they did under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Obama proposes raising the rates on the top two tax brackets, but only to the 1990s levels of 36 percent and 39.6 percent. The inequality of wealth is a political barrier to creating an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy. A bolder program to broaden prosperity will tax the top and make investments in education, infrastructure and economic opportunity.

Who Will Be In Obama's Cabinet?

OurFuture.org Staff — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:23:12 -0700

What Really Scares Us About Barack Obama

OurFuture.org Staff — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:59:43 -0700

Moving Obama Left

OurFuture.org Staff — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:32:20 -0700