middle class

Romney, Ryan Don’t Get the Average Joe

Leo Gerard — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:39:18 -0400

GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney foolishly revived the dust up about his income tax secrecy last week. He claimed he paid at least 13 percent, an assertion easy enough for him to prove by releasing his tax documents.

But he’s refusing to do that. He called the concern about his tax rate “small minded.” Much more important issues overshadow it, he contended.

Maybe so. But the American people, the Average Jane and Joe, do care whether Romney used tricks and loopholes and offshore accounts to manipulate the tax system and pay nothing. And they’re not “small minded,” as Romney accused them of being, for wanting to know.

For them, a quarter billionaire who paid nothing or paid a rate lower than the middle class lacks the principles they like in a president. The vast majority of voters aren’t going to dissect the budget proposed by Romney’s running mate Rep. Paul Ryan, but they will vote based on the values it reveals. Romney’s ability to rattle off technical details won’t decide the election. Morality, or Jane and Joe’s perception that Ryan and Romney’s policies lack it, will.

Other millionaires have led the nation. In fact, the majority of those in the past presidents club were millionaires. But some of the nation’s wealthy presidents had spent time with America’s Average Janes and Joes and understood their dreams and struggles and were sympathetic to them.

Though raised on an estate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew suffering firsthand after being cut down by polio as a young man. He spent long periods with working men and women in Southern recuperation centers as he tried in vain to get his legs to work again. Immediately on his election to the presidency, he launched programs to aid the impoverished.

By contrast, Romney and Ryan, both raised in privilege, have demonstrated remarkable insensitivity to everyday Americans.

Romney, scion of a Detroit car company executive, said as GM and Chrysler struggled in the midst of the Great Recession, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” He’d have countenanced an uncontrolled bankruptcy for the two corporations, costing tens of thousands of middle-class workers at assembly plants, car dealerships and auto part manufacturers their jobs, their homes and their hopes. He’d have done nothing and let them all suffer. There’s a certain carelessness, a heartlessness to that. Those aren’t values many middle-class workers cherish in a president.

Ryan also grew up without worry about money, in a small town where his family owned a construction business and his father was a lawyer. Because his father died when Ryan was 16, Social Security helped him pay for college. Ryan’s plans, however, imperil Social Security for future generations, for the next decade’s 16 year olds who lose fathers.

Ryan sponsored legislation during the Bush administration to privatize Social Security, allowing the fund to be weakened by the draining of untold billions that would be risked on Wall Street, on the very stock market that crashed during the last year of Bush’s reign, sucking the value out of private pension funds. Many middle-class workers don’t find gambling with their retirement security attractive in a president.

Ryan and Romney are in trouble with America’s Average Janes and Joes over their tax proposals as well. Romney says he wants to cut income taxes by 20 percent for everyone, which he claims he would pay for by ending tax deductions. He has declined to specify which ones, however. Here’s what the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said about his plan: it would cost the wealthy like Ryan and Romney less and the Average Jane and Joe more.

That’s right. Specifically, the plan would reduce taxes each year for the nation’s wealthiest 5 percent, ranging from a cut of $1,800 for the least rich to nearly $250,000 for the most rich. For the other 95 percent of taxpayers, the nation’s middle class, Romney’s “tax cut” would mean a tax increase averaging $500 per household because, the Tax Policy Center said, tax breaks that the middle class depends on, like the one for mortgages, would disappear. The center said it was a fantasy for Romney to suggest he could fund his plan by eliminating only tax breaks for the rich.

The Average Jane and Joe may not read the entire report. But they do understand this one key fact: The Romney tax plan will cost them more and Romney less. Many will find the injustice of that to be unattractive in a president.

Similarly, Ryan’s budget “Roadmap” would also lower Romney’s tax rate. Ryan would require him to pay less than 1 percent. That’s because the vast majority of Romney's $21 million income in 2010 came from capital gains, interest and dividends, and Ryan would eliminate all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends.

Most middle-class household income, all of $50,000 a year and declining, comes from wages, not capital gains, interest and dividends. So those families would be paying rates way higher than 1 percent. In fact, the Tax Policy Center determined that Ryan’s budget would raise taxes on the bottom 30 percent of wage earners.

The Average Jane and Joe may not memorize all those facts and figures. But they will recall that Ryan wants quarter billionaires to pay 1 percent and them to pay way more. That’s just galling. Far from what the middle class finds to be a desirable trait in a vice president.

When a reporter asked Romney about his tax rates last week, the Republican candidate had just finished lecturing the ensemble on the intricacies of his Medicare plan using a white board.

What Romney can’t comprehend is that for the middle class, it’s not the numbers.

What the Average Jane and Joe will recall is that Romney and Ryan plan to privatize Medicare, to destroy a beloved program on which the middle class depends. What they’ll know about Romney and Ryan is that their proposed policies show they don’t have a clue what it’s like to struggle. And don’t care. Carelessness is not a quality the middle class finds desirable in the occupants of the Oval Office.

Romney says Obama "Takes His Marching Orders" From Unions

Dave Johnson — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:58:45 -0400

Is this guy a Presidential candidate from a major party, or a fringe nut? He sounds like Rush Limbaugh. HuffPo: Mitt Romney: Obama 'Takes Marching Orders From Union Bosses',

Speaking to a crowd at a campaign stop in Lansing, Mich., on Tuesday, presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney took a swipe at both President Barack Obama and organized labor, saying the president "takes his marching orders" from unions that cost American jobs.

"Liberalism once taught that unions would ensure lasting prosperity for workers," Romney said at Lansing Community College. "Instead, they too often contributed to disappearing companies, disappearing industries and disappearing jobs. But like many politicians of the past, President Obama takes his marching orders from union bosses, rails against right-to-work states, fights to win union elections by eliminating the vote by secret ballot, and even denies an American company the right to build a factory in the American state of its choice."

When People Have A Say

People who follow Romney's line of reasoning think that we need to be more "business friendly" with low wages, low benefits, low environmental protections and low taxes on the rich so we can compete with countries like China. Here's the thing, in countries like China the people don't have a say. When people have a say they say that they want higher wages, benefits, good schools, environmental protections and the rest of the prosperity that democracy brings to all the people, instead of huge amounts accumulating in the hands of just a few people.

Unions Drove Wages And Benefits Up

Romney's argument that unions "contributed to disappearing companies, disappearing industries and disappearing jobs" is based on the idea that unions drove wages and benefits up. He believes that good wages and benefits -- namely US -- are a "cost" instead of the reason that We, the People decided to develop the body of laws that allow corporations to exist, to use our infrastructure and educated people and laws and courts and police and all the other "public structures" as a foundation for doing business. We, the People did that so that we -- all of us -- could benefit. All of us, not just a few of us.

In that respect Romney is correct, unions and democracy brought us higher pay, benefits, "the weekend," vacations, 40-hour workweeks and things like that. Before unions came along to enforce the idea of democracy we didn't, after unions we did. Before unions we had 12-hours a day workdays, seven days a week. Before unions we had low pay. Before unions we had no benefits. Before unions we didn't get vacations. Before unions we could be fired for no reason. Unions are why we ~~have~~ had a middle class.

Unions enforce the concept of democracy. Yes, We, the People were supposed to be in charge. Yes, the economy was supposed to be for our benefit. Why else would We, the People allow corporations to exist in the first place? But it was unions that gave people the power to enforce that idea.

Laying People Off, Cutting Wages, Pocketing That Money For Himself

Romney made his fortune buying up companies (not, by the way, using his own money, but using the companies' own assets as collateral for the loans to buy them with). Then Romney fired many of the workers, making the rest do the extra work. He cut wages and benefits for the rest and then pocketed that money for himself. This is the guy who says that good wages and benefits is what puts companies out of business. In other words, Romney is saying that the problem with our economy is that we have a middle class. Romney wants America to be more "business-friendly."

Romney hates unions. They get in the way of doing business they way business was done "When Mitt Romney Came To Town:

According to the Christian Science Monitor, this is the story of what happened to the workers in one company when the Romney/Bain machine "came to town":

The new owner, American Pad & Paper, owned in turn by [Mitt Romney's] Bain Capital, told all 258 union workers they were fired, in a cost-cutting move. Security guards hustled them out of the building. They would be able to reapply for their jobs, at lesser wages and benefits, but not all would be rehired.

Outsourcing jobs to places where people don't have a say so they can't demand good wages, firing people and making them reapply for their jobs but at half the pay, gutting people's benefits, stripping companies, treating employees like throwaway Kleenex, closing factories, stealing pensions, borrowing and pocketing... Locust capitalism. Chop shops. That's Mitt Romney's view of how to make money. Unions are in the way.

What Is Business-Friendly?

Some quick thoughts about what "business-friendly" really means: (add your own thoughts in the comments)

Business-friendly =

Low wages
Longer hours
No health benefits
No pensions
No vacations
No sick pay
Low taxes on the wealthy and their corporations
"Smaller government," -- which means less "We, the People" in charge of things:

So what are your thoughts on this argument that we need to be more "business-friendly?" What does the phrase even mean? And what happens to the idea that We, the People have an economy for our own benefit?

Invisible Americans: The Overlooked Millions Inside Those Job Numbers

Richard Eskow — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:08:45 -0500

Some politicians are saying that the latest unemployment report is good news, but it's not. It shows us that this country is still in crisis. It shows us that the government needs to act quickly and aggressively to create jobs, and to restore the lost earning power of the average American who has a job.

Mos of all it shows us that millions of struggling people are still invisible in the Nation's Capitol.

This week the Occupy movement is holding a series of "Take Back the Capitol" events in Washington. Let's hope it shines some light on the country's unemployed, under-employed, and under-earning millions. Until now, they've been pretty much invisible in that town.

The Invisible Americans are all around you. They're in your state, in your community, maybe in your family. Maybe they're your kids, just out of college. Maybe they're your fifty-something uncles and aunts, your grandparents, your grandchildren. They're right there in the jobs report, for anyone with the eyes - and the willingness - to find them.

Invisible: Millions of the long-term unemployed.

While some celebrated an unemployment rate of "only" 8.6 percent, half that change was explained by the fact that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Job creation barely kept pace with the entry of new people into the workforce.

Those 315,000 people join the 5.7 million people officially classified as long-term unemployed. That number is at historically high levels, representing nearly half (43 percent) of all the jobless people in this country.

It's not that they don't want jobs. Most of them have fallen into despair. Even worse, what they may have fallen into is realism. Unless we use the power of government to do something, some of them will never work again. They're falling out of the "normal" economy and into a new reality of persistent joblessness and, for some, eventual poverty.

Invisible: Segregation on the unemployment line.

The official jobless rate for white people is 7.6 percent, versus 15.5 percent for African Americans and 11.4 percent for Hispanics.

And those are only the official numbers. The figures are much higher if you count the long-term unemployed, the under-employed, and "discouraged" workers.

In a nation that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, we're denying entire groups of people the chance for a better life.

Invisible: The jobless generation.

There's a silent epidemic of youth unemployment. Official teenaged unemployment is 23.7 percent, and the real rate is much higher. Recent college graduates face historically high jobless rates - along with historically high student debt.

Studies show that young people who begin their work lives un- or under-employed face an entire lifetime of lower income. By failing to act, we're betraying our own children and throwing away an entire generation of young people.

Invisible: The under-employed.

There's a silent epidemic of under-employment. There are 8.5 million people who want to work full-time but can only get part time work. in that category. That figure dropped slightly, but we don't know how much of the drop was due to people finding full-time work or being laid off altogether.

And remember, underemployed people aren't just making less money. In most cases they're also going without health insurance or other benefits. They're struggling on the margins of working America, barely surviving and never knowing how much money the'll earn from one week to the next.

Invisible: The vanishing public servant.

While Washington politicians drone on about "budget cuts," there's not much discussion of the fact that many of those cuts increase unemployment - at the Federal, state, and local levels. Government jobs have been dwindling since 2008, and the shrinkage is continuing a time when we need more of them.

Teachers, police officers, highway toll takers, postal workers - you name it, they're losing their jobs. And the only debate in Washington seems to be, How many more of them can we make unemployed?

Invisible: The drowning middle class.

Average hourly earnings for all nonfarm employees decreased last month by 1 percent. Average hourly earnings increased by only 1.8 percen over the last year, while the cost of living (measured by the Consumer Price Index) increased 3.5 percent.

Once again average Americans have fallen behind in earnings and has seen their standard of living decline. Meanwhile, incomes continue to skyrocket for the wealthiest Americans. Income inequality is the worst it's been since the Great Depression.

Welcome to the New Gilded Age.

Political Blindness

This week we heard almost nothing in Washington about direct action to address these crises. The Democrats' "payroll tax holiday" would provide urgently needed ongoing relief for the battered middle class, and would also have a mild job-creating effect. But it would do so in an inefficient way, and also needlessly and recklessly endangers Social Security.

Republicans have no solution at all - just more of the same policies that caused these problems in the first place.

Our neighbors deserve better than this. We deserve better than this. Change starts with a simple statement we can make to those around us, and they can make to us: You're not invisible. I see you.

People in Washington over-complicate the debate by tinkering at the margins: tax-break this, incentive that. Those things will have some effect, but there's a simpler and better way to fix the joblessness problem: Put people to work. At a time when this country needs trillions of dollar in infrastructure repair, government should hire people and get on with it.

George W. Bush had no problem doing that a few years ago. He signed a bill spending more than a quarter of a trillion dollars on infrastructure spending while the Republican Speaker of the House bragged about creating. But Republicans would apparently rather prolong the suffering so they can defeat Obama and the Democrats in 2012.

As for the Obama Democrats, either they don't understand the problem or they don't think it's politically smart to propose fixing it. I suspect it's the latter - and they're dead wrong. The President's jobs bill had some useful ideas. But the President went small on the fixes and, in his typical fashion, couldn't resist pushing useless conservative "job creation" ideas along with the good ones.

Far-Sighted

We need a massive jobs program now to fix our crumbling bridges, highways, railroads, dams, and public buildings. We need to fix wage stagnation by going back to the policies that built the middle class, beginning with stronger collective bargaining rights for working people. Unions were one of the engines of post-World War II prosperity, and the war on unions needs to stop.

We also need higher taxes for the wealthy, tax advantages for companies that hire, and higher taxes for those who make money by gambling, trading other people's debts, or hedging against the success of the American economy. We need to downsize the financial sector, which is capturing too much corporate profit and squeezing out job-creating businesses.

And we need to rebuild the firewall between banking and speculating, so we can end too-big-to-fail and the boom-and-bust cycle that keeps crashing the economy.

Vision Test

Some political party, maybe one that has had a reputation for defending the middle class, ought to say something this: We know what's going on out there. We understand the problem. Here's how we would fix it. We're going to introduce these measures in the House and Senate wherever and whenever we can, so you can see who's fighting for the Invisible Americans, and who's fighting against them.

But no party appears willing to do that, at least not without the presence of a non-partisan movement that forces it to act.

Someday historians will review this country's history to find those times when our people and our leaders responded to a crisis with vision and courage. They'll see the millions of Americans who rose to the occasion during the War of Independence, the Civil War, World War II, and the Great Depression.

But will they see us, or will we have become ... invisible?

Our political leaders need to be pressured - a lot - which is why the Occupy events in Washington are so important. We need to build and maintain a movement for real change, a movement that sees the invisible ones among us, a movement that sees each of us and makes us visible, a movement that fights unrelentingly for a better society.

Hope to "see" you soon - on the barricades.

Years of Discontent Trigger American Autumn

Leo Gerard — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:15:10 -0400

To convey the significance of the Occupy Wall Street movement, NBC News anchor Brian Williams this week quoted the 1960s Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth:

“There is something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.”

Maybe it’s unclear what the Occupy Wall Street movement ultimately will accomplish. But what’s happening – for the past three weeks in New York and now in hundreds of towns across North America – is a roiling, inspirational, grassroots expression of anger, disgust and revolution.

And, frankly, given what’s been going on in the United States since the bank bailout, it’s amazing that this uprising didn’t precede the Arab Spring. The powers-that-be, from the rich and influential to their coin-operated politicians and corporate-owned media, have mocked and belittled and ignored the protesters, the 99 percenters as they call themselves – everyone but the richest one percent. No matter what the critics say, these young people, with righteous outrage and new age communication, have launched the American Autumn.

This revolt could have started in the spring of 2009, immediately after the Bush administration pushed through Congress the Troubled Asset Relieve Program (TARP), the $700 billion in taxpayer money spent to prop up banks that had gambled and lost untold trillions. A Bloomberg News investigation later would show that the United States lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion to save the banks. Despite that help, the Wall Street recklessness ruined the American economy, throwing tens of millions out of jobs and homes.

Poverty and hunger skyrocketed in the richest country in the world. As tax revenue fell, states, towns and school districts slashed essential public services and laid off teachers, librarians, firefighters and police officers.

Maybe it just took this long for the middle class to grasp all the horrible effects of the Wall Street gambling and to realize that a government held hostage by country club conservatives bent on cutting public services just made matters worse. Maybe young people looked at unrestrained war spending, Pell Grant slashing and voter disenfranchising and decided they were fed up and not going to take foreclosure of their futures anymore.

Whatever the spark, the American Autumn began three weeks ago in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, formerly Liberty Square. Late in September, some of the one percenters sipped Champaign on an upscale restaurant balcony as they looked down on the protesters in the streets below. This week, as protests spread, wealthy risk-takers at the Chicago Board of Trade put signs in the windows of their ritzy offices bragging, “We are the 1 percent.” They don’t get it.

Nor does Bank of America. Here’s a bank bailed out by taxpayers that just announced it would begin imposing a new fee – $5 a month, $60 a year – on debit card users. This bank also just announced that it would worsen the recession caused by bankster recklessness by laying off 30,000 workers.

This is a bank that engaged in the habitual, anti-capitalistic Wall Street practice of rewarding poor executive performance by giving its CEO Brian T. Moynihan a $9 million bonus immediately after the institution he runs lost $2.2 billion in 2010. Moynihan responded to criticism of the $5 fee by saying customers – and ultimately taxpayers -- must line his pockets and that of shareholders, regardless of how badly he runs the bank or how stupidly he gambles with its money. That’s because, he asserted, the bank has a “right to make a profit.” No matter what.

The media and country club conservatives belittled the protesters. Here’s what Herman Cain, a Tea Partier seeking the GOP nomination for president, said:

“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks if you don’t have a job or you’re not rich. Blame yourself!”

He continued:

“It’s not a person’s fault because they succeeded. It’s a person’s fault if they failed. And so this is why I don’t understand these demonstrations and what it is that they’re looking for.”

He called the protesters “anti-capitalist,” although it was the banks that sought a socialist bailout from the government when they got themselves in trouble.

Cain didn’t blame banksters for unemployment, even though it was Wall Street gambling that took down the economy. He blames the teachers and police officers thrown out of work by local governments that are cash-strapped as a result of the recession -- caused by Wall Street recklessness.

Cain and the media keep saying they don’t understand what the protesters want. They just don’t get it.

A specific list of demands is unnecessary. What the 99 percenters want is obvious. They want the American dream restored. Good public education for everyone. Equity in opportunity. Shared sacrifice so that the rich pay a tax rate at least equal to that charged the middle class. An end to poverty and unemployment in the richest country in the world.

In the Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth, lyrics talk of 1960s youths criticized for their protests:

“Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind.”

This time protesters will get backing. The members of my union, the United Steelworkers, get it. Members of the unions of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations get it.

We’re here to support the young people of the American Autumn.

Equity and Sensibility

Leo Gerard — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:58:33 -0400

A long time ago, in an historical America, lawmakers determined a progressive tax code to be the fairest and most logical for all.

The legislators asked more of those who had benefitted most from the advantages America provides. They asked less of those who benefitted least.

As time passed, the rich and wealthy corporations perverted the progressive tax code. Now what America’s got is a flip-flop under which the fabulously wealthy pay taxes at rates lower than the middle class.

This week, President Obama proposed returning the tax code to a time closer to equity and sensibility. He asked that millionaires and corporations pay taxes at the same rate as the middle class. Not more, as they once did. But at an equal rate. It’s not revolutionary. It’s retro. And it would help create jobs.

It’s an idea whose time has come – again. And it should be implemented immediately.

Obama called it the Buffett Rule after billionaire Warren Buffett who has written repeatedly that he thinks it’s wrong that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. He spoke out most recently in a New York Times op-ed on Aug. 14 titled, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” Here’s what he said:

“Our leaders have asked for ‘shared sacrifice.’ But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

“While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.”

His petition to American lawmakers for a return to fairness has been joined by fellow billionaire Mark Cuban and a large group of Americans calling themselves Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength. In an open letter to political leaders, these millionaires asked to be taxed more. It says:

“We are writing to urge you to put our country ahead of politics.

“For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you increase taxes on incomes over $1,000,000.”

Cuban wrote on his blog that millionaires may choke when they see the size of their tax bills, but then they should rejoice at having such a “problem.” He also said:

“In these times of ‘The Great Recession’ we shouldn’t be trying to shift the benefits of wealth behind some curtain. We should be celebrating and encouraging people to make as much money as they can. Profits equal tax money. While some people might find it distasteful to pay taxes. I don’t. I find it Patriotic.”

The rich are ready to pay their fair share. It’s not fair now. Buffett and the other richest 399 billionaires in America pay an average income tax rate of 16.6 percent, while a worker earning between $35,000 and $84,000 a year pays a marginal rate of 25 percent.

Obama described the simple math of tax rates in seeking institution of the Buffett Rule. The nation is faced with a massive deficit and a crushing recession. America doesn’t receive sufficient tax revenues to buy everything it wants. So it must make choices. It could continue to give the rich and corporations special tax treatment and pay the country’s debts on the backs of the middle class. That would require slashing the programs that sustain workers – Medicare, Medicaid, food inspection, public education, Pell Grants – and the government programs that kindle the economy and provide middle class jobs such as infrastructure construction.

Or America could ask the rich to pay a tax rate equal to that of the middle class. America could end outrageous loophole for massively-profitable corporations – loopholes that not only enabled GE to pay no taxes at all last year but allowed it to demand the government give it $3.2 billion! Asking the rich to pay an equitable rate would raise enough money to moderate cuts to crucial government services.

The wealthy supporters of increasing taxes on the wealthy recognize another benefit of paying more – it increases their ability to earn more. Government services, from public schools and roads to civil courts and patent protections benefit business. Cutting funding for those services threatens business profits.

In addition, if government spends money to renovate schools and improve infrastructure as Obama has proposed in his jobs plan, it creates jobs. Those workers spend money. And that stimulates demand for products.

Only when corporations experience demand will they begin spending some of the record $2 trillion in cash they are now just sitting on to hire new workers. Those new workers will spend their paychecks, further increasing demand. It’s a virtuous cycle. The rich pay more in taxes and get more in profits.

Tax equity is not radical. It’s basic fairness. In fact, it’s not even progressive. Progressive would be returning to the days when the fabulously wealthy and profit-fat corporations paid higher tax rates than the middle class. Progressive would be charging the rich a “wealth tax” each year, not on their earnings but on the value of their holdings. This tax, suggested for the United States by Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, already is collected by France, Norway, Switzerland and five other countries.

Parity isn’t progressive. But it is equitable and sensible.

***

Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger.

Campaign for America’s Future Announces a Project Designed to Hold Lawmakers Accountable to the Middle Class: TheMiddleClass.Org

Liz Rose — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:40:41 -0400

Washington, DC -- The Campaign for America’s Future and Progressive Punch are launching a project to hold lawmakers accountable for how their votes will have an impact on the middle class: TheMiddleClass.org. TheMiddleClass.org is a go-to website for information and analysis on congressional voting records on middle class issues.

In addition to breaking analysis, the website will feature a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on legislation, and letter grades for every current member of Congress based on their voting record regarding middle-class issues.

When a budget deal is reached, readers will be able to find out what it means for the middle-class by visiting TheMiddleClass.org. By the fall of 2012, TheMiddleClass.org will offer a full scoreboard for legislators in both houses of Congress. Voters will have a clear way to hold their legislators accountable for policies.

Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future said, “Our economy will only be strong again when our working and middle class families are strong. This means lawmakers must back policies that help middle class families reclaim their sense of economic security and also help low income and working families move in to the middle class through jobs that come with good wages and benefits.”

Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future said, “The American dream is about having family economic security and the opportunity to succeed with hard work. We need to push for policies that create jobs. TheMiddleClass.Org will hold legislators accountable for whether their votes served or screwed the middle class.”

Joshua Grossman President of ProgressivePunch.org said, "Politicians love to proclaim how they're fighting for the Middle Class. This website separates truth from fiction."

Visit TheMiddleClass.org
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/TheMiddleClass.org
Twitter URL: http://twitter.com/ourmiddleclass
Twitter Username: @OurMiddleClass

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Budget Battle: Who Is Our Country FOR?

Dave Johnson — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 01:09:14 -0400

Who is our country for? Is this a country for We, the People, where all of us are banded together to protect and empower each other, together? Or is this a country where a powerful few reap all the benefits, and the rest of us are little more than "the help?" That is what the coming budget/deficit/debt/shutdown battles are about.

In the past several decades our country and economy has been thrown out of balance in ways that hurt most of us but greatly benefit a powerful few. Communities are being bankrupted, forced to lay off police, firefighters, teachers, nurses and other essential people who work to protect and help us. More and more working people are hurting, falling ever further behind, losing or barely clinging to their jobs and homes and businesses and health. At the same time big-company CEOs who cheat, bankrupt their company, ship jobs overseas and fire white collar workers by the thousands are not held accountable -- instead they are rewarded with big bonuses.

And in the larger picture the country is falling behind, the economy is losing its competitive edge, the infrastructure that supports our businesses is crumbling and our public structures like the court system and schools are deteriorating. And in the face of this decline our public confidence, trust, civility and other measures of civic health are falling.

The measure of any serious budget deficit reduction program should be to look at these imbalances and address them. That is the role of We, the People government. But instead, the new Republican budget accelerates the imbalances -- on purpose. It cuts or eliminates the programs that assist people, helping us maintain or rise to a middle-class existence.

Decades of Stealth Attack

Most of us probably thought this country was a "We, the People" democracy where we are all in this together, looking out for each other. But for decades corporate conservatives have been engaged in a stealth attack on the middle class, taking all of the gains of our joint investment in a prosperous economy just for themselves.

The effects of the stealth attack on the middle class have been creeping up on us, and are now widely felt. Incomes have been stagnant for some time, as costs rise. Predatory industries increasingly prey on the public and small business. At the same time a powerful and wealthy few have benefited from these changes so much that today, just 400 people have more wealth than half of our population of 300 million people combined!

One measure of the price of maintaining a middle-class existence is the "toil index." The index of toil measures the work hours it takes for a family to live in an average home where children have access to an average school. In the past few decades the work hours required to maintain a middle-class existence has gone up 62.4%.

So in 1950 the "toil index" was 42.5 hours. That dropped to 41.5 by 1970. But then it started to rise -- a lot. By 2000 it was 67.4 hours, an increase of 62.4%! Yet this was at a time when the country as a whole got ever wealthier. And since 2000 it has obviously gotten much worse.

Now The Attack Is In The Open

Now the attack on the middle class is out in the open. The new Republican budget plan takes away any pretense of our government working for We, the People, and transforms it completely to a government of, by and for the top 1%. Programs to maintain the middle class are cut or eliminated. Help for the jobless is cut back. Government workers are eliminated. Medicare is privatized. Social Security is phased out.

But in this budget taxes for the wealthy few and big corporations are cut, big oil companies continue to raid the treasury, the arms industry prospers and other multinational giants continue to receive subsidies and advantages over smaller, less-powerful competitors.

This budget is clear in its purpose: to create a one-dollar-one-vote plutocracy for the wealthy few, while gutting our one-person-one-vote democratic system.

How We Got Here

Let's look at the effect of the recent decades of this stealth attack on our We, the People government and economy.

Top tax rates for the rich have been dropping and dropping, resulting in big budget deficits that add up to big debt:

The Republican budget doesn't fix this at all. It makes it worse. It cuts tax cuts for the rich even more, and guts the things We, the People do for each other.

The next chart shows how corporate taxes have declined, the one after that shows who owns those corporations:

So at the same time as income taxes for the wealthiest dropped the tax share from the corporations -- mostly owned by the wealthiest few -- also declined dramatically. On top of that cuts in taxes on capital gains and dividends pushed even more of the gains to the top. The Republican budget plan makes this worse.

As top tax rates have been dropping working people's payroll taxes have been rising. This is the money we set aside in the Social Security Trust Fund for our retirement. (Chart from Urban Institute)

The Republican budget not only doesn't address this, it raids this money we have set aside for retirement by cutting our retirement benefits!

Because of cuts in taxes for the rich and the corporations they own, inequality has been increasing dramatically. The Economic Policy Institute shows that, "The share of income going to the majority of households has dropped considerably since the 1970s.. Share of household income held by bottom 99.5%, 1913-2008:"

The share of income that 99.5% of us get has fallen from 93.7% to 83.1%. The top half percent get all the rest. The Republican budget plan doesn't fix this at all. It makes it worse.

Here is a chart of the increasing concentration of income at the top:

The Republican budget plan doesn't fix this at all. It makes it worse.

How It Happened

The "Reagan Revolution" cut taxes, deregulated business, opened our borders to let in goods from "thugocracies" that exploit workers, dramatically increased military spending and cut back on the things we (government) do for each other. It cut back on investment in our people, our infrastructure, education, public structures like our courts, our labor protections, our consumer protections, and attacked the independence of the ways we receive objective information. Things have gotten steadily worse in the years since.

Last year's post Reagan Revolution Home To Roost -- In Charts shows the impact on us of these changes over time, concluding,

Sometimes it can be so obvious where a problem comes from, but very hard to change it. The anti-government, pro-corporate-rule Reagan Revolution screwed a lot of things up for regular people and for the country. Some of this disaster we saw happening at the time and some of it has taken 30 years to become clear. But for all the damage done these "conservative" policies greatly enriched a few entrenched interests, who use their wealth and power to keep things the way they are. And the rest of us, hit so hard by the changes, don't have the resources to fight the wealth and power.

Look at the influence of these entrenched interests on our current deficits, for example. Obviously conservative policies of tax cuts and military spending increases caused the massive deficits. But entrenched interests use their wealth and power to keep us from making needed changes. The facts are here, plain as the noses on our faces. The ability to fight it eludes us. Will we step up and do something to reverse the disaster caused by the Reagan Revolution or not?

The Republican budget plan doesn't fix this at all. It makes it worse. Much, much worse.

More Charts

In the meantime, lobbying to influence our government against the things that help We, the People has gone through the roof.

(Chart source Sunlight Foundation.)

The Republican budget doesn't fix this at all.

They lobby because it pays off. It pays off because the lobbying buys them special favors, breaks, subsidies and policies that favor them over their competitors and the rest of us. This happens because we let them get away with it. Of course when powerful interests can use money to bend the rules they will bend the rules in their own favor -- and will start by bending the rules in ways that let them bend the rules even more.

Of course this is what they have been doing. Here is what is happening in the case of some specific industries:

Lobbying for "defense' has increased:

And the result show how this has paid off: (note, chart includes defense-related spending.)

We spend more on military than all other countries combined. The Republican budget doesn't fix this at all.

Imbalances

So these are just some of the imbalances that government should be addressing. But it isn't. The Republican budget doesn't fix this at all. It just makes all of these problems and imbalances worse. And this is because of that ability of the wealthy and powerful to pay to get the rules bent in their favor. We need to instead change the system to hold politicians and CEO’s accountable, making sure the rich are not abusing the system.

Wresting Control from the Special Interests: Electing Warren in 2012

Joseph M. Firestone — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 17:00:10 -0400

Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy in 2009 with the support of the special-interest backed Tea Party movement, and large campaign contributions from the banking and financial sector. He was also helped by disaffected working class voters. Whether Brown or another candidate supported by these players runs in 2012, mainstream Massachusetts voters will face an uphill battle trying to elect a senator who will champion their interests against special interests.

The legislative track records of major party lawmakers, especially Congressional representatives, show they are closely aligned with the interests of the corporate financial interests that finance their campaigns. While Democratic and Republican Congressional electoral candidates try to make it appear that there are major differences between them, their votes on key legislative issues tend to be quite similar in reflecting the priorities of their corporate campaign contributors. So regardless of which major party’s candidates voters elect, as hamstrung voters jockey back and forth between the two parties, voters get roughly the same special interest-favoring legislation.

Not only are the major party candidates unlikely to provide voters real alternatives in 2012, but the rumored third party presidential candidate who might emerge from the special interest-backed No Labels party, and the Americans Elect online nominating convention, is likely to run on an agenda crafted by the same conservative financial interests that are bankrolling both of these organizations, as well as the Democratic and Republican parties. Although No Labels and Americans Elect claim they are focused on the so-called “center” of American politics, comprised of the nearly 40% of voters who have defected from the ranks of registered Democrats and Republicans, both appear to be pursuing a conservative fiscal agenda articulated by financial fat cats like Peter Peterson.

While these political facts of life may make it seem impossible to imagine a scenario in which Massachusetts voters could elect a senator who would champion their interests, there is one scenario that might work. If Harvard law professor and consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren decides to enter the race, as she is being encouraged to do, she just might be able to take up the cause of mainstream Massachusetts voters and defeat these special interests to win herself the Massachusetts Senate seat if she and her supporters take advantage of two untapped political levers. The first lever is the large scale collective action power of the Internet, which has been showing increasing political muscle, and the second is the online voter mobilization potential of a unique social networking platform, the Interactive Voter Choice System (IVCS), now in development.

In two earlier posts in this series, I've analyzed the potential impact of IVCS on the 2012 elections in the 8th Congressional District of Virginia, and also in the coming Virginia Senate election contest that appears to be shaping up between former Senator George Allen and former Governor Tim Kaine. In this post, I'll show how Warren’s supporters can leverage both the collective action potential of the Internet and IVCS’s unique voter-mobilization tools and services to win both primary and general elections on the Democratic line in the 2012 Massachusetts Senate race. First, a brief primer on IVCS.

How It Works

IVCS enables voters to get out of a reactive mode and into the driver’s seat of U.S. elections. It is a voter-driven, political crowdsourcing platform that enables individual voters and political activists to bring virtually unlimited numbers of voters with common policy priorities into winning voting blocs and electoral coalitions that voters control. These blocs and coalitions can work within existing or new political parties to run and elect candidates to office who pledge to enact their priorities into law.

The IVCS social networking platform provides voters across the political spectrum free agenda-setting, organizing and consensus-building tools on a single website. The agenda-setting tools enable activists and voters to build personal networks with other voters who share their policy priorities. The platform’s organizing-building tools enable them to transform their networks into voting blocs and electoral coalitions hosted on the website. Its consensus-building tools enable them to build winning electoral bases of broad cross-sections of voters that run and elect candidates whom they can hold accountable for enacting their priorities into law. These electoral victories will enable U.S. voters to eliminate the ever widening gap between voters' priorities and the legislation enacted by lawmakers who follow the dictates of their special interest campaign contributors.

Most importantly, voting blocs that use IVCS tools to build voter-controlled electoral coalitions and democratize political parties, by giving their members real decision-making power to set their agendas and select their candidates, can neutralize the influence of special interest money in elections. For they can use web-based IVCS communication tools to get their message out and get their voters to the polls without special interest money. Moreover, by involving voters across the political spectrum in analyzing, weighing and debating policy priorities, they will also be able to counter the cognitive distortions in voters’ perceptions that special interests create by spreading false information and political propaganda.

Significantly, IVCS-enabled voting blocs, coalitions and political parties can prevent the fragmentation of the U.S. electorate into losing splinter groups and parties too small to win elections, and neutralize the impact of three special interest-backed parties, assuming the rumored third major party materializes and runs candidates in the 2012 presidential election. They can use IVCS consensus-building tools to wean away mainstream voters from these special interest-backed parties by giving them decision-making influence over policy agenda setting across the board and candidate selection that none of these parties is inclined to do.

These consensus-building tools enable voting blocs to create broad-based coalitions among large cross-sections of voters around transpartisan policy agendas. They can involve virtually unlimited numbers of voters in making decisions and resolving disagreements by using the IVCS Voting Utility to vote on their agendas, which candidates to run, contested issues and proposed political alliances and coalitions.

Since problem solving in the system will be web-based and distributed, rather than centralized, blocs and bloc-run coalitions will be able to quickly increase their voting strength by using the social networking capabilities of the Internet, coupled with IVCS organizing and consensus-building tools to reach out to other voters online. Moreover, they will adapt to their political environments more quickly and effectively than formally-organized political parties organized around rigid platforms. They will spontaneously merge into a nationwide yet decentralized Internet-based web of voter-controlled political organizations. Their members will be able to interact with each other at the speed of light through the networking capabilities of the IVCS website and rapidly supersede legacy parties and special interests as the driving forces in the American political system. (For more information about IVCS, click here.)

How Warren Supporters Can Use IVCS to Elect Warren in the 2012 Massachusetts Senate Race

Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren is a nationally-known and highly-respected consumer advocate who served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel appointed to monitor the implementation of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which bailed out insolvent banking and financial institutions during the 2008 – 2009 financial crisis. Although Warren was widely heralded as the most able person to take the reins of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) created by Congress after the crisis to protect consumers from predatory banks and financial institutions, Congressional opposition from Republican lawmakers has prevented her from being appointed to head up the new agency, which she originally proposed.

President Obama yielded to the opposition and appointed her only to oversee the development of the bureau as his Assistant. Since the bureau will be housed in the Treasury Department, she was also named Special Advisor to Treasury Secretary Geithner, despite the fact that they are reportedly at odds on numerous fronts. Even after assuming these positions, Warren has continued to be relentlessly attacked in the corporate media, vilified by right-wing lawmakers, and castigated by banking and financial interests – at the same time that she has become an heroic figure to supporters of financial reform. In light of increasing indications that effective financial reform is on-hold in the 112th Congress, and Warren’s appointment as head of the bureau is unlikely, support is gathering behind a Warren candidacy for the 2012 Massachusetts Senate race.

If she runs, the economic and political facts of life in that state in 2012 are unlikely to have changed very much since the 2009 election of Republican Scott Brown. If anything, they have worsened. Unemployment and underemployment will still be very high; the banksters and fraudsters will remain unpunished; taxes for the wealthy will remain low and may get lower; austerity will evidently still be the order of the day; at this writing, there's a good chance that Social Security expenditures will be cut before the Spring is out; a new wave of unemployment will be coming from state and local level austerity policies, and from a new round of foreclosures unless the state courts put a stop to them; health care costs and insurance prices will continue to rise; nothing will have been done about the unpopular “health care reform bill”; credit card interest rates will continue to be oppressive; the wars abroad are likely to continue; the “shared pain” of the trumped up fiscal crisis will not be shared by the well-off; and mainstream Americans will be somewhat, but not very much, concerned about public deficits and debts. During yet another election cycle, the economic and financial distress of working Americans will be given short shrift by politicians resorting to culture war issues to avoid talking about the real problems voters are facing. The views of a majority of voters regarding job creation, the distribution of the tax burden, and single payer health care will be ignored, or merely paid lip-service, by candidates whose real agendas reflect the wishes of their corporate campaign financiers.

So, voters will still be really angry at the Democrats for their poor performance in the last Congress, and absolutely livid at the Republicans for their performance in the present one, and their failure to do anything about any of the above -- especially their failure to keep their promises about jobs. In this environment people will be angry at Scott Brown, and they'll be none too happy with Massachusetts's ten House Democrats. All in all, 2012 won't be a good year for incumbents, for candidates of either of the two legacy parties, or for voters, who will be faced with choosing among a traditional Democratic or Republican candidate, or a rumored third party candidate running on a No Labels platform largely inspired by special interest fat cats like Peter Peterson.

The unique contribution of IVCS to this race (and any race, for that matter) is that it enables voters to join forces to set their own policy agendas, support announced candidates or put their own candidates on the ballot who will honor their agendas, and build electoral bases large enough to elect them to office.

We know from polls that a majority of Americans are fed up with both major parties and would like to replace most elected representatives in Congress. Any voter or political activist in Massachusetts can get the ball rolling to create a voting bloc to draft Warren by using the IVCS Policy Options Database on the IVCS website to set their individual policy agendas, and create their own personal home page on the IVCS website (which they can make public or keep private). This voter can query the IVCS Policy Priorities Database to see how many other Massachusetts voters have already selected priorities similar to theirs, contact them and invite them to the bloc.

These voters can form the nucleus of an ever expanding voting bloc hosted on the IVCS website, with its own home page, internal email and messaging tools. The organizers and members set their own rules for running the voting bloc. They can incrementally increase the size of their bloc by reaching out through their own personal online social networks to friends, family, neighbors, co-workers and members of like-minded groups of all stripes. They can invite them to join their bloc by accessing the website to set their agendas, compare them with those of the bloc as a whole, and decide to join the bloc if their priorities converge.

They should have no trouble ramping up the size of their bloc to attain decisive electoral strength, given polls showing that 60% - 80% of Americans are so dissatisfied with the Democratic and Republican parties that they want to see most incumbents in Congress defeated. They will be able to grow their bloc by leaps and bounds if they make systematic efforts to recruit new members by getting the word out that all of its members will be able to play an active role in setting the bloc’s agenda and formulating its electoral strategy. They can hold face-to-face and online “town meetings” to discuss the track record of Scott Brown, and collectively decide whether to get behind Warren and urge her to make a primary bid on the Democratic line. Assuming the bloc decides to do so, it can contact her directly to open negotiations to set a common agenda and address key strategic and logistical questions. Of course, the bloc will have to demonstrate its ability to gain the electoral strength it will need to get her elected in a primary and a general election

Needless to say, the Democratic primary for the Massachusetts Senate seat held by Scott Brown, as well as the general election, are likely to feature highly competitive races driven by the same divisive ideological and emotional issues that major candidates always use to gin up a winning electoral base on the part of supporters dispirited by their unsatisfactory legislative track records. IVCS can play a decisive role for a candidate like Warren entering the electoral fray by helping her forge a winning transpartisan electoral base that unites rather than divides the electorate.

A voting bloc that is large enough to win a primary election and possibly swing a close general election, but has an agenda that is likely to prove controversial to general election voters, could actually cost Warren votes if she committed to it. But a voting bloc that works with her to involve a broad cross-section of voters in setting a popular agenda can gain many votes for her, if she commits to the process and the agenda that emerges from it. Not only will the bloc’s members support her in getting out the vote needed to win the primary; but they can subsequently reach out across party lines, especially the lines of the unpopular Democratic and Republican parties, to involve large numbers of disaffected voters, especially those who have defected from the parties to register as Independents, in using IVCS agenda-setting, organizing and consensus-building tools. Such a unique, grassroots, pro-active involvement of voters can grow the voting bloc into a broad-based electoral coalition well beyond the ideological confines of the narrowing electoral bases of the Democratic and Republican parties.

One thing to keep in mind is that IVCS is likely to generate not just one voting bloc in the Massachusetts 2012 Senate race, but several. These blocs and coalitions can decide to run their own candidates or negotiate with candidates who have announced electoral bids. In exchange for the bloc’s support in mobilizing voters on their behalf, blocs can ask candidates to commit to bloc agendas that have already been set or to collaborate with them in creating a joint agenda. If, after these negotiations, candidates win with bloc support, the blocs will be able to hold them accountable in future elections for implementing mutually agreed upon agendas after they take office.

So, let’s assume that by late fall of 2011, IVCS is accelerating the formation of voting blocs and the mobilization of voters throughout the state. The whole roster of candidates for elective office in Massachusetts will find themselves in an unprecedentedly fluid, voter-driven political environment comprised of alternately diverging and converging IVCS-based voting blocs and electoral coalitions committed to enacting specific policy agendas set by their members. They will be rapidly growing in size. Once they have negotiated common agendas, endorsed candidates, and created coalitions and political alliances, they will be capable of mobilizing many hundreds of thousands of voters in Massachusetts and tipping the forthcoming elections in favor of the candidates they decided to support. Voters, not special interests, will be in the driver’s seat of the election.

The ability of IVCS-enabled voting blocs and coalitions to gain traction within the constellation of candidates in the Massachusetts 2012 primary election will depend on the present and anticipated size of specific blocs, the perceived degree of competitiveness of the races being run, the degree to which candidates and blocs can agree on common agendas, the blocs’ and candidates’ capacity to build electoral coalitions that mobilize other voters, as well as the degree to which candidates may be so beholden to special interests that they refuse to commit to enacting bloc formulated agendas.

So, assuming a pro-Warren voting bloc is formed with an agenda likely to be popular among Massachusetts voters, how large would its electoral base have to be in Massachusetts in order for her and the bloc to view the bloc as an effective organizational engine to get her on the ballot for the primary election, such that she would be induced to commit to its agenda?

Answer: if the bloc were the only organization working to put Warren on the ballot of the Democratic Party, bloc members would have to collect approximately 15,000 signatures from registered Democrats in order to be fairly certain of obtaining the minimum 10,000 valid signatures required by state law. Clearly, getting her on the primary ballot would not present an insurmountable hurdle for the voting bloc to overcome, assuming it has implemented a systematic voter recruitment and mobilization strategy that taps into the collective action power of the Internet and the social networking capabilities of IVCS.

For the next hurdle, the number of votes needed to win the primary election itself is quite a bit higher. In 2008, in a primary that wasn't hotly contested, Democratic Senate candidate John Kerry won the election with 335,923 votes out of 487,396 total votes cast. By comparison, in the 2009 special election, Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley received 310,227 votes out of 664,195 total votes cast in the Democratic primary.

The ultimately victorious Republican candidate, Scott Brown, won the Republican primary with only 145,465 votes out of 162,706 votes cast. (Once he got on the general election ballot, the donations and voter mobilization assistance he received from Tea Party funders and supporters, combined with the financial contributions he received from banks and financial institutions, enabled him to garner 1,168,178 votes, against 1,060,861 votes cast for his Democratic opponent Coakley in a state that has long been a traditional Democratic strong-hold.)

In view of the 2009 primary results in the Brown-Coakley race, in order for the voting bloc to persuade Warren to get behind the bloc’s agenda, or create a joint agenda, it would have to provide convincing evidence that it could mobilize upwards of 350,000 votes in a 2012 primary, or an average of 35,000 per Congressional District. (If more candidates enter the race, the number of votes the voting bloc needs drops, but it will still have to surpass the total garnered by any other candidate.) This 350,000 figure looks realistic considering that there'll probably be at least 3 or 4 candidates in the Democratic race. Announced, potential, and declined candidates include Martha Coakley, the 2010 Democratic candidate, who appears disinclined to run, with likely contenders including Mike Capuano, Joseph Patrick Kennedy III, Stephen Lynch, and Ed Markey. Three of them are in Congress now and are all very well-known. But the question remains whether an IVCS-enabled voting bloc could deliver 350,000 Democratic primary votes, and whether a candidate like Warren would be sufficiently convinced that it can deliver to commit to a voting bloc's policy agenda and run on it.

This is where a new, emerging political constituency, comprised of young Millennial voters, combined with the collective action power of the Internet, and the political crowdsourcing capabilities of IVCS, can create decisive levers for an insurgent candidate like Warren running an uphill race against major party regulars. Research on the 2008 presidential election demonstrates the margin of victory that Millennials can provide in a tightly divided race, and the effectiveness of web-based social networks in mobilizing them to become actively involved in these races.

Post-election surveys show that upwards of 125,000,000 Americans conducted their political activities during the 2008 presidential election over the Internet -- almost as many people as voted in the election itself. Barack Obama’s victory in that election is credited to his campaign’s ability to use the crowdsourcing capacity of web-based social networks like Facebook and MySpace to recruit young Millennial voters born between 1980 and the early 2000s. He used his campaign’s Facebook and MySpace pages to increase his “fan” base, and then migrate his fans to his campaign website, where his political organizers had built a huge database of voter files with many different kinds of information on each voter.

They used these files and the data they contained to transmit a steady stream of personally-tailored messages to each supporter. These messages were aimed at enticing them not only to volunteer to hold events in their local communities, distribute flyers, and solicit cam paign contributions, but at constantly encouraging them to use their own personal social networks to recruit their friends, family, neighbors and co-workers to Obama’s campaign website. When it came time to get out the vote, the original database had swelled to nearly 13,000,000 voters with whom the campaign could communicate instantly via email and text messages to drive his voters to the polls. The outcome was that Millennials provided Obama 80% of his popular vote margin over McCain.

With IVCS, it is voters rather than candidates who will use the political crowdsourcing potential of web-based social networks to run winning campaigns they control on behalf of agendas they set and candidates they select. Better social networking tools than Obama’s campaign used to create his margin of victory will be available to Millennial members of IVCS-enabled voting blocs hosted on the IVCS website. It is quite likely that they will not work as actively for Obama in 2012 as they did in 2008, because his policies have given them, along with most of the American middle class, the proverbial royal screw, when it comes to jobs and prospects for their futures. In 2012, they'll be looking for new, non-establishment, non-special interest-backed candidates to support. Elizabeth Warren may well be one of them.

Given the ubiquity of Millennials, the largest generation of voters in history, who will comprise 25% of the electorate in 2012 and 40% of the electorate in 2020, and their well-established sophistication using the web to build individual personal social networks comprised of hundreds of friends, family and co-workers, a voting bloc supporting Warren should have little difficulty building a winning electoral base. Once unemployed and uninsured, Millennials will join forces with disaffected mainstream voters to formulate policy agendas for bettering the condition of the middle class and providing full employment. They will use their social networking finesse to build a powerful web-based political constituency that can easily decide both the primary and general elections in Warren’s favor.

She is likely to commit to its policy agenda and to join forces with voting bloc members to win the Massachusetts primary and general elections because together, they can create a transpartisan electoral base that can outmaneuver and outflank the declining electoral bases of the two major parties. She and her supporters within the bloc, and whatever electoral coalitions they create can use IVCS tools and databases to continuously hone their policy agenda, and expand their electoral base to counter the fiscally conservative, special interest-backed agendas that the two parties (and possibly the third major party in formation) will be trying to foist off on a hapless public, which would be without recourse were it not for IVCS.

The game-changing nature of IVCS will further provide a paradigm-shifting reference point and perspective not only for a voting bloc supporting Warren in Massachusetts; but also for other voting blocs in other states running insurgents against major party regulars. As IVCS-enabled voting blocs take the place of traditional political parties as the reference point for political activists as well as mainstream voters, they will engender viewpoints among their members that defy contemporary dogmas and reject traditional political discourse presented to them by the corporate-controlled mainstream media outlets.

As participation in IVCS-enabled voting blocs and coalitions becomes habitual and sustained, political propaganda disseminated by special interests will be dissected and rejected. Corporate political advertising will be critically evaluated by voting bloc members, especially since their advertising messages are by necessity and design very simplistic, while the dialogues, debates and internal communications inside voting blocs will be richer, more layered, and more textured. Typical political mailings will be laughed at. Attempts to divide and distract voters with sensationalism will be viewed as cynical attempts to manipulate the perceptions of voting bloc members. Even the debates among major candidates will be viewed through the reality-based conceptual lenses being developed continuously within the voting blocs. Debates by talking points and disingenuous counterpoints will be recognized for the kabuki they are. And when the post-debate spinmeisters appear to claim victory for their candidates, their views will be quickly dismissed.

In brief, IVCS, and the alternative social/political sphere it will create, will insulate voting bloc members from the special interest-controlled sphere of mass politics and mass political persuasion. The blocs will weaken the power and influence of special interests, and undermine the value of special interest-funded advertising and marketing activities that make it so expensive to run for office.

Remember that the reason why political advertising and marketing messages are effective now is because they are targeted at specific identity groups, and designed to divide the electorate into irreconcilable camps. But when conflict-fomenting marketing and advertising confront new political constituencies that can unite to set common transpartisan agendas and voter-controlled voting blocs with winning electoral bases not under the control of special interests, they will lose their fire power. Will the marketers and advertisers be able to adapt to this new dynamic and figure out how to manipulate it? I don't think so, because they won't be able to keep up with the speed and versatility of voting bloc learning processes, and the continuous adaptations of voting bloc agendas and strategies to emerging political realities.

In early 2012, Massachusetts Senate candidate prospect Elizabeth Warren, together with one or more IVCS-enabled voting blocs eager to support her candidacy, will have the opportunity to reach out to each other, assuming the IVCS website is fully up and running. Given the range of choices available in the IVCS Policy Options Database, and the possibility that voters and candidates can add new options to it, it is quite likely that they can negotiate a common, mutually acceptable policy agenda. Assuming that the voting bloc has put in place an effective strategy for attaining the voting strength that it will need to elect Warren in the primary election against Democratic opponents, and the general election against all other candidates, Warren and the bloc are likely to agree to jointly announce her candidacy.

At this point, the bloc can move quickly toward building the electoral base it will need to garner the approximately 35,000 votes on average it will need in each of the Massachusetts electoral districts to win the primary. Warren’s potential for success in the primary will depend, first and foremost, on what she does. If she works within the confines of the present political system, and declines to join forces with an IVCS voting bloc to use IVCS consensus-building tools to create her own constituency around collective transpartisan agenda-setting, while one of her competitors, say Mike Capuano, the Congressman from the Massachusetts 8th, decides to commit, then the primary campaign will be very hard for her to win.

Moving on to the general election, here Warren will probably need about 1.6 million votes, or an average of 160,000 per Congressional district to win the 2012 Senate race. This assumes that roughly 3 million to 3.2 million people will turn out. It is also worth bearing in mind that there may be a third party candidate running on the No Labels ticket who will be targeting so-called “centrist” voters who have defected from the Democratic and Republican parties, and who will receive substantial backing from fiscal conservatives who think that the political stalemate created by the unpopular Democratic and Republican parties is harming the nation’s ability to solve its pressing crises. In this case, the candidates running on the Republican and No Labels ticket will draw votes from a Democratic ticket led by Obama at the top.

So even if Elizabeth Warren wins the Massachusetts Democratic primary, registered Democratic party voters may continue to decline, so disaffected are they with party performance at all levels. Their defection is likely to prevent Warren from winning on the basis of Democratic voters alone. Given her track record in attempting to regulate predatory bankers and financial institutions, she will be at a great disadvantage in competing against candidates like Scott Brown who will be heavily financed by them. So she will not be able to win the general election with only Democratic votes or with traditional Democratic funders.

But she can turn this necessity into a virtue by working with the IVCS voting bloc to forge a transpartisan electoral base. Elizabeth Warren has been a champion of the middle class for some time, and a general election campaign spear-headed by an IVCS voting bloc would enable her to involve middle class voters across the political spectrum in crafting a transpartisan agenda that addresses their economic and financial distress.

Logistically, her IVCS voting bloc would go all out to use IVCS consensus-building tools to forge a winning electoral coalition and mobilize its voters to go to the polls to ensure that Warren wins the general election in 2012. Given overwhelming voter dissatisfaction with establishment incumbents candidates, which is likely to remain unchanged by election day, and the capability of IVCS to forge electoral coalitions whose members espouse the similar policy priorities, and who are motivated to work for the electoral coalition and those they support, I think it's very likely that an IVCS electoral coalition supporting Warren can deliver the 1.6 million votes that it will need to elect Warren and upset Scott Brown.

(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving and Fiscal Sustainability).

Brutal Bookends: Our Middle's Final Squeeze?

Sam Pizzigati — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 12:57:56 -0500

New governors in New York and California seem hell-bent on delivering a knockout blow to America's most historic social contribution, the mass middle class.

A bit over a half century ago, in the years right after World War II, the United States delivered up onto the global stage something the world had never before seen: a mass middle class.

For the first time ever, a majority of a major nation's people had “disposable income” — real money left over after paying for basic food and shelter.

Two states, New York and California, would serve as geographic bookends to this colossal achievement. The duo offered “ordinary people,” as historian Kevin Starr has chronicled, lives unimaginable anywhere else in the world.

Activist government made those lives possible. Government-subsidized loans raised new middle class suburbs from potato fields and sugar beet acres. Tax dollars funded new infrastructures in energy, water, roads, schools, and parks.

“California's children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller,” as Atlantic editor Benjamin Schwarz has noted. “A sweet, vivacious time.”

A time we may never see again. The two newly elected governors of New York and California, both Democrats, have essentially declared America's mass middle class ancient history.

Both governors, Andrew Cuomo in New York and Jerry Brown in California, are now pushing “a fundamental realignment” that goes beyond the budget cutbacks that have become a grim annual state capital routine all across the nation.

Both are attacking the foundational core of America’s middle class golden age, the notion that the public policies we choose, the public goods we provide, can create better lives for ordinary people. Instead, both are pushing their respective states to abandon those public goods — and coming down hard, with wage cuts and layoffs, on the public employees who provide them.

A half century ago, back in our middle class golden age, no public good meant more to Californians than their remarkable system of public higher education. Every California high school grad had access to free community college. High-achievers attended, at tiny tuition rates, some of the world's finest universities.

The governor who signed the 1960 law that created this magnificent higher ed network? Jerry Brown’s father Pat. Now today, under the budget plan son Jerry is avidly promoting, revenue from student fees will exceed the state government contribution to higher education — for the first time in California history.

Brown says he has no alternative.

“This is the world we live in,” Brown has pronounced. “You can’t manufacture money.”

But governments can raise revenue by taxing their most affluent. Back in America’s middle class golden age, that’s what governments did.

Brown is refusing to go down that road. He does want to continue a set of temporary tax hikes put in place before his election. But these hikes — 1 percent in sales tax, 0.5 percent for vehicle licenses, 0.25 percent across the board on the state income tax — all fall heavier on middle- than high-income Californians.

In New York, Andrew Cuomo isn’t willing to raise taxes on the rich at all. His rationale for that refusal?

“The working families of New York,” Cuomo says, “cannot afford tax increases.”

What does what working families can afford have to do with taxing the rich? Cuomo defines “working families” to include the wealthy. Explains Cuomo: “They work, too.” Indeed they do. But under current law New York's wealthy actually spend less of the income in state and local taxes than ordinary New Yorkers.

New Yorkers making between $33,000 and $95,000, analysts Chloe Tribich, Sunshine Ludder and Ron Deutsch pointed out last week, pay 11 percent of their incomes in state and local tax. New York’s richest 1 percent — taxpayers making over $633,000 — only see 7 percent of their incomes go to state and local taxes.

Decades ago, in the middle class golden age, New York’s wealthy faced a far heavier tax burden. In fact, since 1980, the top state tax rate on New York’s highest incomes has dropped by half.

So has the top federal tax rate, from 70 to 35 percent.

This shrunken federal tax rate on oversized incomes, observes Demos think tank senior fellow David Callahan, gives governors Cuomo and Brown a painless escape route out of the budget squeeze that now endangers their middle classes.

New York and California alone, notes Callahan, have more taxpayers making over $200,000 than all 22 states that John McCain carried in the 2008 Presidential election. These high-income taxpayers, under last month’s federal tax deal, will now enjoy at least another two years at the discount 35 percent top federal tax rate that George W. Bush shoved into place back in 2001.

Without this extension, the most affluent in California and New York would be paying federal taxes at a 39.6 percent rate. So why not, suggests Demos analyst Callahan, raise state tax rates — from 10.5 to 15 percent in California and from 8.97 percent to 13.5 percent in New York — to make up that difference?

High earners would then pay, with these higher state rates, about “the same overall tax rate they would have if the Bush tax cuts weren't extended.”

Don’t hold your breath. Neither Brown in California nor Cuomo in New York sees any reason to inconvenience the financially fortunate. We’re just “going to have to reduce government spending,” as New York’s Cuomo insists.

For the awesomely affluent, that makes sense. Rich people, after all, don’t use public schools and parks and libraries. To live the good life, they don’t need government spending much money on all these public goods.

Only the little people do.

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the online weekly on excess and inequality published by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies. Read the current issue or sign up to receive Too Much in your email inbox.

Obama's Payroll Tax Cut: Another Bailout for the Rich

Daniel Marans — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:32:10 -0500

We already know the proposed $120 billion payroll tax cut in President Obama's deal with the Republicans poses tremendous risks to Social Security. Now, an analysis done by Nancy Altman, Co-Director of Social Security Works, reveals that it is altogether bad policy. The payroll tax cut would provide far more to Wall Street bankers and members of Congress than poor and middle class workers, who need the help more and are more likely to stimulate the economy with the money they receive.

State and local workers who are not covered by Social Security, including policemen and firefighters, would receive nothing from the plan. Americans seeking employment would also see nothing from the payroll tax cut. By contrast, renewing the "Making Work Pay" tax credit would provide real stimulus to our ailing economy without the handouts for the rich--and all at half the cost of the payroll tax cut.

See below for the Strengthen Social Security Campaign's complete chart comparing the proposed payroll tax cut with the "Making Work Pay" tax credit, or click here: