How big corporations screw us and blame the little guy

[Spezialist]

90% of working families in hawaii are currently on assistance.
Some still call it paradise.

Sounds like cheap subsidized labour, right?

[glasseye]

Here's a quick peek under the Kimono at Walmart.
Three minute read. Maybe two if you're lanval.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20333 ... at-walmart

[Amskeptic]

Here's a quick peek under the Kimono at Walmart.
Three minute read. Maybe two if you're lanval.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20333 ... at-walmart

Is it not infuriating? Is it not a perfect picture of what some of us are railing against? Is there a worthy rejoinder to this state of affairs? Can you imagine the unspoken "reasons" that you just know corporate apologists will extend for why this current obscenity has to be so? Are we so stunned by our personal lives that we just passively accept this grotesque inequity?

I have reached the end of my rationalizations, and I cannot stand to hear the rationalizations of those who claim:
"it is a competitive retail market and WalMart has to compete to survive"
"WalMart workers have it good, people in Darfur would jump for a chance to work there"
"don't even think of leveling the playing field, the Walton family earned their billions"

I truly deeply believe that we can have an innovative capitalist economy that serves all of us.
This current greed is disgusting and there is no clean true explanation for it.
Colin
"it's the all the libtard regulations that have socked it to low-wage earners"

[glasseye]

I understand that in the everybody's-happy fifties, America's wealth disparity was among the lowest in the West. Now, it's among the highest. We've been hi-jacked.

There seems to be no answer to it. They hold all the cards now. They took 'em.

"For the first time ever, according to Forbes magazine, the 400 richest Americans have more than $2 trillion in combined wealth. And, a fifth of that amount is held by just 10 individuals. Of those top 10 richest Americans, six hail from two families—the Kochs and the Waltons—who are destroying our economy and corrupting our politics. We all should be outraged."

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20332 ... nd-waltons

[Lanval]

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Thomas Jefferson

Hearing Rush Limbaugh call the new Pope a "Marxist" shows just how evil the wealthy/elite of this nation have become. The oligarchs of this nation had best heed the lessons of history, ere they taste themselves the bitter fruits of their rapacious harvest.

[Amskeptic]

Hearing Rush Limbaugh call the new Pope a "Marxist" shows just how evil the wealthy/elite of this nation have become. The oligarchs of this nation had best heed the lessons of history, ere they taste themselves the bitter fruits of their rapacious harvest.

I am ready to declare them ignorant and self-centered . . .

Said the Pope . . . (I am impressed)

No to an economy of exclusion

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly home­less person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the sur­vival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of peo­ple find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “throw away” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “ex­ploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about great­er justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has devel­oped. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us some­thing new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

No to the new idolatry of money

One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idol­atry of money and the dictatorship of an imper­sonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: con­sumption.

While the earnings of a minority are grow­ing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ide­ologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Con­sequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from en­joying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide di­mensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of in­creased profits, whatever is fragile, like the envi­ronment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.

[Bleyseng]

Wow, that was well said. The "greed" that has gripped the USA since Reagan is astonishing as tax cuts, bank scandals, Wall Street scandals have come one after another. How is the Government supposed to pay for its bills when we keep cutting taxes (especially for the Rich) following the "Trickle Down" economic BS that has been shoved down our throats by the GOP? Free Markets? They are rigged by the Corporations with tax subsidies and cuts.

Yes, the Golden Idol of wealth is what we idolize above all else in the USA and its a shame to see how we are wasting this "Golden Age". Instead of creating a Country where everyone does benefit no matter who you are we have the mess we are in. The ACA is at least a step in the right direction of taking care of our own even if we have put a ring in the nose of every tea party member and drag them into the 21st Century.
Next is to change the tax laws so the rich are taxed more than 20% vs the employee's 39%.

[glasseye]

Iceland seems to have it figured out.

From the BBC:

"Frankly, there is no perfect answer as to why Iceland has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.

According to the 2011 Global Study on Homicide by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Iceland's homicide rate between 1999-2009 never went above 1.8 per 100,000 population on any given year.
Many people have firearms, yet gun crime is rare
On the other hand, the US had homicide rates between 5.0 and 5.8 per 100,000 population during that same stretch.

After visits with professors, government officials, lawyers, journalists and citizens, the pie-chart breakdown became clear - though admittedly, it is impossible to determine how much each factor contributes.

First - and arguably foremost - there is virtually no difference among upper, middle and lower classes in Iceland. And with that, tension between economic classes is non-existent, a rare occurrence for any country.

A study of the Icelandic class system done by a University of Missouri master's student found only 1.1% of participants identified themselves as upper class, while 1.5% saw themselves as lower class.

The remaining 97% identified themselves as upper-middle class, lower-middle class, or working class.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25201471

[Amskeptic]

Iceland seems to have it figured out.
1.1% of participants identified themselves as upper class, while 1.5% saw themselves as lower class.
The remaining 97% identified themselves as upper-middle class, lower-middle class, or working class.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25201471

I think we all know, intuitively, that no one human being is "worth more" than any other. But the game demands that we slap judgments like "hard-working" "smart" "responsible" upon those who have landed in the slop trough raking it in due to games and tricks.

We all know better, even as we sometimes don't admit it.

The game demands that we slap judgments like "lazy" "dependent" "fraudulent" upon those who barely scrape by due to a rigged system.

We all know better, and in our discomfort, we yell senseless generalizations and over-emotional "beliefs" oftentimes adopted long-ago from those who used to hotly defend their lot in life on our young ears.

It will take force to unstick the status-quo. I hope it is gentle in its Truth while relentless in its mission.
Colin

[hippiewannabe]

Buried inside a Congressional Budget Office report this week was this nugget: when it comes to individual income taxes, the top 40 percent of wage earners in America pay 106 percent of the taxes. The bottom 40 percent...pay negative 9 percent.

You read that right. One group is paying more than 100 percent of individual income taxes, the other is paying less than zero.

"For most income groups, average federal tax rates in 2010 were near the lowest rates for the 1979-2010 period," reads the report. "The exception was households in the top 1 percent, whose average federal tax rate in 2010 was significantly above its low in the mid-1980s."

People who make more should pay more, Generally speaking. In America, they are. Yes, the rich (and almost rich) are getting richer. When it comes to individual income taxes, they're also covering the entire bill. And leaving a tip.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101264757

I empathize, Colin, honestly I do. But I have also seen enough through my volunteering at a soup kitchen, bailing out relatives and neighbors, and watching my children’s peers grow up, to have a healthy dose of cynicism. If you know how we can target our welfare spending to the noble, hard-working folks you have come to know in your travels, and deny it to the drug-addled scammers I have known, I’m all ears.

Success in life is highly correlated to coming from a stable, two parent family. Of course it is right to help families that have fallen on hard times or lost a spouse. I throw up my hands, however, when people refuse to recognize that the generosity has created an incentive to forgo marriage, and let taxpayers subsidize the creation of children by people that don’t have the ability to properly raise them. Scoff all you want that the “welfare queen” is a racist bogeyman, it is a simple fact that 70% of black children, and an ever increasing portion of all children, are born out of wedlock. No corporate meanie caused that, the perverse incentives of the welfare state did. Those children have very poor prospects in part because of government spending, but once they are here, they are held up as a victim of not enough of it.

It is the fault of no corporate executive that my son’s classmate, with the same life options open to him, chose to drive drunk, nearly kill three people, and incur the equivalent cost of a year’s worth of university for his choices. He has since recovered from his alcohol abuse, but spends his time hanging out and smoking pot. Another anecdote, I know, but a real data point that is replicated countless times.

The fact is, automation and global competition has rendered unskilled and semi-skilled labor not worth very much. It's not the fault of the rich, and it's not fault of the poor, it just is. The only thing for it is to raise the skills of the poor. I'm not saying we should totally adopt the South Korean and Singaporean models of rote learning and destiny-defining high school tests, but that model has increased their standards of living ten-fold since the '70s.



The problem of income inequality can not be fixed by taking money from the top, it can only be fixed by bringing up the skills of the bottom.

[glasseye]

Those skills the poor need: What skills?

[Amskeptic]

Buried inside a Congressional Budget Office report this week was this nugget: when it comes to individual income taxes, the top 40 percent of wage earners in America pay 106 percent of the taxes. The bottom 40 percent...pay negative 9 percent.

Yes, the rich (and almost rich) are getting richer. When it comes to individual income taxes, they're also covering the entire bill. And leaving a tip.

I am familiar with this. At the same time, I am familiar that when you add sales taxes and fees and food and shelter, the poor are getting socked. You do not serve the conversation with cherry-picked statistics that make it "seem" as though the poor poor rich are paying for everybody else's survival. Not when they are getting richer and richer. No, they are being subsidized. The rich are being subsidized by the labor and all of the precious time spent on the clock of other human beings trying to survive in this stacked system. In a truly moral universe, if the Walton family can't pay their employees a living wage, they sure as hell can't complain when their employees are on food stamps.

I empathize, Colin, honestly I do. But I have also seen enough to have a healthy dose of cynicism.
If you know how we can target our welfare spending to the noble, hard-working folks you have come to know in your travels, and deny it to the drug-addled scammers I have known, I’m all ears.

I throw up my hands when people refuse to recognize that the generosity has created an incentive to forgo marriage, and let taxpayers subsidize the creation of children by people that don’t have the ability to properly raise them. Scoff all you want that the “welfare queen” is a racist bogeyman, it is a simple fact that 70% of black children, and an ever increasing portion of all children, are born out of wedlock. No corporate meanie caused that, the perverse incentives of the welfare state did. Those children have very poor prospects in part because of government spending, but once they are here, they are held up as a victim of not enough of it.

It is a peculiarity of the capitalist to judge the proletariat as morally lacking. I am not "scoffing" that the welfare queen is a racist bogeyman, I am OUTRAGED that President Reagan made up that putrid filth! Scoff? Too small a word! It has no place in this conversation to denigrate ANY welfare recipients (who average 27 months on the rolls) until you answer why we are paying the entire welfare budget all over again to rich corporate plutocrats for tax-exemptions, exclusions, subsidies, that they surely do not need. Do not think I scoff. I want clean real answers.

It is the fault of no corporate executive that my son’s classmate, with the same life options open to him, chose to drive drunk, nearly kill three people, and incur the equivalent cost of a year’s worth of university for his choices. He has since recovered from his alcohol abuse, but spends his time hanging out and smoking pot. Another anecdote, I know, but a real data point that is replicated countless times.

What's with your anecdote in *this conversation*?? I raise your anecdote with my anecdote from two days ago , rich little Texan, Ethan Couch, Kid with All The Advantages, who got probation for killing four people and paralyzing one of his passengers in a drunk driving crash. Do you have any TRUE idea of who is running amok in this culture, or do you *assume* that under-privileged kids are all the example you'll ever need? Hanging out and smoking pot, how about $4,000,000.00 cocaine parties on Wall Street?

The fact is, automation and global competition has rendered unskilled and semi-skilled labor not worth very much. It's not the fault of the rich, and it's not fault of the poor, it just is.
The problem of income inequality can not be fixed by taking money from the top, it can only be fixed by bringing up the skills of the bottom.

As the pope said,
"Today the powerful feed upon the powerless. masses of peo­ple excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “ex­ploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about great­er justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has devel­oped.
Colin

[Amskeptic]

And Bill Moyers gave a speech at the Brennan Institute:

December 13, 2013

The Great American Class War - plutocracy versus democracy

exerpts

The Donor Class and Streams of Dark Money

The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.

We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.

that party would be the Democrats, a terribly disappointing bunch who vote primarily to burnish their re-election hopes whilst alleging fealty to our principles - Colin

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.

***********************************************************************************

The Unfinished Work of America

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter. He said:

“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses… Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.”

And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to “the great task remaining.” That “unfinished work,” as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.

[hippiewannabe]

I am familiar with this. At the same time, I am familiar that when you add sales taxes and fees and food and shelter, the poor are getting socked. You do not serve the conversation with cherry-picked statistics that make it "seem" as though the poor poor rich are paying for everybody else's survival. Not when they are getting richer and richer. No, they are being subsidized. The rich are being subsidized by the labor and all of the precious time spent on the clock of other human beings trying to survive in this stacked system. In a truly moral universe, if the Walton family can't pay their employees a living wage, they sure as hell can't complain when their employees are on food stamps.

Nah. Food and rent are exempt from sales tax. The greatest threat to the poor is obesity, but I don't have a problem giving the working poor supplemental help through food stamps.

Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.

You really want to scold me for cherry picking statistics? I'll call your Bill Moyers bullshit and raise you a Heritage Foundation story:

80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. In 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
92 percent of poor households have a microwave.
Nearly three-fourths have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.
Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite TV.

http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... ricas-poor

A significant milestone in the forming of my worldview occurred when I was holding my first baby in my arms, watching the news on TV. I was a graduate student, broke, and going further in debt by the week. I had been insensed because after watching a woman ahead of me in line at the store buy groceries with food stamps and drive off in a Mercedes, I had gone to in to see if I could get some assistance. I was told the non-citizen lady got the food stamps because her baby was born in the U.S., one car is exempt from calculating eligibility, and they can't track the cash that flows in from their family in the middle east. The man at the agency also told me I don't qualify, because even though I had a negative net worth, my second piece of shit car meant I had too much in assets.

Anyway, I'm watching the news, and on comes a report on the famine in Ethiopia. A women was holding her baby, just like I was holding mine. Except hers was dying, because her breasts had dried up from her own malnutrition and dehydration. She couldn't stop it from dying, and the reporter was ahead of the aid that might have saved it. It was then I realized I really had no problems in comparison. It increased my compassion for those truly in need, but also broadened my perspective on what really constituted poverty. Throughout most of human history, and across the world today, those we think of as poor in the USA today are fine. The conspiracy to keep them down comes from those who tell them they are victims, and they shouldn't bother trying to improve their position.

[Amskeptic]

when you add sales taxes and fees and food and shelter, the poor are getting socked.

Nah. Food and rent are exempt from sales tax.

That is an answer that deflects reality. Being exempt from sales tax doesn't make those expenses go away. I said, when you add sales taxes and fees<stop> AND food and shelter to the expenses of staying alive, the poor are getting socked! Nah???

You really want to scold me for cherry picking statistics? I'll call your Bill Moyers bullshit and raise you a Heritage Foundation story:

80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. In 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
92 percent of poor households have a microwave.
Nearly three-fourths have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.
Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite TV.

http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... ricas-poor

The above outranks Bill Moyers on what level? Moral integrity? Breadth of understanding? Inclusiveness? Fairness? Do we define quality of life by the above objects?
"Hey shut up that you have to work crazy hours and are excluded from company health care because we put you on 'temp hours', we have allowed air-conditioners to trickle down to your lazy asses." The fact of the matter is, fairness counts and people can easily discern that their TIME is owned by others who treat them with utter contempt and scorn, and they are nickled and dimed with fees and surcharges that people can do the math on how many hours of their precious time has to go towards paying. It is not fair that some Americans have to work two weeks each month to have a roof over their heads while others make more by lunch than they make in a year.

I know you say that these are the rules of the game, but the deepest demand of a moral foundation requires that the game provides a floor under which we all do not allow people to fall. But we do. People die due to lack of access to healthcare, and selling the damn truck and the air-conditioner and the microwave will not save them. There are so many poor people scrambling to pay the bills, get an education, get a job, but the rich say "get a job!" yet they outsource like crazy . . . it is dispiriting.

Throughout most of human history, and across the world today, those we think of as poor in the USA today are fine. The conspiracy to keep them down comes from those who tell them they are victims, and they shouldn't bother trying to improve their position.

Pshaw. There is no conspiracy "to keep them down" from those who empathize with their plight.
There is no conspiracy telling the poor to not bother to improve their position. Where do you get that?There is a conspiracy justifying that the rich have "earned" their millions and billions. It is called Congress.
Colin