Politics What is happening????

pan6467 · Jul 30, 2012

The sickest part is some of these banks used tax monies from their respective "home" countries to be bailed out just so they can continue to be tax havens for those who want to pay as little as possible in taxes and can afford to hide their money.
--- merged: Jul 23, 2012 at 7:30 PM ---
wait most of the GOP doesn't give a damn because they believe Obama and the Dems will have gay marriages out number "traditional" marriages, abortion clinics on every street corner and Obama turning us into a Muslim country that will piss off Jesus and God to the point where we will all be destroyed and go to Hell.

The GOP does this because they cannot run on the true economic and foreign issues our country faces today.

rogue49 · Jul 23, 2012

Greed

The explanation can't get any simpler than that.
"I've got mine, I want more. Who cares what I impact, unless it is me & mine."

pan6467 · Jul 23, 2012

rogue49 said: ↑

Greed

The explanation can't get any simpler than that.
"I've got mine, I want more. Who cares what I impact, unless it is me & mine."
Click to expand...

Sad but true, even Obama's job czar doesn't care anymore.... and by virtue of who appointed him, Obama himself doesn't give a shit. But until a friend just posted this on Facebook I didn't know about it. No mainstream press coverage, Hell, as far as I have heard not 1 of the Clear Channel/Faux news "reporters" have ever mentioned it. Then again, I don't pay much attention to them to care.

GE is Moving from Wisconsin.

Keep your eye on Waukesha, Wisconsin......Their biggest employer just moved out. General Electric is planning to move its 115-year-old X-ray division from Waukesha, Wis., to Beijing. In addition to moving the headquarters, the company will invest $2 billion in China and train more than 65 engineers and create six research centers.

This is the same GE that made $5.1 billion in the United States last year, but paid no taxes - the same company that employs more people overseas than it does in the United States.

So let me get this straight. President Obama appointed GE Chairman Jeff Immelt to head his commission on job creation (job czar). Immelt is supposed to help create jobs. I guess the President forgot to tell him in which country he was supposed to be creating those jobs. Thanks Jeff, you're a "real" American....give Barrack our Best! If this doesn't show you the total lack of leadership of this President, I don't know what does. Please pass this information to others and think about it before you buy a GE product.

For Snopes verification of this information, go to:snopes.com: General Electric China Move

GE did the same thing to Bridgeport, CT, about thirty years ago and the City hasn't yet recovered nor will it in another thirty years.

snopes.com: General Electric China Move

rogue49 · Jul 23, 2012

USA, USA, USA...

Basically, we need to get our shit together.
Track crime rise after this... (there will be less cops on the beat too, because of budget cuts)

US poverty on track to rise to highest since 1960s
By HOPE YEN | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.

Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.

Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.

Fritz says she grew up wealthy in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, but fortunes turned after her parents lost a significant amount of money in the housing bust. Stuck in a half-million dollar house, her parents began living off food stamps and Fritz's college money evaporated. She tried joining the Army but was injured during basic training.

Now she's living on disability, with an infant daughter and a boyfriend, Garrett Goudeseune, 25, who can't find work as a landscaper. They are struggling to pay their $650 rent on his unemployment checks and don't know how they would get by without the extra help as they hope for the job market to improve.

In an election year dominated by discussion of the middle class, Fritz's case highlights a dim reality for the growing group in poverty. Millions could fall through the cracks as government aid from unemployment insurance, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps diminishes.

"The issues aren't just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy," said Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.

He pointed to the recent recession but also longer-term changes in the economy such as globalization, automation, outsourcing, immigration, and less unionization that have pushed median household income lower. Even after strong economic growth in the 1990s, poverty never fell below a 1973 low of 11.1 percent. That low point came after President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, launched in 1964, that created Medicaid, Medicare and other social welfare programs.

"I'm reluctant to say that we've gone back to where we were in the 1960s. The programs we enacted make a big difference. The problem is that the tidal wave of low-wage jobs is dragging us down and the wage problem is not going to go away anytime soon," Edelman said.

Stacey Mazer of the National Association of State Budget Officers said states will be watching for poverty increases when figures are released in September as they make decisions about the Medicaid expansion. Most states generally assume poverty levels will hold mostly steady and they will hesitate if the findings show otherwise. "It's a constant tension in the budget," she said.

The predictions for 2011 are based on separate AP interviews, supplemented with research on suburban poverty from Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution and an analysis of federal spending by the Congressional Research Service and Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute.

The analysts' estimates suggest that some 47 million people in the U.S., or 1 in 6, were poor last year. An increase of one-tenth of a percentage point to 15.2 percent would tie the 1983 rate, the highest since 1965. The highest level on record was 22.4 percent in 1959, when the government began calculating poverty figures.

Poverty is closely tied to joblessness. While the unemployment rate improved from 9.6 percent in 2010 to 8.9 percent in 2011, the employment-population ratio remained largely unchanged, meaning many discouraged workers simply stopped looking for work. Food stamp rolls, another indicator of poverty, also grew.

Demographers also say:

—Poverty will remain above the pre-recession level of 12.5 percent for many more years. Several predicted that peak poverty levels — 15 percent to 16 percent — will last at least until 2014, due to expiring unemployment benefits, a jobless rate persistently above 6 percent and weak wage growth.

—Suburban poverty, already at a record level of 11.8 percent, will increase again in 2011.

—Part-time or underemployed workers, who saw a record 15 percent poverty in 2010, will rise to a new high.

—Poverty among people 65 and older will remain at historically low levels, buoyed by Social Security cash payments.

—Child poverty will increase from its 22 percent level in 2010.

Analysts also believe that the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 percent or less of the poverty level, will remain near its peak level of 6.7 percent.

"I've always been the guy who could find a job. Now I'm not," said Dale Szymanski, 56, a Teamsters Union forklift operator and convention hand who lives outside Las Vegas in Clark County. In a state where unemployment ranks highest in the nation, the Las Vegas suburbs have seen a particularly rapid increase in poverty from 9.7 percent in 2007 to 14.7 percent.

Szymanski, who moved from Wisconsin in 2000, said he used to make a decent living of more than $40,000 a year but now doesn't work enough hours to qualify for union health care. He changed apartments several months ago and sold his aging 2001 Chrysler Sebring in April to pay expenses.

"You keep thinking it's going to turn around. But I'm stuck," he said.

The 2010 poverty level was $22,314 for a family of four, and $11,139 for an individual, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income, before tax deductions. It excludes capital gains or accumulated wealth, such as home ownership, as well as noncash aid such as food stamps and tax credits, which were expanded substantially under President Barack Obama's stimulus package.

An additional 9 million people in 2010 would have been counted above the poverty line if food stamps and tax credits were taken into account.

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, believes the social safety net has worked and it is now time to cut back. He worries that advocates may use a rising poverty rate to justify additional spending on the poor, when in fact, he says, many live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.

A new census measure accounts for noncash aid, but that supplemental poverty figure isn't expected to be released until after the November election. Since that measure is relatively new, the official rate remains the best gauge of year-to-year changes in poverty dating back to 1959.

Few people advocate cuts in anti-poverty programs. Roughly 79 percent of Americans think the gap between rich and poor has grown in the past two decades, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/RNS Religion News survey from November 2011. The same poll found that about 67 percent oppose "cutting federal funding for social programs that help the poor" to help reduce the budget deficit.

Outside of Medicaid, federal spending on major low-income assistance programs such as food stamps, disability aid and tax credits have been mostly flat at roughly 1.5 percent of the gross domestic product from 1975 to the 1990s. Spending spiked higher to 2.3 percent of GDP after Obama's stimulus program in 2009 temporarily expanded unemployment insurance and tax credits for the poor.

The U.S. safety net may soon offer little comfort to people such as Jose Gorrin, 52, who lives in the western Miami suburb of Hialeah Gardens. Arriving from Cuba in 1980, he was able to earn a decent living as a plumber for years, providing for his children and ex-wife. But things turned sour in 2007 and in the past two years he has barely worked, surviving on the occasional odd job.

His unemployment aid has run out, and he's too young to draw Social Security.

Holding a paper bag of still-warm bread he'd just bought for lunch, Gorrin said he hasn't decided whom he'll vote for in November, expressing little confidence the presidential candidates can solve the nation's economic problems. "They all promise to help when they're candidates," Gorrin said, adding, "I hope things turn around. I already left Cuba. I don't know where else I can go."

___

Associated Press writers Kristen Wyatt in Lakewood, Colo., Ken Ritter and Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas, Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami and AP Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.

___

Online:

Census Bureau: Census Bureau Homepage

National Association of State Budget Officers: National Association of State Budget Officers | NASBO
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roachboy · Jul 23, 2012

it's not just about greed. that's a subjective attribute that lets institutions and the people who control them---and those who lobby them---all off the hook. greed is the sort of thing that, depending on your view of this fiction we call "human nature," that recurs in a more or less automatic way because people are just like that. the current, obscene state of inequality globally is a direct result of legal choices, which are the direct result of political choices, which are the direct result of convergences of a bankrupt, degenerate ideology (neo-liberalism) with big money lobbyists with intellectually backward people who still imagine nation-states are the horizons of something with a significant technological shift that's made it possible to hide VAST amounts of money in pretend companies or in legal black holes and let it sit there. law that protects secrecy on the part of banks and portfolio managers contribute to this--all the profit of the 50 biggest banks and to the detriment of everyone else.

this is a fundamental political problem for everything that neo-liberal capitalism has paid idiots to blather about for 40 years. not even the implosion of the derivatives market and accompanying devaluation of the housing bubble in the states--which repeated what happened in japan in the 90s and anticipated what's been happening in spain more recently--that triggered a problem of some magnitude across the whole of the global capitalist order that STILL none of the neo-liberal assholes who run the show have been able to think their way out of so mired are they in the backwater simple-mindedness of their degenerate ideological worldview--not even that has managed to convince any of these people to do anything--at all--about the vast amounts of cash that the system allows to be hidden away, amounts that are genuinely staggering to think on.

what does 21-30 trillion of anything look like?
it's unbelievable.

i just read the tax justice network report on the price of offshore linked above. even as the report is strange--like an endless introduction that skips the report and goes straight to conclusions---what's there is unbelievable, a stark and obvious example of systemic blindness, of wholesale capitulation of even the most basic responsibilities of states in the face of the interests of a vanishingly small percentage of extremely wealthy people.

read it for yourself. try to get your head around the amounts that are involved and to think about how on earth it was possible that this situation came into being. then remember the ideology that's been running the show in this fading empire for the past decades. then think about what it endorses, what it says is ethical, what that sense of ethics means socially and politically. but i digress.

rogue49 · Jul 24, 2012

Quite frankly, I think there is a serious imbalance of criminal vs. civil prosecution.

There are many cases and situation where there should be criminal action, not just civil.
Immense loss of money.
Obvious fraud
Neglect
Manipulation
and so on...

The financial, insurance, medical, commodity, etc...and so on...
The excess and abuse in all these industries some one should be criminally accountable,
NOT just civil...with a lack of admission and a relative slap on the wrist. (a 200 million fine may sound large, but not to a Billion annual profit company)

I'd say what the NCAA is doing to Penn State would be what is balanced.
If you do something THAT neglectful and manipulative with intent...then there should be severe terms.
Now if they'd just do something to the banks, etc.
Without bringing the system down at the same time. (ex. Arthur Anderson...this level of punishment is WAY too few for all the abuse at that level)

On the other side, there is too many criminal cases when they should be just civil.
This is typically the opposite, where the little guy with less legal help.
is crushed by established entities with huge lawyer pools...and overzealous prosecutors looking for "the win".

I'm sorry, perhaps we need to somehow go beyond the strictures of the Law.
And start looking at the impact and intent of the issue...and the equivalent nature of the scope & scale of the issue.

And get the prosecutors to stop looking at the politics.

Hmm...Lobbyists...tend to be Lawyers.
Prosecutors...Lawyers.
Lawyers...

I'm beinging to think of a lot of lawyer jokes...
Any lawyers out there want to suggest some improvements???

Baraka_Guru · Jul 24, 2012

roachboy said: ↑

what does 21-30 trillion of anything look like?
it's unbelievable.
Click to expand...

Another perspective at the low end of $21 trillion:

It's more than enough money to pay off the external debt of developing nations five times.

redux · Jul 24, 2012

rogue49 said: ↑

Quite frankly, I think there is a serious imbalance of criminal vs. civil prosecution.

There are many cases and situation where there should be criminal action, not just civil.
Immense loss of money.
Obvious fraud
Neglect
Manipulation
and so on...

The financial, insurance, medical, commodity, etc...and so on...
The excess and abuse in all these industries some one should be criminally accountable,
NOT just civil...with a lack of admission and a relative slap on the wrist. (a 200 million fine may sound large, but not to a Billion annual profit company)
Click to expand...

I agree with this, but I would also suggest that criminal prosecution of the banking/financial services is much more difficult since the repeal of Glass-Steagall -- many of the practices resulting from the now allowable crossover between commercial and investment banking are now legal. (at least that is my lay perspective)

And Obama's coziness with Wall Street (Geitner and friends in high places) certainly does not instill confidence that criminal actions are being aggressively pursued.

But, on the other hand, criminal indictments and prosecutions are up, for the most part.

Corporate Fraud
During FY 2011, cases pursued by the FBI resulted in 242 indictments/informations and 241 convictions of corporate criminals. Numerous cases are pending plea agreements and trials. During FY 2011, the FBI secured $2.4 billion in restitution orders and $16.1 million in fines from corporate criminals.

Securities and Commodities Fraud
As of the end of FY 2011, the FBI was investigating 1,846 cases of securities and commodities fraud and had recorded 520 indictments/informations and 394 convictions against this criminal threat. Additional notable accomplishments in FY 2011 include: $8.8 billion in restitution orders; $36 million in recoveries; $113 million in fines; and $751 million in forfeitures.

Health Care Fraud
Through FY 2011, 2,690 cases investigated by the FBI resulted in 1,676 informations/indictments and 736 convictions of HCF criminals. It should be noted that numerous cases are pending plea agreements and trials. The following notable statistical accomplishments are reflective in FY 2011 for HCF: $1.2 billion in restitutions; $1 billion in fines; $96 million in seizures; $320 million in civil restitution; and over $1 billion in civil settlements.

Mortgage Fraud
With elevated levels of mortgage fraud, the FBI has continued to dedicate significant resources to the threat. The FBI has increased the number of agents who investigate mortgage fraud cases from 120 special agents in FY 2007 to 325 special agents in FY 2011. FBI pending mortgage fraud cases have increased from 1,199 in FY 2007 to 2,691 in FY 2011, with a peak of 3,129 in FY 2010.

Financial Institution Fraud (indictments/prosecution down - these are the toughest to prove, given the repeal of Glass Steagall)
During FY 2011, cases pursued by the FBI resulted in 521 informations and indictments, and 429 convictions of FIF criminals. The following are notable statistical accomplishments in FY 2011 for FIF: $1.38 billion in restitutions; $116.3 million in fines; and seizures valued at $15.7 million.

FBI Financial Crimes Report
Click to expand...

In order to aggressively hold the banking/financial services industry accountable, the first order of business needs to be stricter laws and regulations.

I'm sorry, perhaps we need to somehow go beyond the strictures of the Law.
And start looking at the impact and intent of the issue...and the equivalent nature of the scope & scale of the issue.
Click to expand...

We dont need to go beyond the law, we need to strengthen the law.

rogue49 · Jul 25, 2012

I agree whole heartedly.
They need to bring back aspects of the Glass–Steagall Act.

There is a reason they enacted it back in 1933, to prevent abuse.
And the banks & financial industry have shown they still cannot be depended on to self-regulate...the damage done has been PROFOUND.

In addition, there needs to be a re-doubling of effort and re-enforcement of the Monopoly & Anti-Trust regulations and their intent.

Former Citigroup CEO Weill Says Banks Should Be Broken Up
By Donal Griffin - Jul 25, 2012

Sanford “Sandy” Weill, who ushered in the era of supermarket banks with the creation of Citigroup Inc. (C) before the financial crisis, said U.S. lenders should be broken up to protect taxpayers.

“What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking,” Weil, 79, said today in an interview on CNBC. “Have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail.”

Weill helped engineered the 1998 merger of Travelers Group Inc. and Citicorp, a deal that required the U.S. government to overturn the Glass-Steagall law that forced deposit-taking companies to be separate from riskier investment banks. The company became the biggest lender in the world before almost failing and taking a $45 billion taxpayer bailout.

“We can have size and scale but it doesn’t have to be connected to a deposit-taking institution,” Weill said. “Have banks be deposit-takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans.”

Weill held the positions of chairman and chief executive officer of New York-based Citigroup after the merger. He retains the title “chairman emeritus.”

Weill said he hasn’t spoken with Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit or JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s Jamie Dimon about breaking up the biggest U.S. banks. Dimon, 56, is a former protege of Weill’s and helped to build Travelers before the merger with Citicorp.

Jon Diat, a spokesman for Citigroup, declined to comment on Weill’s remarks.

Richard Parsons, who earlier this year ended a 16-year tenure on the board of Citigroup, said in April that the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall law made the business more complicated and ultimately helped cause the financial crisis.

Former Citicorp CEO John Reed apologized in 2009 for his role in building Citigroup and said banks that big should be divided into separate parts.

Weill said today he altered his view about the industry because “the world changes.” He has been thinking about it a lot over the last year, he said.

“The world we live in now is not the world we lived in 10 years ago,” Weill said. “Good things are simple.”

Former President Bill Clinton said when he signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall that it was “no longer appropriate” for the economy.

“The world is very different,” Clinton said at a White House signing ceremony.
Click to expand...

Baraka_Guru · Jul 31, 2012

How's this for juxtaposition in asking the question "What is happening?"

Federal tax rates hit 30-year low in 2009 - chicagotribune.com

US poverty on track to reach 46-year high; suburbs, underemployed workers, children hit hard - The Washington Post

I can tell you what isn't happening: trickle-down economics.

Romney wants to do the following: reduce marginal tax rates, weaken unions, and repeal PPACA. Who is this going to help?

Is anyone going to help?

Obama, Romney and the media are all lying [in the tax debate].

[...]

[This] supposedly monumental debate isn’t over whether to punish or further enrich households in the top 1 percent — both proposals do the latter. Instead, this is a minute dispute over whether the tax code should give each of those households the equivalent salary of one butler (Obama’s plan) or three butlers (Romney’s plan). For every other income group, the two proposals are identical.
Click to expand...

2012 Elections - Salon.com

rogue49 · Aug 1, 2012

And now....PERHAPS, we may get criminal prosecution,
for criminal action...

Banks - The New Mafia??

HSBC’s misdeeds require prosecution, not a settlement
By: Jack Blum
July 31, 2012 09:28 PM EDT

After reading the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee report, I am convinced that HSBC should be criminally prosecuted. So should its responsible officers and board members.

The report and follow-up hearings have shown that the bank has knowingly violated many criminal laws. Individuals convicted of similar violations are now in jail — with sentences of up to 40 years. The only case that comes close to matching the range of crimes that HSBC committed is the Bank of Credit and Commerce International — the “bank of crooks and criminals,” which I investigated back in the late 1980s. It was closed and its leadership was prosecuted. HSBC deserves the same treatment.

The Justice Department is now reportedly negotiating a deferred prosecution agreement with the bank. HSBC might have to pay a $1 billion fine, according to some news reports and promise not to violate the law again.

For HSBC, given the size of its profits, the length of time over which it broke the law and the seriousness of the offenses, a billion-dollar settlement is like a parking ticket. One 20th of one year’s profits as a fine for 10 years of flagrant criminal behavior makes no sense.

The bankers who went along with the crimes should also be charged. They were clear in their directions to underlings — get a 15 percent return on equity and disregard the law if you have to. They fired compliance officers who tried to do their job. They fired employees who raised questions and who complained about lack of resources.

The corporate leadership must be charged — if only to protect the integrity of the compliance function. If compliance officers can be fired with impunity for doing their jobs, why have them?

Regulators and prosecutors have ignored the problem of mistreated compliance officers in past cases. Martin Woods, the Wachovia Bank compliance officer in London, was fired for bringing bulk money laundering for the Mexican cartels to management’s attention. When they failed to listen, he spoke to regulators.

No one at Wachovia was even reprimanded for firing him. HSBC must have been encouraged by that Wachovia outcome.

The list of HSBC crimes and violations includes:

• Bulk money laundering for the Mexican drug cartels;

• Selling traveler’s checks in bulk to Russian gangsters to help them launder money;

• Helping the governments of Iran, North Korea, Myanmar and others evade U.S. and U.N. sanctions;

• Offering customers products to help them evade taxes in the United States and in other countries;

• Offering banking services to “bearer share corporations,” in violation of U.S., European and Financial Action Task Force know-your-customer rules and recommendations;

• Firing compliance officers who have a statutory duty to report to the board when they believe there are problems to address.

In addition, HSBC is under investigation for rigging the Libor rate along with Barclays and other major banks.

Congress included a provision in the laws against money laundering that requires the government to revoke the banking license of firms that violate the law. Prosecutors have, in the past, danced away from prosecution because the Justice and Treasury departments have thought that law too draconian. Banks now expect that, no matter how bad their behavior, paying a fine and promising to be good will cover any misdeed.

We now have a long list of banks that have entered into deferred prosecution agreements. These clearly don’t provide the necessary deterrence. The stock market has clearly recognized their limited value. As the Senate hearing began, the HSBC share price rose on the London market. It was responding to the possibility of a deferred prosecution agreement.

In addition, there is the outrageous issue of the Treasury revolving door. HSBC hired Stuart Levey as a group managing director and chief legal officer. He had been Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. He was a senior official at the Justice Department just before this. Though there was a one-year gap between his leaving Treasury and his HSBC start date, the investigation was already under way when he was at Treasury. Levey should be barred from meeting with or discussing the case with anyone in the administration.

Americans have been asking why there have been virtually no prosecutions of banks or bankers in the wake of the financial crisis. We have all heard complaints about the difficulty of making the case and identifying responsible individuals. Here is a case that cries out for real prosecutorial action.

Jack Blum, a lawyer who specializes on issues of money laundering and financial crime, spent 14 years as a Senate investigator with the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He played a central role in the 1970s Lockheed Aircraft bribery investigation, which led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the investigation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. He is now chairman of Tax Justice Network USA.
Click to expand...

ASU2003 · Aug 1, 2012

Iran has the right idea for once. And of course Romney is afraid of this...

Iran Executes Bankers for Embezzlement, Earns New Respect Among Many Americans -- Don't Panic! Lighten Up! -- Sott.net

rogue49 · Aug 7, 2012

Money makes the World Go 'Round...
The US too...and never more than ever...
Fortunately, seems to be flowing everywhere, everyway...so it's M.A.D.
Nukes for EVERYONE! (lots of little green nukes)

Election 2012: The myth of the small donor
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
August 7, 2012 04:27 AM EDT

The Billion-Dollar Buy: About this series
Like never before, big dollars are having a big impact on politics and governance. This series examines how the new wide-open fundraising landscape will affect the 2012 campaigns.

See also: Inside Koch World | GOP groups plan record $1 billion blitz | Rove hits big: The birth of a mega-donor

Susan Daole last month gave $100 to President Barack Obama because she wanted to fight the flood of million-dollar checks supporting Mitt Romney.

“I think my contribution in its own way has just as much worth as the millions that some of the wealthy donors contribute,” said the 63-year-old librarian from Lexington, Ky. “And I’m really hoping that even my little bit makes a difference to get him elected again.”

Sorry, Susan. It would take 100,000 Susan Daoles — nearly all of the registered Democrats in Lexington — giving $100 apiece just to match the $10 million that billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife dropped into the super PAC boosting Romney on a single day in June.

(See also: Republican mega-donors | Democratic mega-donors)

Make no mistake, there is no shortage of Susan Daoles this year: Roughly 2.5 million people have kicked in $200 or less to the various committees helping their candidate win the White House.

But those 2.5 million people account for less than 18 percent of the total money haul.

By contrast, 2,100 donors giving $50,000 or more have contributed about $200 million to the Obama and Romney campaign committees, victory funds and their supportive super PACs. That’s far more than the $148 million all those 2.5 million small donors contributed through the end of June, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by POLITICO and the Campaign Finance Institute.

In other words: In an election purportedly being driven by the economic concerns of the middle class, the top 0.07 percent of donors are more valuable than the bottom 86 percent.

This isn’t true only at the extremes. Look across the full $830 million that those committees have raised, and the disparities are also stark: Just 14 percent of the donors account for 82 percent of the total take.

That’s not even the real cash this year.

Big, secret donations — raised by nonprofit groups that can take unlimited checks without revealing their donors — will account for the majority of the $1 billion that GOP-allied forces intend to spend on the 2012 election.

Almost none of the $400 million being steered into politics by the Koch brothers will ever be publicly detailed. Nor will most of the $300 million in spending planned by the Karl Rove-conceived Crossroads outfit. Democrats are also scrambling to raise unlimited cash, though they’ve had less success, with the pro-Obama Priorities USA Action super PAC and a linked secret-money nonprofit angling to raise $100 million.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

For more than a century, American campaign finance regulations were built around the premise that corporations, unions and rich people shouldn’t be able to use their bursting bank accounts to exert disproportionate sway on elections.

And at various points, the little people seemed to be the real power in presidential campaign finance, with Rove himself pioneering the use of direct mail and other techniques to build a massive small donor operation that helped power George W. Bush’s successful White House runs.

Four years ago, Obama used the Internet to raise an unprecedented amount of cash from small donors who helped him shatter fundraising records and led him to boast of ushering in “a new kind of politics.”

But the much-ballyhooed small donor revolution appears to be ending before it ever fully took hold. Instead, the explosion of big money is quickly diminishing one of the few avenues — outside of voting — for average folks to shape elections, help determine candidates’ viability and affect the course of the country.

Aline Kultgen, a retired teacher, from Columbia, Mo., is feeling the difference.

Kultgren, who gave $200 to Obama in 2008 and has given less to his reelection bid, said she was “not as excited as I was last time around.”

While, she said, “I still hope my contribution makes a difference,” she conceded, “I can’t compete with Koch and company. It’s a really bad sign of what’s happening to our democracy.”

It’s not like no one saw this coming. Bob Bauer, Obama’s campaign lawyer and campaign finance guru, in 2009 forecast a “spell of disillusionment” when he urged the Supreme Court not to allow unlimited corporate campaign ads. He said it would create “a widespread sense that the rules were changed, and corporate political power restored to commanding levels, just as the era of the small individual donor had begun.”

Bauer made that argument in the Citizens United case, and the court didn’t heed his warning. Instead, in the seminal 2010 ruling, it sided with the conservative advocacy group of that name and legalized unlimited corporate and union political ad spending. The ruling, which found restrictions on such spending unconstitutionally infringed upon the First Amendment, removed restrictions on anonymously funded nonprofit groups. Plus, it emboldened big donors, who got a new avenue for mega-checks when a subsequent lower court case paved the way for the creation of super PACs.

But Bauer’s most famous client had in role in this as well: In 2008, Obama opted out of the government program for the public financing of presidential campaigns, which had been set up during the Watergate era to avoid the very dollar-for-dollar arms-race mentality that defines running for president in the 21st century.

Now, when it comes to fundraising, it’s more cost effective for candidates and their allies to schmooze a few hundred rich folks than it is to cultivate a base of several hundred thousand activists through labor-intensive — and costly — online and direct-mail solicitations and phone banking.

“There is simply a better payoff by courting seven-figure donors than there was previously,” said Matt Schlapp, a former White House political director for George W. Bush, whose political operation combined aggressive outreach to small donors with cool perks for donors who collected big checks from rich friends and associates. “And that has caused finance consultants to rethink how they spend their time and how they put their projects together.”

Case in point: Obama needed just 60 people to pull in $2.4 million at a Manhattan fundraiser last month.

Small-donor fundraising yield can vary widely depending on time of year — it’s harder to raise money during the summer vacation months, for instance — and spike or fall at major events in the campaign like the Supreme Court’s “Obamacare” decision or debate stumbles.

Plus, it’s not cheap, involving major up-front investments in list maintenance, direct mail, phone banking and text messaging. Even the campaign-branded swag given to small donors adds up, with Romney’s campaign dropping about $1.4 million on promotional items and Obama’s spending at least $7.3 million on merchandise including high-fashion items produced by top designers, such as a Tory Burch tote, which sells for $75.

Even with all that, both Obama and Romney partisans tout their small donors, which they point to as evidence of their campaigns’ grass-roots support.

Romney’s campaign on Monday announced that in July donors who gave $250 or less provided more than 25 percent of the $101 million raised by the campaign, the Republican National Committee and the Romney Victory joint fund created by the campaign and the Republican National Campaign.

A Romney aide told POLITICO that the campaign committee through June had 495,000 donors who had given an average contribution of $280.99, while Obama’s campaign laid out a much more small-money-driven topline: 2.4 million donors with an average contribution of $55 each. In a Monday tweet the campaign announced that its average donation in July was $53.49.

“We are proud of the 2.4 million people who have supported this campaign financially, and we believe that a grass-roots organization is how we’re going to win,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told POLITICO last week. “This campaign has always been about the amount of people across the country who want to get involved at the grass-roots level, and always will be.”

And when it comes to small donors, Obama is still beating Romney hands down.

Obama’s campaign; the Obama Victory Fund, a joint committee set up by Obama and the Democratic National Committee, and the super PAC Priorities USA Action, through June raised about 26 percent of their $469 million haul from folks who gave $200 or less. That’s a slightly higher small-donor percentage than Obama’s campaign committees posted during his 2008 campaign in the pre-super PAC days, according to an analysis by the Campaign Finance Institute.

By comparison, Romney’s campaign committee, combined with Romney Victory and the pro-Romney Restore Our Future super PAC, through June had received only about 7 percent of their $362 million from donors who gave $200 or less.

Romney’s campaign in June boasted of “organically” raising $4.6 million from more than 47,000 online donations in the 24 hours after the Supreme Court upheld the core of Obama’s signature health care law. The haul demonstrated voters’ “renewed sense of energy to repeal and replace this bad law,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul asserted in an email.

The reality is, it’s impossible to verify the campaigns’ low-dollar claims since the FEC doesn’t require them to reveal details of donations that total less than $200. The analysis of small donors’ relative giving power in the 2012 race by POLITICO and the Campaign Finance Institute was based on calculations using FEC filings and figures provided by the campaign committees and the super PACs.

It also does not include the $132 million raised from donors who gave $200 or less to the Democratic National Committee and the RNC, which have cultivated expansive small donor bases over the years through permanent fundraising operations that focus on more than just presidential politics.

Even so, the story of the 2012 cycle so far has been big donors, and so far, Romney’s got a lot to crow about. He outraised Obama in each of the past three months on the strength of the bigger checks the joint committee was able to accept.

And that’s got Democrats worried. Fearing the overwhelming money advantage they enjoyed in the last election will be lost, Obama’s allies have launched a major effort to woo big-dollar Democrats.

It was only four years ago that Obama told rich Democrats not to give to outside groups supporting his campaign. Now, Obama has changed his tune, blessing Priorities USA Action and clearing top aides to raise money for it.

Top White House and campaign aides are expected to appear at a series of fundraising events for Priorities USA and other super PACs at next month’s Democratic convention called “Super-O-Rama,” for which operatives have asked comedian and Obama backer Sarah Silverman to record a video.

The Obama Victory Fund in March quietly increased the maximum donation it can accept, which was initially $35,400, to $75,800. The higher max — which is more than 15 times as large as the $5,000 top check campaign committees can accept — mirrors that of Romney Victory.

Since the change, the Obama Victory Fund has held a succession of glitzy small-group fundraisers for which it’s charged $40,000 or more per ticket, including last month’s fundraiser at New York City’s tony NoMad Hotel, and a planned birthday party fundraiser at the Obama’s Chicago home Aug. 12.

While such high-dollar fundraisers can be expensive — Obama’s campaign paid Jennifer Hudson and Herbie Hancock, $26,000 and $32,000, respectively, after they performed at a fundraiser pegged to Obama’s birthday last year — they also produce reliably big payoffs.

There’s an irony here: As Obama’s campaign has struggled to bring in new big donors, it has taken to raffling high-dollar perks, like a private lunch with Obama and a fundraiser with George Clooney, to people making small donations. The ask: as little as $3.

Veteran Democratic strategist Paul Begala,who is working for Priorities USA Action, said Democratic super PAC fundraising has been hindered by liberal discomfort with the impact of big checks on the political process.

“The super PACs have diluted the small donors,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons I think Democrats want to do away with them.”

Obama’s team recently began pushing its bundlers “to find new big donors,” said Don Peebles, a real estate developer who hosted a fundraiser last year at his Washington home that raised $1 million for the Obama Victory Fund.

“It takes a lot of $25 contributions to equal one $30,000 contribution,” said Peebles, a member of Obama’s national finance committee.

No one has to tell Frank VanderSloot that. He knows.

That’s why it made sense for Romney to focus on rustling up big checks early, said VanderSloot, his national finance co-chairman.

“The most efficient place to get dollars quickly seems to be the larger donors,” said VanderSloot, who has donated $1.1 million through his company to Restore Our Future and has raised between $2 million and $5 million for the Romney campaign, including at fundraisers at his Idaho ranch.

Still, he predicted in June that “the more educated people become and the more knowledgeable people become about Mitt Romney the man, I think the masses are going to get behind him with their money. … But I don’t think that’s where the focus is right now.”

For both campaigns, low-dollar fundraising provides a stream of cash they can continue tap clear through Election Day, as well as a base of volunteers and mini-bundlers. In 2008, for instance, more than 200,000 people who started as small donors to Obama made repeat donations, usually online, and eventually crossed the $200 threshold, according to CFI.

“All money does for you is allow you to buy the tools to mobilize your supporters. So if you can mobilize those supporters directly, why not do it?” asked CFI executive director Michael Malbin.

Schlapp, the former Bush political director, said a robust small-donor program can help get “folks mobilized to make phone calls and drop literature,” adding, “that can be more valuable than the dollars then they yield.”

Obama’s allies have even tried to turn Romney’s strength with big donors into a weakness, making boogeymen of major conservative givers, including VanderSloot and the Koch brothers.

In a Monday email asking supporters to help close the fundraising gap, the Obama campaign wrote “we’re up against billionaires and super PACs that are funneling unprecedented amounts of money to defeat President Obama in this election.” In a graphic, it pointed out that “188,679 grassroots donors with a $53 average gift = one Sheldon Adelson with a $10 million pledge.”

Hits on Romney’s wealth and that of supporters can risk further distancing big Democratic donors from Obama, cautioned Peebles, the Obama bundler.

“Those kinds of attacks on wealth and success are inflammatory,” he said, asserting they’re prompting Wall Street donors who supported Obama in 2008 to “look more aggressively and more actively at Republicans and at Romney.”

But that rhetoric is catnip to some small donors, such as Larry Stevens, a 74-year-old retired teacher from Stockton, Calif., who last month booted up his Mac and donated $500 to Obama’s reelection campaign.

“It really just pisses me off that the Koch brothers and the super PACs and Karl Rove and Crossroads are trying to buy this election with massive amounts of money,” he said. “We have to do what little we can to fight them back, and combined, collectively, maybe it will make a difference.”

Tarini Parti contributed to this report.

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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ASU2003 · Aug 8, 2012

Maybe once the big donors see how much of a waste of money it is this time around that an amendment to the constitution can be added to define voting rights and prevent some of the anonymous extremely large contributions, and to stop all of these silly Super-Pacs or 527 groups.

rogue49 · Aug 9, 2012

Don't anyone get me wrong...I'm a capitalist.
I love to make money, I admire those making money.

But...I want things to be productive,
not destructive.

I like nothing more than to see a great idea or great service...and have it take off and thrive. (Like Apple...or Microsoft...or Google...or even Waste Mgmt)

But I hate to see waste...or using a system to abuse a point.

There's two scenarios that play out often these days and have been refined...
The Leach - Buying a company to dive it into debt, to siphon profits all to investors over time...only to leave a husk to die. (bankrupt and walk away...)
The Vulture - Buying a company only for its assets, to divide and sell off until nothing is left.

Now...The Vulture I could see as useful...if not done to a relatively healthy company...but make something of a dead company.
But the Leach...well, that's just execs & investors taking advantage of the system.
They don't produce, they don't give, they don't attempt to grow...they just use, bleed dry...walk away. (Vampires...)

Now, I'm all for having a person get theirs,
but not at the cost of being productive.

I want a tool to be used as a tool
for as long as it lasts and is viable or a better tool is developed.
And I don't want one surviving beyond its use...just because of political interests.

But to buy & bust, just for the sake of it....there's just something wrong with the intent in that.

rogue49 · Aug 26, 2012

This article I found...seems to reflect some of the conversations I've been hearing lately.

I’m Right, You’re Wrong and Other Political Truths
By Ramesh Ponnuru - Aug 20, 2012

“The period which immediately precedes an election, and that during which the election is taking place, must always be considered as a national crisis. ... As the election draws near, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the populace increase; the citizens are divided into hostile camps, each of which assumes the name of its favorite candidate; the whole nation glows with feverish excitement.” -- Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America,” 1835

I can’t stand the people on your side. Not you, particularly. You’re fine. It’s your side that’s ruining everything great about this country.

Your side lies shamelessly. Your leaders just make things up. And you just follow them blindly, like sheep -- like blind sheep. You hang out with people who think just like you, and listen only to shows where you’ll hear your own views repeated. It’s an echo chamber of lies!

That’s how your side wins elections. It whips gullible people into a frenzy about supposed threats to their freedoms and livelihoods, and it deceives everyone else into thinking it’s more moderate than it really is. Once the election is over, though, your side starts pushing its extreme agenda behind the scenes.

Monstrous Crimes

When your side wins an election, you make out the president to be some sort of messenger from God. Nothing he does can be wrong. It doesn’t matter how big a hypocrite he is. He can campaign on bringing us together and then do nothing but divide us when he gets in -- but you don’t mind. When our side wins, on the other hand, the president has to be personally trashed and accused of the most monstrous crimes.

Your side stirs up hate against the people on my side. The horrible signs your people hold up at their protests, the venom your spokesmen spew on television: It’s scary. I wonder how you can go through life with all that anger inside you.

Your side is simplistic. You never stop and think things through. That’s how you end up with your ridiculously inconsistent positions on abortion and the death penalty. You even fight against legislation that would make your own life better! How crazy is that?

Honestly, I don’t know whether to be sorry for you or mad. Sometimes I wish we could just free you from these awful leaders and their dumb ideas. Sometimes I wish all the people on your side would just secede and form your own country.

I don’t know if your side even believes in democracy. Your people are willing to do whatever it takes to win. That’s all they care about. They don’t care about how much damage their incivility does to the tone of our national life. It makes me sad.

Your side is willing to exploit tragedies for political gain. When your side’s rhetoric leads to political violence, on the other hand, you start saying how we shouldn’t politicize senseless crimes. Awfully convenient, isn’t it?

Your side’s extremism just grows and grows. Back in the day, people on your side had some sensible views and were willing to work with people on my side. Now your side purges anyone who would dare to do that.

The people on your side constantly whine about how unfairly they are treated. You’re always stoking phony outrage against the political leaders you hate. They are shameless liars, you say. But why should we take demands for honesty seriously when they come from your side? Frankly, anything your side gets is justified payback for all the things you’ve done.

Overly Polite

I’m not saying that my side is perfect. Not at all. I complain about the people on my side all the time. They’re wimps. They’re too polite. They let your side get away with murder. And the press lets it happen, too. The people on my side always bring knives to the gunfight.

Maybe the most infuriating thing your side does is pretend that we’re morally equivalent. That’s not true: Your side is full of much worse people. I can’t even stand seeing them on television. No way could I ever watch that supposed news network of yours.

It’s nothing personal. I just hate people like you.

®2012 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Click to expand...

rogue49 · Sep 3, 2012

While many may say this is a projection of the "I've got mine" mentality that has come about.
I don't see this on the middle-class or lower-class valueset...theirs currently is more, "I'm surviving".

Perhaps it is dealing with a over-commitment on loans previously made,
or keeping employment in a more employer centric environ.
I don't even see it as much from higher-class individual...they have their issues too.

But it is more from the company comes first mentality from corporate management.
What is that, just a bit more...we can squeeze out of this...to get better expected profit margins in comparison to last year.
Not as much innovation...or R&D push...or management is risk-adverse, even to the point of not hiring fast enough for what they are supporting.

What can we do to get rid of more expensive employees...setup a scenario where we can have cheaper less-experienced staff.
And even then...have them do more with less.
While I understand...that this is business...and it has been going on for ages,
at the moment I think we're in an extreme swing of the "nickle & dime" mindset.

Customers are "fee'd" to death...to get as much out of them bit by bit.
Then support staff is whittled away, where "productivity" has gone overboard...and become UNproductive.
The question is ...when is Corporate management going to "get it"?

I mean...these are the same people who don't pay more or don't hire more even when they should...
then wonder why people aren't buying more than the basics.
(or getting every penny out of their billing...then wondering why people are bitching about their services)

When Capitalists Cared
By HEDRICK SMITH - September 2, 2012

IN the rancorous debate over how to get the sluggish economy moving, we have forgotten the wisdom of Henry Ford. In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day.

Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts.

This is not to suggest that Ford single-handedly created the American middle class. But he was one of the first business leaders to articulate what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth”: well-paid workers generating consumer demand that in turn promotes business expansion and hiring. Other executives bought his logic, and just as important, strong unions fought for rising pay and good benefits in contracts like the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between General Motors and the United Auto Workers.

Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today.

The chief executives of the long postwar boom believed that business success and workers’ well-being ran in tandem.

Frank W. Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, voiced the corporate mantra of “stakeholder capitalism”: the need to balance the interests of all the stakeholders in the corporate family. “The job of management,” he wrote, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups,” which he defined as “stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large.”

Earl S. Willis, a manager of employee benefits at General Electric, declared that “the employee who can plan his economic future with reasonable certainty is an employer’s most productive asset.”

From 1948 to 1973, the productivity of all nonfarm workers nearly doubled, as did average hourly compensation. But things changed dramatically starting in the late 1970s. Although productivity increased by 80.1 percent from 1973 to 2011, average wages rose only 4.2 percent and hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) rose only 10 percent over that time, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute.

At the same time, corporate profits were booming. In 2006, the year before the Great Recession began, corporate profits garnered the largest share of national income since 1942, while the share going to wages and salaries sank to the lowest level since 1929. In the recession’s aftermath, corporate profits have bounced back while middle-class incomes have stagnated.

Today the prevailing cut-to-the-bone business ethos means that a company like Caterpillar demands a wage freeze and lower health benefits from its workers, while posting record profits.

Globalization, including the rise of Asia, and technological innovation can’t explain all or even most of today’s gaping inequality; if they did, we would see in other advanced economies the same hyperconcentration of wealth and the same stagnation of middle-class wages as in the United States. But we don’t.

In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is “the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interests.”

In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors.

Today, we are all paying the price for this shift. As Ford recognized, if average Americans do not have secure jobs with steady and rising pay, the economy will be sluggish. Since the early 1990s, we have been mired three times in “jobless recoveries.” It’s time for America’s business elites to step beyond political rhetoric about protecting wealthy “job creators” and grasp Ford’s insight: Give the middle class a better share of the nation’s economic gains, and the economy will grow faster. Our history shows that.

Hedrick Smith, a former correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, is the author of “Who Stole the American Dream?”
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rogue49 · Sep 14, 2012

hmm...and another indicator...maybe those early 2000 bets the banks made were wrong...ya think??
of course, everyone buying into credit for everything was stupid too. (myself included...)
old truism is still true,
You Play, You Pay.

Rich-Poor Gap Widens to Most Since 1967 as Income Falls
By Catherine Dodge and Mike Dorning - Sep 12, 2012

A census report showing median household income fell last year puts a new focus on the biggest issue of the U.S. presidential election. And it’s likely to be deployed by both candidates to reinforce their campaign themes.

The U.S. Census Bureau figures released yesterday underscored the struggles of American families in a sputtering economic recovery. The report also showed the income gap between rich and poor people grew to the widest in more than 40 years in 2011 as the poverty rate remained at almost a two-decade high.

“Weirdly, I think you’re going to see both sides take these numbers and suggest it’s evidence why ‘I should be elected,’” said Steve Jarding, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a former Democratic political consultant.

Median household income dropped 1.5 percent last year to $50,054 -- the lowest level since 1995 when adjusted for inflation -- while the proportion of Americans living in poverty was 15 percent, little changed from 2010. The 46.2 million people in poverty remained at the highest number in the 53 years since the Census Bureau has been collecting that statistic.

The economic plight of Americans is at the center of November’s presidential election. Republican challenger Mitt Romney argues that people are worse off because of President Barack Obama’s economic policies. Obama counters that Romney would push plans benefiting the wealthiest at the expense of the middle class and those striving to escape poverty.

‘More Evidence’

“Romney is going to say, ‘This is more evidence Obama failed,’” Jarding said. “Obama is saying, ‘It’s guys like Romney who gave us these income drops and this poverty level.’”

Romney has stressed tax cuts for wealthy “job creators” as a way of boosting economic growth, while Obama has focused on maintaining government support for education, health care and other programs financed by tax increases on higher-income earners.

The president got some good news from the census report, which said the number of Americans who lack health insurance declined to 15.7 percent from 16.3 percent. Many people under the age of 26 took advantage of a provision in Obama’s 2010 health-care overhaul that allowed them to be covered under their parents’ plans.

About 540,000 more young people were insured in 2011, the bureau said. Nationwide, about 48.6 million people were uninsured last year, compared with 49.9 million a year earlier.

Sharpened Attacks

During the Democratic National convention earlier this month, the Obama campaign sharpened its criticism of Republican economic policies under former President George W. Bush as undermining the middle class and accused congressional Republicans of obstructing progress.

Those attacks are resonating with many voters. Americans blame Bush and Congress more than Obama for the decline in middle-class living standards over the past decade, according to a July 16-26 Pew Research Center poll. Among respondents who described themselves as middle class, 62 percent placed “a lot” of responsibility on Congress and 44 percent faulted Bush, compared with 34 percent who said Obama is culpable.

Within hours of the census data release, a posting on the White House’s official blog written by Obama spokeswoman Amy Brundage cited the figures as reason that Republicans in Congress “should act this month” to pass an Obama-backed jobs package they have opposed for a year.

‘Pro-Growth Agenda’

The Romney camp used the release to criticize the president. “Nearly one in six Americans are living in poverty, including a record number of women, and the middle class is struggling amid falling incomes, rising prices, and persistently high unemployment,” Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement. “Mitt Romney’s pro-growth agenda will revive our economy.”

Dan Schnur, a campaign adviser to Republican John McCain’s 2000 bid for the White House, said the impact on the election campaign is diminished, both because public perceptions of the economy are so well-entrenched and Obama’s campaign themes stress the contrast between the two parties’ economic principles over progress on the economy.

“If Obama had given a convention speech that tried to tell the country how well the economy was doing, a report like this one would have undercut that message very severely,” said Schnur, now director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “But numbers like this underscore what voters already know.”

Wealthiest Gain

The census data show the wealthiest Americans secured most of the benefits from the economic recovery that began in June 2009.

“The gains from economic growth in 2011 were quite unevenly shared as household income fell in the middle and rose at the top,” Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, said on a conference call with reporters.

Average incomes fell for the bottom 80 percent of earners and rose for the top 20 percent, highlighting the need for “those at the top to share” as the nation looks to reduce its budget deficit, Greenstein said.

The top 1 percent of households experienced about a 6 percent increase in income, said David Johnson, chief of the social, economic and housing division at the Census Bureau.

While the ranks of Americans in poverty were little changed in 2011, median household income last year was $50,054, down from an inflation-adjusted $50,831 in 2010. In 2011, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was 8.1 percent less than in 2007, the year before the recession began, and 8.9 percent below its peak in 1999.

Not Enough

The weighted-average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2011 was about $23,000, according to the census.

“Even though the recovery has been slow, the economy has been expanding,” said Melissa Boteach, who coordinates an effort to cut U.S. poverty in half in 10 years at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based research group with ties to the Obama administration. “The gains from the economic growth have not reached working families struggling at the bottom.”

U.S. unemployment, which hovered at or above 9 percent for most of 2011, has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, the longest stretch in monthly records going back to 1948. The increase in hardship comes as state and federal governments are cutting spending to close budget deficits.

Modest Expansion

The income figures declined as the U.S. economy expanded 1.8 percent in 2011, down from 2.4 percent in 2010. Growth has averaged a 1.9 percent annual rate through the first six months of this year.

The Census Bureau also reported that a measure of the gap between rich and poor households rose. A figure of zero means all income is evenly distributed while a 1 represents complete concentration. The measurement, known as the Gini index, rose to .463 from .456. The figure has risen steadily from its 1968 low of .351.

The persistent poverty rates pose a threat to the nation’s long-term economic competitiveness as more and more children are growing up in poor households, Boteach said. Down the road, that leads to higher health-care costs, lower educational levels and reduced worker productivity.

“We’re really shooting ourselves in the foot if we don’t tackle early childhood poverty,” she said.

®2012 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Click to expand...

Baraka_Guru · Sep 15, 2012

rogue49 said: ↑

hmm...and another indicator...maybe those early 2000 bets the banks made were wrong...ya think??
of course, everyone buying into credit for everything was stupid too. (myself included...)
old truism is still true,
You Play, You Pay.
Click to expand...

I haven't looked that closely at the data, but at first glance it seems that post-recession it was literally a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer (rather than the rich getting wealthier at a much faster rate than the poor).

The sad thing is you get angry people who lost much in the recession wanting a change, and they will possibly vote for Romney despite the fact that his policies may only exacerbate their situations.

Romney seems to want to go with voodoo economics on steroids: 1) tax cuts to the rich, and 2) program cuts to the poor. This ostensibly leading to more wealth "trickling down" from above and greater lack of wealth below ready to soak it up like a sponge.

Yeah, sure.

redux · Sep 17, 2012

A report released last Friday by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service really comes as no surprise.

Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Linked to Income Inequality... but do not spur economic growth.

Just in time for the year-end debate over extending the Bush tax cuts for high earners: a new report concludes that tax cuts for the rich don’t seem to be associated with economic growth.

The report, from the Congressional Research Service, finds that tax cuts for high earners can be linked to a different outcome: income inequality.

“The evidence does not suggest necessarily a relationship between tax policy with regard to the top tax rates and the size of the economic pie, but there may be a relationship to how the economic pie is sliced,” according to the CRS report, circulated on Friday.

The government researchers found that “the top tax rates do not necessarily have a demonstrably significant relationship with investment.” The researchers also said that the correlation between economic growth and the top tax rates “is not strong,” and that any links “could be coincidental or spurious because of changes to the U.S. economy over the past 65 years.”

What about arguments that “some income inequality is necessary to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship—the possibility of large rewards and high income are incentives to bear the risks?” The researchers note the argument, but say that the most statistically significant link is between income inequality and tax cuts on the rich.

“As the top tax rates are reduced, the share of income accruing to the top of the income distribution increases; that is, income disparities increase,” government researchers said.
Click to expand...

Repeat.

There is no evidence to suggest that tax cuts for the wealthy stimulate savings, investment, or economic growth but do contribute to growing income inequality.

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