OCCUPY WALL STREET

[Cin]

Published on Friday, December 23, 2011 by On the Commons

Occupy Giving: Why Do the 1% Give Less Than the Rest of Us?
by David Morris

This is the giving season and we Americans are prodigious givers. Nearly two thirds of us donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. More than a quarter of this giving will occur in December.

Those are the bare facts. But this year, when the stark divide between the 1% and the 99% has begun to inform our thinking and our approach, it might be instructive to examine the world of giving through that lens.

How The 1% Differs

Unsurprisingly, the 99% are much more generous than the 1%. Households earning less than $25,000 give away twice as much as richer households as a fraction of their income. The disparity is even greater given that many if not most of the 99% do not itemize their tax returns and therefore do not take a tax deduction for charitable contributions.

To discover what motivates giving Paul K, Piff, a PhD candidate in social psychology at University of California carried out a series of experiments. He discovered that people earning $15,000 or less are more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than those earning more than $150,000.

The 99% tend to give primarily to their church. Giving by the 1%, on the other hand, according to Judith Warner writing in the New York Times “was mostly directed to other causes—cultural institutions, for example, or their alma maters—which often came with the not-inconsequential payoff of enhancing the donor’s status among his or her peers.”

Indeed, empathy and compassion seem in short supply among the 1%. Piff comments, “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others”. Which, as Warner notes, affirms economist Frank Levy’s observation in his 1999 book about the new inequality—The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change. “The welfare state rests on enlightened self-interest in which people can look at beneficiaries and reasonable say, ‘There for the grace of God…’ As income differences widen, this statement rings less true.”

We should bear in mind that what is reported as charitable giving by the 1% significantly overstates the actual private sacrifice, as economist Uwe E. Reinhardt points out. If the wealthy donate $10,000 to charity and are in the combined 50% federal, state and local tax bracket then their effective sacrifice is $5,000 and society as a whole, without its advice and consent, subsidizes the rest.

Foundations and the Public Good

Much of the giving by the very wealthy is done through foundations. Foundations account for about 13% of all charitable giving, about $40 billion a year. Foundations may help the needy but they rarely advocate for them. “At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent,” opined Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation recently told the New York Times. “We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities.”

While most Foundations do not engage in campaigns to expand policies that extend a helping hand to our neighbors, a growing number are engaging in campaigns whose result may be the opposite. This movement may have begun in the early 1980s when William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford and principal in leveraged buyout and private equity firms and the President of the Olin Foundation joined with others to start the Philanthropy Roundtable.

In his 1978 book, A Time for Truth, Simon declared, “Most private funds … flow ceaselessly to the very institutions which are philosophically committed to the destruction of capitalism. … [T]he great corporations of America sustain the major universities, with no regard for the content of their teachings [and sustain] the major foundations, which nurture the most destructive egalitarian trends.”

The Philanthropy Roundtable was established to channel the contributions of the 1% in more self-serving directions.

In 2011 the Roundtable awarded the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership to Charles G. Koch. In 2008 Koch, or rather the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation entered into an agreement with Florida State University to provide millions for the school’s economics department. The catch, according to the St. Petersburg Times was that Koch would have the authority to approve who ultimately filled the positions. Moreover, the professors it approves must be hired with tenure and FSU must continue to support them for at least four years past the period in which Koch had promised funding

Just to be clear here. The public is subsidizing possibly to the tune of 50 percent charitable contributions to a public university that give control to a private person to hire professors who will teach what may be a required course that will educate the students about the evils of government.

In the last few years a growing number of billionaires have established their own private foundations. They receive an immediate tax deduction for the full value of their contribution even though the foundation is only required to give away 5% of that endowment each year. Which means that for every $1 million contributed, which can mean a $500,000 loss to the public sector, the foundation must give away only $50,000.

Moreover, the billionaire has the right to decide where that money is spent.

The Gates Foundation and Public Education

The most dramatic example to date may be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates endowed the Foundation, avoiding billions of dollars in taxes and now heads the Foundation and decides how it spends its money.

The Gates Foundation originally gave its money to school districts to encourage smaller schools that have a better track record at improving student performance. But, says Allan C. Golston, President of the Foundation’s U.S. program, “We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes. The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer”. In 2009 the Foundation gave almost $80 million for advocacy to influence the $600 billion various levels of government spend annually on education. In partnership with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walmart Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation has become the dominant player in writing the rules for the future of public education.

The New York Times has reported on how astonishingly comprehensive and influential these Foundations’ campaigns have been.

The 2009 stimulus package included $6 billion to help the public education system. The Gates Foundation and its partners swung into action to make sure it was spent “correctly”. They were helped by the fact that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff and Assistant Deputy Secretary came from the Gates Foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving door policy limiting involvement with former employers.

Gates financed the New Teacher Project to issue and influential report detailing the flaws in existing evaluation systems. The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers developed the standards and Achieve, Inc. a non-profit organization coordinated the writing of tests aligned with the standards, each with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. The Alliance for Excellent Education received half a million “to grow support for the common core standards initiative”. The Fordham Institute received a million to “review common core materials and develop supportive materials”.

And when the rules were issued and the competition began, the Gates Foundation offered $250,000 to help each state apply so long as the state agreed with the Foundations’ market oriented approach.

And to educate the general public, the Foundation spent $2 million on a campaign focused on the film Waiting for Superman that demonized teachers’ unions.

Most charter schools, the preferred solution for Gates, Broad and the Walmart family, are non-profits. But they see no reason why they need to remain non-profits. A 2009 guide book by the Philanthropy Roundtable noted, “many education reformers believe that EMOs (profit oriented management companies) hold real potential for revolutionizing public education. If investors in EMOs are able to deliver consistent student achievement and create a profitable investment vehicle, they will have discovered a highly attractive and sustainable model for charter schools specifically and public education generally.”

Today more than 700 public k-12 schools around the country are managed by for profit companies. In May, Ohio adopted legislation allowing for-profit-businesses to open their own taxpayer-financed charter schools, which led Bill Sims, head of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools to express his concern that this could “take the public out of public charter schools.”

In 2011 the Gates Foundation seems to have deepened its anti-government efforts, giving almost $400,000 to the conservatives’ legislative privatization network ALEC.

Warren Buffett is a major investor in the Gates Foundation. In 2011 he gave another $1.5 billion to the Foundation bringing the total to almost $10 billion so far.

Buffett is well known for writing and speaking about the unfairness of the tax system. He has signed on to an effort to force the 1% to pay a higher, not a lower tax rate than the 99%.

To date Buffett hasn’t been willing to give millions to underwrite a comprehensive campaign to convince legislators and the country to raise taxes on the rich. And the Gates Foundation hasn’t to my knowledge entertained the idea that it might spend $80 million on a campaign to increase the resources devoted to public education.

Eliminate the Charitable Giving Tax Deduction

In June 2010 Gates and Buffett launched The Giving Pledge, asking their wealthy compatriots to give away half or more of their wealth. Several dozen billionaires reportedly have signed on. Many will set up their own foundations and reap substantial tax benefits while retaining the right to decide where the money is invested. CPA Robert A. Green has estimated that this could result in $250 billion or more being diverted from the treasuries of state and federal governments.

We should eliminate the tax deduction for charities. The impact on giving will be modest while the savings to the public sector will be substantial.

A 2006 survey by the Bank of America found that over half of high-net-worth donors said their giving would stay the same, or even increase, if the tax deduction for charitable gifts fell to zero. The American Enterprise Institute notes “research shows that virtually no one is motivated meaningfully to give only because of our tax system.” Jack Shakely who ran the California Community Foundation for 25 years recently penned an Op Ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he noted that while the top tax bracket for individuals has plummeted from 70% in 1980 to 35% in 2003 (and according to the IRS the very rich are today taxed at an effective rate of 17 percent) charitable donations have remained almost constant, hovering between 1.7% and 1.95% of personal income per year.

This year governments may lose $50 billion or more because of tax deductions taken overwhelmingly by the rich for charitable givings intended primarily to enhance their status with their brethren or to attack the public sector. We can’t stop the rich from using their money for their own purposes (although we should certainly enact laws to stop them from unduly influencing legislation and elections). But we should not add insult to injury by giving them huge amounts of public sums to attack the public sector.

[Cin]

Published on Saturday, December 24, 2011 by The Irish Times
In the Year of the Protester, Bradley Manning is the Great Dissenter
by Davin O'Dwyer

PRESENT TENSE : IT HAS BEEN an extraordinary year, full of tragedy and tumult: there’s every chance that 2011 will rank with 1968 and 1945 as an era-defining 12 months.

Time magazine has nominated the “protester” as its person of the year, a decision that has generated plenty of ink, but, among the tsunamis and financial crises, it’s true that the act of protest has marked the year out as particularly noteworthy.

From Tahrir Square to Puerta del Sol to Zuccotti Park, people have gathered out of a desire for fairness and democracy, giving shape to world events in a way that few could have predicted on Christmas Eve 2010.

But there is one protester who has been somewhat omitted from the narrative of 2011’s protests, a protester who has been behind bars since May 2010, and whose act of dissent stands equal to all those who sprung the Arab Spring: Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker of US military and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks.

Manning’s military hearing began eight days ago at Fort Meade, in Maryland, and the sense of inevitability around the charges of aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act makes this trial more about the rights and wrongs of whistleblowing than about determining whether he actually leaked that huge trove of classified information.
Full Article here:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/24-6

More on Manning
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_N...eing_Tortured/

[Cin]

Thud of the Jackboot
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama is signing into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in contempt of constitutional protections for its citizens, or constitutional restraints upon criminal behavior sanctioned by the state.

At least the DPRK doesn’t trumpet its status as the last best sanctuary of liberty. American politicians, starting with the president, do little else.

A couple of months ago came a mile marker in America’s steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic, with Obama’s assertion that he has the right as president to order secretly the assassination, without trial, of a US citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his betrayal in 2009 of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.

Now, after months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has now crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It’s snugged into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

The detention bill mandates – don’t glide too easily past that word - that all accused terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; this includes US citizens within the borders of the United States. Obama supporters have made strenuous efforts to suggest that US citizens are excluded from the bill’s provisions. Not so. “It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” says Senator Lindsay Graham, a big backer of the bill. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’” The bill’s co-sponsor, Democratic senator, cosponsor of the bill, Carl Levin says it was the White House itself that demanded that the infamous Section 1031 apply to American citizens.

Anyone familiar with this sort of “emergency” legislation knows that those drafting the statutes like to cast as wide a net as possible. In this instance the detention bill authorizes use of military force against anyone who “substantially supports” al-Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces”. Of course “associated forces” can mean anything. The bill’s language mentions “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”
 
This is exactly the sort of language that can be bent at will by any prosecutor. Protest too vigorously the assassination of US citizen Anwar al Awlaki by American forces in Yemen in October and one day it’s not fanciful to expect the thud of the military jackboot on your front step, or on that of any anti-war organizer, or any journalist whom some zealous military intelligence officer deems to be giving objective support to the forces of Evil and Darkness.

Since 1878 here in the US, the Posse Comitatus Act has limited the powers of local governments and law enforcement agencies from using federal military personnel to enforce the laws of the land. The detention bill renders the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter.

Governments, particularly those engaged in a Great War on Terror, like to make long lists of troublesome people to be sent to internment camps or dungeons in case of national emergency. Back in Reagan’s time, in the 1980s, Lt Col Oliver North, working out of the White House, was caught preparing just such a list. Reagan speedily distanced himself from North. Obama, the former lecturer on the US constitution, is brazenly signing this authorization for military internment camps.

There’s been quite a commotion over the detention bill. Civil liberties groups such as the ACLU have raised a stink. The New York Times has denounced it editorially as “a complete political cave-in”. Mindful that the votes of liberals can be useful, even vital in presidential elections, pro-Obama supporters of the bill claim that it doesn’t codify “indefinite detention.” But indeed it does. The bill explicitly authorizes “detention under the law of war until the end of hostilities.”

Will the bill hurt Obama? Probably not too much, if at all. Liberals are never very energetic in protecting constitutional rights. That’s more the province of libertarians and other wackos like Ron Paul actually prepared to draw lines in the sand in matters of principle.

Simultaneous to the looming shadow of indefinite internment by the military for naysayers, we have what appears to be immunity from prosecution for private military contractors retained by the US government, another extremely sinister development. Last Wednesday we ran here an important article on the matter from Laura Raymond of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The US military has been outsourcing war at a staggering rate. Even as the US military quits Iraq, thousands of private military contractors remain. Suppose they are accused of torture and other abuses including murder?

The Centre for Constitutional Rights is currently representing Iraqi civilians tortured in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq, seeking to hold accountable two private contractors for their violations of international, federal and state law. In Raymond’s words, “By the military’s own internal investigations, private military contractors from the US-based corporations L-3 Services and CACI International were involved in the war crimes and acts of torture that took place, which included rape, being forced to watch family members and others be raped, severe beatings, being hung in stress positions, being pulled across the floor by genitals, mock executions, and other incidents, many of which were documented by photographs. The cases – Al Shimari v. CACI and Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3 – aim to secure a day in court for the plaintiffs, none of whom were ever charged with any crimes.”

But the corporations involved are now arguing in court that they should be exempt from any investigation into the allegations against them because, among other reasons, the US government’s interests in executing wars would be at stake if corporate contractors can be sued. And Raymond reports that “they are also invoking a new, sweeping defense. The new rule is termed ‘battlefield preemption’ and aims to eliminate any civil lawsuits against contractors that take place on any ‘battlefield’.”

You’ve guessed it. As with “associated forces”, an elastic concept discussed above, in the Great War on Terror the entire world is a “battlefield”. So unless the CCR’s suit prevails, a ruling of a Fourth Circuit federal court panel will stand and private military contractors could be immune from any type of civil liability, even for war crimes, as long as it takes place on a “battlefield”.

Suppose now we take the new powers of the military in domestic law enforcement, as defined in the detention act, and anticipate the inevitable, that the military delegates these powers to private military contractors. CACI International or a company owned by, say Goldman Sachs, could enjoy delegated powers to arrest any US citizen here within the borders of the USA, “who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces,” torture them to death and then claim “battlefield preemption”.

Don’t laugh.

On this issue of the “privatization” T.P.Wilkinson has a brilliant essay in our latest newsletter on “corporate nihilism and the roots of war”. Wilkinson starts with a critique of the familiar argument that a return to the draft would bring America’s wars home to the citizenry and the prospect of their children being sent off to possible mutilation by IEDs or death would spark resistance. Wilkinson suggests that this underestimates the saturation of our society by militarism. He goes on:

“But does the new warfare even need the large battalions of expendable troops? Just as financial “engineering” has replaced industrial production as a means of wealth extraction, remote-control weapons deployment and mercenary subcontracting have largely replaced the mass armies that characterized U.S. and U.K. warfare in Korea and Vietnam. In this sense, warfare has become even more “corporate.” The fiction that wars of invasion and conquest are the result of state action is obsolete. The entire “national security” process has been fully depoliticized; in other words, the state is more clearly than ever a mere conduit for policies and practices whose origin and essential characteristics are those of boardroom strategic planning and marketing. The difference between global business and global warfare has, in fact, dissolved.

“This presents a serious cognitive problem for anyone trying to find the root of this poisonous plant in order to tear it from the ground that nurtures it. The military sustained by the draft was mimetic of the steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or the cotton plantation in the south? Today’s military operates like the headquarters of Microsoft or USX – the actual physical violence has been outsourced.”
Article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/...-the-jackboot/

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

Thud of the Jackboot
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama is signing into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in contempt of constitutional protections for its citizens, or constitutional restraints upon criminal behavior sanctioned by the state.

At least the DPRK doesn’t trumpet its status as the last best sanctuary of liberty. American politicians, starting with the president, do little else.

A couple of months ago came a mile marker in America’s steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic, with Obama’s assertion that he has the right as president to order secretly the assassination, without trial, of a US citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his betrayal in 2009 of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.

Now, after months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has now crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It’s snugged into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

The detention bill mandates – don’t glide too easily past that word - that all accused terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; this includes US citizens within the borders of the United States. Obama supporters have made strenuous efforts to suggest that US citizens are excluded from the bill’s provisions. Not so. “It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” says Senator Lindsay Graham, a big backer of the bill. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’” The bill’s co-sponsor, Democratic senator, cosponsor of the bill, Carl Levin says it was the White House itself that demanded that the infamous Section 1031 apply to American citizens.

Anyone familiar with this sort of “emergency” legislation knows that those drafting the statutes like to cast as wide a net as possible. In this instance the detention bill authorizes use of military force against anyone who “substantially supports” al-Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces”. Of course “associated forces” can mean anything. The bill’s language mentions “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”
 
This is exactly the sort of language that can be bent at will by any prosecutor. Protest too vigorously the assassination of US citizen Anwar al Awlaki by American forces in Yemen in October and one day it’s not fanciful to expect the thud of the military jackboot on your front step, or on that of any anti-war organizer, or any journalist whom some zealous military intelligence officer deems to be giving objective support to the forces of Evil and Darkness.

Since 1878 here in the US, the Posse Comitatus Act has limited the powers of local governments and law enforcement agencies from using federal military personnel to enforce the laws of the land. The detention bill renders the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter.

Governments, particularly those engaged in a Great War on Terror, like to make long lists of troublesome people to be sent to internment camps or dungeons in case of national emergency. Back in Reagan’s time, in the 1980s, Lt Col Oliver North, working out of the White House, was caught preparing just such a list. Reagan speedily distanced himself from North. Obama, the former lecturer on the US constitution, is brazenly signing this authorization for military internment camps.

There’s been quite a commotion over the detention bill. Civil liberties groups such as the ACLU have raised a stink. The New York Times has denounced it editorially as “a complete political cave-in”. Mindful that the votes of liberals can be useful, even vital in presidential elections, pro-Obama supporters of the bill claim that it doesn’t codify “indefinite detention.” But indeed it does. The bill explicitly authorizes “detention under the law of war until the end of hostilities.”

Will the bill hurt Obama? Probably not too much, if at all. Liberals are never very energetic in protecting constitutional rights. That’s more the province of libertarians and other wackos like Ron Paul actually prepared to draw lines in the sand in matters of principle.

Simultaneous to the looming shadow of indefinite internment by the military for naysayers, we have what appears to be immunity from prosecution for private military contractors retained by the US government, another extremely sinister development. Last Wednesday we ran here an important article on the matter from Laura Raymond of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The US military has been outsourcing war at a staggering rate. Even as the US military quits Iraq, thousands of private military contractors remain. Suppose they are accused of torture and other abuses including murder?

The Centre for Constitutional Rights is currently representing Iraqi civilians tortured in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq, seeking to hold accountable two private contractors for their violations of international, federal and state law. In Raymond’s words, “By the military’s own internal investigations, private military contractors from the US-based corporations L-3 Services and CACI International were involved in the war crimes and acts of torture that took place, which included rape, being forced to watch family members and others be raped, severe beatings, being hung in stress positions, being pulled across the floor by genitals, mock executions, and other incidents, many of which were documented by photographs. The cases – Al Shimari v. CACI and Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3 – aim to secure a day in court for the plaintiffs, none of whom were ever charged with any crimes.”

But the corporations involved are now arguing in court that they should be exempt from any investigation into the allegations against them because, among other reasons, the US government’s interests in executing wars would be at stake if corporate contractors can be sued. And Raymond reports that “they are also invoking a new, sweeping defense. The new rule is termed ‘battlefield preemption’ and aims to eliminate any civil lawsuits against contractors that take place on any ‘battlefield’.”

You’ve guessed it. As with “associated forces”, an elastic concept discussed above, in the Great War on Terror the entire world is a “battlefield”. So unless the CCR’s suit prevails, a ruling of a Fourth Circuit federal court panel will stand and private military contractors could be immune from any type of civil liability, even for war crimes, as long as it takes place on a “battlefield”.

Suppose now we take the new powers of the military in domestic law enforcement, as defined in the detention act, and anticipate the inevitable, that the military delegates these powers to private military contractors. CACI International or a company owned by, say Goldman Sachs, could enjoy delegated powers to arrest any US citizen here within the borders of the USA, “who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces,” torture them to death and then claim “battlefield preemption”.

Don’t laugh.

On this issue of the “privatization” T.P.Wilkinson has a brilliant essay in our latest newsletter on “corporate nihilism and the roots of war”. Wilkinson starts with a critique of the familiar argument that a return to the draft would bring America’s wars home to the citizenry and the prospect of their children being sent off to possible mutilation by IEDs or death would spark resistance. Wilkinson suggests that this underestimates the saturation of our society by militarism. He goes on:

“But does the new warfare even need the large battalions of expendable troops? Just as financial “engineering” has replaced industrial production as a means of wealth extraction, remote-control weapons deployment and mercenary subcontracting have largely replaced the mass armies that characterized U.S. and U.K. warfare in Korea and Vietnam. In this sense, warfare has become even more “corporate.” The fiction that wars of invasion and conquest are the result of state action is obsolete. The entire “national security” process has been fully depoliticized; in other words, the state is more clearly than ever a mere conduit for policies and practices whose origin and essential characteristics are those of boardroom strategic planning and marketing. The difference between global business and global warfare has, in fact, dissolved.

“This presents a serious cognitive problem for anyone trying to find the root of this poisonous plant in order to tear it from the ground that nurtures it. The military sustained by the draft was mimetic of the steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or the cotton plantation in the south? Today’s military operates like the headquarters of Microsoft or USX – the actual physical violence has been outsourced.”
Article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/...-the-jackboot/

and what happens when these are the jobs that are available?

[SoNotHer]

[persiphone]

yep. i skipped walmart. i only got ONE thing at target.

[SoNotHer]

Is Target selling adult videos and sex kits now? ;-)

Originally Posted by persiphone

yep. i skipped walmart. i only got ONE thing at target.

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

Absolutely!

I have thought a lot about the fact that we all are going to have change some things in order to really support the working and middle classes economically. As long as we buy like crazy from big box and large chains that import from countries like China, we contribute to large, publically traded corporations.

Then, there are the arguments about stores like WalMart bringing jobs into locales. And major Japanese auto producers do now have plants in the US and employ US workers.

It is a very complex balance, I think. I buy at independent businesses, but I live in a place near a major urban center, so I have choices. And I have made choices about this due to political ideology. I do pay a little more for things due to choosing the Mom & Pop businesses, but I am not raising a child any longer and only financially responsible for myself.

I hate it that solar panels were designed and developed in the US and now are only produced in other countries and sold back to us. Even if you want these made in the USA, forget it.

We do live in a global economy and do some of our own exporting. But, at the helm of trade, multi-national corporations hold the power. Yet, we don't want to give up less expensive products that frankly are most likely made by people in other countries paid very low wages and work in conditions that are inhumane. But, we keep buying these goods because they cost us less.

Now, with the wage disparity in the US, I don't see us changing this much. People look for bargains, or at least a lower price because the 98% does not have much disposible income and it has been shrinking.

There are many variables to look at about how we consume goods and how we can actually change things without harm to one or more segments of the kinds of work we do and where we do it. Just not simple.

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by AtLast

Absolutely!

I have thought a lot about the fact that we all are going to have change some things in order to really support the working and middle classes economically. As long as we buy like crazy from big box and large chains that import from countries like China, we contribute to large, publically traded corporations.

Then, there are the arguments about stores like WalMart bringing jobs into locales. And major Japanese auto producers do now have plants in the US and employ US workers.

It is a very complex balance, I think. I buy at independent businesses, but I live in a place near a major urban center, so I have choices. And I have made choices about this due to political ideology. I do pay a little more for things due to choosing the Mom & Pop businesses, but I am not raising a child any longer and only financially responsible for myself.

I hate it that solar panels were designed and developed in the US and now are only produced in other countries and sold back to us. Even if you want these made in the USA, forget it.

We do live in a global economy and do some of our own exporting. But, at the helm of trade, multi-national corporations hold the power. Yet, we don't want to give up less expensive products that frankly are most likely made by people in other countries paid very low wages and work in conditions that are inhumane. But, we keep buying these goods because they cost us less.

Now, with the wage disparity in the US, I don't see us changing this much. People look for bargains, or at least a lower price because the 98% does not have much disposible income and it has been shrinking.

There are many variables to look at about how we consume goods and how we can actually change things without harm to one or more segments of the kinds of work we do and where we do it. Just not simple.

i've never had personal experience with this...BUT....i've known a few people who work in large companies where the old non chinese boss gets replaced with a new chinese boss and then the non chinese people under him/her get laid off and chinese workers are hired in their place. i've seen this happen quite a few times to friends of mine. i'm not sure what relevance this has if any i just thought it was interesting.

as for consumerism and chinese products....people have been ranting about buying American for decades now. but try actually doing it. it's near impossible. and the products on store shelves aren't the only things coming from China. for every one retail item there is ten times as many hidden products coming from China than the public is even aware of. Chinese honey (springs to mind from a different convo) comes here by the barrel full and it's not even legal. and we unwittingly buy it in plastic bears, cereals, and any processed food that claims to have honey in it because the labeling is all bullshit. we are drowning in much more Chinese imports than even we are aware of on the retail end.

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

Published on Saturday, December 24, 2011 by The Irish Times
In the Year of the Protester, Bradley Manning is the Great Dissenter
by Davin O'Dwyer

PRESENT TENSE : IT HAS BEEN an extraordinary year, full of tragedy and tumult: there’s every chance that 2011 will rank with 1968 and 1945 as an era-defining 12 months.

Time magazine has nominated the “protester” as its person of the year, a decision that has generated plenty of ink, but, among the tsunamis and financial crises, it’s true that the act of protest has marked the year out as particularly noteworthy.

From Tahrir Square to Puerta del Sol to Zuccotti Park, people have gathered out of a desire for fairness and democracy, giving shape to world events in a way that few could have predicted on Christmas Eve 2010.

But there is one protester who has been somewhat omitted from the narrative of 2011’s protests, a protester who has been behind bars since May 2010, and whose act of dissent stands equal to all those who sprung the Arab Spring: Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker of US military and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks.

Manning’s military hearing began eight days ago at Fort Meade, in Maryland, and the sense of inevitability around the charges of aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act makes this trial more about the rights and wrongs of whistleblowing than about determining whether he actually leaked that huge trove of classified information.
Full Article here:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/24-6

More on Manning
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_N...eing_Tortured/

Bradley Manning came to mind when the first stirring of the National Defense Act thingy that encompasses all US citizens into the anti-terror threat started. i thought....hell hasn't it already happened to Bradley? christ.

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

Published on Friday, December 23, 2011 by On the Commons

Occupy Giving: Why Do the 1% Give Less Than the Rest of Us?
by David Morris

This is the giving season and we Americans are prodigious givers. Nearly two thirds of us donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. More than a quarter of this giving will occur in December.

Those are the bare facts. But this year, when the stark divide between the 1% and the 99% has begun to inform our thinking and our approach, it might be instructive to examine the world of giving through that lens.

How The 1% Differs

Unsurprisingly, the 99% are much more generous than the 1%. Households earning less than $25,000 give away twice as much as richer households as a fraction of their income. The disparity is even greater given that many if not most of the 99% do not itemize their tax returns and therefore do not take a tax deduction for charitable contributions.

To discover what motivates giving Paul K, Piff, a PhD candidate in social psychology at University of California carried out a series of experiments. He discovered that people earning $15,000 or less are more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than those earning more than $150,000.

The 99% tend to give primarily to their church. Giving by the 1%, on the other hand, according to Judith Warner writing in the New York Times “was mostly directed to other causes—cultural institutions, for example, or their alma maters—which often came with the not-inconsequential payoff of enhancing the donor’s status among his or her peers.”

Indeed, empathy and compassion seem in short supply among the 1%. Piff comments, “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others”. Which, as Warner notes, affirms economist Frank Levy’s observation in his 1999 book about the new inequality—The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change. “The welfare state rests on enlightened self-interest in which people can look at beneficiaries and reasonable say, ‘There for the grace of God…’ As income differences widen, this statement rings less true.”

We should bear in mind that what is reported as charitable giving by the 1% significantly overstates the actual private sacrifice, as economist Uwe E. Reinhardt points out. If the wealthy donate $10,000 to charity and are in the combined 50% federal, state and local tax bracket then their effective sacrifice is $5,000 and society as a whole, without its advice and consent, subsidizes the rest.

Foundations and the Public Good

Much of the giving by the very wealthy is done through foundations. Foundations account for about 13% of all charitable giving, about $40 billion a year. Foundations may help the needy but they rarely advocate for them. “At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent,” opined Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation recently told the New York Times. “We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities.”

While most Foundations do not engage in campaigns to expand policies that extend a helping hand to our neighbors, a growing number are engaging in campaigns whose result may be the opposite. This movement may have begun in the early 1980s when William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford and principal in leveraged buyout and private equity firms and the President of the Olin Foundation joined with others to start the Philanthropy Roundtable.

In his 1978 book, A Time for Truth, Simon declared, “Most private funds … flow ceaselessly to the very institutions which are philosophically committed to the destruction of capitalism. … [T]he great corporations of America sustain the major universities, with no regard for the content of their teachings [and sustain] the major foundations, which nurture the most destructive egalitarian trends.”

The Philanthropy Roundtable was established to channel the contributions of the 1% in more self-serving directions.

In 2011 the Roundtable awarded the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership to Charles G. Koch. In 2008 Koch, or rather the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation entered into an agreement with Florida State University to provide millions for the school’s economics department. The catch, according to the St. Petersburg Times was that Koch would have the authority to approve who ultimately filled the positions. Moreover, the professors it approves must be hired with tenure and FSU must continue to support them for at least four years past the period in which Koch had promised funding

Just to be clear here. The public is subsidizing possibly to the tune of 50 percent charitable contributions to a public university that give control to a private person to hire professors who will teach what may be a required course that will educate the students about the evils of government.

In the last few years a growing number of billionaires have established their own private foundations. They receive an immediate tax deduction for the full value of their contribution even though the foundation is only required to give away 5% of that endowment each year. Which means that for every $1 million contributed, which can mean a $500,000 loss to the public sector, the foundation must give away only $50,000.

Moreover, the billionaire has the right to decide where that money is spent.

The Gates Foundation and Public Education

The most dramatic example to date may be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates endowed the Foundation, avoiding billions of dollars in taxes and now heads the Foundation and decides how it spends its money.

The Gates Foundation originally gave its money to school districts to encourage smaller schools that have a better track record at improving student performance. But, says Allan C. Golston, President of the Foundation’s U.S. program, “We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes. The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer”. In 2009 the Foundation gave almost $80 million for advocacy to influence the $600 billion various levels of government spend annually on education. In partnership with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walmart Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation has become the dominant player in writing the rules for the future of public education.

The New York Times has reported on how astonishingly comprehensive and influential these Foundations’ campaigns have been.

The 2009 stimulus package included $6 billion to help the public education system. The Gates Foundation and its partners swung into action to make sure it was spent “correctly”. They were helped by the fact that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff and Assistant Deputy Secretary came from the Gates Foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving door policy limiting involvement with former employers.

Gates financed the New Teacher Project to issue and influential report detailing the flaws in existing evaluation systems. The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers developed the standards and Achieve, Inc. a non-profit organization coordinated the writing of tests aligned with the standards, each with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. The Alliance for Excellent Education received half a million “to grow support for the common core standards initiative”. The Fordham Institute received a million to “review common core materials and develop supportive materials”.

And when the rules were issued and the competition began, the Gates Foundation offered $250,000 to help each state apply so long as the state agreed with the Foundations’ market oriented approach.

And to educate the general public, the Foundation spent $2 million on a campaign focused on the film Waiting for Superman that demonized teachers’ unions.

Most charter schools, the preferred solution for Gates, Broad and the Walmart family, are non-profits. But they see no reason why they need to remain non-profits. A 2009 guide book by the Philanthropy Roundtable noted, “many education reformers believe that EMOs (profit oriented management companies) hold real potential for revolutionizing public education. If investors in EMOs are able to deliver consistent student achievement and create a profitable investment vehicle, they will have discovered a highly attractive and sustainable model for charter schools specifically and public education generally.”

Today more than 700 public k-12 schools around the country are managed by for profit companies. In May, Ohio adopted legislation allowing for-profit-businesses to open their own taxpayer-financed charter schools, which led Bill Sims, head of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools to express his concern that this could “take the public out of public charter schools.”

In 2011 the Gates Foundation seems to have deepened its anti-government efforts, giving almost $400,000 to the conservatives’ legislative privatization network ALEC.

Warren Buffett is a major investor in the Gates Foundation. In 2011 he gave another $1.5 billion to the Foundation bringing the total to almost $10 billion so far.

Buffett is well known for writing and speaking about the unfairness of the tax system. He has signed on to an effort to force the 1% to pay a higher, not a lower tax rate than the 99%.

To date Buffett hasn’t been willing to give millions to underwrite a comprehensive campaign to convince legislators and the country to raise taxes on the rich. And the Gates Foundation hasn’t to my knowledge entertained the idea that it might spend $80 million on a campaign to increase the resources devoted to public education.

Eliminate the Charitable Giving Tax Deduction

In June 2010 Gates and Buffett launched The Giving Pledge, asking their wealthy compatriots to give away half or more of their wealth. Several dozen billionaires reportedly have signed on. Many will set up their own foundations and reap substantial tax benefits while retaining the right to decide where the money is invested. CPA Robert A. Green has estimated that this could result in $250 billion or more being diverted from the treasuries of state and federal governments.

We should eliminate the tax deduction for charities. The impact on giving will be modest while the savings to the public sector will be substantial.

A 2006 survey by the Bank of America found that over half of high-net-worth donors said their giving would stay the same, or even increase, if the tax deduction for charitable gifts fell to zero. The American Enterprise Institute notes “research shows that virtually no one is motivated meaningfully to give only because of our tax system.” Jack Shakely who ran the California Community Foundation for 25 years recently penned an Op Ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he noted that while the top tax bracket for individuals has plummeted from 70% in 1980 to 35% in 2003 (and according to the IRS the very rich are today taxed at an effective rate of 17 percent) charitable donations have remained almost constant, hovering between 1.7% and 1.95% of personal income per year.

This year governments may lose $50 billion or more because of tax deductions taken overwhelmingly by the rich for charitable givings intended primarily to enhance their status with their brethren or to attack the public sector. We can’t stop the rich from using their money for their own purposes (although we should certainly enact laws to stop them from unduly influencing legislation and elections). But we should not add insult to injury by giving them huge amounts of public sums to attack the public sector.

quoting because.....HOLY SHIT.