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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Bakari Chavanu

Bakari Chavanu

10 reasons why #DemExit is serious: Getting rid of Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not enou... - 0 views

  • The fact that the party even has superdelegates is a sign of its anti-democratic, pro-oligarchy stance. As Branko Marcetic of In These Times reports the superdelegate system was created specifically to challenge the will of voters. According to Marcetic, “When a Sanders supporter criticized superdelegate Howard Dean for sticking with Clinton despite Sanders’ landslide victory in Vermont, Dean tweeted back: “Superdelegates don’t represent the people.”
  • The DNC created a debate schedule designed to make it hard for candidates to challenge Clinton’s status as the “presumptive” nominee.  Debates were held on weekends, at times that conflicted with other events, and were generally slotted to attract fewer viewers.
  • Fox News offered to host one.  Fox News wrote that, “the race is still contested, and given that you sanctioned a final trio of debates, the last of which has not yet been held, we believe a final debate would be an excellent opportunity for the candidates to, as you said when you announced these debates, ‘share Democrats’ vision for the country.’”  There never was a California debate set up. Not on Fox News or any other venue.
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  • The Sanders camp alleged that the joint fundraising agreement offered Clinton a chance to “launder” money through the DNC.
  • It clearly goes against what was intended for the joint fundraising committees.”  Given the already significant war chest Clinton had to run her campaign it is not surprising that Sanders supporters would find this news disturbing.
  • The recent fights over the DNC platform reveal a real lack of support for progressive policy, especially on key economic issues
Bakari Chavanu

Why Bernie vs Hillary Matters More Than People Think | Benjamin Studebaker - 0 views

  • The left in the 1930’s understood rising inequality as the core cause of the Great Depression. Because wealth was concentrating in the hands of the top 1%, the amount of investment steadily increased while the amount of consumption stagnated.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      The point Tomas Picketney makes in his book,   Capitalism in the 21st-Century
  • So instead, businesses that receive investment tend to reinvest that money rather than use it to grow. That investment circulates through the financial system and accumulates in speculative bubbles–places like the stock market, housing market, commodities market, or various foreign markets. These assets become massively overvalued until one day, the markets recognize the overvaluation. The assets collapse in value and the bubble bursts. People relying on these assets to pay off other debts get into serious trouble, and a contagion can spread throughout the economy with horrifying consequences.
  • This was accomplished through a series of policies that if they were proposed today, would strike most Americans as socialist–Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, strong union rights, high minimum wages, high marginal tax rates on the wealthy (with a 90% top rate under Eisenhower), and strong enforcement of financial regulations and anti-trust laws.
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  • The right embarks on a political platform of reducing union power, reducing the real value of the minimum wage, cutting welfare spending, reducing taxes on the wealthy, and deregulating the financial sector.
  • the Democratic Party was captured by this same ideology, which in academic circles is often referred to as neoliberalism. It is now largely forgotten that it was Carter, not Reagan, who began deregulating the market.
  • Bill Clinton took the party even further to the right. In 1992 he ran on the promise to “end welfare as we know it”, a total repudiation of the FDR/LBJ legacy. With the help of republicans, Clinton was eventually successful in drastically cutting the welfare program. Clinton also signed important deregulatory bills into law, like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
  • Bernie Sanders was against welfare reform and GLBA at the time (he voted for CFMA–it was snuck into an 11,000 page omnibus spending bill at the last minute).
  • The 2008 primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is sometimes billed as if it were a contest between two ideologies, but the most prominent difference between them was the vote on the Iraq War.
  • The major economic legislation passed under Obama (Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act) did not address the structural inequality problem that the Democratic Party of the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s existed to confront.
  • The Democratic Party, which was once the party that saw economic inequality and poverty as the core causes of economic instability, now sees inequality and poverty as largely irrelevant.
  • He is running to take the Democratic Party back from an establishment that ignores the fundamental systemic economic problems that lead to wage stagnation and economic crisis.
  • In the years since 2008, many Americans, in particular young people, are willing to consider the possibility that neoliberalism–the economic ideology espoused by both the post-Reagan republicans and the post-Carter Clinton-era democrats–is fundamentally flawed and must be revised or potentially replaced entirely.
  • This is not a contest to see who will lead the democrats, it’s a contest to see what kind of party the democrats are going to be in the coming decades, what ideology and what interests, causes, and issues the Democratic Party will prioritize.
  • Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal building on the legacy of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. She doesn’t understand the pivotal role inequality plays in creating economic crisis and reducing economic growth. She has been taken in by a fundamentally right wing paradigm, and if she is elected she will continue to lead the Democratic Party down that path.
  • Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist building on the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
Bakari Chavanu

September 8, 2014 Too Much weekly - 0 views

  • Executives in the fast food industry know a thing or two about exploitation for self-enrichment. Top restaurant industry CEOs averaged $10.9 million each in 2013, 721 times the take-home of a minimum-wage fast-food worker.
  • One of the world’s most fabled global luxury hotel chains will be opening a new outlet next month in Moscow. The 180 accommodations in the Four Seasons Hotel Moscow will include one suite that stretches 5,597 square feet, over twice the size of a typical American home. The smallest rooms in this new luxury palace will start at $930 per night . . .
  • “Baloney!” Yes, the Minnesota media mogul acknowledged last week to the Washington Post, he has given $191,000 so far this year directly to congressional candidates and party committees — and plans on giving much more now that the Supreme Court has struck down the old $123,000 annual limit on such contributions.
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  • If you made $30,452 in 1963, after adjusting for inflation, you paid a tax of 26 percent on the next dollar you reported to the IRS. If you made $36,255 in 2013, you paid a 25 percent tax on your next dollar of taxable income. Above these modest-income levels, the 1963 and 2013 stories start diverging. If you made $106,582 in 1963, after inflation, you paid a 47 percent tax on your next dollar of income. On income between $87,850 and $183,255 in 2013, taxpayers faced just a 28 percent rate. At the top, the biggest divide of all. Income over $1,522,595 in 1963, in today's dollars, faced a 91 percent federal income tax. Income at that level in 2013 faced a 39.6 percent top-bracket rate.
  • The number of public university presidents making over $1 million jumped to nine last year, with Ohio State’s Gordon Gee leading the pack at $6.1 million.
  • Custom planes like the Airbus pictured here can run up to $300 million. Airbus has sold 170 of them.
  • Emory University researcher Sabino Kornrich, the Dallas News notes, has one explanation for the income-sensitive SAT scores: “Wealthy parents are increasing their education spending so much that middle- and lower-class parents can’t keep pace.” The top 10 percent of U.S. income earners — average income, $253,146 — now spend $5,495 per year on education. The nation’s bottom 90 percent spend an average $1,088 . . .
  • Stat of the Week America's 400 richest individuals now hold a combined $2.9 trillion in wealth, a sum that about equals the gross national product of Brazil, a nation of 200 million people.
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    Good newsletter to subscribe to about economic inequality.
Bakari Chavanu

The Rich Are Making the Poor Poorer | Economy | AlterNet - 1 views

  • In Sunday's New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.
  • First, the Clemens example distracts from the reality that a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class: Every year, 4 or 5 of the people on Forbes magazine's list of the ten richest Americans carry the surname Walton, meaning they are the children, nieces, and nephews of Wal-Mart's founder.
  • All those late fees, puffed up interest rates and exorbitant charges for low-balance checking accounts do not, as far as I can determine, go to soup kitchens.
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  • Third, the overclass bids up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace the rural poor and middle class. Similarly, the rich can swallow tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.
  • It may well turn out to be because Hillary Clinton is, as The Nation reports, "the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry." And who do you think demanded those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy -- the AFLCIO.
Bakari Chavanu

50% of All Workers Made Less than $26,000 in 2010 - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atl... - 0 views

  • Half of all workers made less than $26,364, the median wage in 2010. That means the typical wage is at its lowest level since 1999, after adjusting for inflation.
  • 2) The number of millionaires increased by about 20 percent.
Bakari Chavanu

Four Things Occupy Wall Street Should Know About the Federal Reserve | | AlterNet - 0 views

  • We left the gold standard in the 1930s because it greatly exacerbated the Great Depression.
  • The gold supply grows by 2 percent every year, while the global economy grows at four percent, leading to deflation and constrained economic progress.
  • It can be spurred by government spending to stimulate an economy that has already reached its productive capacity. But right now America is suffering from the opposite problem. The problem isn’t inflation, it’s unemployment, crushing debt and stagnant growth: issues that can be assuaged through monetary stimulus. 
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  • In fact, one of the easiest ways to achieve the Occupy movement’s goals of lower unemployment and household debt would be to use monetary stimulus to mildly increase this measure inflation.  
  • We should talk about deflating the debt. If we had wage and price inflation of four percent every year for two or three years that reduces the debt burden by eight, 10, or 12 percent relative to their wages.” 
  • American corporations are currently sitting on massive cash reserves. If the Fed announced a higher inflation target those horded assets would soon be worth less, thus incentivizing spending.
  • Look at the “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr. Almost every entry names debt—from student loans, credit cards, medical, or housing—as a principal concern. Household debt is currently 90 percent of GDP.
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