Tag Archives: America

A Few Reasons We’re Getting Screwed

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It’s one thing to get screwed. It’s another thing to know why. From recent reading:

Instead of raising wages, hiring more workers or investing in research and new equipment, corporations are increasingly accumulating cash and buying their own stock. This raises the corporation’s stock price, enriching the people in charge (who receive much of their compensation in the form of stock and stock options) and shareholders (who tend to be the wealthiest among us), but does little to improve the lives of most Americans. Some statistics from The Atlantic‘s “Stock Buybacks Are Killing the American Economy”:

Over the past decade, the companies that make up the S&P 500 have spent an astounding 54 percent of profits on stock buybacks. Last year alone, U.S. corporations spent about $700 billion, or roughly 4 percent of GDP, to prop up their share prices by repurchasing their own stock.

Instead of doing something productive.

The Atlantic article is by Nick Hanauer, a very successful capitalist who acknowledges that inequality is a problem that needs to be addressed. A poorly-named article from Salon called “Let’s All Screw the 1 Percent” cites an article Hanauer wrote last year about overtime pay.

We all know that wages have stagnated for many workers or even declined when adjusted for inflation. In order to have the same buying power it had in 1968, the federal minimum wage would have to be raised from $7.25 to almost $11.00 (see this attempt at myth-busting from the Department of Labor). What isn’t as well-understood and what Hanauer pointed out is that millions of workers would and should be receiving overtime pay, even though they aren’t paid by the hour (declaring workers to be “exempt” and giving them a salary is, of course, a great way to force people to work long hours without extra compensation). From the Salon article by Paul Rosenberg:

…there’s a wage level below which everyone qualifies for mandatory time-and-a-half overtime, even if they’re on a salary, and that level has only been raised once since 1975, with the result that only 11 percent of salaried Americans are covered today, compared to over 65 percent of them in 1975. If you make less than $23,660 a year as a salaried worker, you qualify for mandatory overtime—if not, you’re out of luck.  … Just adjusting the wage level for inflation since 1975—an act of restoration, not revolution—would be as significant an income increase for millions of middle-class Americans as a $10.10 or even $15 minimum wage is for low-wage workers.  It would cover an additional 6.1 million salaried workers (by one account) up to $970 per week, about $50,440 annually—the vast majority of those it was originally designed to protect, but who have slowly lost their protections since the 1970s. Hanauer proposes a slightly greater increase, intended to cover roughly all the workforce that was covered in 1975. That would raise the threshold to $69,000 annually, and would cover an added 10.4 million workers.

What was also surprising to me is that the President can raise the $23,660 threshold without the approval of Congress. Last year, in fact, President Obama promised to do just that. This website for Human Resources specialists predicts that the threshold for overtime pay will be increased in 2016, but only to around $45,000 (they also predict that the rules for declaring an employee to be “exempt” will be tightened, making more workers eligible for overtime pay).

In a related article at the Alternet site, a postal worker explains why the people delivering your mail during the week or a package from Amazon on Sunday may not look as official as they used to (jeans and a sweatshirt seem to have replaced those blue uniforms in my neighborhood). Paul Barbot says that he is a City Carrier Assistant:

City Carrier Assistants are a brand new classification of employee within the postal ranks; we are the low-wage, non-career, complement workforce at the USPS. Before [a 2013] reclassification, we were called Transitional Employees and made a respectable $23.52 hourly rate, only several dollars per hour less than what the average career employee made. But with the USPS management’s financial woes … a low-wage workforce was needed to help entice big business into choosing the postal service to partner up with. City Carrier Assistants now perform the same work they did when they were called [“Transitional Employees”], but now they get to do that work for 31 percent less pay ($16.68 per hour)….Newly hired CCAs will make even less —starting at $15 per hour.

Barbot argues that this lower-wage workforce helped the Postal Service and Amazon reach a “Negotiated Service Agreement” regarding special treatment for Amazon packages. 

And finally, The Guardian reports (no surprise) that:

Poor Americans are less likely to vote and more likely to distrust government, study shows… Political engagement, it appears, is a privilege for those who aren’t struggling to make ends meet…

while the right-wing Koch brothers, who aren’t struggling at all (not even with their consciences), plan to spend almost $900 million in 2016 in support of reactionary candidates, almost twice what they spent in 2012.

Summarizing the Torture Report

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I personally know only one person who has read all 499 unclassified pages of the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence’s Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, popularly known as the “torture report”. It’s available here if you want to take a look or start reading.

In lieu of those 499 pages, you might read this excellent interview given by Mark Danner. He’s the Chancellor’s Professor of English and Journalism at the University of California at ­Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College. Danner has become an expert on the so-called “War on Terror”. He knows what he’s talking about. Some selections:

The relentlessness, day in day out, of these techniques … and the totality of their effect when taken together is recounted in numbing, revolting detail. The effect can only be conveyed by a full reading, through page after awful page of this five-hundred-page document, which is after all less than 10 percent of the report itself.

What I think is strictly speaking new is, first, how amateurish the torture program was. It was really amateur hour, beginning with the techniques themselves, which were devised and run by a couple of retired Air Force psychologists who were hired by the CIA and put in charge though they had never conducted an interrogation before. They had no expertise in terrorism or counterterrorism, had never interrogated al-Qaeda members or anyone else… They were essentially without any relevant experience….

The second revelation is the degree to which the CIA claimed great results, and did so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely. But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having obtained essential, lifesaving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. And the case is devastating….

Because the Democratic majority on the committee agreed [with the Republican minority] to limit the report to the CIA … we still have no report on how decisions were made in the executive branch…

What is fascinating is what seems to have led the CIA to resort to this improvised, amateurish program. It was the utterly mistaken conviction that Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about attacks that would have killed thousands of people….

The CIA officers are convinced that Abu Zubaydah … is this very important guy who would have this most vital information on current planning. But he’s not. He’s not even a member of al-Qaeda…. But because the CIA was convinced that he was at the pinnacle of the organization, they thought that even though he seemed to be cooperating with these FBI interrogators, he was actively withholding what they really needed: information about an impending “threat.”

Eventually … he was put under forced sleep deprivation for 180 hours and waterboarded eighty-three times….So even though the interrogators are saying he’s compliant, he’s telling us everything he knows—even though the waterboarding is nearly killing him, rendering him “completely non-responsive,” as the report says—officials at headquarters were saying he has to be waterboarded again, and again, because he still hadn’t given up information about the attacks they were convinced had to be coming….

And finally, grudgingly, after the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings, they came to the conclusion that Abu Zubaydah didn’t have that information. So when they judged the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah a “success,” what that really meant was that the use of those techniques, in this brutal, appalling extended fashion, had let them prove, to their satisfaction, that he didn’t know what they had been convinced that he did know. It had nothing to do with him giving more information…. The use of these techniques let them alleviate their own anxiety [which] was based on complete misinformation. Complete ignorance about who this man actually was….

This kind of corruption through mendacity has continued, and we see it clearly now, in this cheerleading society organized by the CIA, consisting mostly of ex-officials, who have come out publicly not only to defend the agency but also to defend torture itself  … which used to be illegal, which used to be anathema, has now become a policy choice.

It’s a deeply perverse situation that goes beyond the original choice to use torture itself. It’s also a result of the ambivalent way this choice was treated by Barack Obama… Though President Obama formally abolished torture with an executive order …, his refusal to … approve investigations, prosecutions … means that only his signature on that executive order stands between us and the possibility of more torture in the future. If this issue is raised in the Republican primaries in 2016, I’d expect that most politicians on that stage will declare themselves firmly in favor of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” We may not torture now, but because torture has become a recognized policy choice, it is perfectly conceivable that our political masters, depending on who they are, might well decide to do so in the future. This is where we find ourselves, a dozen years after Abu Zubaydah first was strapped down to that waterboard.

We sometimes hear that America was traumatized by the 9/11 attack. But that’s not true. It wasn’t America as a whole that was traumatized. What happened was that Americans who were already especially fearful of the outside world became even more fearful, and Americans with the worst instincts, people like Dick Cheney, were freed to act on those instincts. We didn’t all go off the deep end, but many of us did. Now it’s up to the rest of us to exert control over the worst and weakest among us.

Is It Bad Enough Yet? Yes, It Is

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“Is It Bad Enough Yet?” That’s a wonderful title for an article by Mark Bittman about where we are today:

The police killing unarmed civilians. Horrifying income inequality. Rotting infrastructure and an unsafe “safety net.” An inability to respond to climate, public health and environmental threats. An occasionally dysfunctional and even cruel government. A sizable segment of the population excluded from work and subject to near-random incarceration.

You get it: This is the United States, which, with the incoming Congress, might actually get worse….

The root of the anger is inequality, about which statistics are mind-boggling: From 2009 to 2012 (that’s the most recent data), some 95 percent of new income has gone to the top 1 percent…

Everything affects everything. It’s all tied together, and the starting place hardly matters: A just and righteous system will have a positive impact on everything we care about, just as an unjust, exploitative system makes everything worse….

When underpaid workers begin their strikes by saying “I can’t breathe,” or by holding their hands over their heads and chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot,” they’re recognizing that their struggle is the same as that of African-Americans demanding dignity, respect and indeed safety on their own streets….

Increasingly, it seems, there’s an appetite and even unity to take on the billionaire class. Let’s recognize that if we are seeing positive change now, it’s in part because elected officials respond to pressure, and let’s remember that that pressure must be maintained no matter who is in office. Even if Bernie Sanders were to become president, the need for pressure would continue.

“True citizenship,” says [Saru Jayaraman of U.C. Berkeley]— echoing Jefferson — “is people continually protesting.” Precisely.

So warmest congratulations to the fast food workers and Walmart employees demanding a living wage and to the thousands who have marched or stood silently in protest because black lives matter. It’s all connected.

And enough is enough. That’s what Senator Elizabeth Warren said this week. Listen to her talk about Citigroup’s stranglehold on the Federal government and why we need to break up the biggest banks. It’s only 10 minutes and it’s worth watching and sharing.

We can’t directly vote against Walmart or Citigroup, but we can boycott them. Don’t shop at Walmart until they institute a living wage and don’t use a Citigroup credit card or checking account until they’re small enough to fail, because, yes, it is bad enough. 

We Don’t Torture Them Now – We Kill Them Instead

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American insanity isn’t limited to Republicans or Republican-sympathizers, of course. For example, President Obama may have curtailed our use of torture, but he’s expanded our use of drones. From The Atlantic:

A report from the CIA’s inspector general [in 2004] had raised the possibility that the CIA’s interrogation techniques violated the UN Convention Against Torture, and that individual officers might be liable for criminal prosecution. That torture report … “was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.”

The difficulty in keeping terrorism suspects locked up indefinitely without access to the regular judicial system gave our government an additional reason to kill them instead of capturing them. The result has been more drone attacks:

Though the U.S. drone war started under Bush …, Obama has ramped it up considerably in his half-decade in office. [According to Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, Obama] has authorized over nine times as many strikes as his predecessor… Estimates of the precise number of fatalities in those operations range widely; Zenko’s own tally, based on reporting from non-governmental research organizations, puts the rough death toll at around 3,500 people. These include an unknown number of civilian casualties believed by independent researchers to number at least in the hundreds….Tuesday’s report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, lists 119 terror suspects known to have been detained by the CIA, of whom “at least 39 were subject to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques”….

But despite the vast disparity in the numbers of people abused through the CIA’s detention program versus killed by drones, there has been no official accounting of the latter program on par with the torture report released this week. “[Those] normally interested in upholding human rights ideals and promoting transparency (generally Democrats) simply will not investigate their own,” Zenko explained. “And as I’ve pointed out, in every public opinion poll … Americans are more comfortable killing suspected terrorists than torturing them.”

As Andrea Tartaros of Fox News said the other day, “We are awesome!”.

Insanity, Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, …

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You could make a list: the Declaration of Independence and most of the Bill of Rights; the electric light bulb and the Model T; the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Marshall Plan; Citizen Kane and “Good Vibrations”. The Apollo program. The personal computer and the Internet. Where would bloggers be without those?

We Americans have done some very good things. No doubt we’ll do many more, considering that there are almost 320 million of us now.

Still, the first entry on this blog, back in July 2012, was “Insanity”. I wrote it a few days after the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado (12 dead, 58 wounded). Since then, according to the statistics, my most frequent topics have been “America” and “Republicans”. Insanity has been a continuing theme.

It strikes me now that I might as well stop writing about how screwed up this country is. It’s like beating a dead prisoner.

Too often, we’ve been brutal and greedy, fearful and stupid. 

And it isn’t that we’ve simply had bad leaders now and then. Many of us have been in favor of slavery and genocide and showing those foreign bastards who’s boss. Today, an amazing number of Americans think racist cops are heroes, torture is justified, global warming is a hoax and the Rapture is coming any day now. For crying out loud, in 2004, a majority of American voters decided to give Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld four more years!

Maybe reading about Ferguson, “I can’t breathe”, the lowest turnout in 72 years, Boehner and McConnell, the CIA, the rapacious rich and the incessant shrinking of the middle class have merely put me in a temporary funk. But it’s hard to deny that there is something seriously wrong with America and many Americans. 

Rather than filling this blog every day with the latest outrage, I could add a sentence or two to every post: “BTW, America is still screwed up and not getting better. Please vote and, if you call yourself a Christian, try acting like one”.

Or maybe I can focus on things we could do to make things better. In that spirit, here’s what Senator Bernie Sanders called for recently. He wants to make Election Day a national holiday, amend the constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, and institute public funding of political campaigns. But he knows that none of that will happen unless more of us vote:

For those of us who believe in a vibrant democracy with an engaged and well-informed electorate, we have a lot of work ahead. Sadly, in the year 2014, we must still convince the American people about the relevance of government to their lives.

We must convince young people that if they vote in large numbers, we can lower the 20% real unemployment they are experiencing with a major jobs program. We must convince students that if they participate in the political process, we can lower the outrageously high student debt they face. We must convince low-income workers that voting can raise the national minimum wage to a real living wage. We must convince seniors that not only can we prevent cuts to Social Security – we can expand the paltry benefits that so many are forced to live on. We must convince the millions of Americans who are deeply worried about climate change that political participation can transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy – and create millions of jobs.

Throughout American history, people have fought and died to protect our democracy and set an example for other nations. In these very difficult times, we cannot turn our backs on them.

Well, actually, we can. But if we choose not to, how do we go about convincing more people that it’s worth being part of a “well-informed and engaged electorate”, while convincing many of our fellow citizens to give up their benighted political, economic and social beliefs? I really don’t know.