Amend 2012

It was two years ago this week when five corporatists on the US Supreme Court made the ludicrous argument that corporations are people and that not allowing them to spend unlimited money on political campaigns would be denying them their right, as people, to free speech. Thanks to their ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC, not only do rich people have more free speech, corporations do now as well. And since we do not hinder free speech, we cannot hinder the free flow of money into politics. Corporations can now buy elections and politicians more blatantly than ever before. Since money is fungible, that guarantees foreign corporations will be in on it as well. It's free speech, you see. It's right there in that constitution teabaggers keep waving around.

Corporate America dominates government, politicians, the voting process, and the media that covers it. Citizens United has helped turn us into a banana republic that allows an oligarchy to subvert our entire political economy. The impact of that ruling will surely be magnified greatly in 2012, a presidential election year. 

Robert Reich reviews the issue and invites us to learn more and get involved in the only way we can to reduce the ridiculous and corrupting influence of corporate money in elections. He joins with amend2012.org and others to push for a constitutional amendment that states what should have been obvious; corporations are not people. They do not get to buy elections.

Think about Citizens United the next time Republicans claim they favor strict constructionism. Think about that case's tortured logic that effectively guarantees that corporations will buy elections the next time conservatives complain about activist judges.

Robert Reich: The Truth About the Economy

Robert Reich, telling it like it is.



He forgot one last point; none of this shit started with Obama.

America's Problem is Low Taxes, Not Spending

It has quickly become a Republican talkling point that the US does not have a taxation problem; it has a spending problem. No need to raise taxes, they say. Just cut all that wasteful spending, and we will be all right. After all, teabaggers tell us we are Taxed Enough Already.

The reality is dramatically different. The chart below shows "general government expenditures as a percent of GDP". It is taken from the OECD "iLibrary" and can be found here. The bars represent each country's annual average for 2006-8. The blue bar is the average for all OECD countries combined.

The US is the seventh bar from the left, below the average and far below most of  Europe's most developed states. Note also that the gray diamonds hovering above each bar represent that govenment's average expenditure for 1995-97. They show that the spending percentage for the US was virtually unchanged for the subsequent decade.

The reality is that US government expenditures are a relatively modest percentage of GDP. Needless to say, US expenditures would be even lower were it not for our monstrously expensive industrial-military complex.

In other words, the US is not spending nearly as much on non-military items as some politicians would have you believe. Our overall spending levels are relatively low, and entitlement spending that directly benefits families is even lower. The US does not have a tax and spend issue. Our national debt is burgeoning because we keep reducing taxes on the wealthy and on corporations.

The chart below shows spending for families as a percent of GDP for the US and four other OECD members. This represents the socialistic spending and entitlements Republicans say is out of control and must be cut. Background and additional charts can be seen here.

Finally, have a look at the next chart. It comes from the same place as the first one. It also encompasses the same time frame. The one below measures taxes as a percent of GDP. The US is the fourth bar from the left, putting us even further down the OECD list.

To summarize, the US is not a tax and spend socialist nightmare. Government spending is comparatively low; spending on entitlements, welfare and the like is proportionately even lower. Teabaggers and others who buy into Congressman Paul Ryan's asinine spending bill, the one that guts Medicare and lowers taxes on the rich even more, are full of some serious shit.

Read Robert Reich, who details why we must raise taxes on the rich.

Reich: Fed Creating a New Bubble

I am off to volunteer some time to Hanabusa for Congress. But before I go, just a quick reference to a recent post by Robert Reich, where he argues that the Fed's decision to pump more money into the economy, and thus keep interest rates low, and therefore spur on the economy, will be ineffective. He gives a variety of reasons, but the upshot is that there is no productive place for the money to go. Banks could lend, and that was the original idea, but they are supposed to be following stricter standards, yes? So no loans for you, bub.

It needs to go to higher wages, but as obvious as that may seem, no one in power wants to push the idea, certainly not corporations, Republicans, or the investor class. And government mechanisms to make that happen are utterly inchoate. Compare that with the speed with which TARP was enacted, or tax breaks for hedge fund managers.

So, as Reich reminds us, the money ends up in the stock market, which helps explain why the Dow has gone up so much recently, despite poor economic indicators. The investor class is in the process of creating a new financial bubble.

Swell