Abortion and Contraception Protect Women’s Health: That’s an Incontrovertible Medical Truth
From: AlterNet
By: Dr. Jennefer Russo.
“My name is Dr. Jennefer Russo. I am a Fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. I am an obstetrician/gynecologist in Pittsburgh. My patients come to me for a variety of different medical needs, including contraception, pap smears, ovarian cysts, sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy. Some women choose to continue pregnancies and some don’t. Either way, I take care of them.
I grew up in the 1980s, and I remember my first pro-choice march in 1992. I am sad to say that as I have moved through my career in medicine, the political climate has worsened. In 1998, I spoke on the National Mall in Washington, DC, as a member of Medical Students for Choice. I talked about the need to improve training on abortion. I never imagined that today, 14 years later, I would be speaking in protest of serious, direct threats to fundamental women’s health care.
You and I are here because we understand that women rely on birth control and abortion for their health and their self-determination. We understand that every woman deserves the best possible medical options for her reproductive health. We know that the walls that separate women from high-quality abortion care and contraceptives must come down.
My colleagues and I see what happens when women have to struggle to obtain the care they need.
I think of Kelly, who had to travel three hours to have her abortion after she and her doctor struggled to find someone to perform it. She was gravely ill with multiple medical problems, including a form of arthritis that left her unable to walk. Although her arthritic body couldn’t support a pregnancy, she couldn’t find anyone in her area to help her. Each day of pregnancy put her at more risk, but she was also forced by the state to wait 24 hours for her procedure. Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures we have, but the later in pregnancy, the higher the risk. No one should have to wait for basic medical care, including abortion.
My patient Rita, a young mother of five, suffered from a serious heart defect. Rita had a heart valve that had been replaced with a synthetic one. Pregnancy put her at high risk for a blood clot forming on the new valve and traveling to her brain, where it could kill her. Rita wanted to use contraception, but she had no health insurance to make it affordable. She became pregnant. Despite taking blood thinners to treat her clots, Rita had a stroke, all because she couldn’t get the birth control she needed.
What happened in Philadelphia in the office of Kermit Gosnell is an atrocity. Indeed, the reproductive health community had reported him long before he was arrested. Our government did not respond. Now they use him as a reason to target us for regulations that serve no medical purpose and make it harder for us to serve our patients.
The same political figures who talk about getting government out of our personal lives have no problem dictating what happens in a woman’s vagina. They have no problem lying to women—telling them that abortion causes breast cancer and depression, that it will ruin their fertility. Mountains of medical evidence show the opposite: abortion has no connection to breast cancer or depression, and having an abortion doesn’t affect a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant again.
The medical truth about abortion and contraception? They protect women’s health. In countries where abortion is legal and accessible, the death rates for pregnant women are low. In countries where it is illegal, millions of pregnant women die unnecessarily from unsafe abortion. This is why my colleagues and I across the country stand with you today. We want all of our patients to have safe, affordable, and convenient access to the care they need.
It makes me so happy to see all of you here. We need to continue to stand together. Those of us in the medical profession need you as our allies, to keep speaking up for reproductive health care. Those who are anti-contraception and anti-abortion want to take us backwards. But we will not go back. We have come too far. Keep fighting! Thank you!”
Emphasis Mine
From: Alternet
By: Sara Robinson
“The self-made myth is one of the most cherished foundation stones of the conservative theology. Nurtured by Horatio Alger and generations of beloved boys’ stories, It sits at the deep black heart of their entire worldview, where it provides the essential justification for a great many other common right-wing beliefs. It feeds the accusation that government is evil because it only exists to redistribute wealth from society’s producers (self-made, of course) and its parasites (who refuse to work). It justifies conservative rage against progressives, who are seen as wanting to use government to forcibly take away what belongs to the righteous wealthy. It’s piously invoked by hedge fund managers and oil billionaires, who think that being required to reinvest any of their wealth back into the public society that made it possible is “punishing success.” It’s the foundational belief on which all of Ayn Rand’s novels stand.
If you’ve heard it once from your Fox-watching uncle, you’ve probably heard it a hundred times. “The government never did anything for me, dammit,” he grouses. “Everything I have, I earned. Nobody ever handed me anything. I did it all on my own. I’m a self-made man.”
He’s just plain wrong. Flat-out, incontrovertibly, inarguably wrong. So profoundly wrong, in fact, that we probably won’t be able to change the national discourse on taxes, infrastructure, education, government investment, technology policy, transportation, welfare, or our future prospects as a country until we can effectively convince the country of the monumental wrongness of this one core point.
The Built-Together Realty
Brian Miller and Mike Lapham have written the book that lays out the basic arguments we can use to begin to set things right. The Self-Made Myth: The Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed is a clear, concise, easy-to-read-and-use summary that brings forward a far more accurate argument about government’s central role in creating the conditions for economic prosperity and personal opportunity.
Miller, the executive director of United For a Fair Economy, and Lapham, a co-founder of UFE’s Responsible Wealth project, argue that the self-made myth absolves our economic leaders from doing anything about inequality, frames fair wages as extortion from deserving producers, and turns the social safety net into a moral hazard that can only promote laziness and sloth. They argue that progressives need to overwrite this fiction with the far more supportable idea of the “built-together reality,” which points up the truth that nobody in America ever makes it alone. Every single private fortune can be traced back to basic public investments that have, as Warren Buffet argues in the book, created the most fertile soil on the planet for entrepreneurs to succeed.
To their credit, Miller and Lapham don’t ask us to take this point on faith. Right out of the gate, they regale us with three tales of famous “self-made” men — Donald Trump, Ross Perot and the Koch brothers, whose own stories put the lie to the myth. (This section alone is worth the price of admission — these guys so did not make it on their own!) Once those treasured right-wing exemplars are thoroughly discredited, the middle of the book offers a welcome corrective: interviews with 14 wealthy Americans — including well-known names like Warren Buffet, Ben Cohen, Abigail Disney, and Amy Domini, who are very explicit about the ways in which government action laid the groundwork for their success. Over and over, these people credit their wealth to:
* An excellent education received in public schools and universities. Jerry Fiddler of Wind River Software (you’re probably running his stuff in your cell phone or car) went to the University of Chicago, (N.B.: hardly public)and started his computer career at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Bookseller Thelma Kidd got her start at Texas Tech and the University of Michigan. Warren Buffet went to the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Nebraska as an undergrad. And beyond that: several interviewees paid for their educations with federal Pell Grants and Stafford loans.
Over and over, the point gets made: public universities — and the good public schools that feed them, and the funding programs that put them within financial reach — have hatched millions of American entrepreneurs who might not have been fledged without that opportunity to get an education.
* The support of the Small Business Administration and other government agencies. Ben Cohen notes that almost all the business training he and Jerry Greenfield had came from the extension courses at the University of Vermont and Penn State, and small brochures produced by the SBA. And as they spun up, they also got an Urban Development Action Grant from the federal government. Other interviewees started their businesses in incubators or other quarters provided or arranged by their local city governments.
* A strong regulatory environment that protected their businesses from being undercut by competitors willing to cut corners, and ensured that their manufacturing inputs are of consistently high quality. Glynn Lloyd of Boston’s City Fresh Foods points out that nobody in the food business can get by without reliable sources of clean water; and that the USDA inspection process is an important piece of his quality control.
* Enforceable copyright and intellectual property laws that enabled them to protect good ideas. Abigail Disney recalls that her father, Roy Disney, and her Uncle Walt made and lost one great cartoon character — Oswald the Rabbit — because they didn’t have copyright protection. They didn’t repeat that mistake when Mickey Mouse was born three years later, launching the Disney empire.
* A robust system of roads, ports, airports, and mass transit that enabled them to reliably move their goods both within the US, and around the world. Kim Jordan of New Belgium Brewing (the makers of Fat Tire beer) points out that “Beer is heavy, and it needs to be transported in vehicles. Certainly, the highway system has been important to New Belgium Brewing.” Lloyd also points out that Boston’s excellent public transit system enables him to draw on a far wider employee base.
* The government’s role in creating the Internet, without which almost no modern company can function. Anirvan Chatterjee built Bookfinder.com (now a subsidiary of Amazon.com), the world’s biggest online used-book marketplace, an achievement that wouldn’t have been remotely imaginable without DARPA, the establishment and enforcement of common protocols, and significant congressional investment in the 1980s to take the Internet commercial.
* The ability to issue public stock in a fair, reliable, regulated marketplace — a benefit that raised the value of several interviewees’ companies by about 30 percent overnight. Peter Barnes, founder of Working Assets, spoke with concern about the loss of trust in this system over the past decade. “The corporate scandals [Enron and Worldcom] caused people to stop trusting the numbers that companies were reporting. Imagine how much value is created by trust and the whole system that assures that trust?”
Besides the government, most of those interviewed also locate their companies in the context of a large community of customers they utterly depend on for their success. “It takes a village to raise a business,” says Nikhil Arora of Back to the Roots, a sustainable products company that came about through partnerships and grants from UC Berkeley, Peet’s Coffee and other interested parties.
Others are quick to acknowledge the contributions of their employees, without whom their companies wouldn’t exist. When Gun Denhart and her husband sold their company, children’s clothier Hanna Andersson, in 2003, they distributed a healthy portion of the sale proceeds to their employees, prorated on the basis of their length of service.
All businesses exist within a vast network of human connections — customers, vendors, employees, investors, and the communities that support their work. These stories make it clear: saying you did it all yourself and therefore don’t owe anybody anything is about as absurd (and self-centered) as saying that you raised yourself from babyhood, without any input from your parents, and therefore don’t have any further obligations to your family.
The Role of Luck and Timing
We all know wealth isn’t just a matter of hard work, brains or talent. Most of us probably know some hard-working, brilliant, or extraordinarily talented people who aren’t being rewarded at anything close to their true value. So perhaps the most intriguing and useful part of the book is a long discussion of the many other factors that go into making someone wealthy — factors that are blithely brushed off the table whenever the self-made myth is invoked.
Rich conservatives have to downplay the role of luck. After all, if we think they’re just lucky, rather than exceptionally deserving of exceptional wealth, we’ll be a lot more justified in taxing their fortunes. But luck — the fortunate choice of parents, for example, or landing the right job or industry at the right time – plays a huge role in any individual’s success. Timing also matters: most of the great fortunes of the 19th century were accumulated by men born during the 1830s, who were of an age to capitalize on the huge economic boom created by the expansion of the railroads after the Civil War. Likewise, the great tech fortunes almost all belong to people born between 1950 and 1955, who were well-positioned to create pioneering companies in the tech boom of the late 1970s and 1980s. Such innovative times don’t come along very often; and being born when the stars lined up just so doesn’t make you more entitled. It just makes you luckier.
Because Americans in general like to think we’re an equal society, we’re also quick to discount the importance of race, gender, appearance, class, upbringing, and other essential forms of social capital that can open doors for people who have it – and close them on those who don’t. The self-made myth allows us to deflect our attention from these critical factors, undermining our determination to level the playing field for those who don’t start life with a pocket fat with advantages.
What Changes?
The book winds up with specific policy prescriptions that can bring the built-together reality back into sharper political and cultural focus. The last section shows how abandoning the self-made myth for a built-together reality creates fresh justification for a more progressive income tax, the repeal of the capital gains exemption and raising corporate and inheritance taxes. It also makes a far more compelling philosophical backdrop against which progressives can argue for increased investment in infrastructure, education, a fair minimum wage, a strong social safety net, and better anti-discrimination laws.
But the most striking thing about the book — implicit throughout, but explicit nowhere — was the alternative vision of capitalism it offers. Throughout the book, Miller and Lapham seem to be making the tacit case that businesses premised on the built-together reality are simply more fair, more generous, more sustainable, and more humane. While far from perfect (Disney’s empire being one case in point), they are, as a group, markedly more aware of the high costs of exploiting their workers, their customers, the economy, or the environment. Owners who believe themselves to be beholden to a community for their success will tend to value and invest back into that community, and they seem to be far more willing to realize when they’ve got enough and it’s time to start giving back.
The implication is clear: if we can interrupt American’s long love affair with the self-made myth, we will effectively pull the center tent pole out from under the selfish assumptions that shelter most of the excesses of corporate behavior that characterize our age. This isn’t just another point of contention between progressives and conservatives; it’s somewhere near the very center of the disconnect between our worldviews. The Self-Made Myth is an essential primer that gives us the language and stories to begin talking about this difference, and the tools to begin to bend that conversation in some new and more hopeful directions.”
Emphasis Mine
Shock Doctrine at the Post Office: How the GOP Manufactured a Crisis and Too Many Dems Went Along
From: AlterNet
by:Laura Clawson
“Hold one thought in your mind every time you read about the “crisis” the U.S. Postal Service is in: There is a crisis, but it’s a manufactured one. If Congress wasn’t busy applying the Shock Doctrine, the postal service would face a challenge, but one it had time to meet. Instead, we’re being told by Congress and by high-level management at the post office that the crisis is now and that massive cuts are the only answer—that degrading the services the postal service offers will save it.
But before we look at the cuts being proposed, what’s so manufactured about this crisis?
In 2006, the postal service generated a profit. That was the last time it did so, because in late 2006, a lame duck Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which among other things forced the postal service to fund its retiree health benefit obligations 75 years into the future, and to do so within 10 years. Taking care of retirees is a good thing, and we’ve seen far too many workers expected to fill the gaps in pensions and health benefits underfunded through no fault of their own. I’m not arguing that the postal service should reverse course so far that it leaves its retirees without health care. But if you needed a single concrete example to demonstrate that this is a manufactured crisis, here it is: Congress put a burden on the postal service that no other government agency or private corporation faces, and when that causes or accelerates problems, it’s taken as evidence of certain doom and the need to make deep cuts. According to Sen. Bernie Sanders, not someone who is going to argue for leaving retired workers in the lurch:
[T]he Postal Service should be released from the “onerous and unprecedented burden” of being forced to put $5.5 billion every year into its future retiree health benefits fund. Sanders’s office explains that “even if there are no further contributions from the post office, and if the fund simply collects 3.5 to 4 percent interest every year, that account will be fully funded in twenty-one years.” At the same time, the senator suggests, the postal service should be allowed to recover more than $13 billion in overpayments it has made to a federal retirement systems.
So the immediacy of the “crisis” the postal service faces is one created by Congress. But there are legitimate long-term challenges, including one in particular we hear a great deal about: the internet. We’re all paying our bills online these days, leading to a precipitous decline in mail sent. Right? Well, there’s another factor no one seems to talk about: the recession. It’s funny when you think about it, because we know how deeply the recession struck the government at all levels, businesses, and individuals. But again and again we’re told that the reason, the reason not a reason, for declining mail is the internet. Yet:
From peak first-class volumes in 2001 to 2007, before the recession began, first-class mail volumes declined from 103.6 billion to 96.3 billion — a total drop of 7%, or just over 1% a year. From 2007 to 2011, first-class volumes declined from 96.3 billion to 73.5 billion — a drop of 23%, or about 6% a year.In other words, first-class mail has declined by 30% over the past ten years. About 7% of that 30% happened in the six years before the recession, and the other 23% happened in the four years after the recession began.
The internet should also create possibilities. After all, while people pay their bills there, they also rack up a lot of those bills through online shopping, and someone has to ship those packages. UPS and FedEx don’t serve as many doors as the postal service, and in many cases they contract with the postal service to provide “last-mile” delivery.
For that matter, UPS or FedEx taking a package the last mile can create hassles of its own. I live in an apartment building and work from home. Only our actual mail carrier has a key to the outer door of my building, and I cannot tell you how many times I have gone running downstairs in response to desperate pounding from UPS or FedEx trying to deliver something for the online shopping addict in apartment one. If I didn’t work from home, she’d face what she did one day when I was out—a slip from UPS saying they’d be back between the following hours, and be there if she wanted her package. The stress over how to get a package being delivered during working hours by a private carrier who can’t get into your building is a not uncommon fact of apartment life. Which is to say, it’s not that packages aren’t being carried. They are. Surely there’s an advantage to exploit here somewhere.
But Congress and top postal management aren’t looking for advantages or for growth. They’re looking to cut, supposedly in the name of equipping the postal service for the long haul. However, an analysis (PDF) by the financial advisory firm Lazard, conducted for the National Association of Letter Carriers, notes that:
…one of the Postal Service’s own witnesses at a Postal Regulatory Commission hearing on its network optimization plan recently acknowledged the existence of a study that found that the combined effects of all service cuts under consideration would reduce mail volume by over 10% – an amount which would offset most of the proposed savings from these initiatives.
That means the proposed cuts—no Saturday delivery, longer first-class delivery times, closed processing centers and post offices, and more—would set off a death spiral, with cuts leading to loss of business leading to further cuts. This wouldn’t just affect the postal service, slowing mail delivery and forcing many people in rural areas to drive long distances to get their mail, it would affect the entire economy. We’re talking here about tens of thousands of layoffsthat would disproportionately affect African-Americans and veterans. And cutting that many jobs, especially in concentrated clumps with closing of processing centers, would hit local economies hard.
But that, with the exception of Bernie Sanders and a few other officials fighting to protect the postal service, is where the establishment political discussion is happening. As the Senate debates S. 1789, a bill that would simply put the postal service on a slightly delayed death spiral rather than an immediate one, a number of individual senators have potentially useful proposals, seeking to protect rural mail delivery, the ability to vote by mail in states that rely on that, prescription delivery for senior citizens who may not easily be able to get to the pharmacy, capping postal executive pay—postal executives are paid more like corporate executives, in many cases far more than cabinet secretaries make—and allowing postage prices to be raised beyond the rate of inflation (our first-class postage is cheaper than in most other countries).
There are also proposals for ways the postal service could expand its services. It could potentially return to a postal savings service for the many people who don’t use banks. Sen. Mary Landrieu has suggested the post office could become a place to go for notary publics, copying and handling hunting and fishing license sales. I would love to see fax services at my local post office—the day before tax day, I needed to fax my electronic filing permission. There’s a post office less than a five minute walk from my house, but it doesn’t offer fax services. I had to go to a private packing and shipping store, where I paid $2 a page. Why can’t the post office add fax services and let me pay $2 a page there? In fact, the postal service has tried to expand its services in much larger ways than these, only to be stopped byRepublicans not wanting it to compete with private business. This happened with online bill paying, money transfers, phone cards, postal meter cartridges, and more.
So when the postal service tries to expand its services as a private business could do, it’s stopped by Congress. But operating in the restricted ways it’s allowed, it’s assailed for being an unresponsive money-losing dinosaur. Clearly a number of senators have grave concerns about S. 1789 and are trying to blunt its harm with amendments. But this is a slate that needs to be wiped clean. We need a postal bill that rejects the language of crisis and does not seek to manufacture further crisis. As Lazard notes, “A business plan based on degrading your greatest strength is not likely to be a path to success.” The postal service needs a business plan that expands on its strengths and takes it into new areas of service.
Emphasis Mine
What If the Greedy Rich Paid Their Share? 8 Things to Know About Wealth and Poverty in the US
From: AlterNet
By:Les Leopold
America is loaded. We are not a struggling nation ready to go under. We are not facing an enormous debt crisis despite what the politicians and pundits proclaim. We are not the next Greece.
Rather, we have an enormous concentration-of-wealth problem – one that must be solved for the good of our commonwealth. We are a very rich nation but it doesn’t seem that way because our wealth is so concentrated in the hands of a few. This is America’s disaster.
But wait. Doesn’t the wealth belong to the super-rich? Didn’t they earn it fair and square? Isn’t that the way it’s always been?
Not by a long shot. The amount of wealth that flows to the super-rich is determined by our public policies. It’s all about how we choose to share our nation’s productivity.
Productivity and the Wealth of Nations
Our country is rich because we are enormously productive as measured by output per hour worked. The greater our collective output per hour, the more our economy produces and the wealthier we are…or should be. It’s not a perfect measure since it doesn’t adequately take into account our environment, our health or our overall well-being. But it is a good gauge of our collective level of effort, skill, knowledge, level of organization, and productive capacity. As the top line on the productivity chart below shows, we’ve been able to produce more and more per hour year after year since WWII. It’s a remarkable achievement.
From 1947 until the mid-1970s, the fruits of our bountiful productivity were shared reasonably fairly with working people. As productivity rose so did workers’ real wages (See the bottom line in the chart below. It represents the average weekly wage of non-supervisory workers who make up about 80 percent of the entire workforce.) This wasn’t socialism. There were still plenty of rich people who earned a significant slice of the productivity harvest. But much of that wealth was plowed back into the economy through taxation rates that between 1947 and 1980 hovered between 70 to 91 percent on incomes over $3 million (in today’s dollars). Much of that money was used to build our physical and knowledge infrastructures, and to fight the Cold War. Unions were supported by public policy and workers’ real wages rose steadily after accounting for inflation. Wall Street was tightly controlled and the middle-class grew like never before.
Then something happened.
It wasn’t an act of God, or the blind forces of technological change, or the mysterious movements of markets. Nor did the super-rich become enormously smarter than before. Instead, flesh-and-blood policy makers decided that deregulation and tax cuts should become the order of the day starting in the mid-1970s. The idea was that if we cut taxes on the super-rich and deregulated the economy (and especially Wall Street), investment would dramatically increase and all boats would rise. But as we can see from the chart below, the average worker’s wage in real terms stalled and even declined after the mid-’70s. The fruits of productivity no longer were shared equitably. The enormous gap between the two lines (trillions of dollars per year) went almost entirely to the super-rich. The wealth of the wealthy skyrocketed, not by accident, but by policy design. “Greed is good” replaced the middle-class American dream.
What Is Wealth and Who Has It?
Wealth or net worth is the total value of what you own (your assets) minus the total value of your debts (your liabilities.) Our collective net worth is really huge. We’re talking big, big numbers. As of the end of 2011, U.S. households had $30 trillion in private assets and $13.6 trillion in liabilities for a total net worth of $16.4 trillion (PDF). How much is that? It comes to an average of $141,000 per household – free and clear of any debts.
But averages are extremely misleading, because wealth is so highly concentrated at the top. Here are some eye-popping numbers.
1. The number of households with a million dollars or more of net worth grew by 202 percent between 1983 and 2007.
2. The number of households with a net worth of $5 million or more grew by 494 percent.
3. The number of $10 million or more households grew by a whopping 598 percent!
4. There are now more than 464,000 households worth $10 million or more. (PDF)
5. But the bottom 40 percent of American households has a net worth of nearly zero (.2 percent).
6. If you take out the value of our homes, the bottom 40 percent has a negative net worth of minus 1 percent – meaning they owe more than their assets are worth.
7. Meanwhile the top one percent holds 34.6 percent of our total net worth and 42.7 percent of all financial assets (excluding homes).
8. That means that the top one percent has a positive net worth valued at approximately $5,700,000,000,000 (that’s $5.7 trillion).
Why We Need a Financial Transaction Tax
Most Americans live on earned income which is taxed instantly through substantial payroll taxes. You can’t collect a paycheck without paying taxes. The super-rich, however, receive most of their income through financial investments that are taxed at lower capital gains rates and which can be offset through a myriad of deductions and loopholes. In effect, the super-rich live by one tax code and the rest of us use another. This is why the wealthiest Americans pay lower effective tax rates than their servants. It’s also why our government appears to be starved for income. If we want a vibrant economy and good investments in our public infrastructures, the wealthy must pay a great deal more, just like they did during the early post-WWII period.
For starters we need a financial transaction tax which is a small sales tax on each and every financial trade – from stocks and bonds to futures and other derivatives. Since the super-rich hold so many financial assets, this kind of tax would directly target their excessive trading and enormous holdings. Not only would this sales tax produce upwards of $150 billion a year in federal revenue, but also, it may help eliminate much of the financial gambling that took down the economy in 2007. Considerate it a tax on financial toxic waste.
A Wealth Tax to Improve our Commonwealth
Finland, France, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland have small net wealth taxes, and England has had a financial transaction tax for three centuries. We should join them. A 1 to 3 percent wealth tax with a million-dollar deduction would only hit the top 1 percent and would provide the nation with from $50 to $150 billion per year in income. Spare change for the super-rich.
The beauty of a wealth tax is that there are no loopholes. Your assets (which include both foreign and domestic) and your liabilities are easily calculated. It’s easier to spot the cheaters. It’s easier to press for information from other countries that may be tempted to launder money for our super-rich. There’s nowhere to run unless the super-rich want to give up their citizenship.
Even Ronald McKinnon, a conservative economist writing in the Wall Street Journal (“The Conservative Case for a Wealth Tax”) is advocating a wealth tax on the super-rich:
In order to have a fairer tax system, we should implement a new federal wealth tax in addition to the federal income tax. Unlike the current income tax, the wealth tax would not rely on how income is defined. Rather, it would require that households list all their domestic and foreign assets on, say, Dec. 31 in the relevant tax year. With a large exemption of $3 million that effectively excludes more than 95% of the population, a moderate flat tax—say 3%, on wealth so defined—could then be imposed.
Combined with the financial transaction tax, we would have more than $200 to $300 billion per year which could rebuild our crumbing infrastructure, provide higher education for our children, eliminate much of the student loan burden, and hire millions of laid-off teachers. Unemployment would fall dramatically and deficit hysteria would vanish into its own hot air.
We can cry about the distribution of income all we want. We can moan and groan about the top 1 percent and how they have captured political power. We can proclaim our membership in the 99 percent for all to hear. But none of that matters much unless we build a mass movement that reclaims our fair share of the fruits of productivity.
The 1 percent didn’t get there just because they were great entrepreneurs or because they were smarter than the rest of us. They got there because they pressed for tax cuts for the super-rich and the deregulation of Wall Street. Those twin policies poured the money into their coffers and stalled our middle-class dead in its tracks. Those policies also crashed the economy and destroyed the jobs of millions of Americans.
A financial transaction tax combined with a wealth tax will bring us closer to the time when the middle-class again was growing year by year. It would put Americans back to work and place our foot right back on Wall Street’s neck – where it needs to be for the good of us all.
But you know it won’t come easy. The super-rich feel entitled to all they can grab. Which means we’ll have to organize like never before and fight like hell. Let’s hope the 99 percent are ready, able and willing.
Emphasis Mine
Any Rand was wrong: humans have evolved to co-operate
from: NY Times
By: Mark Buchanan
“…In a classic experiment of modern behavioral science – one that is now familiar to many people – an experimenter gives one of two people some cash, say $50, and asks them to offer some of it (any amount they choose) to another person, who can either accept or reject the offer. If the second person accepts, the cash is shared out accordingly; if he or she rejects it, no one gets to keep anything.
If we were all self-interested and greedy, then the second person would always accept the offer, as getting something is clearly better than getting nothing. And the first person, knowing this, would offer as little as possible. But that’s most certainly not what happens.
Experiments across many cultures show that people playing this “ultimatum game” typically offer anything from 25 to 50 percent of the money, and reject offers less than around 25 percent, often saying they wanted to punish the person for making an unfair offer.
An important point that people often overlook about these experiments (and others like them) is that they’ve been performed very carefully, with participants remaining completely anonymous, and playing only once. Everything is set up so no one can have any hope of building a good reputation or of getting any kind of payback in the future in kind for their actions today.
So this really does seem to be pure altruism, and we do care about fairness, at least most of us.
That’s not to say, of course, that we’re not often self-interested, or that human kindness isn’t frequently strategic and aimed at currying favor in the future. The point is that it’s not always like that. People give to charity, tip waiters in countries they’ll never again visit, dive into rivers to save other people or even animals – or set aside $1 million to send poor kids to school – not because they hope to get something but, sometimes, out of the goodness of their hearts.
Social researchers have begun referring to this human tendency with the technical term “strong reciprocity,” which refers to a willingness to cooperate, and also to punish those who don’t cooperate, even when no gain is possible. And there’s an interesting theory as to why we’re like this.
In theoretical studies, economists and anthropologists have been exploring how self-interest and cooperation might have played out in our ancestral groups of hunter-gatherers. In interactions among individuals, it’s natural to suppose that purely self-interested people would tend to come out ahead, as they’d never get caught out helping others without getting help in return and would also be able to cheat any naïve altruists that come along.
But it is also natural to suppose that when neighboring groups compete with one another, the group with more altruists would have an advantage, as it would be better able to manage collective tasks – things like farming and hunting, providing for defense or caring for the sick – than a group of more selfish people.
So you can imagine a basic tension in the ancient world between individual interactions that favor self-interest and personal preservation, and group interactions that favor individual altruism. Detailed simulations suggest that if the group competition is strong enough, cooperators will persist because of their intense value to group cohesion. But there’s slightly more to the story, too.
Further work shows that groups really thrive if the altruists are of a special sort – not just people who are willing to cooperate with others, but who are also willing to punish those who they see failing to cooperate.
This work is only suggestive, but it raises the interesting idea that it’s a long history of often brutal competition among groups that has turned most of us into willing cooperators, or, more accurately, strong reciprocators. We’re notHomo economicus, as Herbert Gintis of the University of Amherst puts it, butHomo reciprocans – an organism biologically prone to cooperative actions, and for good historical reasons.
No doubt this is what many people probably thought all along, without the aid of any theory or computer simulations. It just goes to show how theorists can labor for years to re-discover the obvious. Then again, re-discovery often casts the familiar in a not-so-familiar light, and leads us to reconsider what we thought we already knew.
We’ve been so busy over the past half century glorifying the power of markets driven by self-interest that we’ve overlooked how many of our most important institutions depended not on self-interest but on something more akin to a cooperative public spirit. If an impulse toward cooperation rather than self-interest alone is the “natural” human condition, then we’ve been poor stewards of a powerful social resource for the collective good. The United States health care system, to take one example, has by design been set up around the profit motive, based on the belief that only this narrow motivator of individual action can be counted on to produce anything good. It’s perhaps no surprise that it is among the most expensive in the world, and far from the most effective.
In a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, following a screening of his new film “Sicko,” Michael Moore criticized how financial interests play such a foundational role in health care in the United States. “It’s wrong and it’s immoral,” he said. “We have to take the profit motive out of health care. It’s as simple as that.”
But it’s not quite that simple. It’s not that profits shouldn’t play any role, because we are indeed motivated in part by self-interest. It’s just that we have other motivations, too, and helping others is one of those. We need to be just as open to the better parts of human nature as we are protective against the narrowly materialistic ones, whether we’re considering health care or anything else, including education.
You don’t need a new breed of experimental economists to tell you that. Just ask Braylon Edwards.
Emphasis Mine
see:http://buchanan.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/to-thrive-in-the-human-jungle-be-nice/
The Cleveland Chapter of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy hosted
” A Review of the Supreme Court’s ‘Health Care’ Oral Arguments”
Thursday 12 April 2012 at the Squire Sanders office in downtown Cleveland. The presentation featured Elizabeth Wydra http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-b-wydra)
The presenter ( who has a face made for television – on which she often appears) is General Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center. Ms. Wydra heard the arguments all three days, and presented a very lucid summary. In general, she did not agree with some of the negative summaries one heard on various news sources.
She told us that when the ACA was signed into law, even conservative constitutional scholars agreed that it was clearly constitutional, and when the first suits were filed challenging it, there were suggestions that those attorneys should be sanctioned!
She also observed that Justice Scalia read from Tea Party Talking points…
At the end of the event, I feel more confident than ever that we will win this one.
Having said that, I am still displeased to be living in a country where helping grandma on the other side of town pay for her prescription drugs is more controversial than unilaterally invading a sovereign nation and killing, maiming, injuring, and dislocating at least a million of its citizens…
