Category: #OccupyWallStreet

Why don’t poor people save?

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Piggy bank turned into cactus pot <3 By #marnovio #piggybank #plantpot #cactus #recycle

If you don’t have enough money to buy food or turn up the heat, where on earth would you get money to save? What planet do they live on?

Real Time Economics (WSJ) links to a new survey being pushed by America Saves (which appears to be a marketing campaign run by the Consumer Federation of America, which seems not to be evil*). According to the survey, there are significant differences in savings rates and accumulated savings between lower-middle- and middle-income households. And that’s treating all households in the same income bracket as being alike, leaving aside differences in family structure, cost of living, etc.

I’m all for living within your means and saving for retirement and all that. But it’s a myth to say, as America Saves does on its home page, “Once you start saving, it gets easier and easier and before you know it, you’re on your way to making your dreams a reality.” The underlying problems are stagnant real incomes for most people, rising costs (in real terms) for education and health care, increasing financial risk due to the withdrawal of the safety net, and increased longevity (good in some ways, but bad if incomes aren’t rising and you want to retire at 65). That’s why households are showing up at age 64 with less in retirement savings than they had just last decade. And why, if you feel like you’re not saving enough, it’s probably not your fault.

* But America Saves itself is supported by a bunch of financial institutions and trade associations like the Investment Company Institute, which have a vested interest in getting people to entrust more money to them.

UK towns are drowning

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

RNLI helping out in Moorland, Somerset

Everything, everywhere, is terribly wrong. No one represents people like us:

Over 5,000 homes and businesses have been affected, rail services have been cut and thousands of roads closed. And the danger is far from over yet. At the time of writing severe flood warnings remain in place along the River Thames and in Somerset, a large county in south-western England.

It’s revealing to compare the attitude of the authorities in Britain to such matters in the pre-neoliberal era, to today. In 1974 work began on the Thames Flood barrier, to protect London from flooding. It was opened in 1982. It was a great engineering project-typical of the sort of work that public bodies undertook in the post-war era when our politics was more democratic. In recent years however flood protection has been very low down on the list of priorities for the government.

The Thatcher government, on an ideological mission to privatize and deregulate, started the rot by easing planning restrictions. That led to hundreds of thousands of houses being built on flood plains, a recipe for disaster at a time when climate change was leading to milder, wetter and stormier winters. The Labour government which came to power in 1997 did increase funding for flood protection but not by the amount that experts had called for.

A 2008 report by the National Audit Office found that 63 percent of Britain’s flood defenses were not being properly maintained. Meanwhile the building on flood plains increased – between 2001 and 2011 around 200,000 homes were built on flood plains in the UK.

Continue reading “UK towns are drowning” →

Worldwide Wave of Action, April 4th

~ susie

A music video was released yesterday by elements of Anonymous along with Ice Cube, Eminem, and Korn, calling people to action at the former Occupy encampments:

They team up to splice together a nuance-eschewing, face-melting, testosterone-charged collaboration meant to incept a massive wave of action against the seemingly indomitable power of corporatist-totalitarianism within the world’s leading liberal republics.

The video features some hilarious spots of Rob Ford–perhaps the Western world’s most flamboyant symbol of transparent corpo-political stoogism–as well as the mainstream media’s two favorite tools of distraction, Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. There are also a number of clips of Obama acting especially bourgeois while surrounded by animated cameras, implying that the spying-industrial-complex is an apolitical institution supported and grown by whichevever political party is in office.

Ice Cube, Eminem and Korn hit the peak of their musical careers within the mainstream musical establishment over a decade ago, which probably engenders them with a degree of freedom to partake in such an overtly political project.

It might be the most insane music video you’ve seen in a long time–and for some, it may inspire the visceral outrage necessary to orient toward a path of action. Others will just roll their eyes.

Check out the video below, and keep in mind the Worldwide Wave of Action begins on April 4 at “former occupation sites around the world.”

This will be interesting

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

| #OccupyWallStreet #NATGAT |

I figured Taibbi was ready to leave Rolling Stone when I noticed him pulling punches about for-profit schools in an expose. They’re big RS advertisers:

Matt Taibbi, who made a name as a fierce critic of Wall Street at Rolling Stone magazine, has joined First Look Media, the latest big-name journalist to leave an established brand to enter the thriving and well-financed world of news start-ups.

Mr. Taibbi will start his own publication focusing on financial and political corruption, he said in an interview on Wednesday. First Look is financed by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who is worth $8.5 billion, according to Forbes. Mr. Omidyar has pledged $250 million to the project.

“It’s obvious that we’re entering a new phase in the history of journalism,” Mr. Taibbi said. “This is clearly the future, and this was an opportunity for me to be part of helping to found something and create something that might carry us into the next generation.”

The site, as yet unnamed, will open this year. Mr. Taibbi will write for it and take an editorial role, while based in New York. There will be “an emphasis on bringing in talented writers who can have fun with the subject in addition to producing solid investigative journalism,” he said.

First Look began its first publication, The Intercept, with the national security reporters Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. In recent weeks, the group has hired Lynn Oberlander, formerly of The New Yorker, as its general counsel, and the author and journalist Peter Maass, among others.

Tit for tat

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

The white House in Washington

Why, it’s almost as if they expect something in return!

A controversial trade deal being touted by the White House is expected to give American corporations broad new authority if approved. Now according to newly released documents, big banks gave millions to the execs that are now orchestrating the agreement.

Investigative journalist Lee Fang wrote for Republic Report on Tuesday this week that two former well-placed individuals within the ranks of Bank of America and CitiGroup were awarded millions of dollars in bonuses before jumping ship to work on the Trans-Pacific Partnership on behalf of the White House.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is a widely-contested trade deal between the US and 11 other nations adjacent to the Pacific Rim, and has been negotiated by representatives for those countries in utmost secrecy. According to leaked excerpts of the TPP and remarks from experts following the news closely, though, it’s believed that the arrangement would allow corporations to oppose foreign laws while at the same time limiting the abilities for governments to regulate those entities.

On Tuesday, Fang wrote that two major United States-based financial firms have significantly awarded former executives who have since attracted the attention of President Barack Obama and subsequently been offered positions that put them directly involved in TPP talks.

Former Bank of America investment banker Stefan Selig, Fang acknowledged, received more than $9 million in bonus pay after he was nominated to join the Obama administration in November. And Michael Froman, the current US trade representative, was awarded over $4 million from Citigroup when he left them in 2009 in order to go work for the White House. Republic Report were provided those statistics through financial disclosures included in Fang’s article.

Even Larry Summers knows there’s something wrong

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Downton Abbey

When Larry Summers says so, you know it’s bad:

Inequality has emerged as a major issue in the US and beyond. A generation ago it could reasonably have been asserted that the overall growth rate of the economy was the main influence on the growth in middle-class incomes and progress in reducing poverty. This is no longer a plausible claim.

The share of income going to the top 1 per cent of earners has increased sharply. A rising share of output is going to profits. Real wages are stagnant. Family incomes have not risen as fast as productivity. The cumulative effect of all these developments is that the US may well be on the way to becoming a Downton Abbey economy. It is very likely that these issues will be with us long after the cyclical conditions have normalised and budget deficits have at last been addressed.

Well, Larry, if you and your ilk hadn’t been pushing deficit reduction, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad. So fuck you.

[…] It is not enough to identify policies that reduce inequality. To be effective they must also raise the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Tax reform has a major role to play. The current tax code is so badly designed that it is very likely to be having the effect of reducing economic growth. It also allows the rich to shield a far greater proportion of their income from taxation than the poor. For example, last year’s increase in the stock market represented an increase in wealth of about $6tn, of which the lion’s share went to the very wealthy.

It is unlikely that the government will collect as much as 10 per cent of this figure. That is because of a host of policies that favour the rich, such as the capital gains exemption, the ability to defer tax on unrealised capital gains, and the fact that gains on assets passed on at death are not taxed at all. Similarly, the corporate tax system allows value to flow through it like a sieve. The ratio of corporate tax collections to the market value of US corporations is near a record low. The estate tax can be more or less avoided with sophisticated planning.

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Closing loopholes that only the wealthy can enjoy would enable taxes to be cut elsewhere. Measures such as the earned income tax credit can raise the incomes of the poor and middle class by more than they cost the Treasury, because they give people incentives to work and save.

It is ironic that those who profess the most enthusiasm for market forces are least enthusiastic about curbing tax benefits for the wealthy. Sooner or later inequality will have to be addressed. Much better that it be done by letting free markets operate and then working to improve the result. Policies that aim instead to thwart market forces rarely work, and usually fall victim to the law of unintended consequences.

Now that I think of it, fuck you twice, Larry. We know which side you were on.

Another banker jumps

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

This is No. 7:

A man on Tuesday jumped to his death from the top of Chater House in Central, where Wall Street bank JP Morgan has its Asia headquarters, witnesses told the South China Morning Post.

The man, said to be in his early 30s, went to the roof of Chater House, a landmark 30-floor building in the heart of Hong Kong’s central business district – also near the city’s stock exchange – and jumped.

The incident happened between 2pm to 3pm, a witness said.

Several policemen were seen on the roof but apparently failed to convince the man not to jump, one of the witnesses said.

Max Kaiser thinks it’s because the foreign exchange trading desks are being replaced with computers.

Debt slavery

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

FP_IMAGE_7651016/FP_SET_7650602

This is pretty fucking unbelievable. If you have one, tear it up and send it back:

Credit card issuer Capital One isn’t shy about getting into customers’ faces. The company recently sent a contract update to cardholders that makes clear it can drop by any time it pleases.

The update specifies that “we may contact you in any manner we choose” and that such contacts can include calls, emails, texts, faxes or a “personal visit.” As if that weren’t creepy enough, Cap One says these visits can be “at your home and at your place of employment.”

… “It sounds really invasive, but I don’t think it’s a violation of your 4th Amendment rights,” said Daniel E. Kann, a Santa Clarita lawyer who specializes in illegal-search cases.

… Incredibly, Cap One’s aggressiveness doesn’t stop with personal visits. The company’s contract update also includes this little road apple: “We may modify or suppress caller ID and similar services and identify ourselves on these services in any manner we choose.”

Billionaire to 99%: Quit whining

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Oh, how they whine. “We’re job creators,” “we already pay too many taxes,” “YOU TAXED MY YACHTMAKER.” Whine, whine, whine. This is why I have such a firm conviction that Carl Jung is a genius. I have never seen such projection in my life as when the obscenely wealthy lecture the “undeserving” poor.

Nicole Miller CEO Bud Konheim (Philips Exeter Academy ’53, Darmouth grad) was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple:

The island reminded Konheim of his family home in New England. He was born during the Depression, though his family was comfortably situated.

“We had a 23-room house on a few acres of land in the suburbs on the south shore of Long Island,” Bud explained. “But the Depression wasn’t just an economy; it was a mentality. I was born in 1935, and things really didn’t start turning around until after the War. You just didn’t flaunt your status. It was considered tasteless and offensive. There was no keeping up with the Joneses back then.”

This was brought home to him as a teen when he started becoming interested in cars.

“I went home from school one day and asked my parents why we didn’t have a Cadillac. The looks on their faces!” Konheim chuckled. “What would people think? We had three cars and a chauffer, but the cars were Plymouths. A Cadillac was too much.”

Continue reading “Billionaire to 99%: Quit whining” →