Category: #OccupyWallStreet

New Warren bill could save billions

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts.

Mother Jones:

Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced a bill with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that aims to make government settlements with corporations more transparent and fair. It could end up saving taxpayers billions of dollars.

When banks and other corporations are accused of breaking the law, the government often settles cases instead of going to trial. In the wake of the financial crisis, for example, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and government banking watchdogs have settled cases against banks that helped tank the economy. Regulatory agencies have argued that settlements are adequate tools to enforce the law, but Warren has protested. She notes that many settlements are tax-deductible. Other deals are confidential, meaning the public has no idea whether the terms of the agreement are fair.

Warren’s bill would discourage tax-deductible settlements by forcing federal agencies to explain why certain settlements are confidential, and to publicly disclose the terms of nonconfidential agreements so that taxpayers can see how much settlement tax-deductibility is costing them.

Read on for details.

Class war volunteers

~ susie

White House Interns 041998

In case you wondered why people in the political elite don’t have a clue how the rest of us live:

The Obama administration, like previous administrations, allows rich parents in effect to buy résumé-enhancing jobs in the public sector for their upper-class offspring. The sale of public offices to rich families was one of the abuses of the Ancien Régime that helped to inspire the French Revolution. Like that corrupt premodern practice, unpaid internships are an inherently aristocratic institution. If you are in your late teens or early twenties, and you don’t have a personal trust fund or rich parents who can fund your living expenses as an unpaid intern in Washington, D.C., New York or San Francisco, then you are out of luck.

When I say rich kids, I mean really rich kids. We’re talking One Percenters. Even many upper-middle-class parents with professional jobs might not be able to subsidize children with unpaid internships at the White House, Washington think tanks or New York publications and media enterprises.

Because my own parents were not rich, in my twenties I could never have afforded a job as an unpaid or poorly-paid intern at any of the magazines for which I once worked in my thirties as a writer or editor — the New Republic, Harper’s Magazine or the New Yorker. Indeed, it was my unscientific impression that the interns at these publications were much richer, in their twenties, thanks to family wealth, than most of the middle-aged editors and writers. An intern at one magazine had a party for the magazine staff at her two-story Midtown Manhattan apartment.

Unpaid internships have the effect, if not the intent, of providing the children of the super-rich with major advantages over the children of the lower 99 percent in the job market after college. Imagine what a benefit a White House internship is on a résumé. Too bad that benefit is not available to poor, working-class, middle-class or even upper-middle-class Americans, unless they are lucky enough to find an outside sponsor to pay the wages that the Obama administration refuses to pay.

It’s bad enough that elite institutions like magazines and think tanks ration opportunity by discriminating in favor of the sons and daughters of the One Percent by means of unpaid internships. A president who engages in this practice sends a signal to all other employers in the United States: As long as you call a job an “internship” you are free to discriminate against the majority of Americans who were not born into the upper class.

Tiny homes for the homeless

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Interior painting

Back in the 60s and 70s, it was all the rage to knock down or rehabilitate SROs (single-room occupancy hotels), but like most redevelopment projects, it merely displaced people who couldn’t afford a real place to live. This is something that makes more sense, but with the current economy, I don’t know how they could possibly build enough of them to deal with the number of now-homeless people:

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Madison officials are working to get the city more housing for the homeless.

The Wisconsin State Journal reports (http://bit.ly/1gyZyQO ) Occupy Madison Inc. hopes to buy a parcel of land so it can build “tiny houses” for the homeless and then park eight to 10 of the houses there.

The 98-square-foot houses have a roof, insulated walls, a compost toilet and sink and are on wheels. Currently, a tiny house parked on a Madison street must be moved every day or two.

The city’s Community Development Authority, meanwhile, is assembling a site for a housing project with 50 to 60 efficiency units and case management services for homeless residents.

Local aldermen have expressed concern about both sites, but details of both proposals are still being worked out.

Poverty gets more expensive every day

~ odd man out
A view of Philly from my shack before the weather changed
From my shack, a view of Philly when the weather was good

Yesterday at the shack we woke to bone-chilling wind and a blanket of ice. The swamp rabbit was huddled in a corner with a bottle from the case of Wild Turkey I stole to help him get through his post-holiday funk. I told him to fetch wood from the swamp so we don’t freeze, it would be two below zero soon.

“That booze won’t warm you for long,” I said. “I’ll find you stiff as a board tomorrow morning.”

“Won’t be my fault,” the rabbit said. “You ain’t nothin’ but an enabler, don’t ya know?”

While the rodent fetched wood, I chopped ice off the roof and surfed the Net for more weather and news and so on. I saw a letter to the Naked Capitalism guy that I read to the rabbit when he got back with some dead branches that looked like bones:

My expenses are beginning to get the better of me and month’s end is stretching beyond my dollars. Next year is looking the same. So, yesterday I was pointedly reminded how expensive it is to be poor. Instead of buying a lot when something I use is on sale, I have to buy what I have dollars for. No savings for me! And instead of buying by unit price–I’m a ferocious unit price shopper–I have to buy whatever size I have dollars for. And now I have to make more trips because I can only buy small dollars worth at a time.

“Amen to that,” the swamp rabbit said. “I used to buy carrots at twelve bucks a carton when I worked for that magician, gettin’ pulled out of a hat. Now I can barely afford one of them two-dollar bags that don’t hold no more’n a half-dozen carrots.”

The lying varmint never worked for a magician but I could feel his pain, especially now that our secessionist Congress is cutting food stamps and unemployment, and reactionary governors in 25 states, with help from our neo-Confederate Supreme Court, are denying Medicaid to 4.8 million people who aren’t eligible for Obamacare. I read to the rabbit from something by William Greider:

The Supremes have done quite a lot in the last fifteen years to mess up our already weakened democratic system. They stole the presidential election in 2000. They cut loose Big Money to swamp elections by destroying lawful restraints. They are trying step-by-step to restore hoary old legalisms that favor capital over labor, corporations over individuals. Shouldn’t we be talking about how to stop them?

“No, we should be talkin’ about gettin’ somethin’ to eat,” the rabbit said. “I’m too hungry to talk politics.”

I told him to get a fire going in the stove so I could unfreeze the pack of wieners I pinched from Pathmark.

“What you take me for, a heathen?” he said. “I don’t eat no swine.”

“Better get used to it,” I said, “or start growing your own carrots.”

Footnote: Now I’ve got in my head Captain Beefheart’s “A Carrot Is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond.”

The Wolf of Wall Street

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

The wolf of Wall Street
I wanted to see this movie (I mean, Scorcese, right?) but only because I had some vague misunderstanding that of course it would show the comeuppance of the Wall Street vultures! Now that I know what it’s really about, I won’t spend the money:

For three hours, Belfort, portrayed with manic intensity by Leonardo DiCaprio, lies, humps and snorts his way through a binge of fraud and frolic that would make Gordon Gekko, and possibly a few Roman emperors, blush. Belfort starts out hustling penny stocks, selling “garbage to garbage men,” but quickly works his way up from screwing over poor people to ripping off wealthy investors, using the proceeds to hire truckloads of hookers and dwarves used for target practice at office parties (seriously!).

Not everyone was amused. In an open letter to Scorsese and DiCaprio, Christina McDowell, the daughter of one of Belfort’s partners in crime, describes the emotional pain and financial ruin she suffered as a teen when the dad she believed in turned out to be a crook. She doesn’t mince words about the treatment of the Belfort saga in the film:

“So here’s the deal. You people are dangerous. Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers’ fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees. And yet you’re glorifying it—you who call yourselves liberals.”

She’s got a point. Why does Hollywood celebrate financial fraudsters when just about the entire country has been victimized by them?

Wahh

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Ken Langone Threatens Pope Francis

Rich asshole to Catholic Church: If you don’t love me, I’ll just take my ball and go home!

Home Depot founder worries Pope Francis neither loves nor understands rich Americans (via Raw Story )

In an interview on CNBC on Monday, Home Depot founder and devout Catholic Ken Langone said that the Pope’s statements about capitalism have left many potential “capitalist benefactors” wary of donating to the Church or its fundraising projects…

Continue reading “Wahh” →

The ill logic of the lower classes

~ odd man out ~ 4 Comments

Lone marsh tree

It’s the Ninth Day After the Solstice, and I’m back at the shack after checking up on my house, which stopped feeling homey after a tree fell on it last year. Some of my old neighbors are doing OK, judging by the number of houses with Christmas decorations. Some of the those who weren’t doing OK have died. Others — the ones who, because of joblessness or a catastrophe, couldn’t make their mortgage payments — have simply disappeared.

On my way back to the swamp I ran into one of the disappeared — a big, blustery guy who used to remind me of a circus strong man, probably because of the striped tank tops he wore in the summer. Today he was wearing dark glasses and a ratty coat with a big hood, and he seemed about four inches shorter, but I recognized him and said hello as we crossed paths on the sidewalk. He returned my hello but didn’t stop walking. I got the impression he was homeless but I can’t be sure, because I didn’t stop walking either.

When I got back here I asked the swamp rabbit, an amateur shrink as well as a closet bibliophile, why my former neighbor and I had shied away from one another. He spit into the Tinicum swamp and said, “Your ex-neighbor feels like a bum. He’d feel even more like a bum talking to you, because you knew him when he had a house. And I reckon you didn’t want him to know you feel like a bum, too.”

I reminded the rabbit that I’m a fiction writer, not a bum. He asked me what the difference was. It was noon, but he already smelled like he’d finished off a bottle.

I said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve, all you do is drink Wild Turkey and spit in the swamp.”

“Think about it,” he replied. “It ain’t just them hyper-capitalists and their lap dogs in Congress that blame the poors for being poor. The poors blame themselves. They don’t even raise hell when food stamps get cut and unemployment benefits get killed after six months. If they do raise hell, it’s agin each other.”

“You don’t understand the fear, you dumb rodent. Things only get worse when people rock the boat. Demand better wages and you just get fired and disappear. The New Deal is done, the rich have the whip hand until things change again.”

I read him the tail end of a column by Paul Krugman:

Too many Americans currently live in a climate of economic fear. There are many steps that we can take to end that state of affairs, but the most important is to put jobs back on the agenda.

The rabbit twitched his nose and chuckled. “Whose agenda? Jobs are on your agenda if you’re jobless, but they ain’t if you’re in the owner class. The owners don’t need more workers, they’re making bigger profits without them. Who’s gonna make them hire, especially when they know the poors are busy blamin’ themselves for being poor?”

I threw one of his empty bottles at him. I hate it when the varmint makes more sense than that guy in The New York Times.

The Unwinding

~ susie

This is, by the way, a really good book. I highly recommend it:

Tracking the breakdown of American social institutions in ‘The Unwinding’ (via PBS News Hour)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Even as the U.S. economy continued its recovery, 2013 was yet another year that raised sobering questions about inequality and the nation’s ability to tackle some of its biggest problems. Some of those issues, and an unusual perspective…

Continue reading “The Unwinding” →

Morning Reads: Pope Francis’s Populism Rattles GOP; Debtors’ Prisons Return

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Pope Francis on Trickle Down Economic theory

Morning Reads: Pope Francis’s Populism Rattles GOP; Debtors’ Prisons Return (via Moyers & Company)

Good morning! Only 364 shopping days left until Christmas! Before working on your list, take a look at some of the stories we’re reading on this slow holiday news day… He’s freaking them out –> Katie Glueck reports for Politico that Pope Francis…

Continue reading “Morning Reads: Pope Francis’s Populism Rattles GOP; Debtors’ Prisons Return” →