What Happened to the 50,000 Homeless in NYC During Hurricane Sandy?

Advocate
Sunny Bjerk

With the mess of Hurricane Sandy in New York City over the last few days, we have been hearing a lot about mandatory evacuations for people in Zone A: areas in Staten Island, lower Manhattan, and eastern Brooklyn (Red Hook and Greenpoint especially). To meet the needs of these Sandy evacuees, Bloomberg opened 65 additional shelters across the five boroughs, stocking these makeshift shelters—high schools, middle schools, etc.—with food, water, blankets, and pet food.

The strongest part of this evacuation plan is that it’s a piece of a larger puzzle, and that these shelters are only a detour until these people can return to their homes. But for the 50,000 people in New York City who are homeless and need shelter every night, they simply are not given the same thought-out consideration or planning, at least not outside of weather emergencies. Certainly, we must commend those who were on the front line of the storm over the last few nights, reaching out to the homeless across New York City and even into New Jersey (well done, Cory Booker) and encouraging them to seek shelter, but where’s the same outreach and energy on an average NYC night? Where is the long-term solution for the population that is the same as Hempstead, NY?

Think about it. Like the Sandy evacuees, the ever-increasing homeless population in the city was met with the same solution: open more shelters. And that’s exactly what Bloomberg and Co. did, opening roughly 10 in the last few months. But where’s the same long-term consideration or planning for the city’s homeless? Expanding the city’s emergency shelter system, which typically have limits on stays and that homeless people avoid due to sexual assaults and drug use, without a long-term plan for the homeless population is like putting a Band-Aid on a growing wound. It may hide the problem for a little while, but it certainly doesn’t address the severity of the wound. And unless the city is thinking of pushing FEPSapplications a little faster, or reinstating the Advantage Subsidy program, the city, Bloomberg, and social service organizations can expect a steady increase in the rise of the homeless across the city.

Insert your own scoff here.

While we must be thankful that our city was able to provide shelter to those made vulnerable by Hurricane Sandy, but we must also remember that 50,000 people, regardless of weather, seek shelter every night in the city, without any long-term plan in sight, and whose vulnerability is made apparent day-in and day-out.

We cannot let the city’s homeless population continue to remain politically or socially invisible.

Republicans, Democrats attacking Americans in bipartisan push for savage austerity

PressTV
Webster Tarpley

By all indications, the US ruling class of Wall Street financiers is determined to follow Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain down the road to drastic austerity. The financiers of lower Manhattan are thus ignoring the evidence offered by these other countries showing that austerity policies reduce employment, lower production, cause severe mass privation, introduce powerful elements of chaos into society, and actually increase the government budget deficits in future years -- meaning that austerity fails even in its own terms.

Since the 1930s, it has been widely recognized that a policy of deflation with severe cuts in government spending and in expenditures for social services will plunge a country deeper into depression. Once the depression has hit, usually as the result of the collapse of a speculative bubble like the $2 quadrillion derivatives mania of 2000-2008, the private economy shrinks rapidly, leaving government spending as the principal form of economic activity. If the government budget is nevertheless cut, this lowers the overall rate of economic activity; working people paying taxes are turned into recipients of public assistance, and the budget deficit grows rapidly. The classic case is the German government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in 1930-32, whose brutal austerity policies shrank the national economy by about 25% over the course of two years, but still could not prevent the German budget deficit from growing.

Despite all this, there is today a consensus between Wall Street and Washington that draconian austerity must be imposed in the United States. This will be the case no matter whether Obama or Romney wins the upcoming election. Romney has been very open about his determination to rule in the name of the top 1% of financiers and oligarchs, while imposing hardships and sacrifices on the rest of the population. Obama is somewhat more discreet, but he also has clearly signaled his desire for a sweeping austerity program to be agreed on by the two major US parties as soon as possible, probably before the end of this year.

Observers have noted that Obama and Biden, in their three debates held so far with their Republican rivals, have never mentioned the traditional Democratic Party platform planks of raising the minimum wage; preserving the funding of the food stamp program (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program of the US Department Of Agriculture) which keeps some 50 million Americans alive; maintaining and extending unemployment insurance payments to the jobless; or making it easier for trade unions to organize.

Obama and Biden ignore waitress moms

This failure by Obama and Biden to even mention these concerns of lower middle class working people and the working poor does not represent astute politics. On the one hand, it is true that the Democratic Party has almost entirely lost its earlier base of support among white male workers. But the Democratic Party still has a sizable constituency of working women, often single mothers, who have no college education. These are the so-called “waitress moms,” for whom the economic issues are very important. But the Democratic Party ignores them, since promises of this type might get in the way of delivering the austerity demanded by Wall Street.

Intelligent trade unionists have not forgotten that, when the entire state of Wisconsin was gripped by a de facto general strike against the fascist Governor Walker in February-March 2011, Obama refused to lift a finger to help them. Obama could have sent in Vice President Biden, who pretends to be a populist, to support the strikers. He could have sent Attorney General Eric Holder to frighten the Walker gang with the prospect of federal indictments. He could have sent Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to investigate violations of the labor law. Obama could even have gone to Wisconsin himself, something he had promised to do in his 2000 campaign. But Obama did nothing. Nor did he help unions and other residents in Ohio, who were able to fight off a union busting campaign by their own fascist Governor Kasich, or in Indiana, where a union busting plan largely succeeded, or in Michigan, where the fascist Governor Snyder has kicked out the democratically elected mayors and city councils and replaced them with austerity dictators in cities like Benton Harbor, Flint, Pontiac, and Ecorse, and in the Detroit public schools.

Obama needs the members of trade unions to mobilize in his support during the final phases of his reelection campaign, but he offers nothing in return but killer cuts. When Obama ran for president the first time, he promised to institute a reform known as Card Check, which is simply a way to facilitate the establishment of union representation in workplaces. But Obama never did anything to get this law through Congress, and he has not mentioned it for years.

The ideological atmosphere in Washington, DC is heavily in favor of severe austerity, reflecting the elite consensus. Many news commentators are demanding that Obama implement the recommendations of the so-called Simpson-Bowles Commission, which favored three dollars worth of cuts in entitlements and the social safety net compared to one dollar in increased revenue, with only a tiny fraction of the latter coming from taxes on the super-rich. Former Senator Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chair of this commission, is no humanitarian, but is on record saying he hates senior citizens and also that he hates his own grandchildren, among others. Simpson Bowles is often called the cat food commission, since the entitlement cuts it demands would reduce many elderly people to eating cat food because of their poverty. In the first presidential debate, Obama endorsed the murderous program of Simpson-Bowles.

In the United States Senate, an effort for savage austerity supported by an alliance of both major parties is being mounted by the Gang of Eight, sometimes called the Crapo Commission by its critics in honor of the reactionary Idaho Mormon Senator Mike Crapo who is one of its prominent members. Crapo is joined by Republicans Alexander, Coburn, and Chambliss, plus Democrats Bennett, Warner, Durbin, and Conrad in discussions over how to flay the American people alive.

The essential unifying ideology of the Democratic Party is the defense of the progressive economic reforms of the New Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society. Depending on the specific program, polls show that between 65% and 80% of the American people want these social programs preserved in their current form, with no cuts. But Obama and other leaders see the Democratic Party as a confederation of social groups, each of which wants to practice its own brand of identity politics. By pandering to each of these forms of particularism and parochialism, postmodern Democrats like Obama hope to sell out the traditional entitlements and still survive politically. But it is quite possible that a massive betrayal by Obama of his own base on these issues would lead to a permanent weakening of the Democratic Party, conceivably a fatal one.

During the current pre-election phase, Obama is pretending to take a principled position on the coming austerity deal, sometimes referred to as the “Grand Bargain.” According to the Washington Post of October 18, Obama is sending out word to the Congress that he will veto any December-January budget deal that does not contain some tax increase on the rich. This posturing is hollow, for at least three reasons. First, Obama would be more than willing to barter a tiny tax hike on the super-rich for massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare. These cuts would leave the luxuries of the superrich untouched, but would cut deeply into the amenities of the middle class and the necessities of the working poor. Secondly, the Obama White House refused to say whether this veto threat will apply in case Obama loses the election. The implication is that, if he becomes a one term president, Obama will want to secure his place in history - as an austerity enforcer, given his neoliberal mentality -- at the expense of the weakest, oldest, sickest, and most defenseless elements of US society. A third problem is that the cowardly Obama has surrendered so many times that few take his threats seriously now. “Some Republicans, noting that the president has backed off demands for higher taxes twice in the past, are skeptical that he will stand firm now,” commented theWashington Post.

Another group which Obama has sold out is the college students who did so much to put him into the White House in 2008. Two thirds of the US college graduates of 2011 were groaning under student loan debt, with an average of $26,000 per bachelor’s degree student, plus more for advanced degrees, and much more for degrees in law and medicine. The student loan burden has now topped $1 trillion, about as much as consumer and credit card debt. Student loan debt is interfering with the normal process of human life, since the indebted young people are less likely to find apartments of their own, less likely to get married, and less likely to have children.

Because the US government is operating under multiple states of emergency, a real president could easily use the existing provisions of the Defense Production Act to declare a five-year freeze on all payments of interest and principal on these crippling student loans. He could use the same law to impose a 10% ceiling on all interest rates in the United States, thus reviving the usury laws of the pre-Volker era. But Obama is determined to serve Wall Street to the bitter end, even if the financiers are now channeling significantly more money to Romney than to the current tenant of the White House.

Leaked Audio Captures Romney Asking Employers To Tell Their Employees How To Vote

Global Post
Jessica Phelan

Newly-discovered audio from a conference call in June captures Mitt Romney asking business owners to urge their employees to vote for him.

Romney, speaking on a call to the very conservative National Federation of Independent Business, tells a group of business owners that they should “make it very clear” how they feel about the candidates. The audio, discovered by In These Times, also captures Romney telling the business owners to “pass… along to your employees” how their jobs might be effected by who wins in November:

I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope — I hope you pass those along to your employees. Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well.

Listen at 26:44:

SAT reading scores hit a four-decade low

Washington Post
Lyndsey Layton
Emma Brown

Reading scores on the SAT for the high school class of 2012 reached a four-decade low, putting a punctuation mark on a gradual decline in the ability of college-bound teens to read passages and answer questions about sentence structure, vocabulary and meaning on the college entrance exam.

Many experts attribute the continued decline to record numbers of students taking the test, including about one-quarter from low-income backgrounds. There are many factors that can affect how well a student scores on the SAT, but few are as strongly correlated as family income.

Scores among every racial group except for those of Asian descent declined from 2006 levels. A majority of test takers — 57 percent — did not score high enough to indicate likely success in college, according to the College Board, the organization that administers the test.

In the Washington region, average statewide reading scores in Maryland, Virginia and the District all slipped slightly from 2011. But in Montgomery, Fairfax and Arlington counties, students outperformed their peers across their states and the country. And Montgomery County set a record for total average scores.

But the national trend lines are alarming and should serve as “a call to action,” College Board President Gaston Caperton said. “When less than half of kids who want to go to college are prepared to do so, that system is failing.”

The nearly four-hour SAT covers critical reading, writing and math. Each subject is worth a maximum of 800 points, for a potential total of 2400 points. For generations, SAT scores have been used, in conjunction with grade-point averages, by college admission officers to judge whether an applicant is likely to succeed at their school.

But questions about whether the SAT is biased in favor of middle-class and wealthy students have led many colleges and universities to use other gauges or to accept an alternative exam, the ACT, which edged out the SAT in 2012 for the first time as the nation’s most popular college entrance exam.

There is a significant correlation between family income and test scores on the SAT, with average scores increasing with every $20,000 in additional family income.

Educational experts are divided over the causes. Some assert that privileged students do better on the SAT because they are exposed to activities, from summer camp to private violin lessons, that give them an advantage in that particular test. Others point to the fact that affluent parents can provide private tutoring and privileged students can afford to take the test multiple times.

Still, many school districts — and parents — traditionally have seen SAT scores as an important measure of the quality of a K-12 education.

Across the country, 1.66 million seniors who graduated last June took the SAT, the highest number since the exam was first administered in 1926 to a few thousand overwhelmingly white and privileged students headed for Ivy League schools. In many places around the country, school administrators have been nudging more students to take the exam, saying that all students should consider college. In Prince George’s County, officials plan to offer the exam during the regular school day this year, making it more convenient for students.

In Prosecutors, Debt Collectors Find a Partner

New York Times
Jessica Silver-Greenberg

Angela Yartz with debt collection notices on district attorney letterhead.
She was threatened with conviction over a $47.95 check to Walmart.

The letters are sent by the thousands to people across the country who have written bad checks, threatening them with jail if they do not pay up.

They bear the seal and signature of the local district attorney’s office. But there is a catch: the letters are from debt-collection companies, which the prosecutors allow to use their letterhead. In return, the companies try to collect not only the unpaid check, but also high fees from debtors for a class on budgeting and financial responsibility, some of which goes back to the district attorneys’ offices.

The practice, which has spread to more than 300 district attorneys’ offices in recent years, shocked Angela Yartz when she was threatened with conviction over a $47.95 check to Walmart. A single mother in San Mateo, Calif., Ms. Yartz said she learned the check had bounced only when she opened a letter in February, signed by the Alameda County district attorney, informing her that unless she paid $280.05 — including $180 for a “financial accountability” class — she could be jailed for up to one year.

“I was so worried driving my kid to and from school that if I failed to signal, they would cart me off to jail,” Ms. Yartz said.

Debt collectors have come under fire for illegally menacing people behind on their bills with threats of jail. What makes this approach unusual is that the ultimatum comes with the imprimatur of law enforcement itself — though it is made before any prosecutor has determined a crime has been committed.

Prosecutors say that the partnerships allow them to focus on more serious crimes, and that the letters are sent only to check writers who ignore merchants’ demands for payment. The district attorneys receive a payment from the firms or a small part of the fees collected.

“The companies are returning thousands of dollars to merchants that is not coming at taxpayer expense,” said Ken Ryken, deputy district attorney with Alameda County.

Consumer lawyers have challenged the debt collectors in courts across the United States, claiming that they lack the authority to threaten prosecution or to ask for fees for classes when no district attorney has reviewed the facts of the cases. The district attorneys are essentially renting out their stationery, the lawyers say, allowing the companies to give the impression that failure to respond could lead to charges, when it rarely does.

“This is guilty until proven innocent,” said Paul Arons, a consumer lawyer in Friday Harbor, Wash., about two hours north of Seattle.

How Quantitative Easing Helps the Rich and Soaks the Rest of Us

And why the Occupy movement should be up in arms.

Reason

Anthony Randzzo

The decision is in: Unlimited quantitative easing. That was the announcement from the Federal Open Market Committee this afternoon, launching a third round of purchases of securities in a bid to boost the economy and reduce unemployment. This time, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and crew are pledging to buy $40 billion per month until the economy improves. The Fed's policy committee also extended its zero-interest rate policy until “at least mid-2015.” If QE3 lasts that long, the Feds will be printing at least another $800 billion to buy mortgage-backed securities.

It won’t be a surprise to read conservatives lambasting this as unconventional monetary policy meant to help re-elect President Obama. And inflation hawks have already started screeching. But the loudest cry of “for shame” should be coming from the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Quantitative easing—a fancy term for the Federal Reserve buying securities from predefined financial institutions, such as their investments in federal debt or mortgages—is fundamentally a regressive redistribution program that has been boosting wealth for those already engaged in the financial sector or those who already own homes, but passing little along to the rest of the economy. It is a primary driver of income inequality formed by crony capitalism. And it is hurting prospects for economic growth down the road by promoting malinvestments in the economy.

How is the Federal Reserve contributing to regressive redistribution, income inequality, and manipulated markets? Let’s flesh this out a bit.

Last month, Bernanke said that quantitative easing had contributed to the rebound in stock prices over the past few years, and suggested this was a positive outcome. “This effect is potentially important, because stock values affect both consumption and investment decisions,” he argued, apparently under the belief that the Fed has a third mandate to support rising stock prices.

This is ironically a trickle down monetary policy theory, where rising stock prices mean more wealth and more consumption that trickles down the economic ladder. One problem with this idea is that there is a gigantic mountain of household debt—about $12 trillion worth—that is diverting away any trickle down. An even worse assumption is that the stock market really reflects what is going on in the real economy.

Where the Occupy movement should really be teed off is when you consider that most equity shares in America are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent. That is not inherently a problem—wealthier individuals with more disposable income will have more ability take ownership stakes in companies than those in lower income brackets. And it is not a call for class warfare. However, it does mean that when the Fed engages in quantitative easing it is providing a benefit to a very narrow segment of society at the expense of others (either through future inflation or through the cost of raising taxes to pay for increased federal debts). That is the definition of crony capitalism.

At the same time, all Americans have seen the prices of basic goods increase over the past few years in large part due to rising commodities prices. The whole idea of QE is to drive investors out of lower risk investments like mortgage backed securities and government debt and get them to put that money in “more productive” use—lend it, build skyscrapers, invest in technology, etc. Since there is little confidence about the future of the economy, many investors have crowded into the stock market with their money, and still others have invested in commodities.

The problem is that investing in commodities can push up prices on things like gas, meat (because of feed corn prices), bread (because of wheat prices), and even orange juice. There certainly have been other contributors to commodities prices going up, but if the Fed has boosted stocks, they've boosted commodities too. So not only are the cronies gaining from quantitative easing, there is a negative wealth effect too.

The cronyism doesn’t end there. In a Dallas Fed paper released in August, OPEC chief economist William White points out that easy monetary policy favors “senior management of banks in particular.” And even Bernanke himself suggested (as if it was a good thing) that quantitative easing purchases “have been found to be associated with significant declines in the yields on both corporate bonds and MBS.” Translation: the Federal Reserve has made it artificially cheaper for corporations to borrow money and has pushed up the prices of houses (benefiting homeowners but hurting homebuyers).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought cheap loans allowing businesses to leverage up and juiced housing prices were key parts of what got us into this mess?

All of this might be acceptable to some if quantitative easing was helping the American economy recover. The reality is that quantitative easing has made it cheaper for the government to borrow, has artificially propped up the housing market (making it take longer to recover), and has dramatically manipulated the distribution of capital in financial markets. And the economy has not been in recovery.

The plans announced today will exacerbate pre-existing malinvestment and income inequality. What is this continuous round of purchases going to do? It won’t get banks lending any more than they already are. And even if it did, households and small business still have a lot of debt that will keep them in a deleveraging state for a while. It won’t help the housing market bottom out, clear away toxic debt, and end the wave of foreclosures that need to process. It is not going to push up incomes, create new jobs, or change the technological revolution that is altering the face of employment in America.

To put it simply: More quantitative easing is not going to move the dial much on the growth meter.

Taken together, the crony capitalism and negative wealth effects of quantitative easing should clearly give pause. The fact that QE promotes activities that led to the housing bubble should have stopped its progression as an idea a long time ago, especially since these problems are greater than any gain that would come from this now perpetual pace of money creation.

If there is a time to head down to Zuccotti Park and raise some cardboard in opposition to the continuation of such a devastatingly failed policy, it is now.

America’s Descent into Poverty

Paul Craig Roberts

The United States has collapsed economically, socially, politically, legally, constitutionally, and environmentally. The country that exists today is not even a shell of the country into which I was born. In this article I will deal with America’s economic collapse. In subsequent articles, i will deal with other aspects of American collapse.

Economically, America has descended into poverty. As Peter Edelman says, “Low-wage work is pandemic.” Today in “freedom and democracy” America, “the world’s only superpower,” one fourth of the work force is employed in jobs that pay less than $22,000, the poverty line for a family of four. Some of these lowly-paid persons are young college graduates, burdened by education loans, who share housing with three or four others in the same desperate situation. Other of these persons are single parents only one medical problem or lost job away from homelessness.

Others might be Ph.D.s teaching at universities as adjunct professors for $10,000 per year or less. Education is still touted as the way out of poverty, but increasingly is a path into poverty or into enlistments into the military services.

Edelman, who studies these issues, reports that 20.5 million Americans have incomes less than $9,500 per year, which is half of the poverty definition for a family of three.

There are six million Americans whose only income is food stamps. That means that there are six million Americans who live on the streets or under bridges or in the homes of relatives or friends. Hard-hearted Republicans continue to rail at welfare, but Edelman says, “basically welfare is gone.”

In my opinion as an economist, the official poverty line is long out of date. The prospect of three people living on $19,000 per year is farfetched. Considering the prices of rent, electricity, water, bread and fast food, one person cannot live in the US on $6,333.33 per year. In Thailand, perhaps, until the dollar collapses, it might be done, but not in the US.

As Dan Ariely (Duke University) and Mike Norton (Harvard University) have shown empirically, 40% of the US population, the 40% less well off, own 0.3%, that is, three-tenths of one percent, of America’s personal wealth. Who owns the other 99.7%? The top 20% have 84% of the country’s wealth. Those Americans in the third and fourth quintiles--essentially America’s middle class--have only 15.7% of the nation’s wealth. Such an unequal distribution of income is unprecedented in the economically developed world.

In my day, confronted with such disparity in the distribution of income and wealth, a disparity that obviously poses a dramatic problem for economic policy, political stability, and the macro management of the economy, Democrats would have demanded corrections, and Republicans would have reluctantly agreed.

But not today. Both political parties whore for money.

The Republicans believe that the suffering of poor Americans is not helping the rich enough. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are committed to abolishing every program that addresses needs of what Republicans deride as “useless eaters.”

The “useless eaters” are the working poor and the former middle class whose jobs were offshored so that corporate executives could receive multi-millions of dollars in performance pay compensation and their shareholders could make millions of dollars on capital gains. While a handful of executives enjoy yachts and Playboy playmates, tens of millions of Americans barely get by.

In political propaganda, the “useless eaters” are not merely a burden on society and the rich. They are leeches who force honest taxpayers to pay for their many hours of comfortable leisure enjoying life, watching sports events, and fishing in trout streams, while they push around their belongings in grocery baskets or sell their bodies for the next MacDonald burger.

The concentration of wealth and power in the US today is far beyond anything my graduate economic professors could image in the 1960s. At four of the world’s best universities that I attended, the opinion was that competition in the free market would prevent great disparities in the distribution of income and wealth. As I was to learn, this belief was based on an ideology, not on reality.

Congress, acting on this erroneous belief in free market perfection, deregulated the US economy in order to create a free market. The immediate consequence was resort to every previous illegal action to monopolize, to commit financial and other fraud, to destroy the productive basis of American consumer incomes, and to redirect income and wealth to the one percent.

The “democratic” Clinton administration, like the Bush and Obama administrations, was suborned by free market ideology. The Clinton sell-outs to Big Money essentially abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But this sell-out of struggling Americans was not enough to satisfy the Republican Party. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to cut or abolish every program that cushions poverty-stricken Americans from starvation and homelessness.

Republicans claim that the only reason Americans are in need is because the government uses taxpayers’ money to subsidize Americans who are unwilling to work. As Republicans see it, while we hard-workers sacrifice our leisure and time with our families, the welfare rabble enjoy the leisure that our tax dollars provide them.

This cock-eyed belief, on top of corporate CEOs maximizing their incomes by offshoring the middle class jobs of millions of Americans, has left Americans in poverty and cities, counties, states, and the federal government without a tax base, resulting in bankruptcies at the state and local level and massive budget deficits at the federal level that threaten the value of the dollar and its role as reserve currency.

The economic destruction of America benefitted the mega-rich with multi-billions of dollars with which to enjoy life and its high-priced accompaniments wherever the mega-rich wish. Meanwhile, away from the French Rivera, Homeland Security is collecting sufficient ammunition to keep dispossessed Americans under control.

Feds Are Cutting Social Security Benefits From Retirees Who Can't Pay Back Student Loans

Business Insider
Mandi Woodruff

While most attention in the ongoing student debt crisis narrative has focused on new graduates, it turns out the federal government has been quietly targeting a different group of debtors: retirees.

The Treasury Department has been withholding as much as 15 percent of Social Security benefits from "a rapidly growing number of Social Security recipients who have fallen behind on federal student loans," Smart Money's Annamaria Andriotis reports:

"From January through August 6, the government reduced the size of roughly 115,000 retirees' Social Security checks on those grounds. That's nearly double the pace of the department's enforcement in 2011; it's up from around 60,000 cases in all of 2007 and just 6 cases in 2000...

The amount that the government withholds varies widely, though it runs up to 15%. Assuming the average monthly Social Security benefit for a retired worker of $1,234, that could mean a monthly haircut of almost $190."

Since 2001, the number of retirees who've seen benefits garnished has ballooned from about 20,000 to nearly 100,000. The worst part? Some of these retirees are simply among the growing number of older consumers who've taken on loans to help their kids or grandchildren through college.

A recent report by the New York Federal Reserve found more than 17 percent of student loan borrowers are over the age of 50.

And while slates for credit and other forms of debt can be wiped clean in bankruptcy, lawmakers have yet to add student loan debt to the list.

Still, simply owning study loans in old age doesn't automatically put retiree's

 benefits on the fed's chopping block.

"It's when people aren't making any attempt whatsoever [to pay] that they start heading down that road," Treasury Department spokesman Justin Hamilton said.

The Global 1%: Exposing the Transnational Ruling Class

Global Research

Prof. Peter Phillips

Kimberly Soeiro

This study asks: Who are the the world’s One percent power elite? 

And to what extent do they operate in unison for their own private gains over benefits for the 99 percent? 

We examine a sample of the 1 percent: the extractor sector, whose companies are on the ground extracting material from the global commons, and using low-cost labor to amass wealth. These companies include oil, gas, and various mineral extraction organizations, whereby the value of the material removed far exceeds the actual cost of removal.We also examine the investment sector of the global 1 percent: companies whose primary activity is the amassing and reinvesting of capital. This sector includes global central banks, major investment money management firms, and other companies whose primary efforts are the concentration and expansion of money, such as insurance companies. 

Finally, we analyze how global networks of centralized power—the elite 1 percent, their companies, and various governments in their service—plan, manipulate, and enforce policies that benefit their continued concentration of wealth and power. We demonstrate how the US/NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in service to the transnational corporate class for the protection of international capital in the world.

The Occupy Movement has developed a mantra that addresses the great inequality of wealth and power between the world’s wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of us, the other 99 percent. While the 99 percent mantra undoubtedly serves as a motivational tool for open involvement, there is little understanding as to who comprises the 1 percent and how they maintain power in the world. Though a good deal of academic research has dealt with the power elite in the United States, only in the past decade and half has research on the transnational corporate class begun to emerge.[i]

Foremost among the early works on the idea of an interconnected 1 percent within global capitalism was Leslie Sklair’s 2001 book, The Transnational Capitalist Class.[ii] Sklair believed that globalization was moving transnational corporations (TNC) into broader international roles, whereby corporations’ states of orgin became less important than international argreements developed through the World Trade Organization and other international institutions. Emerging from these multinational corporations was a transnational capitalist class, whose loyalities and interests, while still rooted in their corporations, was increasingly international in scope. Sklair writes:

The transnational capitalist class can be analytically divided into four main fractions: (i) owners and controllers of TNCs and their local affiliates; (ii) globalizing bureaucrats and politicians; (iii) globalizing professionals; (iv) consumerist elites (merchants and media). . . . It is also important to note, of course, that the TCC [transnational corporate class] and each of its fractions are not always entirely united on every issue. Nevertheless, together, leading personnel in these groups constitute a global power elite, dominant class or inner circle in the sense that these terms have been used to characterize the dominant class structures of specific countries.[iii]

Estimates are that the total world’s wealth is close to $200 trillion, with the US and Europe holding approximately 63 percent. To be among the wealthiest half of the world, an adult needs only $4,000 in assets once debts have been subtracted. An adult requires more than $72,000 to belong to the top 10 percent of global wealth holders, and more than $588,000 to be a member of the top 1 percent.  As of 2010, the top 1 percent of the wealthist people in the world had hidden away between $21 trillion to $32 trillion in secret tax exempt bank accounts spread all over the world.[iv] Meanwhile, the poorest half of the global population together possesses less than 2 percent of global wealth.[v] The World Bank reports that, in 2008, 1.29 billion people were living in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day, and 1.2 billion more were living on less than $2.00 a day.[vi] Starvation.net reports that 35,000 people, mostly young children, die every day from starvation in the world.[vii] The numbers of unnecessary deaths have exceeded 300 million people over the past forty years. Farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up 4 percent from the year before—yet, billions of people go hungry every day. Grain.org describes the core reasons for ongoing hunger in a recent article, “Corporations Are Still Making a Killing from Hunger”: while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control global food prices and distribution.[viii] Addressing the power of the global 1 percent—identifying who they are and what their goals are—are clearly life and death questions.

It is also important to examine the questions of how wealth is created, and how it becomes concentrated. Historically, wealth has been captured and concentrated through conquest by various powerful enities. One need only look at Spain’s appropriation of the wealth of the Aztec and Inca empires in the early sixteenth century for an historical example of this process. The histories of the Roman and British empires are also filled with examples of wealth captured.

Once acquired, wealth can then be used to establish means of production, such as the early British cotton mills, which exploit workers’ labor power to produce goods whose exchange value is greater than the cost of the labor, a process analyzed by Karl Marx in Capital.[ix] A human being is able to produce a product that has a certain value. Organized business hires workers who are paid below the value of their labor power. The result is the creation of what Marx called surplus value, over and above the cost of labor. The creation of surplus value allows those who own the means of production to concentrate capital even more. In addition, concentrated capital accelerates the exploition of natural resources by private entrepreneurs—even though these natural resources are actually the common heritage of all living beings.[x]

In this article, we ask: Who are the the world’s 1 percent power elite? And to what extent do they operate in unison for their own private gains over benefits for the 99 percent? We will examine a sample of the 1 percent: the extractor sector, whose companies are on the ground extracting material from the global commons, and using low-cost labor to amass wealth. These companies include oil, gas, and various mineral extraction organizations, whereby the value of the material removed far exceeds the actual cost of removal.

We will also examine the investment sector of the global 1 percent: companies whose primary activity is the amassing and reinvesting of capital. This sector includes global central banks, major investment money management firms, and other companies whose primary efforts are the concentration and expansion of money, such as insurance companies.

Finally, we analyze how global networks of centralized power—the elite 1 percent, their companies, and various governments in their service—plan, manipulate, and enforce policies that benefit their continued concentration of wealth and power.

The Extractor Sector: The Case of Freeport-McMoRan (FCX)

Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is the world’s largest extractor of copper and gold. The company controls huge deposits in Papua, Indonesia, and also operates in North and South America, and in Africa. In 2010, the company sold 3.9 billion pounds of copper, 1.9 million ounces of gold, and 67 million pounds of molybdenum. In 2010, Freeport-McMoRan reported revenues of $18.9 billion and a net income of $4.2 billion.[xi]

The Grasberg mine in Papua, Indonesia, employs 23,000 workers at wages below three dollars an hour. In September 2011, workers went on strike for higher wages and better working conditions. Freeport had offered a 22 percent increase in wages, and strikers said it was not enough, demanding an increase to an international standard of seventeen to forty-three dollars an hour. The dispute over pay attracted local tribesmen, who had their own grievances over land rights and pollution; armed with spears and arrows, they joined Freeport workers blocking the mine’s supply roads.[xii] During the strikers’ attempt to block busloads of replacement workers, security forces financed by Freeport killed or wounded several strikers.

Freeport has come under fire internationally for payments to authorities for security. Since 1991, Freeport has paid nearly thirteen billion dollars to the Indonesian government—one of Indonesia’s largest sources of income—at a 1.5 percent royalty rate on extracted gold and copper, and, as a result, the Indonesian military and regional police are in their pockets. In October 2011, the Jakarta Globe reported that Indonesian security forces in West Papua, notably the police, receive extensive direct cash payments from Freeport-McMoRan. Indonesian National Police Chief Timur Pradopo admitted that officers received close to ten million dollars annually from Freeport, payments Pradopo described as “lunch money.” Prominent Indonesian nongovernmental organization Imparsial puts the annual figure at fourteen million dollars.[xiii] These payments recall even larger ones made by Freeport to Indonesian military forces over the years which, once revealed, prompted a US Security and Exchange Commission investigation of Freeport’s liability under the United States’ Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

US poverty on track to reach 46-year high; suburbs, underemployed workers, children hit hard

Washington Post

The ranks of America’s poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.

Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.

Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

“I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I’m here, applying for assistance because it’s hard to make ends meet. It’s very hard to adjust,” said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.

Fritz says she grew up wealthy in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, but fortunes turned after her parents lost a significant amount of money in the housing bust. Stuck in a half-million dollar house, her parents began living off food stamps and Fritz’s college money evaporated. She tried joining the Army but was injured during basic training.

Now she’s living on disability, with an infant daughter and a boyfriend, Garrett Goudeseune, 25, who can’t find work as a landscaper. They are struggling to pay their $650 rent on his unemployment checks and don’t know how they would get by without the extra help as they hope for the job market to improve.

In an election year dominated by discussion of the middle class, Fritz’s case highlights a dim reality for the growing group in poverty. Millions could fall through the cracks as government aid from unemployment insurance, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps diminishes.

“The issues aren’t just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy,” said Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.

Elites Bilk Populace through Manipulation of Currency, Interest Rates and Precious Metals

J.T. Waldron

The mechanisms for transferring wealth from the majority to the elite involve a massive conspiracy to deceive with the primary goal of getting all to jump into tangled heaps of collapsing markets. 

Starting with the currency market, the Federal Reserve responds to increased public scrutiny and pending audits by posting a study extolling the virtues of  quantitative easing to keep high prices for the stock market.   As reported by CNBC, the Federal Reserve claims that stock market prices woud be 50% lower without the Federal Reserve.  The question should be, "So what?  Do the prices accurately reflect the value of the stocks or not? "  This inflation is fueled by the misconception that the price of stocks somehow reflect the state of the economy.  Stocks from companies that rely on cheap labor overseas, downsizing, consolidation, liquidation - anything that could dismantle the domestic labor force. 

Keeping news pundits with ample filler on their tele-prompters, one can often hear the excuse du jour for why indexes have slipped on any given day.  This becomes its own clever PR technique suggesting concerns with the war on terror, public trends less favorable to investors, or whatever the desired suggestion is laid out for those who've bought into the system. 

In the name of saving the market from dismal price performance on behalf of a handful of investors, U.S. currency has incurred a 97% loss in purchasing power since the Federal Reserve's formation in 1913.  

The Federal Reserve is directly accountable for an average of 10% inflation in the last 10 years.  The result is a population indirectly taxed through the reduction of real purchasing power, especially among those for whom purchasing power actually means something.  They are robbed to please an elite handful of investors depending upon inflated stock prices. 

But that is only one avenue for bilking the public.  Apparently, interest rates were manipulated to draw more unwitting families and individuals into financial traps like various credit lines and mortgages.   As a Barclay's employee reported to the New York Federal Reserve, “Our feeling is that Libors are again becoming rather unrealistic and do not reflect the true cost of borrowing.”. 

There was nothing ambiguous about what was communicated by the Barclay employee to the New York Fed:  “Where I would be able to borrow in the interbank market … without question it would be higher than the rate I’m actually putting in.”

Libor serves as a benchmark interest rate for trillions of dollars worth of loans to consumers and corporations.

Recollections of Geithner's handling of interest rate-fixing are no different from skilled bureaucracies at all municipal levels - make sure there is one memo or piece of paper to pull out of your ass for culpable deniability.  A sincere effort to restore credibility to the markets would have seen Geithner demanding an end to the practice, stating the implications for fraud at this scale, and threats to go public.   The staid approach in itself suggests that systemic deception is the norm, not the exception.
  

As much as 800 trillion dollars of financial products were were initially valued based on Libor rates.  The consistent pattern was to present lower interest rates to sell more loans and financial products.   This makes the market so inefficient, there is no reliance in determining the value of these debt instruments.  

Some analysts, like Bruce Kastling, make the claim that consumers enjoyed initial lower rates and, because they entered at a lower rate, they have no claim.  

How many people would have never qualified for or purchased mortgages or consumer loans had the cost truly reflected the market?  Setting aside the folly of variable interest rate loans, illegal rescission of various credit lines, and extreme interest rate hikes, what about the effects from a massive fraud of this scale on the economy?  

How many times have vast market corrections induced default and foreclosure among those who didn't see it coming?  Are we to blame the victim for not anticipating huge market volatility that results from mass conspiracy to commit fraud?  Probably not. 

And what's in store for those who choose precious metals as a means of protecting real purchasing power?   Are those investing in gold going to see an accurate reflection of their wealth over time? 

According to Ned Taylor-Leland, an investment director at Cheviot, "like interest rates, gold and silver reflect the true value of money the same way interest rates do."

"It is effectively an intervention in two ways; one would be the fact that for central banks, gold and silver going up doesn't make their currency look any good, and secondly a number of the big commercial banks have very large short positions which they like to manage and make easy money from."

Under the guise of a safe haven for value, smaller investors are finding their prices subject to an elite group of investors corrupting market accuracy in exchange for speculative profits and the concerted effort to keep the value of the U.S. dollar artificially high in the wake of massive Bernanke-style currency dumps.  

These conspiracies to deceive the public should open renewed dialog over U.S. taxpayer funded bailouts for institutions hiding behind the fascist concept of "too big to fail".  Bailouts are another example of how the majority is bilked into thinking they are somehow supporting the saviors of capitalism when they are actually handing more wealth over to the criminal elite.

This whole system relying  on  the "magic of the market place" needs to be dismantled.  Here are some additional statistics indicating this mass exodus of wealth from the majority to the criminal elite from an earlier article by J.D. Sayles:

#1 - The “corporate-tax-percentage” of all federal revenue plummeted from 32% to7% since 1960.

#2 - Two out of three U.S. corporations paid no federal taxes from 1998-2005 on sales of $2.5 trillion

#3 - Tax rates for the wealthiest plummeted from 91% to 36% - which goes far lower with loopholes.  All of which combined to cause a collapse in tax revenues from these sectors.  Our revenue this past decade was about $41 trillion.  Had we received just an additional 10% over this time period we could have our debt reduced by:  $4.1 trillion

#4 - Multi-Billion dollar corporate subsidies have doubled over the past decade to over 2000 programs.  Energy subsidies cost roughly $200 billion the past 20 years and farm subsidies over the same period of time cost taxpayers roughly $300 billion more:  $500 billion

#5 - Tax-payer bailouts for bankers, who provide 40% of all campaign donations:  $700 billion

#6 - More than one trillion tax dollars have been wasted on wars, subsidizing the corporate war machine with another $2 trillion predicted in future commitments resulting from these wars:  $1.167 trillion plus $45 billion for aid to repair the destruction that we caused.

#7 - Trillions of dollars were admittedly "misplaced" by the Pentagon, subsidizing the corporate war machine:  $2.3 trillion

#8 - Billions of tax dollars given in foreign “aid”, subsidizing the corporate war machine:  $200 billion

#9 - Trillions of dollars in salaries and bonuses for the political/corporate elite the past few decades

#10 - The corporate elite (top 1%) own almost 50% of America’s wealth and 23% of America’s income.  The last time these numbers happened were as we exited the "Guilded Age", the collapse of the stock market in 1929 and entered into the age of "The Great Depression".  Yet they push for more...

#11 - Politicians make fortunes legislating to the gain of their personal corporate stock portfolios

#12 - Politicians make fortunes in the political after-life with corporate lobbying income

#13 - An unfunded big PHRMA bill (03 modernization act) cost taxpayers another:  $534 billion

#14 - Due to market manipulations, pensions lost:  $3.3 trillion

#15 - Small investors and 401ks invested in the stock market lost:  $9.3 trillion

#16 - In addition to 3 million foreclosures, homeowners lost in home equity:  $9 trillion

Domestic violence rises in sluggish economy, police report

USA Today

Kevin Johnson

Police are encountering more domestic violence related to the sluggish economy, a national survey of law enforcement agencies finds. 

The review, part of a continuing examination of how economic conditions are affecting law enforcement by the Police Executive Research Forum, found that 56% of the 700 responding agencies reported that the poor economy is driving an increase in domestic conflict, up from 40% of agencies in a similar survey in 2010.

Domestic violence is not a separate category of crime tracked in the FBI's annual crime report, which has recorded a sustained decline in overall violence since the financial collapse in 2008. But the survey concludes that police are responding to more reports of domestic incidents, regardless of whether charges are filed.

In Camden, N.J., police responded to 9,100 domestic incidents in 2011, up from 7,500 calls in 2010.

Camden Police Chief Scott Thomson said it was "impossible'' to separate the economy from the domestic turmoil in the city where unemployment is 19%. 

Thomson said domestic-related aggravated assaults increased nearly 10% in 2011 from levels in 2010. The chief said the department has been tracking the calls closely because of the time and personnel they draw from a force that has been depleted in the past two years with layoffs of about 200 employees, another consequence of the poor economy.

"When stresses in the home increase because of unemployment and other hardships, domestic violence increases," Thomson said. "We see it on the street."

UK poor being lured into more debt

Al Jazeera

Campaigners say the so-called 'Pay Day loans' are targeting poorest in the society affected by austerity measures.



As the saying goes, someone always makes a profit out of a crisis, and Britain's high streets are filling up with these little enterprises.

Many British citizens who have been affected by the austerity measures have been lured by these money-lending firms which claim to offer short term solutions.

But a growing number of people in the UK are getting further into debt. Campaigners say the so-called 'Pay Day loans' are targeting the poorest in the society.

Laurence Lee reports from Wigan in the northwest of England.