When you look at today’s older Americans, you are in large part looking at the legacy of an economy that is no more. Many workers used to have defined-benefit retirement plans, plans in which their employers guaranteed a steady income after retirement. And a fair number of seniors (like my father, until he passed away a few months ago) are still collecting benefits from such plans.
Today, however, workers who have any retirement plan at all generally have defined-contribution plans — basically, 401(k)’s — in which employers put money into a tax-sheltered account that’s supposed to end up big enough to retire on. The trouble is that at this point it’s clear that the shift to 401(k)’s was a gigantic failure. Employers took advantage of the switch to surreptitiously cut benefits; investment returns have been far lower than workers were told to expect; and, to be fair, many people haven’t managed their money wisely.
As a result, we’re looking at a looming retirement crisis, with tens of millions of Americans facing a sharp decline in living standards at the end of their working lives. For many, the only thing protecting them from abject penury will be Social Security. Aren’t you glad we didn’t privatize the program?
So there’s a strong case for expanding, not contracting, Social Security. Yes, this would cost money, and it would require additional taxes — a suggestion that will horrify the fiscal scolds, who have been insisting that if we raise taxes at all, the proceeds must go to deficit reduction, not to making our lives better. But the fiscal scolds have been wrong about everything, and it’s time to start thinking outside their box.
in his expose of modern Authoritarian forms of Empire and global capital, the book Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism, notes that, "the crucial political issue of our times concerns the incompatibility between the culture of everyday reality to which political democracy should be attuned and the culture of virtual reality on which corporate capitalism thrives." Those capable of exploiting modern communication, who aspire for the power of Empire, are the type of people we should fear and organize against in Wolin's mind.Lying is more than deception; the liar wants the unreal to be accepted as actuality, so he sets about to establish as true what is not actually the case, not really real. A lie by a public authority is meant to be accepted by the public as an "official" truth concerning the "real world." At bottom, lying is the expression of a will power. My power is increased if you accept "a picture of the world which is a product of my will."Chris Christie appears to be a master manipulator of reality. If there is one "name to fear" in 2016 for Democrats I'd argue that rather than the flat earth society Ted Cruz who seems to only have the trust of a small faction of dying off Dixiecrats and Libertarian curmudgeons, Chris Christie is the true Republican to fear. Christie has a capacity to enthrall in the way that Reagan did--the herd of Nietzsche's "Last Man" who blink. Wolin speaks of this "performance president"
The roles Reagan played in her earlier career were an apprenticeship for his original contribution to American government, the creation of "performance president" who fashioned illusion (a tough leader who had learned to throw a crisp salute) from inauthenticity (almost persuading himself that he had been present when inmates were freed from concentration camps). With little or no interest in policy and the details of governance he took on the task of evoking nostalgia, overlaying the present with an idealized past, warmer, believing, guileless, "a shining city on the hill" that provided an illusion of national continuity while obscuring the radical changes at work. The other element characterizing his administration was a presidential entourage that included hard-nosed, ideological zealots and operatives from the corporate world and the public opinion industry. These agents were intent on expanding the power of the president,reducing governmental oversight of the economy, overriding environmental safegaurds, and dismantling welfare programs; simultaneously they expanded vast sums in order to build up a military sufficiently intimidating to stare down an "evil empire," causing it to collapse, exhauste, unable to compete, its power spent from being outspent.Wolin then goes on to note in the next few paragaphs the damage wrought by our next Master of Performace GWBush. Christie, I would argue, is the next "Master" waiting in the wings. Nietzsche reminds us the Performance President has one role and one role only--inspire the herd to blink, so that the corporate raiding of social wealth can go unchecked.
alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.
'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth...
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink...
One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."from Nietzsche's Thus spoke Zarathustra
@JimNichols If she is a democrat I am SCARED> Her pages read just like the propaganda from the NH #GOPThe austerity wing of the Democratic Party has played a key role in devastating millions of lives; citizens who will never recover from the policy intransigence of these "fiscally responsible" defenders of the 1%. Nunn wants to ignore reality and sell austerity on the campaign trail--this is just a glimpse of the damage she would do in DC.
— NH Labor News (@NHLABOR_NEWS) November 6, 2013
@chrislhayes would totally make a great segment to bring @MichelleNunnGA and @DrRadForSenate on to talk pro/cons of austerity economics.
— JimNichols (@JimNichols) November 6, 2013At a time when the much needed efforts to expand Social Security are starting up in the US Senate; the last thing we need to do is send Neoliberal Nunn to Washington DC to fight on behalf of the 1% to cut your Social Security. No matter if you live in Georgia or not this primary may well decide if we see cuts to your Social Security or not.
Operation #DudeWheresYourLawyer day 8: Hey @StephenAtHome can I get the contact number for your lawyer? http://t.co/1D8ovdaNlv #uniteBlue
— WorkingClassGeorgia (@WorkingClassGA) October 31, 2013
Day 8 of my efforts to get @ColbertReport to draft his Lawyer. I still need a theme song! http://t.co/qGcx8yEqiL #occupy @FatMike_of_NOFX
— WorkingClassGeorgia (@WorkingClassGA) October 31, 2013
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Operation #DudeWheresYourLawyer day 3: Hey @StephenAtHome can I get the contact number for your lawyer? http://t.co/Fe0PDoGPw1 #uniteBlueSo far everything is going as planned--meaning total radio silence.
— JimNichols (@JimNichols) October 26, 2013
Hey @StephenAtHome can I get the contact number for your lawyer? And maybe some cash to pay him to work for me? http://t.co/Fe0PDoGPw1My mentor's gatekeepers must think this is a joke. But its not, and persistence pays off--I will wear them down.
— JimNichols (@JimNichols) October 24, 2013
Day 3 of my efforts to get @ColbertReport to draft his Lawyer... I need a theme song! http://t.co/plS0Tg6XVU Begin #occupy @FatMike_of_NOFX
— JimNichols (@JimNichols) October 26, 2013
I love it when pols say move to the center for the gen election. So they were lying in the primary? #uppersThat is what is going on right now in Georgia. The pols are saying "move to the middle" as if going after "swing voters" which is also known as the least informed voters of all. Michelle "No Backbone" Nunn is "the only candidate who can win". Or so say a lot of politico's who will reap jobs and appointments from having a Democratic Senator in DC.
— JIM DANIELS (@azjimdaniels) October 26, 2013
“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”― Martha C. Nussbaum
You don’t generally find WAGA’s “Georgia Gang” on YouTube, but clearly an interested party wanted to document Sunday’s discussion of the campaign contribution made by actress Jane Fonda to the U.S. Senate campaign of Michelle Nunn – a fact that the Insider’s Greg Bluestein reported last week.
Watch it above. Boiled down:Alexis Scott: “That population has aged right out, and Jane Fonda has made a comeback.”Dick Williams: “If Michelle Nunn is with Jane Fonda, I don’t need to know anything more.”Consider the exchange just a foretaste of what’s headed our way next year. But also note something of a family connection here. Fonda’s ex, billionaire Ted Turner, is a major underwriter of former U.S. senator Sam Nunn’s efforts to corral “loose nukes” around the world.
To officially launch your super PAC you will need to file what's called a Statement of Organization, or Form 1, with the Federal Election Commission. Check box 5(f) under "Type of Committee."Also, write a short cover letter to the Federal Election Commission. Here's a sample. You'll want to be sure you make it clear your new committee will be functioning as a super PAC.You can do that by including the following paragraph verbatim:"This committee intends to make unlimited independent expenditures, and consistent with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decision in SpeechNow v. FEC, it therefore intends to raise funds in unlimited amounts. This committee will not use those funds to make contributions, whether direct, in-kind, or via coordinated communications, to federal candidates or committees."
Step 5: What To Do With Your Super PAC
As the proud new owner of a super PAC, you are permitted to raise unlimited amounts of money from people including your friends, neighbors and families. But you can also solicit money from political action committees, corporations and labor organizations.You can turn around and use all that money to produce and air TV commercials or take out a massive billboard along a busy highway to roundly criticize a politician you don't like. Have fun and be creative!
A Note of Caution: What You Can't Do With Your Super PAC
This is pretty simple. You are not allowed to use all that money you've raised from corporations and unions to make "direct contributions" to candidates or their political action committees. You also can't take out TV ads or billboards in coordination with any of those candidates or their PACs. This is a fairly gray area, so play it safe and steer clear of planning your attacks with any candidate or elected official.
Rising political polarisation in the US has gone hand-in-hand with rising income inequality, falling top-end tax rates, lower taxes on business, rising leverage and higher asset prices. These trends may be coincidental, but they seem to reinforce each other. The medium-term risk is that some of these trends reverse, as occurred after the 1920s.Congressional political polarisation and income inequality in the US are at multi-decade extremes (Exhibit 1). The polity is split; incomes are unequal.
The rise in polarisation partly reflects electoral gerrymandering that has sharply reduced the number of contestable seats (Exhibit 2). Only 20% of House of Representatives seats would change hands on a 5% swing. This increases the centrifugal influence of the party members who dominate the increasingly-decisive party primary elections.However, rising political polarisation pre-dates the decline in contestable seats: it started as incomes became more unequal. Inequality has not risen because the rich got richer faster than the poor. It increased because the income gains of the past 30 years have gone to the top 1%. Average income for the bottom 99% is now unchanged in real terms over the past 40 years (Exhibit 3). The rising tide did not lift all the boats: it floated a few yachts.In 2012 the highest-paid 1% earned 21½% of total income, according to academic Emmanuel Saez (http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/). This is the highest share since the 1920s. The lift in top-end income mainly reflected a rise in business income and salary payments. Exhibit 4 shows the source of income for the highest paid 0.1%, as a percentage of total US income. The income share of the highest paid did not increase just because capital has done better than labour: it also reflects the increase in the share of salaries going to the highest paid.
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Nunn $raising email on shutdown: "neither side of the debate is facing the very real imperative to address our growing national debt" #gapol
— Daniel Malloy (@ajconwashington) September 27, 2013
It looks like even the Democrats in Georgia have to make up nonsense about out of control government spending http://t.co/jDykQzkr28and she's done nothing but use Pete Peterson Fix the Debt talking points all campaign. That's why Nunn is making an empty statement after the crisis has passed and even GOP members of Congress are admitting it was a mistake. Now that no one wants to shutdown the Government again Nunn is calling for us all to stand with her and say NO MORE SHUTDOWNS!!--This is the kind of bold Democratic leadership[sic] that got us in to Iraq.
— Dean Baker (@DeanBaker13) October 5, 2013
interview she did which you need to check out. After buying her book, my own organizing in the workplace blossomed in to some really awesome work which i've learned and grown from in so many ways.Palm Beach County was the land of the butterfly ballot and the hanging chad. Butterfly ballots were punch card ballots with the candidates and issues displayed on both sides of a single line of numbered voting marks— an arrangement especially liable to misinterpretation by people with poor vision, such as the elderly. Hanging chads were tiny bits of paper that should have fallen out of the ballots when voters punched in their choice of candidate but hadn’t, leaving a trail of ambiguity that could be used to obscure the intent of the voter. Thousands of ballots were being discounted or contested due to this rather archaic paper voting system.
Finally, our plan took shape. Each of the senior staff would be given a team of organizers and we would start knocking on doors and collecting affidavits from people who would swear under oath that they had meant to vote for Gore but, confused by the butterfly ballot, had accidentally voted for Bush or Pat Buchanan.* Other teams were dispatched to grocery stores, and some were sent to a candlelight “protest” vigil. I was given a team of organizers, an attorney or two, a van, and a stack of maps indicating our assigned condominium complexes, mostly inhabited by senior citizens, and we raced off to collect affidavits.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel. From the first complex we hit until we were pulled off the assignment a few days later, it was hard to find an elderly voter who hadn’t screwed up the ballot or didn’t want to make a sworn statement. These places were full of funny, highly educated, cranky New York Jews. I was a New Yorker myself, with a partly Jewish upbringing,† and these people felt like home to me. I adored them. And they were really pissed off, especially the ones who thought they had accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan (“ the SS guard,” they called him). There were holocaust survivors, and sons and daughters of holocaust survivors. What’s more, many of these folks had been union members in the Northeast before retiring. You would knock on their door and it was as if they had been sitting there impatiently wondering when the union would finally show up. Soon there were long lines in the community rooms, because we hadn’t anticipated such an outpouring. These folks could hardly stand up, there were walkers all around, but no one was leaving until they’d all met the lawyer, told their stories, and filled in the affidavits. And they were ready to do much more than that. Affidavits? Lawyers? Hell, these people were furious.
I reported this every morning and evening at the debrief meetings for lead organizers. “So when can we actually mobilize them, put these wonderful angry senior citizens into the streets and on camera?” I would ask. But we didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, we did a candlelight vigil, which was an awful, badly organized affair, just the kind of event that makes me crazy. First, because it could have been huge, and second, because everyone who came was bored— a good recipe for how to get motivated, angry people to stay home the next time they get a flyer. But it got worse. Big-shot politicians from across the land were starting to show up, and they all came to the vigil to calm people down. It was a mind-blowing thing to watch. Were these guys idiots, did they want to lose, or what?
I heard someone from the press mention that Jesse Jackson was coming in two days to do his own rally and march. Hmm. Why hadn’t we heard of that? Then, later that night, during the regular debriefing on legal updates on the recount and the next day’s assignments, a higher-up said, “Jesse Jackson is coming to do a big march. We won’t be participating in it.
” I thought I had heard him wrong: “Um, sorry, can you repeat that?”
“The Gore campaign has made the decision that this is not the image they want. They don’t want to protest. They don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want to seem like they don’t have faith in the legal system. And they definitely don’t want to possibly alienate the Jews— you know, it’s Jackson— so we are not mobilizing for it.”
While my heart was sinking my head was exploding. The American electoral process is breaking up like the Titanic and we don’t want to rock the boat?
“I’m sorry, something doesn’t seem quite right here. As the person leading a field team in largely Jewish senior complexes, and, frankly, as someone raised by Jews, I can tell you that we need to take people into the streets. We need to let them express their anger. Republicans are starting to hold little rallies demanding that Democrats not be allowed to ‘steal’ the election. We need to either support this rally or do our own or both.
” I also knew that to turn them out would require some resources, beginning with transportation from each condo complex. Most of these people didn’t drive or didn’t like to drive, which was why they lived in the condos, but that also meant they were generally home where we could find them. We had an instant mobilization in waiting; we could have 30,000 people in the streets in two days. I knew that the only outfit in Florida with the money, staff and experience to make this happen was organized labor.
What was on the table here was more than a rally. It was a question of what sort of power was going to be brought to bear on a defining national crisis. The Gore people not only wanted to project a nice image, they wanted to be nice. They wanted everyone to go home and hand everything over to something called “the legal process.” This was ridiculous, because when and how and where this went to court was deeply political. Al Gore himself appeared to actually believe that if he could politely demonstrate that more Floridians had voted for him than for Bush, the “democratic system” would award him the election. Gore was right in the sense that he had won the state. There were other Democratic Party honchos who were not so naïve, but they lived in a world where you deal with these things behind closed doors. They were completely unprepared for the hypercharged political street theater exploding in Florida, and couldn’t understand the difference between a narrowly conceived legal strategy and a mass mobilization direct action strategy. They thought there was no difference.
OK. That was the Democratic Party. We were organized labor. We didn’t represent the candidate. We represented thousands of union workers whose votes were being stolen, and millions more who would suffer if the whole damn election was stolen. We knew how to mobilize and we had the resources to do it. We had the Florida voter lists. We had the computers. We had an army of smart people on the ground, ready to go. And we had a base of literally millions of really angry people. We could have had buses of senior citizens chasing Katherine Harris,Florida’s secretary of state and the Bush campaign’s hatchet woman, all over the state— a Seniors Truth Commission of lovely, smart, appealing, telegenic elders lined up with their walkers outside every single meeting Harris was in and camped outside her house at night while she slept. Don’t Let the Republicans Steal Votes from Your Grandparents. All they needed was a top-notch lead organizer and an experienced field team, a lawyer, a communications team: in short, exactly the big support we had on hand. They could have operated 24/ 7, like in a strike. Unions know how to do strikes, don’t they?
That moment, when we could have supported the Jesse Jackson rally and didn’t, could have organized something big of our own and didn’t, was the turning point, the moment when the Gore campaign and their unquestioning AFL-CIO cohort snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. And by the way, it wasn’t like I was a big fan of the contemporary Jesse Jackson. But Jackson could turn people out and give a good speech— the same one he’d been giving for thirty years. The fact that our choice was between joining a rally led by Jesse Jackson and not doing anything at all was beyond pathetic. Oh, well. All that was at stake was an endless war in Afghanistan, an unprovoked war on Iraq, American torture, warrantless wiretapping, eight years of doing nothing on global warming, not to mention a relentless class war against workers and their unions, all building up to a second Great Depression. No big deal.McAlevey, Jane; Ostertag, Bob (2012-11-13). Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement (Kindle Locations 55-118). Norton. Kindle Edition.
