What irks me is the notion that if women behave differently, the corporate world will welcome them in and hold the ladder while they climb to the top. In what way is this really different than telling a woman that what she wore precipitated a rape? I’m also thinking of military generals telling women that if they take on combat roles they will finally be paid equally and maybe be less likely to be sexually assaulted. The problem with that, and the problem with what Sandberg is saying is that the real issue is that there is something terribly wrong with the power-over dominator system on which the corporate and military power structures depend. And even if a higher percentage of women rise to the top, most women, and for that matter most men, will still be at the bottom.I admire the deft way that Lucinda Marshall unpacks the self-absorption and arrogance of one very privileged woman who wants to lecture the rest of us on what we ought to do differently. Taking on Facebook's over-the-top sexism? Apparently Sandberg doesn't give even passing mention to that.
Calgary-based TransCanada has proposed a 1,700-mile pipeline, dubbed the Keystone XL, to carry oil derived from tar sands in Alberta to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. Although the northern leg of the project has not received federal approval, the company currently is constructing the 485-mile southern portion of the pipeline that will transport oil from storage facilities in Cushing, Okla., to Texas, said TransCanada spokesman David Dodson.For in-depth background about the XL Keystone Pipeline, I recommend Michael Klare's excellent post at CommonDreams.org
The man who locked himself to the machinery, called a side boom, was removed after he was lowered to the ground and a local fire department used a pair of bolt cutters to free him, Conn said. A spokesman for the environmental group identified the man as Stefan Warner, a youth pastor from Harrah.
I'm worried the values of Wal-Mart—greed at any cost—will seep into the still growing tech sector. Will Marissa become chummies with the Waltons? Will they trade secrets on union busting? Will she influence Yahoo!'s political giving to support conservative, anti-worker candidates?I agree with Byrne's sentiments, but wonder if there really are good corporations out there that respect their workers, their customers, and the natural world. Isn't that how corporate owners succeed, by ripping off the rest of us and covering it up with public relations campaigns? Is it possible for women (or anyone) to succeed in business without abandoning their moral principles?
I want women to succeed at business. But, I want no one to succeed at business who doesn't respect the rights and dignity of workers, especially low-wage workers, most of whom are women.
I do wish Marissa the best. Mostly, I wish that she would spend a few days with low-wage workers and decide to leave Wal-Mart.
Burnham’s Trotskyist period ended with a declaration in 1940 that he had decided that Marxism was merely a form of imperialistic class politics, and he proposed a new theory which said that the managerial class was the new force in the class struggle, seizing privilege and control over society. Capitalism, he said, as a form of social organization, was finished. His new managerial class was taking over in German Nazism, Soviet Stalinism and in F.D.R.’s New Deal.Pfaff goes on to say:
Burnham’s theory that a new class of professional and technocratic managers were taking control of modern economies accompanied another phenomenon of the wartime and postwar years in the U.S. Intellectually moribund university business schools were reawakened by the influence of “scientific” and strategic management theories and practices developed by military staffs and at such institutions as the RAND Corporation. These made use of mathematical models, behavioral theory and operations research (usually a glamorized and heavily numerate version of empirical or common-sense analysis) and gave business executives an aura of scientific professionalism.This reminded me, actually, of the annoying management guru Peter Drucker, whose worship of the managerial class was accompanied by a subtle contempt for democracy and ordinary working people. A quick Google search turned up a review of Burnham's book by Drucker. Drucker loved it--except for this:
This combination eventually gave us the version of global finance and industry that has given us world crisis. It generally is run by managers who, without necessarily investing a farthing of their own money, control the American (and increasingly European) economies, enriching themselves by assigning to one another titanic emoluments as rewards for having been hired, for carrying out executive duties that earlier professional managers performed for unexceptional rewards and eventually rewarding themselves for leaving their jobs.
(I)f society is to continue free, it must be asserted that ideas are not economically determined, that they are not "myths" invented to cover economic power; and above all, it must be re-asserted that power must be legitimate and that legitimacy is not a function of economic reality but one of the basic beliefs of society. If Mr. Burnham thinks that the totalitarian power wielded by the managers will be "legitimate" simply because it mirrors the existing structure of industrial production, he denies all possibilityDrucker was an interesting and complicated guy, actually, who came by his distrust of government power as a Jew who fled the Nazis. He really wanted to believe in the benevolence of the managerial class.
of right or wrong in politics.
Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end. Burnham's writings are full of apocalyptic visions. Nations, governments, classes and social systems are constantly described as expanding, contracting, decaying, dissolving, toppling, crashing, crumbling, crystallising, and, in general, behaving in an unstable and melodramatic way. The slowness of historical change, the fact that any epoch always contains a great deal of the last epoch, is never sufficiently allowed for. Such a manner of thinking is bound to lead to mistaken prophecies, because, even when it gauges the direction of events rightly, it will miscalculate their tempo. Within the space of five years Burnham foretold the domination of Russia by Germany and of Germany by Russia. In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible. With this in mind one can criticise his theory in a broader way.In other words, Burnham did identify a powerful trend in society, but there is no reason to insist that this is how everything will end up.
As The Los Angeles Times reported, Google’s announcement of its “Google Drive” came with the promise that users will “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.” But when you save files to Google’s new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content” as the company sees fit.As Sirota notes, Google has an innocent explanation for this--they insist they're merely getting your permission to allow you to share your stored material with others. But keep in mind that Google, like Facebook and other "free" online services, makes its profits from mining and selling our personal information. Maybe it's time to reconsider whether this kind of "free" is a good deal.
The documents offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs—revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.Levine and Ames go on to explain how the Cato Institute (originally called the Charles Koch Institute) carried on a stealth campaign to undermine Social Security and other social safety net programs.
Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to dismantle the American social safety net. At the center of their most recent push is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has co-sponsored Tea Party events, spearheaded the war against healthcare reform and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions. FreedomWorks, another conservative group central to the rise of the Tea Party and the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, emerged from an advocacy outfit founded by the Koch brothers called Citizens for a Sound Economy. FreedomWorks now exists as a separate entity that champions the “Austrian school” of economics.
Thanks in part to Hayek’s writings and to the Koch brothers’ decades-long war on the social safety net, Americans are among the Western world’s few citizens without universal healthcare. Not surprisingly, life expectancy here has fallen to forty-ninth place in the world, while medical costs are double those of other Western nations. By contrast, Hayek’s native Austria, which has a public health plan that covers 99 percent of the population, boasts a healthcare system ranked ninth in the world by the World Health Organization.
Rick Anaya, chief executive of the council, said he had brought about 6,000 J-1 visa students to the United States this summer. Mr. Anaya said he had tried to respond to the Palmyra workers’ complaints. “We are not getting any cooperation,” he said. “We are trying to work with these kids. All this negativity is hurting an excellent program. We would go out of our way to help them, but it seems like someone is stirring them up out there.”
AMY GOODMAN: So, Michael Hudson, what could President Obama do?I've almost decided to just stop worrying about the debt limit. As Dean Baker points out, there could be some positive effects from failing to raise the debt limit:
MICHAEL HUDSON: He could say, "This debt ceiling has nothing to do with policy. You want to argue about the tax policy? Fine, let the Democrats and Republicans do it under non-crisis conditions. But this has nothing to do at all with the debt ceiling. If you want to refuse to increase the debt and plunge the economy into disaster, maybe you’d better talk to your campaign contributors and see what they want, because I know what they say. Your campaign contributors, in the Republicans, are my campaign contributors. They don’t like crises." And you’ll find that it’s all—the charade will—it’s just like pricking the balloon.
If the question is default, that would end the supremacy of the U.S. financial industry. The downturn from a default would be very bad news for all of us, but the end of the supremacy of the U.S. financial industry would likely be good news for the rest of us. This would radically reduce the political power of this sector and their ability to steer the government to serve Wall Street's agenda. We could instead pursue economic policies that serve the rest of the economy with the resources consumed by the financial sector redeployed to more productive uses.
On a bright spring day in a wisteria-bedecked courtyard full of earnest, if half-drunk, conference attendees, we were commiserating with a fellow journalist about all the jobs we knew of that were going unfilled, being absorbed or handled "on the side." It was tough for all concerned, but necessary—you know, doing more with less.I so wish I had written it myself. I have so lived every sentence and paragraph of this article, and I bet you have, too. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, because it holds the open secret to why ordinary people are getting kicked in the teeth by this economy. Fewer workers are working harder and harder for no increase in pay, while corporate profits are up 22 percent. (And the f***ers don't even want to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains.)
"Ah," he said, "the speedup."
His old-school phrase gave form to something we'd been noticing with increasing apprehension—and it extended far beyond journalism. We'd hear from creative professionals in what seemed to be dream jobs who were crumbling under ever-expanding to-do lists; from bus drivers, hospital technicians, construction workers, doctors, and lawyers who shame-facedly whispered that no matter how hard they tried to keep up with the extra hours and extra tasks, they just couldn't hold it together. (And don't even ask about family time.)
The question is whether we reduce the deficit only through spending cuts, or also by raising taxes on the rich. This should be an easy issue for Democrats to stand on ... and run on. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 72% of of those surveyed agreed that federal taxes should be raised for households making more than $250,000 - including 55% of Republicans. Yet even with the GOP leadership far to the right of the country on this issue, Democrats haven’t taken an unequivocal position.Sanders has gained lots of positive attention from progressives for his speech on the Senate floor Monday, in which he called for each dollar of cuts in social programs to be matched by a dollar of tax increases on the wealthy and corporations in order to achieve deficit reduction, as well as "significant cuts to unnecessary and wasteful Pentagon spending."
Who's speaking for this Republican majority (and most everybody else) in Washington? Only Sen. Bernie Sanders, Socialist from Vermont. Sanders has unequivocally said that he won't support a deal to raise the debt ceiling unless it includes higher taxes on on the rich. Where are the Democrats? Nancy Pelosi's been marginalized from the discussions, even though a deal won't be possible without the support of Democrats in Congress. The White House and Harry Reid have refused to take a firm stand.
To fully understand the growth trends in income and wealth in recent decades, one must recognize that the growth has been very unequal: households at the top of the scale have seen much faster growth in their incomes and wealth accumulation than have those in the middle or bottom of the distribution. For instance, the top 10% of the income distribution has claimed almost two-thirds of the gains in income since 1979, with the top 1% alone claiming 38.7% of those overall gains. Moreover, the wealth of the median (or ‘typical’) household was lower in 2009 than in 1983, in spite of the 40.3% growth in the average household’s wealth.4 When the median is substantially lower than the average, it indicates very lopsided growth, which has been the case for the past 30 years: there was no growth in wealth for the bottom 80% of households, while those in the top fifth enjoyed a 50% increase.In other words, the extremely rich have benefited much more than everybody else from the nation's increase in productivity over the past 30 years. The extremely rich have also enjoyed huge tax cuts. If the rich paid a bit more in taxes, we could afford government programs that help poor and middle-class people. Choosing not to raise taxes on the rich is just that--a choice.
So if the private sector has grown for the past 30 years (albeit very lopsidedly), and the projections for the next 30 years indicate comparable total income growth for the economy, then what is the story for the public sector?
It is true that all levels of government are facing budget difficulties as a result of falling revenues during the recession. Higher unemployment and depressed economic activity have certainly depressed tax revenues, and past tax cuts at all levels of government have seriously eroded revenues as well. But some policymakers and pundits want to have it both
ways: choke off the revenue stream to governments while slashing budget expenditures. For instance, the current domestic spending cuts proposed by the House of Representatives for this year were smaller than the revenues lost from extending the upper-income Bush tax cuts and the inheritance tax cut legislated last December
In the boardrooms of corporate America, profits aren't everything - they are the only thing. A JPMorgan research report concludes that the current corporate profit recovery is more dependent on falling unit-labor costs than during any previous expansion. At some level, corporate executives are aware that they are lowering workers' living standards, but their decisions are neither coordinated nor intentionally harmful. Call it the "paradox of profitability." Executives are acting in their own and their shareholders' best interest: maximizing profit margins in the face of weak demand by extensive layoffs and pay cuts. But what has been good for every company's income statement has been a disaster for working families and their communities.I agree with Provost almost entirely. Corporate executives must be in really deep denial about what they're doing to their workers, or they wouldn't be able to live with themselves. But the bosses are going to hurt themselves in the long run if they keep shafting their employees. Workers who are badly paid and badly treated are workers who find it harder and harder to give a damn about doing a good job.
At least one economist burst out laughing on hearing about the S&P announcement. “They did what?” exclaimed James Galbraith, a professor of economics at the University of Texas in Austin, who formerly served as executive director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. “This is remarkable! It certainly will confirm the suspicions of those who have questioned S&P’s competence after its performance on the mortgage debacle.”Hat tip to Common Dreams, where I first found this article.
S&P, as well as the other two big ratings firms, all notoriously failed completely to spot the looming disaster of the banking collapse and financial crisis, and famously issued A ratings to mortgage-backed securities that later proved to be virtually worthless paper, as well as to the banks that had loaded up on the financial dreck.
As Galbraith explains it, “US debt consists of bonds issued in US dollars, which I assume the S&P analysts know. How can the US possibly default on its own currency? The obligation is in nominal dollars, which is to say when the bond retires, the US issues a check in dollars to cover it.”
Since the US prints its own currency (or actually just issues electronic payments to create new money) whenever it needs it, as Galbraith puts it, “As long as there is diesel fuel to power up the back-up generators that run the government’s computers, they will have the money to back their own bonds.”
the richest Americans take the money they don't pay in taxes and invest it in hedge funds and with stockbrokers to make profitable investments. These days, that often means speculating in oil and food, which drives up their prices, undermines economic recovery for the mass of Americans, and produces acute suffering around the globe. Those hedge funds and brokers likewise use part of the money rich people save from taxes to speculate in the US stock markets. That has recently driven stock prices higher: hence, the stock market recovery. And that mostly helps – you guessed it – the richest Americans who own most of the stocks.The whole post is well worth reading. Professor Wolff also has an interesting web site.
The one kind of significant wealth average Americans own, if they own any, is their individual home. And home values remain deeply depressed: no recovery there.
Cutting the taxes on the rich in no way guarantees social benefits from what they may choose to do with their money. Indeed, their choices can worsen economic conditions for the mass of people. These days, that is exactly what they are doing.
(w)orking with local Tammany Hall officials such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers such as Frances Perkins, the future Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt administration, who had witnessed the fire from the street below, pushed for comprehensive safety and workers’ compensation laws. The ILGWU leadership formed bonds with those reformers and politicians that would continue for another forty years, through the New Deal and beyond. As a result of the fire, the American Society of Safety Engineers was founded soon after in New York City, October 14, 1911.Although unions have been under attack and workers' rights and protections have eroded during the right-wing backlash of the last 30 years, I'd like to think that a catastrophe such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire would not occur again. I'd like to think that this fire would be replayed only as a historical exhibit, as part of a work of literature such as Beyond the Pale, by Elana Dykewomon or as the occasion for a commemorative event.
the young, destitute women in Bangladesh who produce those clothes in almost slave-like conditions aren’t feeling the holiday spirit after more than two dozen of them were burned to death last week.According to post author Benjamin Joffe-Walt, the factory, owned by the Ha-Meem group, supplies clothing to more than a dozen US clothing companies and retail stores. The December 14 fire was the latest in "a series of deadly incidents in clothing factories in Bangladesh." For instance, a similar incident in February took the lives of 21 workers. Joffee-Walt also reports that:
28 workers were killed when a massive blaze broke out in an unsafe, multi-story sweatshop known as the "That's It Sportswear" factory in the Ashulia industrial park just north the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. With a number of the exits blocked, most of the victims were burned to death, some trampled to death, some killed by suffocation and others jumped from the flames to their death. Several dozen more suffered severe burns.
Last week's fire also came just days after deadly protests over clothing manufacturers' failure to implement a required 80 percent increase in the minimum wage to 3,000 taka a month (about $42). That's right folks, the workers who were burned alive while making $25 T-Shirts were likely being paid some $24 a month, less than $1 a day.To sign an online petition calling on US clothing companies and retailers to demand better conditions for the workers, follow this link. More suggestions for activism can be found here. One Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was too many. We don't need any more.
Democratic officeholders have had difficulty standing behind tax increases for the very richest people in the country. It is difficult to imagine them sticking their necks out for tax increases that will hit low and middle-income workers. In other words, it is very plausible that in the 2012 election, Democrats will feel the need to take the Republican pledge that they will never raise taxes. This means that the reduction in Social Security taxes may not be for just two years, it may be for the indefinite future.For all of these reasons, I hope that House Democrats are successful in their attempt to keep this plan from passing without serious renegotiation.
In principle there is nothing wrong with financing a portion of Social Security benefits with money from general revenue. This was in fact the original intention of President Roosevelt when he designed the program. However, the fact is that the program has always been financed exclusively by the Social Security tax that is taken from workers’ wages. This makes the tax regressive, but it has the advantage that workers can quite legitimately say that they have paid for their benefits. This will be to some extent less true if a portion of the funding comes from general revenue rather than payroll taxes. In short, getting funding from general revenue opens a new line of attack on the program.
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