The Welfare State - American Corporations Live Off The Welfare Of American Workers

 The Welfare State - American Corporations Live Off The Welfare Of American Workers

From 2007 to 2011, the biggest public benefits programs spent $243 billion each year on working families who live in poverty or on the brink of it because their jobs pay so poorly, according to a study published Tuesday by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The research focuses on fast food workers as exemplifying the plight of low-wage workers and the costs that low wages pass along to taxpayers.

    The study focused on the largest direct assistance programs to establish the cost of the “last line of defense between America’s growing low-income workforce and the want of basic necessities.” The combined cost of public health care programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps), the Earned Income Tax Credit that targets low-income workers, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, formerly known as welfare Note: No one can live off TANF or welfare there whole life, there is a limit of five years for any one person's lifetime) for working families averaged $243 billion from 2007 to 2011.

Conservative and anti-American plutocrats like the Koch brothers are not capitalists, they do not practice free enterprise, neither do the Waltons ( the family that owns WalMart, Walgreens and Sams Club). The five largest banks in the USA who are still so big that if they fail the country will go into another big recession - do not practice capitalism. They and all large US and western European corporations practice plutocracy, the modern incarnation of feudal lordships. Sure today is a little better, we get wages and we can buy stuff from those corporations, but they own American workers just like feudal lords owned serfs. Even more crazy is that American workers - by virtue of the capital they create - pay these plutocrats to continue being plutocrats. Every time a working class Conservative or libertarian votes conservative they vote to disempower themselves and their country.

Conservatives Lie When They Say They're Capitalists, They're Plutocrats and Captives of Modern Feudal Lords

Conservatives Lie When They Say They're Capitalists, They're Plutocrats and Captives of Modern Feudal Lords

Spare a thought this Labor Day holiday, when you fire up the barbecue for the last weekend of the summer and raise a beer for the workers in this country, for some of the notable men who have lost their jobs over the past 20 years. I’m thinking of Richard Fuld, Dennis Kozlowski and Eckhard Pfeiffer.

They aren’t union leaders who were fired for organizing for better wages or men who lost their jobs to sweatshop labor in Bangladesh. They aren’t even the engineers who have been put out to rust by robot-run assembly lines. They don’t really number among the almost 20 million who areestimated to be unemployed or underemployed [3].

No, these three names popped up in a review of the “Bailed Out, Booted and Busted” – a study released Wednesday [4] by the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington DC of the 241 people who have ranked as the highest paid CEOs in the US in the past two decades.
An astonishing 38% of these titans of finance and industry have either been kicked out of their jobs, put in jail or had to have their companies be rescued from bankruptcy. Fuld, Kozlowski and Pfeiffer are three that top the list.

“Outrageous pay packets seem to encourage outrageous behavior,” says Sarah Anderson, one of the authors of the new report.

Fuld raked in $466.3m in salary and stocks in seven years as CEO of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank, before the company collapsed in September 2008, precipitating the last financial crisis [5]. He’s just one of 112 such CEOs whose companies were given a total of $258bn in taxpayer bailouts.
Kozlowski ran Tyco, a conglomerate which bought companies that did everything from laying undersea fiber-optic cables to making fire-fighting foam, from 1992 to 2002. He paid himself $170m in 1999 and $125m in 2000. Found guilty of systematically looting the company in 2005, he was sent to jail, and is now serving time at a minimum-security facility [6] near Central Park in Manhattan.
He joins 18 other top paid CEOs in the past 20 years that have led companies that were “busted” or ordered to pay more than $100m each for fraud-related fines and settlements.
Then there’s Pfeiffer, who ran Compaq computer from 1992 to 1999, and was fired when his company lost business to rivals Dell and Gateway. Like 27 other CEOs on the list, he was smart enough to have given himself a generous “golden parachute” contract, allowing him to walk away with $416m in compensation [7] on his final payday.
It’s easy to argue that there are a couple of bad apples in every cart, but think of it this way: if two out of every five pieces of fruit in a store were rotten, it would behoove the manager to tell stockers that if they didn’t cull the bad ones, customers would take their business elsewhere.
In other words: shouldn’t we be asking companies’ boards of directors to tighten the rules on CEOs to make sure they don’t fail at such an astounding rate? And what better way than tying it to their pay packets? And if the boards won’t do this, could government step in, if only to save the companies from their own CEOs abject levels of failure?
One of the simplest reforms that shareholder activists have lobbied for is a report by companies to shareholders comparing CEO compensation to that of their worst paid worker. This has been mandated by the US Congress under the 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation but companies have fought tooth and nail [8] against this being implemented.

Corporate America has been backed up by business school pundits who say that CEO compensation is not a matter that government should regulate. I asked VG Narayan, who runs the Board of Directors Compensation Committee Executive Education Program of the Harvard Business School what he thought of the IPS findings. “It’s terrible when poor performance gets rewarded with a high level of compensation,” he said via email.
But he firmly believes that corporate boards and executives are best placed to fix this. “Governmental and shareholder second-guessing on pay would create an environment of fear in which no board would dare try an approach that’s different from the herd’s or that is tailored to the company’s particular strategy,” Narayan wrote in 2009. “For instance, if the maximum ratio of CEO pay to worker pay were mandated, companies might respond by outsourcing the work of the lowest paid workers [9] rather than curbing CEO pay.”

David Larcker, the director of the Corporate Governance Research Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, also says that governments should be cautious about scaring away these CEOs.
“Executive compensation may be the lightning rod for shareholders in the wake of the financial crisis, but the truth about how pay should be structured is clouded by a lot of popular myths,” Larcker wrote in 2011. “Boards have to consider that how much they pay will have an impact [10] on the types of people who want to take the CEO position. You don’t want to drive talented CEOs out of public companies so that they can avoid scrutiny over how much they are paid.”
Well, these business schools have had decades to preach about better practices. Workers jobs are being outsourced anyway, and the CEOs are still getting away with outrageous pay packages. And the IPS study shows that these CEOs aren’t that talented – since they are failing at an incredibly high rate.

As Anderson says:
Boards of directors are not going to change this. They are mostly made up of other CEOs who says if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Unless regulators, lawmakers or shareholders do something to stop this madness, 20 years from now today’s corporate compensation will seem as modest as the pay levels of 1993.

The IPS report suggests several additional legal reforms in addition to encouraging narrower CEO-worker pay gaps such as bolstering accountability to shareholders and extending accountability to broader stakeholder groups.
Plus governments can eliminate taxpayer subsidies for excessive executive pay and encourage reasonable limits on total compensation by not giving out contracts to companies who pay excessive CEO salaries (effectively subsidized by the taxpayer) and rewarding those who pay their workers well.

Maybe fewer businesses would fail and more workers would be able to celebrate Labor Day if CEO’s had a government-led incentive to do a better job in the first place. Hopefully, the US Congress will get on this when they return from their summer vacations and barbecues.

But this kind of massive welfare for failure, unethical behavior, cronyism and outright corruption cannot be happening. Conservatives tell us all day every day that if we only had less regulation poor old corporate America would be buzzing along and hiring everyone in sight. Gosh, it turns out that business is raking in the cash like never before. CEOs are taking the capital created by low paid workers and working stiffs who buy their generally crappy products, and redistributing that money to bank accounts that get fatter no matter how incompetent they are. That is not fuzzy corruption, that is stealing from labor. Labor whose powers have been weakened by conservatism. Let's change the rules if corporate America can't get anyone to be a CEO for a reasonable amount of money, so what. Maybe we'll geta new class of business managers who are  humanitarians, patriots and capitalists, instead of modern day feudal lords who see average Americans as serfs.

The Restaurant Industry is a Conservative Republican Plantation

The Restaurant Industry is a Conservative Republican Plantation

While thousands of fast-food workers were preparing to walk off their jobs earlier this summer to seek raises to $15 an hour, the industry’s corporate lobbyist, the National Restaurant Association, was celebrating a string of political victories blocking state minimum wage increases and preempting local sick day laws.


In June, the NRA boasted [3] that its lobbyists had stopped minimum wage increases in 27 out of 29 states in 2013. In Connecticut, which increased its state minimum wage, a raise in the base pay for tipped workers such as waitresses and bartenders vanished in the final bill. A similar scenario unfolded in New York State: It increased its minimum wage, but the NRA’s last-minute lobbying derailed raising the pre-tip wage at restaurants and bars. The deals came despite polls showing [4] 80 percent support for raising the minimum wage.  

The NRA’s lobbying didn’t stop there. It also told members that it blocked [5] a dozen states this year from passing laws that would require earned paid sick leave, which is what New York City [6] and Portland, Oregon [7] adopted. Meanwhile, it boasted that six states, including Florida, passed NRA-backed laws that preemptively ban localities from granting earned and paid employee sick time.

“These are horrible things, but there are amazing things that are happening to change it,” said Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United [8] (ROC), which has been working a dozen years to slowly change the industry’s exploitive business model and labor practices. “And there will be increasingly important stuff coming up.”   

As fast-food workers across the country prepare for a second nationwide walkout [9] over wages on Thursday, most Americans have little idea how profitable [10] and politically aggressive the corporate mainstays [11] of America’s second biggest employer have become. While labor activists have had victories in 2013, such as New York and Portland passing sick leave laws, and New Jersey [12] poised to raise its minimum wage via a ballot measure this fall, the restaurant industry’s lobbying powerhouse is at war with the industry’s workers.

“It’s an old-boy network. It’s very old-school thinking. It’s very, very conservative,” said Paul Saginaw, founder of Zingerman’s food companies [13] in Michigan, which employes 600 people and unlike [14] the NRA, supports better benefits for employees like healthcare. “There has to be some pressure put out to provide better lives for people.”

Most Americans are unaware that millions of people who work in the industry—especially the 2.5 million fast-food preparers and servers who earn an average of $8.74 an hour, according to federal labor statistics [15]—are not just teens in their first job, but adults with families to support. They may not know there’s a separate minimum wage for tipped workers, $2.13 an hour, that hasn’t changed in 22 years—although 32 states have raised it slightly. They may not realize that they, as the restaurant-going public, subsidize owners via cash tips, even as the NRA routinely tells legislators its industry cannot afford to pay better wages or basic benefits.

Most Americans don’t know that restaurant salaries are so low [15] that the industry’s 12.2 million workers use food stamps at twice [16] the rate of the U.S. workforce, and are three times as likely to be below the poverty line. Or that women [17] earn less than men in similar jobs. Or that restaurants are among the biggest low-wage employers of people of color. Or that virtually every chain—except for In and Out [18], according to ROC—don’t want to pay living wages and benefits or offer real opportunities [19] for advancement.

Most tellingly, almost every national chain—from fast-food outfits such as Yum! Brands Inc. (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) and McDonald’s to full-service dining such as Darden Restaurants Inc. (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Capital Grille)—have reported [10] higher revenues, profits, margins and cash holdings to Wall Street analysts despite the recession, according to the National Employment Law Project. Giants like McDonalds had 7.8 percent revenue growth over the past decade, according to Gurufocus.com, a financial reporting site. Yum had 10-year revenues of 8.7 percent, and Darden’s 10-year revenues grew 9.1 percent.

But last winter, as the NRA was fighting minimum wage increases and paid sick leave, it was telling lawmakers that the industry could not afford to pay employees more. Yet this August, the NRA’s newsletter was predicting [20] another profitable year, where revenues would be up 4 percent compared to 2012. "Restaurant and foodservice sales are expected to reach a record high of $660.5 billion this year," another 2013 revenue forecast [21] on its website said.

[3] http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/News/Majority-of-states-reject-minimum-wage-increases
[4] http://www.nelp.org/page/-/rtmw/uploads/Memo-Public-Support-Raising-Minimum-Wage.pdf?nocdn=1
[5] http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/News/Cities-and-states-debate-paid-sick-leave
[6] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/27/nyc-paid-sick-time_n_3507814.html
[7] http://nwlaborpress.org/2013/04/city-council-portland-sick-leave/
[8] http://rocunited.org/
[9] https://www.facebook.com/FastFoodForward
[10] http://nelp.3cdn.net/e555b2e361f8f734f4_sim6btdzo.pdf
[11] http://rocunited.org/files/2013/04/reports_darden.pdf
[12] http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/04/nj_voters_strongly_support_min.html
[13] http://www.zingermans.com/AboutUs.aspx
[14] http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/News/NRA-files-brief-with-Supreme-Court-on-health-care
[15] http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag72.htm#earnings
[16] http://billmoyers.com/segment/saru-jayaraman-on-justice-for-restaurant-workers/
[17] http://www.nelp.org/page/-/rtmw/ROC_GenderInequity_ES.pdf?nocdn=1
[18] http://www.in-n-out.com/
[19] http://www.scribd.com/doc/115557026/2013-ROC-National-Diners-Guide-to-Ethical-Eating
[20] http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/News/Economist-s-Notebook-Restaurant-sales-growth-will
[21] http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/Research/Forecast-2013

Yum Brands Inc executive compensation was just shy of $43 million in 2012. The executives at that company have not, and will never do any work that earns that kind of compensation. They could pay their employees a living wage plus gold plated health care insurance and still make a very nice living. Yum Brands are not capitalists, they are rent seek plantation owners-  redistributing the money earned by workers to themselves. Clarence Otis/Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Darden (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Capital Grille) paid himself over $6 million in 2013. Total executive pay was $16 million, yet they have threatened to make life even harder for their employees rather than provide health care coverage. Clarence and his executive staff have never done more than $50k a year worth of actual work, they're plantation owners, just like Yum Brands. They would rather their employees collect food stamps, go without heat in the winter and forget about ever getting good dental care; what is important to them is giving working Americans the shaft so they can live in mansions and call people who point out what sleazeball bastards they are, commies.

Patriots Expose Another Conservative Lie, Low Wage Jobs Do Not Lead To Management Positions

Patriots Expose Another Conservative Lie, Low Wage Jobs Do Not Lead To Management Positions

Entry-level jobs in the fast food business are far more likely to be dead ends than stepping stones to higher-level work, according to new data from the National Employment Law Project. Less than 9 percent of fast food employees are supervisors, and just 2.2 percent hold managerial, professional, or technical jobs.

The remaining 89.1 percent of fast food workers – 3.6 million Americans – earn a median pay rate of $8.94 per hour.

A 40-hour work week, every single week of the year without time off would therefore earn the median front-line fast food worker $18,595 before taxes – right on the cusp of poverty for a family of three. The think tank Demos, using a more realistic accounting of days off and family expenses, has calculated that anything under $12 per hour is insufficient to support a family. That may explain why a McDonald’s website meant to help workers budget recommends they get a second job and why fast food workers in more than half a dozen major cities are striking to demand a livable wage.

NELP notes that fast food companies defend their treatment of workers by depicting cashier and fry cook jobs as the first step on the path to economic mobility. Indeed, in looking at the overall economy it makes sense to think of entry-level jobs as dues-paying stages on the way to the front office. That’s because a third of employees in the whole economy hold managerial, technical, professional, or workplace supervisory roles. The nearly nine-to-one ratio of worker bees to higher-level employees in fast food doesn’t add up:

And it isn’t just that there are hundreds of frontline workers for every franchise owner, leaving very little room for new entrants to the top level of fast food entrepreneurship. It’s that fast food chains require their franchisees to be quite wealthy before they ever purchase a store. In order to be considered for franchise ownership at Wendy’s, applicants must show a net worth of $5 million. KFC, Taco Bell, Burger King, and Jack in the Box set their minimums at $1.5 million. At the low end, Subway requires net worth of $80,000 for franchisees. That means the hypothetical front-line fast food worker from the example above, who never takes a day off, could be eligible to apply for a Subway franchise after 20 years if she somehow saved more than 20 percent of her earnings every year.

Fast food companies aren’t alone in justifying their low wages and treatment of workers by citing opportunities for advancement that almost none of their employees will ever reach. As the Columbia Journalism Review recently noted, such claims are a key piece of Walmart’s public relations strategy.

 These large coporations do not pay their employees a fair share of the revenue generated by those employees because they pay the excetives huge salaries and pay share holders - which are predominantly also wealthy- large proceeds. McDonalds, Hobby Lobby and Walmart are stealing from employees to make themselves filthy rich.

Today's Links For Patriots

The IRS "Scandal" Was A Scam

Monday's revelation that progressive as well as conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status had been singled out for review by the Internal Revenue Service left one pressing question: Why [[then]] did the inspector general's report detailing improper scrutiny only mention conservative groups?

Last night we got the answer: The IG only reported on conservative groups because that's what Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the notoriously partisan chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told him to do.

The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals is Evidence of Rent Seeking in Top 1 Percent Incomes. Rent seeking is a kind of modern conservative form of feudalism.

This decision didn't make the headlines, Conservatives on Supreme Court Serve A Legal Blow to Sustainable Development

Conservatives On Supreme Court Steal Voting Rights From Millions of Americans

Wendy Davis Showed Texas' GOP Boys How to Respect Women

Conservative Ohio Thugs Are Using Their State Budget To Try To Restrict Abortion And Redefine Pregnancy. As soon as Ohio governor Kasich grows a uterus he can have dictatorial control of women's bodies.

UnAmerican Culture of Conservatism Exposed at Morally Corrupt Bank of America

UnAmerican Culture of Conservatism Exposed at Morally Corrupt Bank of America

Just when we thought the big banks couldn’t hit a new low, they did.

Six former employees of Bank of America have come forward, alleging that the big bank intentionally denied eligible homeowners mortgage loan modifications, and lied to those homeowners about the status of their mortgage payments and documents.

Bank of America allegedly used these dirty tactics to lead homeowners into foreclosures and in-house loan modifications, both of which helped reap massive profits for BOA’s bottom-line.

The employees who have come forward have also said that the big bank rewarded customer service representatives with hefty cash bonuses and gift cards to popular stores when they foreclosed on homes.

According to a lawsuit filed in federal court, a Bank of America employee who placed ten or more mortgage accounts into foreclosure a month could get up to a $500 bonus.

The lawsuit also alleges that the bank punished representatives who did not hit foreclosure target numbers or who objected to the bank’s tactics. In some cases, those employees who didn’t foreclose on enough people were fired.

This latest jaw-dropper out of Bank of America comes just days after it was revealed that the bank was also using deceptive mailers and sales pitches to sell consumers on mortgage refinancing plans that could actually add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a borrower’s loan.

Despite these latest revelations about foreclosure targets, lies and dirty tactics, nobody at Bank of America is worried about going to jail.

That’s because our elected lawmakers in Washington, particularly Republican lawmakers, are scared straight by the idea of going after the big banks and going after corporate America.

Yet, these same lawmakers are just fine going after the big bad government, especially when it comes to things like the IRS controversy.

But, let’s look at the parallels between the IRS controversy and the latest news coming out of Bank of America.

With the IRS controversy, IRS agents deliberately went after and applied higher scrutiny towards potentially political organizations, liberal and conservative, applying for 501c3 tax-exempt status.

At Bank of America, employees allegedly intentionally denied eligible homeowners loan modifications, and pushed them into foreclosure to get a bonus.

With the IRS scandal, one IRS official took the fifth when testifying before Congress, but is the subject of both a criminal and an internal investigation.

At Bank of America, it’s alleged that customer service representatives were rewarded for lying to homeowners about the status of their mortgage payments and documents.

Despite the obvious similarities between these two scenarios, only one is being investigated loudly and publicly by Congress; The IRS controversy.

So, why is Congress willing to go to the ends of the earth to get to the bottom of the IRS scandal, but refusing to lift a finger when it comes to investigating America’s big banks?

Could it be that employees of the IRS do not make multimillion dollar campaign contributions to members of Congress?

Could it be that employees of the IRS don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying?

And even the media, which is supposed to be an impartial and unbiased source of news and information, is afraid to go after big banks when they commit crimes.

The media would rather drag on ad nauseum about manufactured witch hunts like the IRS controversy, than discuss how the big banks, which American taxpayers have already saved once, are back up to their same old dirty tricks, and threatening to bring down the entire American economy once again.

 One of the reasons the banks are likely to get off is that to do so would appear to be anti-business. Ever hear the word pro-business from conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats. That is code for letting big business do whatever it wants. If you are pro regulation that protects consumers, tax payers and small investors - in this conservative culture you are defined as a raging commie. How did that framing of issues happen. Most of the media is owned by big corporations. The media gets it's revenue from big corporations. So the media never or at least seldom ever holds a politicians accountable for what they mean when they claim that regulations which protect ordinary Americans is somehow anti-business.

Real Patriots Should Reject Conservative Propaganda About The Minimum Wage

Real Patriots Should Reject Conservative Propaganda About The Minimum Wage

With seven strikes of fast food workers in eight weeks, demanding $15/hour and the right to a union, a discussion of raising the minimum wage has begun to stir up the predictable frenzy of pro-market mythology.

As in every previous discussion of raising the minimum wage, it has been asserted that such a move would increase unemployment, be harmful to the most underprivileged workers, bad for small businesses, and indeed, disastrous for the wider economy. In this same narrative, low-wage jobs are stepping stones, and hard work and higher education are reliable paths to middle class employment.

Is any of this true?

Who Are Low-Wage Workers?

Let's start with a useful benchmark of a low-wage job as one that keeps a full-time worker and their family of four at or below the federal poverty threshold - $23,005 per year, or $11.06/hour in 2011.

Contrary to the myths, the working poor are an ever-expanding contingent of America's labor force, while the middle class has been steadily shrinking. Over 25 percent of all workers qualify as low-wage workers.

Lest we think this is an issue only in Tennessee and Alabama, nearly 20 percent of Washington workers qualify as low-wage workers, with an additional 40 percent living within what is known as the supplemental poverty measure.

The road of higher education also increasingly leads nowhere. Low-wage workers are better educated than ever before, with over 26 percent having had some college education. Low-wage workers now carry sizable sums of student debt.

Conditions have deteriorated even more rapidly since the Great Recession began. Low-wage jobs comprised about 35 percent of jobs lost in 2008 and 2009, yet they accounted for 76 percent of net job growth in 2010.

Minimum Wage Already Too High in Washington?

It is true that Washington is currently the only state with a minimum wage above $9.00/hour.

What this demonstrates, however, is not a lavishness of wages here, but rather the abysmal standard of living faced by tens of millions of hardworking people nationwide. A full-time job at Washington’s minimum wage fetches about $18,000, clearly far less than necessary to meet basic expenses.

A more useful benchmark is a living wage. The Alliance for a Just Society defines living-wage jobs for Washington state, assuming full-time hours, as $16.13/hour or $33,544 annually for a single adult. Those figures would rise to $28.71/hour or $59,715 a year for a household of one adult and one child, and $29.42/hour or $61,188 a year for a family of four with one adult working. Keep in mind, many low-wage workers are unable to get full-time employment.

What Would the Fallout of $15/Hour Be?

Much is made of the impact a higher minimum wage would have on small businesses. But what about Starbucks, McDonald's, Subway, Pizza Hut and the vast array of huge corporations whose mega profits rest on the poverty wages of their workforce?

The CEO of YUM! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell) made $20.5 million last year. The average worker in one of the stores made $7.50/hour. Restaurant chains spent nearly a million dollars in 2006 to fight minimum-wage increases in six states.

The past several decades have seen worker productivity skyrocket, and wages for most stagnate. Where did the balance go? It went to the top one percent. If minimum wage had kept pace with productivity, it would be approximately $22/hour. If it had grown at the same pace as the income to the one percent, it would be around $33/hour.

Increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour is surely reasonable in the face of the massive siphoning of income to the very top. Should those who work hard every day have to struggle to pay for rent and groceries?

Research does show that a minimum wage increase can initially pose difficulty to some small businesses. However, this can be addressed by increasing taxes on big business (which are at historically low rates) and eliminating corporate welfare to subsidize small businesses, along with cutting B&O and property tax burden on small businesses.

But the main danger facing working people and small businesses is the continued proliferation of low wages. The economy is reeling with over 20 million people unemployed or underemployed, a low-wage workforce, a collapse of the housing bubble, and staggering consumer and student debt. Raising wages is a vital measure to break out of the depressionary spiral.

Statistical studies show a positive impact of wage increases on jobs. When working people have more income, their spending power goes up, which in turn boosts sales, which further increases jobs and overall spending power, and so on.

The idea that raising the wage would harm the most disadvantaged workers is a fig leaf to justify anti-worker policymaking. In fact, increasing the minimum wage raises the bargaining power of all workers, and has the effect of raising wages across the board.

The Great Recession has left in tatters the idea that capitalism works. It works well for the billionaires, but for the rest of us, it has meant fast eroding standards of living. The American middle class was created on the edifice of courage and sacrifice of a mobilized labor movement. Let us support the workers demanding $15/hour. They are a sign of the times.

(reprinted here for educational purposes)

There is no CEO at any company in the USA or Western Europe who is worth millions of dollars a year, absolutely zero CEOs anywhere in the world do millions of dollars worth of work, intellectual or otherwise. As profits roll in they take what they want, and let some of the crumbs trickle down to the workers who create the profits. CEO is another name for leech. No CEO should be paid more than three times their highest paid hourly employee.

How Conservative Republicans Are Giving The USA The Shaft This Week

How Conservative Republicans Are Giving The USA The Shaft This Week

Corporate Cowards Divert Shareholder Funds into “Dark Money”

But don't front groups have to report (at least to election authorities) who's really behind their ads, so voters can make informed decisions? No. Thanks to the Supreme Court's infamous Citizen United edict in 2010, such groups can now pour unlimited sums of corporate cash into elections without ever disclosing the names of their funders. This "dark money" channel has essentially established secret political campaigning in America.

REPORT: Republican Senate Nominee Gabriel Gomez Claimed $281,500 Tax Deduction Under What IRS Called A ‘Tax Scam’

GOP cabinet boycott reaffirms Senate is archaic embarrassment

This Is How the NRA Lies to Gun Owners About Obama's Agenda

The survey, provided to Mother Jones by a reader, claims that "President Obama has supported a national gun registration system allowing federal government officials to keep track of all your firearm purchases." This is an all-too-common NRA talking point. NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre echoed it in January, saying that Obama "wants to put every private, personal transaction under the thumb of the federal government, and he wants to keep all those names in a massive federal registry."

That's not true.

Federal law has long banned a national gun registry. And the recent gun control bill that died in Congress, which was cosponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and fully supported by Obama, did not create a national gun registry. In fact, the bill expressly prohibited such a registry. Obama emphasized this point repeatedly, and award-winning mainstream media fact-checkers backed him up.

The Demi-God of Conservatism, Foreigner Rupert Murdoch: Journalism's Jack the Ripper

Another conservative lie bites the dust, Fox-Promoted Claim That Benghazi Witness Was Threatened Falls Apart

Proto-Fasicst Corporations whine that Obama's a Socialist even as business profits skyrocket to all-time record high

Obama's been called an anti-business president and a socialist, yet corporate profits are at all time record highs and the share of the nation's output that goes to corporate profits has never been higher. If Obama were truly a socialist, wouldn't you see more for workers? That has not been the case. Obama can be blamed for many things, but being anti-business is not one of them.

Conservative Republican America Where Workers Are Treated Like Soviet Dissidents

Welcome To Conservative Republican America Where Workers Are Treated Like Soviet Dissidents

Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your clothes in the 90-degree heat, but you keep going: your kids need their dinner. One day, your supervisor tells you that instead of being paid an hourly wage, you will now get paid for the number of containers you load or unload. This will be great for you, your supervisor says: More money!  But you open your next paycheck to find it shrunken to the point that you are no longer even making minimum wage. You complain to your supervisor, who promptly sends you home without pay for the day. If you pipe up again, you’ll be looking for another job.

Everardo Carrillo says that's just what happened to him and other low-wage employees who worked at a Southern California warehouse run by a Walmart contractor. Carrillo and his fellow workers have launched a multi-class-action lawsuit for massive wage theft (Everardo Carrillo et al. v. Schneider Logistics) in a case that’s finally bringing national attention to an invisible epidemic. (Walmart, despite its claims that it has no responsibility for what its contractors do, has been named a defendant [3].)

What happened to Carrillo happens every day in America. And it could happen to you.

How big is the problem?

Americans like to think that a fair day’s work brings a fair day’s pay. Cheating workers of their wages may seem like a problem of 19th-century sweatshops. But it’s back and taking a terrible toll. We’re talking billions of dollars in wages; millions of workers affected each year. A gigantic heist is being perpetrated against working people: they’re getting screwed on overtime, denied their tips, shortchanged on benefits, defrauded on payroll, and handed paychecks that bounce like rubber balls. A conservative estimate of unpaid overtime alone shows that it costs workers at least $19 billion per year.

The laws protecting workers are grossly inadequate [4], and wage thieves go unpunished. For giant companies like Walmart, Citigroup and UPS, getting fined is just the cost of doing business. You could even say that they're incentivized to cheat because punishment is so unlikely, and when it happens, so light. The protections we used to take for granted, like the right to receive at least the minimum wage, the right to workers’ compensation when hurt on the job, and the right to advocate for better working conditions, are nothing more than a quaint memory for many Americans. Activist Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America,calls it a "national crime wave."

The sheer scope of the problem is jaw-dropping, sweeping across key industries and inflicting massive damage on individuals and society as a whole. In 2009, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a ground-breaking study, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers,” which found that in America, an honest day’s work is frequently rewarded with theft and abuse. A survey of over 4,000 workers in Chicago, L.A. and New York found that minimum and overtime violations were rife, and any attempt to complain or organize was swiftly met with punishment. Among the revelations:

    26 percent of low-wage workers got paid less than the minimum wage.

    76 percent of workers toiling over 40 hours were denied overtime.

    Workers lose an average of $2,634 a year due to these and other workplace violations.

Who gets cheated?

Women, minorities, immigrants, and workers at the bottom of the wage scale are hardest hit, but wage theft is thriving across the employment spectrum.

The people at the top who are stealing these wages are not going broke. They are not in need of food and shelter. They have money. They just want more. They're the ones always yelling about how regulation is hurting American business. Regulation is not hurting business or capitalism. What is hurting business, American culture, American values and capitalism is greedy immoral thugs who call themselves patriotic conservatives and libertarians.

Freedom Loving Americans Understand What It Is Like to Have Fracking in Your Backyard

Freedom Loving Americans Understand What It Is Like to Have Fracking in Your Backyard

Ed Wade’s property straddles the Wetzel and Marsh county lines in rural West Virginia and it has a conventional gas well on it. “You could cover the whole [well] pad with three pickups,” said Wade. And West Virginia has lots of conventional wells — more than 50,000 at last count. West Virginians are so well acquainted with gas drilling that when companies began using high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing in 2006 to access areas of the Marcellus Shale that underlie the state, most residents and regulators were unprepared for the massive footprint of the operations and the impact on their communities.

When it comes to a conventional well and a Marcellus well, “There is no comparison, none whatsoever,” said Wade, who works with the Wetzel County Action Group [4]. “You live in the country for a reason and it just takes that and turns it upside down. You know how they preach all the time that natural gas burns cleaner than coal; well, it may burn cleaner than coal, but it’s a hell of a lot dirtier to extract.”

To understand what’s at stake, you have to understand the vocabulary. Take the word “fracking” for example. When people say it’s been around since the 1950s, they are referring to vertical fracturing, but what’s causing all the contention lately is a much more destructive process known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing. Or they’re using "fracking" in a very limited way. “The industry uses [fracking] to refer just to the moment when the shale is fractured using water as the sledgehammer to shatter the shale,” scientist Sandra Steingraber told AlterNet [5]. “With that as the definition they can say truthfully that there are no cases of water contamination associated with fracking. But you don’t get fracking without bringing with it all these other things — mining for the frack sand [6], depleting water, you have to add the chemicals, you have to drill, you have to dispose of the waste, you have drill cuttings. I refer to them all as fracking, as do most activists.”

The potential impacts that go well beyond the moment the well is fracked are mammoth. What has been most discussed is the concern that the chemicals used in the fracking process, as well as naturally occurring but dangerous substances underground like arsenic, heavy metals and methane, can migrate back to the surface with water through faults, fissures and abandoned mines. That’s deeply concerning, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The footprint of the well site, which now often includes freshwater or wastewater ponds and tankers full of chemicals, has grown expotentially from the size of conventional wells -- they certainly aren't the size of a few pickup trucks. Here's an aerial view of a new home, built in rural West Virginia that is now surrounded by a fracking operation after the owner's neighbor leased to a drilling company.


Fracking takes rural communities and turns them into industrial zones — and citizens have little recourse. Thanks to the so-called “Halliburton Loophole” in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, fracking is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act and there are exemptions also in the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. In West Virginia, a state with a long history of energy extraction, industry has a controlling hand in local and state politics and thus far, seems to be calling the shots. To make matters worse, many properties had their mineral rights separated over a century ago. So, people may own their homes and properties, but not the minerals underneath. Their property can be destroyed by drilling and they will have no financial gain.

Or, they can lose virtually everything, simply by living next door to someone who does lease.

Maybe some old school vertical fracturing is safe enough. Maybe. Yet it is fairly obvious that that horizontal fracking combined with the massive numbers of wells is not safe, not clean, not sustainable and not good for American families.

If You Love The USA You Should Demand Millionaires Pay Their Fair Share

If You Love The USA You Should Demand Millionaires Pay Their Fair Share

President Barack Obama’s new budget proposal, released Wednesday, would raise $16 billion in revenue over 10 years by getting rid of one of the ways millionaires and billionaires pay lower taxes than their secretaries. It's called the carried interest tax break, and it allows the wealthy to pay a lower rate on some of their income. But ending the carried interest exception will be tough, and not just because a budget compromise with Republicans is unlikely: Previous proposed legislation to kill the tax break was riddled with loopholes.

The carried interest tax break works by letting private equity and hedge fund managers treat some of the income they earn from managing clients' portfolios as if they had invested it themselves. That allows folks like Mitt Romney to pay a 20 percent investment income tax rate on their money management fees, instead of the normal 39.6 percent tax rate on earned income. This special rich person perk costs the government some $1.3 billion a year. That's one reason why Obama and many Democrats slam the tax break as unfair and have targeted it for repeal.

"There continues to be no rationale whatsoever for people to pay at a vastly lower tax rate when they are managing other people’s money," Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), who has introduced all of the carried interest legislation in past years, said in an email. "This is an issue of fairness that we should address as we seek a balanced approach to deficit reduction that involves both additional revenues and spending cuts."

But getting rid of the tax break may not be such an easy task, given the tortuous history of the movement to deep-six it. The fight against carried interest is Levin's baby. He first introduced a bill to ax the loophole in 2007, and has introduced two more versions since then, all of which have stalled.

"It's rather unusual that this legislation hung out there for so many years," says Steve Rosenthal, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center. That's due to the "pretty effective job" that the trillion-dollar private equity industry has done in "confusing and delaying legislation," he says.

Rosenthal says that so much damage has been done to the legislation over the years that he has no faith in the effectiveness of whatever nominal repeal legislation eventually does get into a compromise budget bill—if there ever is one.

First of all, he notes, it's unclear whether the entirety of an executive's carried interest income would be subject to the higher tax rate. Rosenthal says some versions of the bill have only called for raising taxes on 75 percent of it.

Rosenthal says the most recent legislation also includes a loophole that would allow private equity firms, which are usually organized as limited partnerships, to convert themselves into a special kind of small business entity, which would allow them to avoid the carried interest tax hike.

And if Levin's most recent legislation passes, private equity managers would also be exempt in certain cases from a higher carried interest rate on the profit from selling part of their own interest in the firm.

"The carried interest lobbying effort has been a scandal," Rosenthal says.

This insanity where the American people reward wealth and punish work could end in a week. All it would take, and it is asking a lot apparently, is for a few million patriotic Americans to send a postcard to their Senator and representative. They can't ignore the overwhelming wished of working class Americans who want the filthy rich to start paying back society for providing them with roads, firefighters, the world's best military and other infrastructure - that makes their wealth even possible.

American Patriots Know That Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Americans Near Historic Lows

American Patriots Know That Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Americans Near Historic Lows

Federal taxes on middle-income Americans are near historic lows, our updated report explains, and that’s true whether you’re talking about federal income taxes or all federal taxes.

When it comes to income taxes, a family of four in the exact middle of the income spectrum will pay only 5.3 percent of its 2013 income in federal income taxes next year, according to a new analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Average income tax rates for these typical families have been lower during the Bush and Obama Administrations than at any time since the 1950s (see graph).  Taxes were particularly low from 2008 to 2010 because of the Recovery Rebate Credit and the Making Work Pay Tax Credit, which have since expired.

When it comes to overall federal taxes, households in the middle fifth of the income spectrum paid an average of 11.1 percent of their income in taxes in 2009, the latest year for which data are available, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).  This is the lowest on record in data that go back to 1979.
When CBO publishes data for more recent years (such as 2013), overall federal average tax rates on this middle group will likely be higher — though still low historically — because they will reflect the expiration of Making Work Pay and other temporary tax cuts, including the payroll tax cut that expired at the end of last year.

The expiration of the payroll tax cut is the biggest tax change for most people in 2013.  As this table shows, the tax cut helped workers in a wide range of income groups, and its expiration is a key contributor to the slowdown in economic growth that CBO forecasts for 2013.

Yet those wacky conservatives keep claiming that we have to keep large tax cuts for wealthy corporations and billionaires to stimulate economic growth, or have new tax cuts. There is no relationship between low taxes for those skimming huge profits off the backs of American workers. Why are cons lying about taxes. They want to starve thew government safety net - Medicare, Social Security, workmen's comp, unemployment insurance  - pretty much anything that does not fire a missile. The reason we safety net is because history shows us that markets are often good and create wealth, but they are not perfect - as any adult who was around in 2007 will know. The U.S. and it's imperfect markets have a long history. Patriots learn from history, conservatives either rewrite it or pretend it didn't happen.

Evil is Restless, Monsanto's Next Target is the Destruction of American Democracy

Evil is Restless, Monsanto's Next Target is the Destruction of American Democracy

Big Food’s greatest fear is materializing. A critical mass of educated consumers, food and natural health activists are organizing a powerful movement that could well overthrow North America’s trillion-dollar junk food empire. Savvy and more determined than ever, activists are zeroing in on the Achilles heel of Food Inc. -- labeling.

But as consumers demand truth and greater transparency in labeling, it isn’t just Big Food whose empire is vulnerable. The biotech industry, which makes billions supplying junk food manufacturers with cheap, genetically engineered (GE) ingredients, has even more to lose. Monsanto knows that if food producers are forced to label the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in their food products, they’ll reformulate those products to meet consumer demand for GMO-free alternatives. That’s why companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Dow, along with Coca-Cola and Pepsi, last year spent more than $46 million to defeat Proposition 37, California’s GMO labeling initiative.

The junk food and biotech industries narrowly (48.5% - 51.5%) prevailed in California, but they know it’s only a matter of time before one or more states pass a mandatory GMO labeling law. More than 30 state legislatures are now debating GMO labeling bills. And consumers have broadened the fight [4] beyond just labeling. Five counties and two cities in California and Washington have banned the growing of GE crops. In addition, given the near total absence of FDA regulation, 19 states have passed laws restricting GMOs [4].

How is the biotech industry fighting back? By attacking democracy.  Experts say the laws are on the side of consumers. But consumers will no doubt still have to defend democracy against an increasingly desperate, and aggressive, industry bent on protecting the highly profitable business of genetically engineered food.

The battle lines have been drawn. Will we cede our food sovereignty rights to a profit-at-all costs corporatocracy?

Monsanto’s lobbyists are out in force in Washington, Vermont, Connecticut, and several dozen other states. They’re lobbying politicians behind the scenes and planting misleading articles [5] in the press. Attacking pro-labeling anti-GMO proponents as anti-technology Luddites.  They’re repeating ad nauseum their propaganda claims that GE foods and crops are perfectly safe and therefore need no labeling, that transgenics are environment- and climate-friendly, and that genetically modified crops are necessary to feed the world.

One of Monsanto’s major propaganda points, designed to discourage state officials from passing GMO labeling laws, is that state GMO labeling is unconstitutional. Monsanto has repeatedly stated that it will sue any state that dares to label. This threat of a lawsuit was enough to convince lawmakers in Vermont and Connecticut in 2012 to back off [6] from labeling, even though there were sufficient votes, and overwhelming public sentiment, to pass these bills.

The same scenario [7] is unfolding again [7] in Vermont, where the Governor is refusing to endorse a popular labeling bill that could easily pass through both houses of the legislature.

Biotech industry lawyers claim that Federal courts will strike down mandatory state GMO labeling for three reasons: 1)because Federal law, in this case FDA regulations, preempts state law; 2) because commercial free speech allows corporations to remain silent on whether or not their products are genetically engineered and; 3) because GMO labeling would interfere with interstate commerce.

These claims simply don’t hold up. State GMO labeling, and other food safety and food labeling laws, are constitutional. Federal law, upheld for decades by federal court legal decisions, allows states to pass laws relating food safety or food labels when the FDA has no prior regulations or prohibitions in place. There is currently no federal law or FDA regulation on GMO labeling, except for a guidance statement on voluntary labeling, nor is there any federal prohibition on state GMO or other food safety labeling laws. In fact there are over 200 state food labeling laws in effect right now in the U.S., including a GMO fish labeling law in Alaska, laws on labeling wild rice, maple syrup, dairy quality, kosher products, and laws on labeling dairy products as rBGH-free. It is very unlikely that any federal court will want to make a sweeping ruling that would nullify 200 preexisting state laws.

U.S. case law does indicate that commercial free speech in certain instances allows corporations to remain silent about what’s in their products. However federal courts have consistently ruled that when there are compelling state interests -- health, environment, economic -- states can require corporations to divulge what’s in their products or how they were produced.

When it comes to GMOs, states can clearly make the case for compelling state interests, according to Consumer Union’s senior scientist, Michael Hansen. Hansen says: “...there is a compelling state interest in labeling of genetically engineered foods and that is due to the potential human health and environmental impacts of genetically engineered foods.”

Hansen also argues that Codex Alimentarius,  a collection of internationally recognized standards, codes of practice, guidelines and other recommendations relating to foods, food production and food safety, guarantees nations the right to implement mandatory labeling of GMO foods. The standards support the argument that GMO labels do not constitute a restriction of free trade, as long as they are applied to both domestic and international producers.  Similarly state GMO labels, as long as they do not discriminate against particular producers, but rather apply to all producers -- state, national, and international -- do not constitute a restriction of interstate commerce.

The U.S. government, under massive global pressure, has signed on to the Codex Alimentarius, which serves "as a risk management measure to deal with the scientific uncertainty" associated with genetically engineered foods. And according to Hansen, there most certainly is significant scientific uncertainty [8] about the potential health impacts of genetically engineered foods.”

States and localities have the right and the power to pass their own legislation, especially when the federal government fails or refuses to act on matters of compelling interest. Although large corporations now control the federal government, we still have room to organize and govern ourselves, especially at the local level.

“Home rule,” embedded in state constitutions and municipal charters across the U.S., provides the legal basis that has enabled several hundred cities and counties to pass ordinances banning factory farms, the spreading of sewage sludge on farmlands, fracking (which pollutes groundwater, farms and gardens), and even GMOs.

Yet undeterred by 200 years of case law and legislation institutionalizing states’ rights and local “Home Rule,” corporations are brazenly attacking the rights of states and localities to regulate Corporate America’s often reckless and criminal behavior.  They’re getting help from the infamous pro-corporate lobbying group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC [9]is lobbying states across the country to restrict counties or local governments from passing any laws limiting pesticide use, GMOs, fracking, or industrial agriculture practices.

So corporations do not have human rights, they have super human rights. or so they seem to think. Let's say that all genetically modified foods are safe, how could labeling them - thus giving people a choice interfere with Monsanto's ability to do business. That is unless they know that some people do not want to gamble their lives or the lives of their children on what a corporation says is safe.

Former Tenn. Vice-Mayor William Blakely Allegedly Drove 90 MPH While Masturbating Out Window

According to Monsanto corporations never lie, Former Walmart District Manager Accuses Company of Widespread Inventory Manipulation

The Patriotic Truth About Middle-Class Taxes and Corporations

The Patriotic Truth About Middle-Class Taxes and Corporations

Transplanting Taxes from Corporations to the Rest of Us
American taxpayers are increasingly picking up the tab for unpaid corporate taxes.

Today, corporate profits are setting all-time records while middle class families continue to struggle financially. These trends are intertwined.

Whether you’ve clicked to send your tax forms to the IRS along the cyber-highway or dropped your return in the old-fashioned blue mailbox, you’ll be paying extra to cover the growing amount of taxes that the nation’s clever corporations are shunting onto individual taxpayers.

Officially, the U.S. corporate tax rate stands at 35 percent, but in practice it’s far lower. Corporations have lots of tricks in their box of tax-avoidance tools.

In the 1950s, corporations paid nearly a third of the federal government’s bills. Last year, thanks to the antics of Pfizer and other examples of overly creative accounting, corporate income taxes accounted for less than a tenth of Uncle Sam’s total revenue.

Consider Pfizer’s track record. The drugmaker increased its offshore profits by $10 billion in 2012, boosting its offshore stash to $73 billion — all of it untaxed by Uncle Sam. Like most pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer registers its patents in a low-tax offshore haven, and then charges a high price for the use of this “intellectual property.” Doing so, it shifts all of its U.S. profits offshore, avoiding U.S. taxes and bloating its overseas bank account.

Pfizer’s tax dodging prowess has earned it a gold medal in the sport, but it has also drawn unwanted attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC wrote to Pfizer last year asking them to explain four years of large losses in their U.S. operations despite reporting about 40 percent of their sales on American soil. Undeterred by the SEC investigation, Pfizer added a fifth year of U.S. losses to the string in 2012.

Imagine for a moment one of the physicians that prescribes Pfizer’s products taking their diploma off their office wall, carefully packing it up, and shipping it to a bank vault in the Cayman Islands. That diploma represents the doctor’s intellectual property. Without it, they would not be able to practice their profession.

After each visit, patients approaching the check-out desk would be given their bill and an envelope to mail their check to a post office box in the Cayman Islands. Faced with confused looks, the receptionist cheerfully explains, “Well, we have to pay for the use of the skills represented by the diploma, which is housed in the Caribbean.”

The corporate offshore tax dodge that shifts $90 billion of tax expenses onto individual taxpayers this Tax Day is just that crazy. Just like having a doctor’s diploma parked in the Cayman Islands does nothing to improve the quality of care, having corporate profits transferred from America to tax haven nations provides no enhanced benefits in terms of product quality or service. In other words, there is no economic value. It only serves to add more to already-overflowing corporate coffers.

In the 1950s, corporations paid nearly a third of the federal government’s bills. Last year, thanks to the antics of Pfizer and other examples of overly creative accounting, corporate income taxes accounted for less than a tenth of Uncle Sam’s total revenue. This dramatic shortfall shows up in two ways — federal budget deficit growth and the growing trend of individual taxpayers paying an increased share of the costs of government.

Only about two in every thousand American businesses are even eligible to play this game, and far fewer actually do. Most business owners are proud to pay taxes they know support schools, good infrastructure, and national security.

If tax-dodging corporations were people, they might say thanks to the responsible taxpayers who are picking up their share of unpaid taxes. But since they aren’t human, allow me to say on their behalf, “Have a Nice Tax Day.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Scott Klinger is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies

But conservatives keep claiming that taxes are too high and are preventing economic growth. Unlike the years following the new Deal and up through the 1970s, when corporations were somewhat responsible about the social contract between workers and consumers, now they let the workers have the crumbs and corporate plutocrats take must of the pie. And big institutional investors get a big share too. On the other hand workers are more productive than ever yet their wages are not keeping up with inflation. Our roads, bridges, cities and schools could use some infrastructure improvement, but that is slow in coming because conservatives, who caused the deficit and the recession, say the deficit is more important than rising revenue. 

Real Patriots Do Not Lie About Food Stamps

Real Patriots Do Not Lie About Food Stamps

As you probably know, complaints about the size and cost of the food stamp program (now known as SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) has become an ever-more-prominent part of the conservative argument that America is awash in redistributive "welfare" spending (they can't much make that case about cash assistance any more). It was no accident that during his 2012 presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich called Barack Obama the "food stamp president." That's now a quasi-racial appeal along the lines of the old "welfare queen" smear.

Just today, the Wall Street Journal had a report [2] on rising SNAP costs, with the provocative title, "Use of Food Stamps Swells Even as Economy Improves," with the planted axiom being that there should be an inverse relationship between food stamps and the unemployment rate.

But as Jordan Weissmann points out [3] at The Atlantic, that's a false premise:

    [R]epeat after me: There are record numbers of Americans on food stamps today because there are record numbers of Americans in poverty (records begin in 1959.)

    As of 2011, there were 46.2 million men, women, and children living below the U.S. poverty line. There isn't much reason to believe that the last year of mediocre job growth has dented that number. And until it plunges, the food stamp rolls are going to stay full -- plain and simple.

One might add that it's more than a bit hypocritical for Republicans to deride reductions in the unemployment rate as meaningless while simultaneously complaining that counter-cyclical assistance programs should be shedding beneficiaries. But it's all kinda beside the point:

    Of all the social welfare programs the U.S. has, we should probably be worrying about food stamps the least. Its beneficiaries are overwhelmingly needy. In 2010, about 87 percent were at or below the poverty line and almost half were children. Only 3.5 percent had incomes higher than 130 percent of the poverty line. Meanwhile, the program arguably encourages more work by letting unemployed parents take the first job they can find, even if it won't pay enough to feed their family on its own. It's also hyper-efficient stimulus. The money has to be spent instead of saved, meaning it cycles quickly back into the economy.

    Our food stamp rolls are eye popping, but they're not the problem. Poverty is.

This won't be much of an answer to those conservatives who claim that helping poor people is why they are poor in the first place. But that's another issue.

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ed-kilgore-0
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323699704578328601204933288.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-most-important-thing-to-remember-about-americas-food-stamp-boom/274443/
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/food-stamps
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Conservatives live in a bubble of lies. It is the only way they can win an argument. That bubble is the world of fake patriotism they must keep going by lying to America and to themselves. It is beyond pathetic. One of the fastest ways to get people off food stamps is to pay them a living wage. Yet the plastic patriots fight increase in wages. America is subsidizing Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, grocery store chains with millionaire owners - because they pay their workers so little for an honest day's work, the workers have to get food stamps or Medicaid to eck out an existence. America needs to stand up and tell these blood sucking conservative leeches to start paying back the American workers who made their wealth possible.