Why Is The Media Echoing The Conservative Deficit Zombies When They Do Not Represent The Views of Real Americans

Why Is The Media Echoing The Conservative Deficit Zombies When They Do Not Represent The Views of Real Americans

Why are so many Washington officials obsessed with budget deficits?  And why are they so willing to entertain big cuts to social programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and education, while being reluctant or outright unwilling to increase taxes on the highest income earners?  The answer cannot be that most Americans want these choices. Survey after survey shows that large majorities support asking the wealthiest to pay more in taxes and want to maintain or increase spending on Social Security and federal health and education programs.

A possible answer to where budget hawks get energy and inspiration comes from the first systematic survey social scientists have managed to do of the political attitudes of wealthiest one percent of Americans. Working with a team of scholars from several disciplines, I have conducted a study called the “Survey of Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good.” Most national surveys include only a tiny number of very wealthy citizens, but we used additional data sources to identify a larger sample of wealthy individuals living in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.  Further research would be needed to explore attitudes among the very wealthy living everywhere in the United States.  But our findings are highly suggestive of what would be found in a nationwide study.  For the first time, we are able to pinpoint issues on which the very wealthiest agree or disagree with other Americans.

On Key Budget Questions, the Wealthy Have Distinctive Priorities

The wealthy respondents to our survey expressed great concern about budget deficits:

    Fully 87% called deficits a “very important problem” facing the United States, more than attributed such importance to unemployment, education or anything else on a list of eleven potential national challenges.
    On an open-ended question that asked respondents to name the most important problem facing the country, a hefty 32% of the wealthy mentioned budget deficits or excessive government spending, far more than cited any other problem.
    Only 11% of the wealthy mentioned unemployment or education as America’s top problem.
    Wealthy respondents tilted toward cutting back – rather than expanding – federal government spending on Social Security and health care.

By contrast, in a national survey taken about the same time as our survey, only seven percent of all Americans mentioned deficits or the national debt as the most important problem, while 53% cited jobs and the economy as the top problem.  Average Americans also leaned toward expanding rather than cutting back on major federal outlays for Social Security and health care.

Disagreements on Jobs and Income Supports

Most wealthy respondents to our survey opposed a wide range of job and income policies that majorities of ordinary Americans favor. Our respondents were against setting the minimum wage above the poverty line; providing a decent standard of living for the unemployed; increasing the earned income tax credit; and having government provide jobs for everyone able and willing to work who cannot find private employment.

Likewise, the wealthy opposed – while most Americans favor – providing health insurance financed by tax money; spending “whatever is necessary” to ensure that all children can attend good public schools; making sure that everyone can go to college can do so; and investing more in worker retraining and education to help workers adapt to changes in the economy.

The general American public favors more regulation of big corporations, but our wealthy respondents tend not to favor this idea. Most Americans favor using corporate income taxes “a lot” to get revenue for government programs, but most of the wealthy do not favor this.

Darth Vader's human embodiment Dick Cheney famously said that deficits did not matter, he and his conservative comrades tanked the economy, and Democrats took the wheel of the ship they sunk. Suddenly deficits were the most important thing in the world. What is important is rising more revenue, creating jobs, protecting the environment, educating the next generation, reeducating adults to have the skills for new jobs and getting everyone health. What the wealthy want or want conservatives want is irreverent. Conservatives and the conservative wealthy trashed America. They deserve what they reaped. To be ignored.

Fox News and CNN conservative pundit Erick Erickson : Give A Medal To Store Employee Who Beat Shopper's Child With Belt. How can the USA call itself a merit based society when this assclown makes a six figure salary for being a political analyst.

The Anti-American Worker Republican Origins of Michigan’s Right-To-Work Law

The Anti-American Worker Republican Origins of Michigan’s Right-To-Work Law

As police held back thousands of protesters near the state capital building, Michigan, the birthplace of the modern labor movement, became the 24th state to enact so-called “right-to-work” legislation. Earlier today, Governor Rick Snyder signed two bills preventing public and private sector unions from requiring workers to pay union fees.

The Detroit News reports that after requests from Grover Norquist and others, Snyder switched sides on the issue. United Auto Workers President Robert King said in an interview, that the Koch brothers and Amway owner Dick DeVos “bullied and bought their way to get this legislation in Michigan.”

In an editorial headlined “Drinking the Kochs’ Kool Aid,” the Detroit Free Press was unable to account for the governor’s change of heart, but offered some theories on the motivations of State Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville. He may have been under pressure, the newspaper said, from the anti-union Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), both financially supported by the Koch brothers. ALEC’s model right-to-work bill “mirrors the Michigan law word for word.”

    Word is the groups threatened Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville’s leadership post, and promised him a primary challenge in 2014, if he refused to move right-to-work forward.

    But none of this explains why the seemingly pragmatic Snyder would hitch his wagon to an organization that has already demonstrated more interest in its own ideological objectives than in Snyder’s priorities. What have the [American Legislative Exchange Council] ALEC’s sponsors done for Michigan, and how did a governor who seemed dedicated to the middle path …end up in bed with them?

(Although it isn’t known how many Michigan state legislators are members of ALEC, the Detroit Free Press reports that at least one of the lawmakers who introduced the bill has been associated with ALEC.)

Some have speculated that the governor’s decision was born out of frustration with the UAW, which earlier this year pushed through a ballot initiative to write collective bargaining rights into the state constitution. The proposition was voted down in November by a margin of 58 to 42 percent. Greg McNeilly, who runs Michigan Freedom Fund, a PAC that supports the right-to-work law, told The Washington Post that the measure’s failure emboldened Republicans.

    “Bob King put this on the agenda,” McNeilly said, referencing the UAW president. “He threatened this state. He tried to bully and intimidate the state with this disastrous proposal that was so bad a majority of his members didn’t even back it. The whole state had a conversation. They lost.”

Last week, the governor and the state’s House and Senate majority leaders suddenly moved on the legislation, announcing their plans in a group press conference in which they said the issue is about fairness: workers should have a choice.

In fact, workers already do have a choice. Federal law guarantees that they can’t be forced to join unions, that they can’t be made to pay dues or fees to causes they don’t support. A worker hired today in a Michigan union shop already can refuse membership and pay only a fraction of a union member’s dues to cover the cost of workplace bargaining. The new law — aimed at weakening unions even further — effectively puts organized labor into a position where workers can pay nothing and still receive the benefit of collective bargaining.

As President Obama noted on Monday, “These so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws, they don’t have to do with economics, they have everything to do with politics. What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.” Research backs the president up. Last year, the Economic Policy Institute released a report estimating that right-to-work laws decreased hourly wages for all workers by 3 percent. When businesses make a profit, the beneficiaries are typically CEOs and owners, not workers.

The conservative movement has always held the average American worker in contempt. The think that businesses should be run much like prison road gangs with workers as servants who shut up and do what they are told. Republicans hate the idea of workers having any rights, a legacy of the white male voters of red states. hearing Republicans talk about freedom is always good for a laugh - its jingoism - they mean the freedom to trample over Americans like they just so much trash. That is not freedom, that is the way the totalitarian monarchs of Medieval Europe thought about the serfs. Michigan Adopts the ALEC Model for Diminishing Democracy

Rupert Murdoch's Anti-American Fox News Uses Falsehood-Based Poll Questions To Back Up Its Phony Benghazi Scandal

Liberal Media? You Must Be joking. Wall Street Journal More Interested in Caviar and Foie Gras Than Employee-owned Firms

Liberal Media? You Must Be joking. Wall Street Journal More Interested in Caviar and Foie Gras Than Employee-owned Firms

Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the country.

A vast democratized “new economy” is slowly emerging throughout the United States. The general public, however, knows almost nothing about it because the American press simply does not cover the developing institutions and strategies.

For instance, a sample assessment of coverage between January and November of 2012 by the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States , the Wall Street Journal, found ten times more references to caviar than to employee-owned firms, a growing sector of the economy that involves more than $800 billion in assets and 10 million employee-owners — around three million more individuals than are members of unions in the private sector.

Worker ownership — the most common form of which involves ESOPs, or Employee Stock Ownership Plans — was mentioned in a mere five articles. By contrast, over 60 articles referred to equestrian activities like horse racing, and golf clubs appeared in 132 pieces over the same period.

Although 2012 was designated by the United Nations as the International Year of the Cooperative — an institution that now has more than one billion members worldwide — the Journal‘s coverage was similarly thin. More than 120 million Americans are members of co-operatives and cooperative credit unions, 30 million more people than are owners of mutual funds. The Journal, however, devoted some 700 articles to mutual funds between January and October and only 183 to cooperatives. Of these the majority were concerned with high-end New York real estate, with headlines like “Pricey Co-ops Find Buyers.”

The vast number of cooperative businesses on Main Streets across the country were discussed in just 70 articles and a mere 14 gave co-op businesses more than passing mention. Together, the articles only narrowly outnumbered the 13 Journal pieces that mentioned the Dom Pérignon brand of champagne over the same time frame, and were eclipsed by the 40 Journal entries that refer to the French delicacy foie gras.

Another democratized economic institution is the not-for-profit Community Development Corporation (CDC), roughly 4,500 of which operate in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Such neighborhood corporations create tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space a year. The Journal ran no articles mentioning CDCs in 2012 and only 43 over the past 28 years — less than two a year. Meanwhile, the word château appeared in 30 times as many articles, and luxury apartments received 300 times as much coverage over the same period.

Not surprisingly, the growing “new economy movement” championing democratization of the economy has itself received even less coverage, despite growing citizen involvement on many levels. Over the past year, major national, state and other conferences focusing on worker-owned companies, cooperatives, public banking, nonprofit and public land trusts, and neighborhood corporations were oversubscribed, reflecting the growing interest in these forms. The Journal, however, gave scant coverage to the movement.

Thousands of other creative projects — from green businesses to new forms of combined community-worker efforts — are also underway across the country but receive little coverage. A number are self-consciously understood as attempts to develop working prototypes in state and local “laboratories of democracy” that may be applied at regional and national scale when the right political moment occurs. In Cleveland, Ohio, for instance, a complex of sophisticated worker-owned firms has been developing in desperately poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. The model is partially structured along lines of the Mondragón Corporation, a vibrant network of worker-owned cooperatives in northern Spain with more than 80,000 members and billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Since 2010 legislation to set up public banks along the lines of the long-established Bank of North Dakota has been proposed in 20 states. Several cities — including Los Angeles and Kansas City — have passed “responsible banking” ordinances that require banks to reveal their impact on the community and/or require city officials to do business only with banks that are responsive to community needs. But municipally led responsible banking initiatives appear to have received no attention in the Journal, whereas the newspaper published seven articles this year discussing President Obama’s birth certificate.

The limited nature of the coverage can also be seen in particular cases. Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is a highly successful consumer co-op with $1.8 billion in sales for 2011, allowing it to share $165 million of its profits with its 4.7 million active members and 11,000 employees. Organic Valley, a Wisconsin-based cooperative dairy, generated more than $700 million in revenue for nearly 1,700 farmer-owners. From January through October 2012, the Journal referred (briefly) to REI in just three articles; Organic Valley rated just one mention. In combination, REI and Organic Valley appear in the Journal only as often as the Cavalier King Charles spaniel, a breed of dog that turned up in four entries in the Journal‘s pages this year.

Further perspective on the coverage is offered in the way in which “hot topics” are presented, and others of greater economic significance played down. Co-ops in the U.S. generate over $500 billion in annual revenues. The global market for smartphones is estimated by Bloomberg Industries at $219 billion — less than half as large. Furthermore, there are 20 million more co-op members than smartphone users in the United States. The Journal, however, published over 1,000 print articles that included the terms “smartphone” or “smartphones” from January through October this year — more than five articles for each piece mentioning co-ops (many of which, as noted, were about upscale Manhattan apartments.)

The print coverage of the Journal was analyzed by the Democracy Collaborative of the University of Maryland through the online database ProQuest. Although the assessment focused on the Journal, the nation’s preeminent source of news for economic and business affairs, a preliminary review suggests that other national media outlets devote a similarly miniscule proportion of space to the exploding “new economy” sector. This highlights the need for greater media exposure regarding important developments toward a more democratic, sustainable and community-based economy.

By Gar Alperovitz and Keane Bhatt.

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative.

The reason the Wall Street Journal or any other major media outlet does not cover co-operative type businesses is because they do not want the average American workers to get any crazy ideas about empowerment. About having more control over their lives. They also do not want the people to start pondering the idea that employee owned businesses generally make better products and provide better services because some bean counting elite CEO is not the one deciding what is good or bad.