See Progress: Heather Boushey: 'Middle Out Economics 101'

Source:Center For American Progress I believe at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

"CAP's Senior Economist Heather Boushey, explains how middle out economics helps bolster the United States economy." 

From the Center For American Progress

If you watched and listened to this video, you'll hear or see nothing that has to do with raising taxes across the board, or even just on the wealthy. Or arguing for a bigger, stronger, national government. Or less individual choice and more government control of the marketplace. Or paying people not to even bother working. Or some national basic income, so no one has to work for a living. 

What I just laid out and what you didn't see or hear in this video, is not what President Barack Obama and the Center For American Progress is proposing. But instead an alternative to both supply side economics, that's just about lowering taxes and regulations on the wealthy. As well as an alternative to social democracy, which is what American leftists are proposing in America, that we simply change our form of government and become a social democratic state.

Think Progress: Jeff Spross: 'Moving The Goal Posts: Simpson-Bowles Renege On Their Own Plan For More Revenue'

Source:Think Progress- left to right: former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles (Democrat, North Carolina) & former U.S. Senate Alan Simpson (Republican, Wyoming?

"Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles will release a new plan today to reduce the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade. The pair of deficit hawks previously co-chaired a 2010 commission on fiscal reform (which failed) and then released a proposal for $6.3 trillion in deficit reduction.

That plan became a go-to talking point for Republicans — except, of course, whenever Obama recommended similar targets.

The new Simpson-Bowles plan adds an additional $2.4 trillion in savings onto the approximately $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction the United States has already carried out since 2010. Roughly three-fourths of that new $2.4 trillion would come from spending cuts and savings on interest payments:

The outline below is not meant as a revision to the original Fiscal Commission plan, but rather builds upon where elected leaders were in their negotiations last year. […]

[W]e call for an additional $2.4 trillion of deficit reduction over the next ten years. Roughly one quarter of those savings should come from health care reforms and another quarter from tax reform. The remaining savings should come from a combination of mandatory spending cuts, stronger discretionary caps, cross-cutting changes such as adopting the chained CPI for inflation-indexed provisions in the budget, and lower interest payments. This $2.4 trillion should exclude savings from policies such as the war drawdown.

There’s a very simple problem with Simpson and Bowles’ latest proposal: It represents a massive shift away from their own previous target and towards even more spending cuts.

As the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities previously laid out, the original 2010 Simpson-Bowles plan split its $6.3 trillion in deficit savings between $2.9 trillion in spending cuts, $2.6 trillion in tax revenue, and $800 billion in reduced interest payments on the debt. Since then, the country has passed roughly half of those recommended spending cuts — but less than a quarter of the recommended tax increases, according to recent calculations from the Center for American Progress.

Between the budget deals in the spring of 2011 and the Budget Control Act, which averted the debt ceiling crisis that same year, spending has been cut by $1.5 trillion and interest payments reduced by another $200 billion. Then the American Taxpayer Relief Act, which solved the impasse over the “fiscal cliff,” raised $600 billion in new tax revenue.

So if Simpson-Bowles are interested in “building upon” what lawmakers have already achieved, the logical thing to propose is another $1.4 trillion in spending cuts plus another $2 trillion in additional tax revenue. Or if they’re happy with their new $4.8 trillion target — rather than the original $6.3 trillion — their new proposal should heavily favor tax increases, since deficit reduction so far has favored spending cuts by three to one. Instead, Simpson and Bowles are proposing $1.8 trillion in new spending cuts and reduced interest payments, and only $600 billion in additional revenue.

This continues a trend amongst Republicans and deficit hawks. They’ve consistently treated every new round of deficit reduction as if it exists in a vacuum, throwing the cumulative spending cuts already achieved down the memory hole.

It’s also worth mentioning that their goal of bringing debt below 70 percent of GDP by early next decade is likely major overkill. There is no magic debt-to-GDP ratio at which safety is guaranteed or doom is assured. There’s also plenty of reason to the think America’s debt-to-GDP ratio can be stabilized at well over 70 percent without significant threat to the budget’s fiscal sustainability. The Economic Policy Institute recently calculated that debt stability over the next decade could be achieved with as little as $670 billion in additional deficit reduction — $580 billion in actual policy savings, plus $90 billion in resulting interest savings." 

From Think Progress

Intelligent Channel: Alex Cherian: ‘U.S. Senator & Future Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy (1967)’

Source:The Intelligent Channel- U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy (Democrat, New York) visiting San Francisco, California in 1967.

Source:The Daily Journal

“Senator Robert F. Kennedy, future presidential candidate, visiting San Francisco (1967) – from THE EDUCATION ARCHIVE. Kennedy was on a 10-state, 15-city tour to evaluate President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious War on Poverty campaign. San Francisco State’s archivist Alex Cherian provides a 2013 introduction. Copyright belongs to Young Broadcasting of San Francisco, Inc. Special appreciation to Pat Patton and KRON-TV for helping to make this material publicly accessible.” 

From the Intelligent Channel

This video is the exact reason why I wish former U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone was still alive and had he lived I believe he not only would’ve been reelected to the Senate, but would’ve pushed what Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin L. King called the Poor People’s Campaign and tour from the late 1960s. But Senator Wellstone would’ve started this campaign the 21st Century once he returned to the U.S. Senate.

Not many people were talking about poverty in America back then at least not many public officials at the Federal level. And not many public people who were at, or near the height of Martin King were talking about.

Poverty and yes that it actually existed back then in a country that was then and now the richest country in the world and yet we have 1-5 or 1-4 then Americans living in poverty in Appalachia, the Delta in Mississippi, inner-city ghettos like in big cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, Baltimore and so-forth. That how can a country that’s as rich as ours have so many people who don’t have enough to live a good life.

Another thing that I respect about Senator Kennedy’s campaign was that it came right after the so-called War on Poverty was announced by President Lyndon Johnson. Because that so-called war really didn’t go far enough and I’m not talking about money.

What Senator Kennedy was looking at were not only the what people in poverty go through and their living conditions, but also how to help these people move out of poverty and make a good life for themselves. Where the so-called War on Poverty was more about how to do we prevent these people from starving, going homeless, without clothes and healthcare and so-forth.

The War on Poverty, didn’t take the next step and building off of a system that prevents people from essentially dying. But how we do we empower them so they don’t have to live in poverty at all. Which I believe had Bobby Kennedy had lived, we would’ve seen those ideas come from him later on.

This is just one example of why RFK’s assassination was so tragic, because of the attention and the focus to these issues he would’ve brought. And why we need people with that type of power to focus people on these issues today since we are still dealing with the same issues that we were talking about as a country forty-five years ago. And be able to finally focus on how we actually solve these problems. Instead of just talking about them. 

Chris Hedges: 'Profiting From Human Misery'

Source:Common Dreams columnist Chris Hedges.

"Marela, an undocumented immigrant in her 40s, stood outside the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, N.J., on a chilly afternoon last week. She was there with a group of protesters who appear at the facility's gates every year on Ash Wednesday to decry the nation's immigration policy and conditions inside the center. She was there, she said, because of her friend Evelyn Obey.

Marela, an undocumented immigrant in her 40s, stood outside the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, N.J., on a chilly afternoon last week. She was there with a group of protesters who appear at the facility's gates every year on Ash Wednesday to decry the nation's immigration policy and conditions inside the center. She was there, she said, because of her friend Evelyn Obey.

Obey, 40, a Guatemalan and the single mother of a 12-year-old and a 6-year-old, was picked up in an immigration raid as she and nine other undocumented workers walked out of an office building they cleaned in Newark, N.J. Her two children instantly lost their only parent. She languished in detention. Another family took in the children, who never saw their mother again. Obey died in jail in 2010 from, according to the sign Villar had hung on her neck, "pulmonary thromboembolism, chronic bronchiolitis and emphysema and remote cardiac Ischemic Damage.' "

"She called me two days after she was seized," Marela told me in Spanish. "She was hysterical. She was crying. She was worried about her children. We could not visit her because we do not have legal documents. We helped her get a lawyer. Then we heard she was sick. Then we heard she died. She was buried in an unmarked grave. We did not go to her burial. We were too scared of being seized and detained."

The rally--about four dozen people, most from immigrant rights groups and local churches--was a flicker of consciousness in a nation that has yet to fully confront the totalitarian corporate forces arrayed against it. Several protesters in orange jumpsuits like those worn by inmates held signs reading: "I Want My Family Together," "No Human Being is Illegal," and "Education not Deportation."

"The people who run that prison make money off of human misery," said Diana Mejia, 47, an immigrant from Colombia who now has legal status, gesturing toward the old warehouse that now serves as the detention facility. As she spoke, a Catholic Worker band called the Filthy Rotten System belted out a protest song. A low-flying passenger jet, its red, green and white underbelly lights blinking in the night sky, rumbled overhead. Clergy walking amid the crowd marked the foreheads of participants with ashes to commemorate Ash Wednesday.

"Repentance is more than merely being sorry," the Rev. Joyce Antila Phipps, the executive director of Casa de Esperanza, a community organization working with immigrants, told the gathering. "It is an act of turning around and then moving forward to make change."

The majority of those we incarcerate in this country--and we incarcerate a quarter of the world's prison population--have never committed a violent crime. Eleven million undocumented immigrants face the possibility of imprisonment and deportation. President Barack Obama, outpacing George W. Bush, has deported more than 400,000 people since he took office. Families, once someone is seized, detained and deported, are thrown into crisis. Children come home from school and find they have lost their mothers or fathers. The small incomes that once sustained them are snuffed out. Those who remain behind often become destitute.

But human beings matter little in the corporate state. We myopically serve the rapacious appetites of those dedicated to exploitation and maximizing profit. And our corporate masters view prisons--as they do education, health care and war--as a business. The 320-bed Elizabeth Detention Center, which houses only men, is run by one of the largest operators and owners of for-profit prisons in the country, Corrections Corporation of America. CCA, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, has annual revenues in excess of $1.7 billion. An average of 81,384 inmates are in its facilities on any one day. This is a greater number, the American Civil Liberties Union points out in a 2011 report, "Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration," than that held by the states of New York and New Jersey combined.

The for-profit prisons and their lobbyists in Washington and state capitals have successfully blocked immigration reform, have prevented a challenge to our draconian drug laws and are pushing through tougher detention policies. Locking up more and more human beings is the bedrock of the industry's profits. These corporations are the engines behind the explosion of our prison system. They are the reason we have spent $300 billion on new prisons since 1980. They are also the reason serious reform is impossible.

The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, according to statistics gathered by the ACLU. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the ACLU report notes, says that for-profit companies presently control about 18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. Private prisons account for nearly all of the new prisons built between 2000 and 2005. And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which imprisons about 400,000 undocumented people a year, has an annual budget of more than $5 billion. ICE is planning to expand its operations by establishing several mega-detention centers, most run by private corporations, in states such as New Jersey, Texas, Florida, California and Illinois. Many of these private contractors are, not surprisingly, large campaign donors to "law and order" politicians including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

In CCA's annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission for 2011, cited by the ACLU, the prison company bluntly states its opposition to prison reform. "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws," it declares. CCA goes on to warn that "any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration" could "potentially [reduce] demand for correctional facilities," as would "mak[ing] more inmates eligible for early release based on good behavior," the adoption of "sentencing alternatives [that] ... could put some offenders on probation" and "reductions in crime rates."

CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties and 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the ACLU reported. The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials along with undisclosed funds to lobby state officials, according to the ACLU. CCA, through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), lobbies legislators to impose harsher detention laws at the state and federal levels. The ALEC helped draft Arizona's draconian anti-immigrant law SB 1070.

A March 2012 CCA investor presentation prospectus, quoted by the ACLU, tells potential investors that incarceration "creates predictable revenue streams." The document cites demographic trends that the company says will continue to expand profits. These positive investment trends include, the prospectus reads, "high recidivism"--"about 45 percent of individuals released from prison in 1999 and more than 43 percent released from prison in 2004 were returned to prison within three years." The prospectus invites investments by noting that one in every 100 U.S. adults is currently in prison or jail. And because the U.S. population is projected to grow by approximately 18.6 million from 2012 to 2017, "prison populations would grow by about 80,400 between 2012 and 2017, or by more than 13,000 additional per year, on average," the CCA document says.

The two largest private prison companies in 2010 received nearly $3 billion in revenue. The senior executives, according to the ACLU report, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million. The for-profit prisons can charge the government up to $200 a day to house an inmate; they pay detention officers as little as $10 an hour.

"Within 30 miles of this place, there are at least four other facilities where immigrants are detained: Essex, Monmouth, Delaney Hall and Hudson, which has the distinction of being named one of the 10 worst detention facilities in the country," Phipps, who is an immigration attorney as well as a minister, told the gathering in front of the Elizabeth Detention Center. "The terrible secret is that immigration detention has become a very profitable business for companies and county governments."

"More than two-thirds of immigrants are detained in so-called contract facilities owned by private companies, such as this one and Delaney Hall," she went on. "The rise of the prison industrial complex has gone hand in hand with the aggrandizing forces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, which, by the way, has filed suit against the very government it is supposed to be working for because they were told to exercise prosecutorial discretion in their detention practices." [Click here to see more about the lawsuit, in which 10 ICE agents attack the administration's easing of government policy on those who illegally entered the United States as children.]

There is an immigration court inside the Elizabeth facility, although the roar of the planes lifting off from the nearby Newark Airport forces those in the court to remain silent every three or four minutes until the sound subsides. Most of those brought before the court have no legal representation and are railroaded through the system and deported. Detainees, although most have no criminal record beyond illegal entry into the United States, wear orange jumpsuits and frequently are handcuffed. They do not have adequate health care. There are now some 5,000 children in foster care because their parents have been detained or deported, according to the Applied Research Center's report "Shattered Families." The report estimates that this number will rise to 15,000 within five years.

"I am in family court once every six to eight weeks representing some mother who is surrendering custody of her child to somebody else because she does not want to take that child back to the poverty of Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador," Phipps said when we spoke after the rally. "She has no option. She does not want her child to live in the same poverty she grew up in. It is heartbreaking."

We have abandoned the common good. We have been stripped of our rights and voice. Corporations write our laws and determine how we structure our society. We have all become victims. There are no politicians or institutions, no political parties or courts, that are independent enough or strong enough to resist the corporate onslaught. Greater and greater numbers of human beings will be consumed. The poor, the vulnerable, the undocumented, the weak, the elderly, the sick, the children will go first. And those of us watching helplessly outside the gates will go next." 

From Common Dreams

CBS News: Bill Plant: 'Federal Budget Faces Severe Sequestration Cuts'

Source:CBS News talking to White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on Face The Nation.

"As the deadline for reaching a compromise on spending cuts approaches, both Democrats and Republicans continue to point fingers. Bill Plante reports on the severe consequences the federal budget may face.' 

From CBS News

If the U.S. Government, at least in Washington, was forced to lie in the real world, instead of their made up political fantasy world, there would be an easy solution and compromise here: 

Republicans get some entitlement reform as it has to do with Medicare and how it pays for health care, and perhaps raising the age of eligibility of Social Security for wealthy, white-collar workers. And Democrats would get cuts to corporate subsidies having to do with private jets and other corporate welfare. 

But the problem, is the U.S. Government doesn't live or operate in the real world in Washington. They just come down for a visit every now and then, where there's a crisis. Both parties are just listening to their bases. 

Tea Party Republicans are basically saying you can balance the budget by eliminating most if not all regulations, as well as taxes involving corporate America, and gutting Food Assistance, Public Housing, Food and Drug Safety, that sort of thing. 

Democrats don't really want to cut anything, other than perhaps defense and really just want to raise taxes and on the wealthy and corporations. But not to reduce the deficit. But to spend that money on more government social programs. 

Noam Chomsky: 'Public Education & The Common Good'

Source: Professor Noam Chomsky.

I was watching BookTV on C-Span 2 today. (because I'm a current affairs as well as history and political junky, whose interested in things besides celebrity culture and technology. If that offends you, too bad.) And I was watching a presentation from Tom Allen who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1997-2009. He and Chuck Hagel who served in the Senate from that same period actually came to Congress the same year and left the same year. Without ever serving in the same chamber. (Just a little food for thought) And Representative Allen has a new book about the broken U.S. Congress about why he believes Congress is not working and so-forth.

And I'm not going to focus on Congress in this post. I only mention that because in his presentation, Tom Allen was talking about the need to balance individualism and freedom with community and responsibility. 

Professor Noam Chomsky in this presentation talks about the need for community. Basically arguing that someone paying taxes to fund public education, might not see a direct benefit from that. But those taxes probably funded their education and so-forth that we pay taxes that funds what we need directly by also what we've used in the past. 

Take education, or what we'll be consuming in the future, like Social Security or Medicare and perhaps Unemployment Insurance. And all of that is true. But my argument is that without individual freedom and individualism, we wouldn't have the resources to fund those programs. Or not enough money to fund those programs.

Liberal democracy at its best recognizes the need for individual freedom, individualism, individual responsibility, and community as well. That we won't do very well if we are lacking in just one of those areas. That freedom becomes too expensive if we constantly have to subsidize the bad decisions of others. Or when we can't profit from the good decisions that we make, that we should subsidize success, but that there also has to be consequences that we have to deal with when we mess up. But also an opportunity to work our ways out of those failures.

So that's exactly what individual freedom and responsibility and community are about. That we are all part of the same society that empowers us to be successful. But then with what we do with those opportunities is up to us and when we do well, we are rewarded. But when we don't do well we have to deal with the consequences of those decisions. But then there's an opportunity for us to survive and get ourselves on our feet.

So liberal democracy at its best and I believe at its core, is a national system not necessarily Federal, but a system and philosophy where we all have the freedom to live our own lives. As long as we are not hurting innocent people with what we are doing. And that we are rewarded when we do well, but also have to deal with the consequences of our good and bad decisions. But when we do mess up, there's a community that helps us get ourselves up on our two feet. Which is individual freedom and responsibility to go along with community.

The Atlantic: Heather Boushey: 'The Economics Behind Barack Obama's New Liberal Agenda'

Source:The Atlantic at President Barack H. Obama's 2013 State of the Union, in front of a joint session of the 113th Congress.

"A higher minimum wage and universal pre-K might sound like hackneyed progressive goals. But they're supported by broad economic research -- and common sense." 

From The Atlantic