Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
marmar
marmar's Journal
marmar's Journal
December 11, 2011
from Dollars & Sense:
Public-Sector Workers Under Attack
It’s not about their pay and benefits—it’s about what they do.
BY GERALD FRIEDMAN
From California to Massachusetts, from Texas to Wisconsin, whether by fiat or through bargaining, state governments would balance their budgets by taking a meat ax to public employee wages, benefits, and jobs. Behind the headlines, the relative strength of public-sector unions has long made them a target for economists and conservatives hostile to all forms of working-class collective action and any regulation of the capitalist marketplace. Labor economist Leo Troy set the tone for many when he warned in 1994 of “A New Society” that was emerging, dominated by unions of public employees and a redistributive state. While market competition had beaten back the threat of private-sector unionism, public employee unions, in his view, had renewed the socialist challenge to free enterprise.
Ideologues like Troy inspired an ongoing attack on public-sector unions to defend America from socialism. When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, for example, Bob Dole singled out the teachers’ unions for attack. While this was a great applause line, Dole lost the election. This has been the outcome of most of the right’s attack on public-sector workers and unions: applause from the far right and some of the media but little resonance among a public that generally supports public services and those who provide them.
It may be that those who would attack public employees and their unions as sponsors of incipient socialism have learned to conceal their real motives. Instead of attacking public services, they present themselves as advocates for private-sector workers and insist that they only seek to eliminate inequities between private- and public-sector workers. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie denounces public-sector unions as creating “two classes of citizens: one that receives rich health and pension benefits, and all the rest who are left to pay for them.”
It is odd to find such touching concern for equity among those who have campaigned relentlessly to widen disparities between rich and poor and between managers and workers. In any case, such equity concerns should be relieved by the growing body of empirical studies showing that public-sector workers are not overpaid compared with private-sector workers. Nor is there evidence that public-sector unions have been diverting national income towards their exorbitant salaries and staffing. State and local taxes took 9% of income in 1990 and 9% in 2007. As a share of national income, state and local employee compensation has fallen since the 1990s despite rising demands on the public sector—to improve education, repair infrastructure, clean up the environment, and provide health care to growing numbers left out of our private health care system. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/1111friedman.html
Public-Sector Workers Under Attack
from Dollars & Sense:
Public-Sector Workers Under Attack
It’s not about their pay and benefits—it’s about what they do.
BY GERALD FRIEDMAN
From California to Massachusetts, from Texas to Wisconsin, whether by fiat or through bargaining, state governments would balance their budgets by taking a meat ax to public employee wages, benefits, and jobs. Behind the headlines, the relative strength of public-sector unions has long made them a target for economists and conservatives hostile to all forms of working-class collective action and any regulation of the capitalist marketplace. Labor economist Leo Troy set the tone for many when he warned in 1994 of “A New Society” that was emerging, dominated by unions of public employees and a redistributive state. While market competition had beaten back the threat of private-sector unionism, public employee unions, in his view, had renewed the socialist challenge to free enterprise.
Ideologues like Troy inspired an ongoing attack on public-sector unions to defend America from socialism. When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, for example, Bob Dole singled out the teachers’ unions for attack. While this was a great applause line, Dole lost the election. This has been the outcome of most of the right’s attack on public-sector workers and unions: applause from the far right and some of the media but little resonance among a public that generally supports public services and those who provide them.
It may be that those who would attack public employees and their unions as sponsors of incipient socialism have learned to conceal their real motives. Instead of attacking public services, they present themselves as advocates for private-sector workers and insist that they only seek to eliminate inequities between private- and public-sector workers. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie denounces public-sector unions as creating “two classes of citizens: one that receives rich health and pension benefits, and all the rest who are left to pay for them.”
It is odd to find such touching concern for equity among those who have campaigned relentlessly to widen disparities between rich and poor and between managers and workers. In any case, such equity concerns should be relieved by the growing body of empirical studies showing that public-sector workers are not overpaid compared with private-sector workers. Nor is there evidence that public-sector unions have been diverting national income towards their exorbitant salaries and staffing. State and local taxes took 9% of income in 1990 and 9% in 2007. As a share of national income, state and local employee compensation has fallen since the 1990s despite rising demands on the public sector—to improve education, repair infrastructure, clean up the environment, and provide health care to growing numbers left out of our private health care system. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/1111friedman.html
December 11, 2011
from In These Times:
Killing Us Sweetly
Conservatives’ role in the growing burden of American obesity.
BY Theo Anderson
Conservatives interested in defining and defending American exceptionalism should really love our waistlines. The United States may not lead the world in much anymore, but its citizens are easily among the fattest in the industrialized world. And there is no end in sight to our growing size. Our political system, paralyzed by a lethal combination of conservative dogma and corporate interests, is completely unprepared to face the realities underlying America’s obesity epidemic.
One-third of the country’s adults were classified as obese in 2010. That’s double the adult obesity rate in 1980. The state with the highest overall obesity rate in 1995 was Mississippi. Its rate at the time–19 percent–would now be the lowest in the nation. Mississippi’s obesity rate remains America’s highest, at more than 34 percent, while Colorado has the lowest rate, at 20 percent.
Those numbers will almost certainly continue to rise, and it’s plausible that half of America’s adult population will be obese within the next two to three decades.
The medical costs related to obesity are enormous, because it’s closely linked with diabetes–a chronic disease requiring costly, long-term treatment. In 1995, only four states had a diabetes rate above 6 percent. But as rates of obesity have soared, so has the incidence of diabetes. All but eight states now have a diabetes rate above 7 percent. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12286/killing_us_sweetly
Killing Us Sweetly: Conservatives’ role in the growing burden of American obesity
from In These Times:
Killing Us Sweetly
Conservatives’ role in the growing burden of American obesity.
BY Theo Anderson
Conservatives interested in defining and defending American exceptionalism should really love our waistlines. The United States may not lead the world in much anymore, but its citizens are easily among the fattest in the industrialized world. And there is no end in sight to our growing size. Our political system, paralyzed by a lethal combination of conservative dogma and corporate interests, is completely unprepared to face the realities underlying America’s obesity epidemic.
One-third of the country’s adults were classified as obese in 2010. That’s double the adult obesity rate in 1980. The state with the highest overall obesity rate in 1995 was Mississippi. Its rate at the time–19 percent–would now be the lowest in the nation. Mississippi’s obesity rate remains America’s highest, at more than 34 percent, while Colorado has the lowest rate, at 20 percent.
Those numbers will almost certainly continue to rise, and it’s plausible that half of America’s adult population will be obese within the next two to three decades.
The medical costs related to obesity are enormous, because it’s closely linked with diabetes–a chronic disease requiring costly, long-term treatment. In 1995, only four states had a diabetes rate above 6 percent. But as rates of obesity have soared, so has the incidence of diabetes. All but eight states now have a diabetes rate above 7 percent. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12286/killing_us_sweetly
February 14, 2021
+1. Remember Al Franken
December 11, 2011
Unfettered Capitalism - Chris Hedges & Michael Moore
December 11, 2011
Published on Saturday, December 10, 2011 by RobertReich.org
The Remarkable Political Stupidity of the Street
by Robert Reich
Wall Street is its own worst enemy. It should have welcomed new financial regulation as a means of restoring public trust. Instead, it’s busily shredding new regulations and making the public more distrustful than ever.
The Street’s biggest lobbying groups have just filed a lawsuit against the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, seeking to overturn its new rule limiting speculative trading.
For years Wall Street has speculated like mad in futures markets – food, oil, other commodities – causing prices to fluctuate wildly. The Street makes bundles from these gyrations, but they have raised costs for consumers.
In other words, a small portion of what you and I pay for food and energy has been going into the pockets of Wall Street. It’s just another hidden redistribution from the middle class and poor to the rich. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/10-6
Robert Reich: The Remarkable Political Stupidity of the Street
Published on Saturday, December 10, 2011 by RobertReich.org
The Remarkable Political Stupidity of the Street
by Robert Reich
Wall Street is its own worst enemy. It should have welcomed new financial regulation as a means of restoring public trust. Instead, it’s busily shredding new regulations and making the public more distrustful than ever.
The Street’s biggest lobbying groups have just filed a lawsuit against the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, seeking to overturn its new rule limiting speculative trading.
For years Wall Street has speculated like mad in futures markets – food, oil, other commodities – causing prices to fluctuate wildly. The Street makes bundles from these gyrations, but they have raised costs for consumers.
In other words, a small portion of what you and I pay for food and energy has been going into the pockets of Wall Street. It’s just another hidden redistribution from the middle class and poor to the rich. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/10-6
December 11, 2011
from Consortium News:
The Warning in Gary Webb’s Death
December 9, 2011
Special Report: Modern American history is more complete because journalist Gary Webb had the courage to revive the dark story of the Reagan administration’s protection of Nicaraguan Contra cocaine traffickers in the 1980s. However, Webb ultimately paid a terrible price, as Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
Every year since investigative journalist Gary Webb took his own life in 2004, I have marked the anniversary of that sad event by recalling the debt that American history owes to Webb for his brave reporting, which revived the Contra-cocaine scandal in 1996 and forced important admissions out of the Central Intelligence Agency two years later.
But Webb’s suicide on the evening of Dec. 9, 2004, was also a tragic end for one man whose livelihood and reputation were destroyed by a phalanx of major newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times– serving as protectors of a corrupt power structure rather than as sources of honest information.
In reviewing the story again this year, I was struck by how Webb’s Contra-cocaine experience was, in many ways, a precursor to the subsequent tragedy of the Iraq War.
In the 1980s, the CIA’s analytical division was already showing signs of politicization, especially regarding President Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras and their war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government – and the U.S. press corps was already bending to the propaganda pressures of a right-wing Republican administration. ............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/09/the-warning-in-gary-webbs-death/
The Warning in Gary Webb’s Death
from Consortium News:
The Warning in Gary Webb’s Death
December 9, 2011
Special Report: Modern American history is more complete because journalist Gary Webb had the courage to revive the dark story of the Reagan administration’s protection of Nicaraguan Contra cocaine traffickers in the 1980s. However, Webb ultimately paid a terrible price, as Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
Every year since investigative journalist Gary Webb took his own life in 2004, I have marked the anniversary of that sad event by recalling the debt that American history owes to Webb for his brave reporting, which revived the Contra-cocaine scandal in 1996 and forced important admissions out of the Central Intelligence Agency two years later.
But Webb’s suicide on the evening of Dec. 9, 2004, was also a tragic end for one man whose livelihood and reputation were destroyed by a phalanx of major newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times– serving as protectors of a corrupt power structure rather than as sources of honest information.
In reviewing the story again this year, I was struck by how Webb’s Contra-cocaine experience was, in many ways, a precursor to the subsequent tragedy of the Iraq War.
In the 1980s, the CIA’s analytical division was already showing signs of politicization, especially regarding President Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras and their war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government – and the U.S. press corps was already bending to the propaganda pressures of a right-wing Republican administration. ............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/09/the-warning-in-gary-webbs-death/
Profile Information
Gender: MaleHometown: Detroit, MI
Member since: Fri Oct 29, 2004, 12:18 AM
Number of posts: 77,091
