Quote of the Day -- The Day Before This Year's Tax Day

"Just a casual reminder that the richest 1% of Americans is responsible for 70% of all unpaid taxes.
Quite literally, tax the rich."

--Professor Robert Reich

A Solution to a Great Deal of America's Problems

Professor Robert Reich said it well and truly the other day when he asked if maybe we didn't incarcerate so many people, so many black Americans especially, in particular and instead, put that money into their schools and neighborhoods and lives. What a concept.

1--We imprison more of our citizens than any other nation, including China which dwarfs us

U.S. incarcerates more than any other nation

2--We incarcerate more black Americans, as a total percentage of our people, far more than white Americans and for the same offenses as whites.

Black Americans incarcerated 

five times more than white

We're "exceptional" all right.

Imagine putting all that money into these people's lives, their homes, their neighborhoods, their schools, even into their health care instead of putting them into prisons and incarceration.

Again, what a concept.

And the heck of it?

It would, first, strengthen the nation and second, improve our economy. But then same thing with cutting the obscene defense budget and plowing that money into our infrastructure.

Tell me all about that "American Exceptionalism."

6 Responses to Sanders Skeptics

From Professor, economist, writer, political commentator Robert Reich.

He's for you, folks. He's for you and me.

#FeeltheBern

What Is It That's Different About This President, Anyway?

Last week, this took place:

GOP Congress Breaks With History For First Time In 41 Years 

GOP Denies Hearings for Obama's Unseen Budget

Congress Declines to Hear Obama's Budget Proposal in Person

Then, this, yesterday.

Agencies of the U.S. government make regulations to implement acts of Congress – such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation limiting carbon emissions from power plants, under the Clean Air Act. Sometimes plaintiffs challenge the legality of such a regulation, arguing the agency exceeded what Congress intended – as plaintiffs have done in this case. Occasionally, plaintiffs ask the courts to put the regulation on hold until the courts have fully considered their lawsuit – arguing they’ll otherwise suffer irreparable harm while awaiting a ruling. Often, as in this case, the lower court refuses. But never before in history has the Supreme Court overruled a lower court that refused such a stay, and decided itself to put a regulation on hold. Yet that’s what the five Republican appointees on the Court did yesterday evening -- blocking the Environmental Protection Agency’s landmark regulation. They gave no reasons.

The result is to freeze the heart of Obama’s climate policy until the courts have fully considered its legality. When might that be? The D.C. Circuit’s Court of Appeals has scheduled oral arguments for July 2, so a ruling from that court could be early next fall. The Supreme Court might then hear an appeal in late 2017 and decide by 2018. Of course, the five Republican appointees might then decide the regulation is illegal, or by then a Republican president might simply refuse to put the rule into effect. (Several Republican candidates, including Marco Rubio, don’t believe carbon emissions are contributing to climate change.)

In this case, the five Republicans on the Court decided that the plaintiffs – coal companies, power plants, utilities – will suffer irreparable harm over the next two or three years if the regulation is put into effect. But what about the irreparable harm to the environment from two or three more years of gunk being spewed into the atmosphere? Why should harm to profits take precedence over harm to life on earth? What planet are the five Republicans on, anyway?         --Robert Reich

What is it?

I'm trying to think.

What is it about this President, this one President that's different that Congress treats him differently than any other.

Let me see...

On Tonight's State of the Union

I have read no other, better, brief summary of President Obama's 2 terms as President and their relative success, like it or not, than what I saw last evening on Facebook from Professor/economist Robert Reich:

Tomorrow night will be Barack Obama’s final State of the Union – the last time he addresses a joint session of Congress. So it seems like an appropriate time for a few thoughts about his presidency.

First, I think historians will judge it to be among the most successful – saving the U.S. economy from a second Great Depression, enacting the first almost-universal health insurance system (something neither FDR, nor Truman, JFK, LBJ, or Clinton could get done), finding and killing the person who engineered the worst terrorist act ever to occur on American soil, and, all the while, holding at bay the most disciplined, adamantly right-wing Republican Congress in history. The Obama administration has played the long game, and mostly won.

Second, Barack Obama as a person has exhibited extraordinary coolness under fire. No president in my lifetime has come under such relentless, scathing, disrespectful (often thinly-veiled racist) attack from political opponents and opportunistic pundits, and yet he has never wavered from the dignified tone he set for himself and his presidency at the outset.

Third, this administration has not been marred by scandal – no revelations of self-dealing by high officials, no sexual exploits, no illegal political payoffs, no secret and illicit deals. To laud a presidency for its lack of scandal may be a sad commentary on our era, but given the harshness and meanness of politics it is nonetheless a significant achievement.

It is not all roses. I won’t easily forgive the mass deportations, the early emphasis on deficit-reduction, the compromises on civil liberties, the absurd Trans Pacific Partnership, or the failure to put tough conditions on Wall Street banks that got bailed out. The Administration has been way too kind to big corporations and Wall Street. Fifty years ago we would have considered Obama a liberal Republican.

But given the times and the circumstances, he has done remarkably well. That’s a provisional verdict, of course; there’s still a year to go.

So State of the Union?

Bring it on.

Link:  Yes, He Did: Why Obama Is the Most Consequential Second-Term President Since FDR

Quote of the day

"Newt Gingrich is to hypocrisy what Mitt Romney is to principle." --Robert Reich, political economist, professor, author, and political commentator. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich

Quote of the day

"Concentration of income, wealth, and power at the very top is undermining our economy and destroying our democracy." --Robert Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, writer (thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, "Aftershock"). His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes. He is also Common Cause's board chairman. Link: http://robertreich.org/

One of our own on under-reported stories in our media right now

From The Huffington Post just now:

From William K. Black, professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of the book,"The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One":


The things I think are critical and badly underreported are:

1. The astonishing amount of mortgage fraud (literally, millions of cases annually) and how it hyperinflated the bubble and led to the Great Recession.

2. The fact that these mortgage frauds were overwhelmingly due to consciously fraudulent lending practices in which the CEOs of seemingly legitimate entities used accounting tricks as their “weapon of choice" to report higher profits and get bigger bonuses. (George A. Akerlof and Paul R. Romer got it right in the title to their 1993 article: Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.)

3. The disgraceful lack of prosecutions which has resulted from regulators virtually ending the practice of making criminal referrals and the pathetic March 2007 "partnership" that the FBI entered into with the Mortgage Bankers Association (the trade association of the "perps") that led the FBI and the Department of Justice to (implicitly) define out of existence fraud by the lenders (and to conceive of them as the "victim" -- which they are, but only of their controlling officers). Bush administration attorney general Michael Mukasey in June 2008 notoriously refused to create a national task force against mortgage fraud based on his claim that mortgage fraud was analogous to "white collar street crime."

4. The "echo" epidemics of fraud set off by the primary epidemic of accounting “control fraud". The fraud designed by CEOs in turn kicked off an epidemic of fraud among loan brokers and appraisers. Reporters should explore the concept of the Gresham's-style dynamic in which bad ethics were a competitive advantage and drove good ethics out of the marketplace.

5. The massive foreclosure fraud we are seeing now as another "echo" epidemic. To optimize their accounting control fraud, lenders gutted underwriting. That led to "fraud in the inducement" (vis a vis borrowers), endemic documentation problems, and an extraordinary numbers of defaults. The process required tens of thousands of real estate financing personnel to commit fraud on a daily basis as their core function. Some of these people are unemployed, but many are in the industry and are presently engaged in loan servicing. Now that their job is to foreclose on properties, there is no reason to expect that they would suddenly become honest, and they haven't.

6. The ongoing massive cover up of losses on bad assets, particularly by the “too big to fail” institutions, which I call “systemically dangerous institutions” (SDIs). Those institutions, along with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and Congress (at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce and with no opposition from the Obama administration) in April 2009 forced the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to change the rules so that the banks do not have to recognize their losses unless and until they sell the bad assets. The implications of this cover up are large (and rarely reported). At the very least, it means that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's propaganda campaign about TARP saving the world at virtually no cost (perhaps even a "profit") is nonsense -- despite its success in influencing the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Consider:

A) The repayment of TARP funds does not mean the banks are healthy. Their asset values are often grossly inflated, which means their net worth is grossly inflated. That means that the claims that we have increased net worth requirements (and that Basel III will further increase net worth requirements) are false. Net worth requirements have meaning only if the accounting is honest

B) The repayment of TARP funds does mean that the banks are freed from any meaningful restraint on senior officer compensation. Note that absent the accounting lies the banks would often be reporting losses (and failure to meet required capital requirements, or outright insolvency) and could not pay their senior officers bonuses and would be subject to mandatory closure under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law.

C) No commercial entity would have ever signed the TARP deals on the terms that the U.S. drafted for itself. The U.S. provided not only fresh money but an unlimitedde facto guarantee (along with permitting phony accounting). If the U.S. had negotiated competently it would have owned virtually all the shares of every TARP recipient (which, of course, was a political impossibility).

D) The accounting lies are stalling the recovery. Markets cannot clear promptly when one creates an incentive to hold massively overvalued assets for years.

E) The losses are still there, but the taxpayers are on the hook via Fannie and Freddie and the Fed (which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic collateral at grossly inflated values).

7. The continued absence of effective regulation. It should be scandalous that President Obama left in charge, or even promoted, the anti-regulators who permitted the Great Recession. The (failed) anti-regulator of Fannie and Freddie, for example, remains FHFA's acting director. This is significantly insane as a matter of both economics and politics. (The administration doesn't even seem to realize the issue of integrity.)

8. The crises of state and local government and the lack of a rational basis for Republican and Blue Dog opposition to the proposed revenue sharing component of the stimulus bill. The compounding insanity of the administration failing to fight for its concept and failing to make explicit how badly its removal would harm the recovery, employment, and vital government services.

9. The insanity of accepting mass, long-term unemployment rather than having the government provide productive jobs for everyone willing to work (as the employer of last resort).

Links  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/20/nine-stories-the-media-is_n_769620.html;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/the-two-documents-everyon_b_169813.html