By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Many of you soon-to-be college graduates are determined to make the world a better place. Some of you are choosing careers in public service or joining nonprofits or volunteering in your communities.

But many of you are cynical about politics. You see the system as inherently corrupt. You doubt real progress is possible.

“What chance do we have against the Koch brothers and the other billionaires?” you’ve asked me. “How can we fight against Monsanto, Boeing, JP Morgan, and Bank of America? They buy elections. They run America.”

Let me remind you: Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. You have no chance if you assume you have no chance.

“But it was different when you graduated,” you say. “The sixties were a time of social progress.”

You don’t know your history.

When I graduated in 1968, the Vietnam War was raging. Over half a million American troops were already there. I didn’t know if I’d be drafted. A member of my class who spoke at commencement said he was heading to Canada and urged us to join him.

Two months before, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. America’s cities were burning. Bobby Kennedy had just been gunned down.

George (“segregation forever”) Wallace was on his way to garnering 10 million votes and carrying five southern states. Richard Nixon was well on his way to becoming president.

America was still mired in bigotry.

I remember a classmate who was dating a black girl being spit on in a movie theater. The Supreme Court had only the year before struck down state laws against interracial marriage.

My entire graduating class of almost 800 contained only six young black men and four Hispanics.

I remember the girlfriend of another classmate almost dying from a back-alley abortion, because safe abortions were almost impossible to get.

I remember a bright young woman law school graduate in tears because no law firm would hire her because she was a woman.

I remember one of my classmates telling me in anguish that he was a homosexual, fearing he’d be discovered and his career ruined.

The environmental movement had yet not been born. Two-thirds of America’s waterways were unsafe for swimming or fishing because of industrial waste and sewage.

I remember rivers so polluted they caught fire. When the Cuyahoga River went up in flames Time Magazine described it as the river that “oozes rather than flows,” in which a person “does not drown but decays.”

In those days, universal health insurance was a pipe dream.

It all seemed pretty hopeless. I assumed America was going to hell.

And yet, reforms did occur. America changed. The changes didn’t come easily. Every positive step was met with determined resistance. But we became better and stronger because we were determined to change.

When I graduated college I would not have believed that in my lifetime women would gain rights over their own bodies, including the legal right to have an abortion. Or women would become chief executives of major corporations, secretaries of state, contenders for the presidency. Or they’d outnumber men in college.

I would not have imagined that eleven states would allow gays and lesbians to marry, and a majority of Americans would support equal marriage rights.

Or that the nation would have a large and growing black middle class.

It would have seemed beyond possibility that a black man, the child of an interracial couple, would become President of the United States.

I would not have predicted that the rate of college enrollment among Hispanics would exceed that of whites.

Or that more than 80 percent of Americans would have health insurance, most of it through government.

I wouldn’t have foreseen that the Cuyahoga River — the one that used to catch fire regularly — would come to support 44 species of fish. And that over half our rivers and 70 percent of bays and estuaries would become safe for swimming and fishing.

Or that some 200,000 premature deaths and 700,000 cases of chronic bronchitis would have been prevented because the air is cleaner.

Or that the portion of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood would have dropped from 88 percent to just over 4 percent.

I would not have believed our nation capable of so much positive change.

Yet we achieved it. And we have just begun. Widening inequality, a shrinking middle class, global warming, the corruption of our democracy by big money – all of these, and more, must be addressed. To make progress on these — and to prevent ourselves from slipping backwards — will require no less steadfastness, intelligence, and patience than was necessitated before.

The genius of America lies in its resilience and pragmatism. We believe in social progress because we were born into it. It is our national creed.

Which is to say, I understand your cynicism. It looks pretty hopeless.

But, believe me, it isn’t.

Not if you pitch in.

***
Robert B. Reich is the former secretary of labor, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future.”

***

This blog is reposted from The Huffington Post.

Kathy Newman
Professor of English, Carnegie Mellon University

I started following Ed Schultz, the beefy, loud mouthed, pro-labor MSNBC anchor on Twitter a year ago last spring, when Pennsylvania education cuts were starting to reverberate across the state, forcing thousands of K-12 schools to cut art, band, music, drama, and science programs. Right around this time, the Pittsburgh Opera decided to give Governor Tom Corbett a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to the arts, and Pittsburghers staged a raucous rally to protest Corbett’s award and to bring attention to the cuts. Schultz caught wind of the statewide crisis and helped to focus attention on it by giving it ample coverage on his show.

Schultz, occupying the coveted 8:00 PM slot for two years, from 2011 to 2013, was the only MSNBC host who seemed to be following the school cuts as closely as I was. Watching Schultz I had the feeling—one I rarely get from the mainstream media—that he was speaking for me and the thousands of other “little people” across the country who were losing their jobs, their homes, their schools, their unions, their homes, their healthcare, and their dignity in the wake of the great financial collapse of 2008.

During his education coverage last spring, I watched The Ed Show almost every night, but over the course of Schultz’s tenure at MSNBC I didn’t watch as often as I should have, and now I feel bad. In March of this year Schultz announced he was moving to 5:00 PM on Saturdays and Sundays later in the spring. He claims that he “raised his hand” for the assignment, but it’s hard to believe that he would give up a prime time weekday slot, voluntarily, for a weekend gig.

Schultz, admittedly, doesn’t look or sound like a lot of the other hosts on MSNBC. He’s 59, barrel chested, and a former football player. He was an All-American quarterback at Minnesota State University in the 1970s, played as a free agent for the Oakland Raiders, and had a short stint with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in Canada. In 1982, Schultz became a sportscaster for KTHI-TV, in Fargo, North Dakota, and started calling the radio play-by-play for North Dakota State University football games. He didn’t broadcast his political opinions until the 1990s, when he started adding political commentary to his sportscasts. Then, he started broadcasting “on location” in economically depressed American towns. Oddly, Schultz stayed No. 1 in his market for 10 years, “despite the fact that [his] political views changed radically—from conservative to progressive—during that time.”

As Schultz tells it, his second wife, a nurse named Wendy, was the one who brought him out of what he describes as his “right-wing darkness.” She introduced him to homeless people and veterans where she worked, and she encouraged him to meet with struggling Dakota plains farmers face to face. By 2009, Schultz had a successful radio show, The Ed Schultz Show, on the Jones network.  MSNBC first tapped him to host a 6:00 pm show, then a 10:00 pm show, and then moved him to the coveted 8:00 pm slot when Keith Olbermann left in a blaze of rage and bluster.

During his time at MSNBC, Schultz has put his foot in it at least once. In 2011 he called Laura Ingrahm a “right wing slut.” He quickly made an on-air apology and took a week off the air, without pay, as penance. But most of the time, Schultz has been a rare champion of the working class, taking his anchor desk to Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan as these rust belt states have fought off attacks from Scott Walker, the Koch Brothers, and the Ohio supporters of SB 5, a severely anti-union bill that was signed into law and then reversed by Ohio voters—with the help Schultz’s powerful 8:00 pm newscasts. As Schultz explained in an interview with the AFT, “we’re . . . staying focused on the plight of the workers, on outsourcing, privatization, the loss of collective bargaining rights, cuts to wages, on the attacks on workers, and working on solutions that will help the working class in this country.”

Was Ed Schultz sidelined, or did he go willingly? There are conflicting accounts. This blogger speculates that Schultz was pushed out because he could not make a dent in audience attracted to the Bill O’Reilly Show, Fox’s 8:00 PM behemoth. But according to The Daily Beast, it was Schultz’s idea to move to the weekend. He still does his radio show every day, and he told his boss at MSNBC, Phil Griffin, that he wanted to spend more time with his wife, who has recently undergone treatment for ovarian cancer, at their home in Minnesota.

Ed Schultz’s replacement is no slouch—the eggheady Nation-affiliated Chris Hayes, who created a loyal following for his weekend show, Up with Chris Hayes, over the last two years. The charm of Up was that Hayes interviewed small groups of super smart people about things they had written books about, and then wowed his audience with his ability to understand everything that his guests were saying, weave it together into a narrative, and, sometimes, cut people off and referee.

Hayes is also not completely alienated from the working class. He explained to Politico that he “grew up in the Bronx,” the son of a teacher (his mother) and a community organizer (his father). In 2012, his brother worked as a paid organizer for the Obama campaign. “I come from a working-class background,” explained Hayes. “My first job was as a labor reporter for a socialist newspaper in the Midwest, called In These Times.” Hayes insists that he has a “genuine awe and admiration” for Schultz’s focus on working-class and labor issues, and he says wants to continue the conversation that Schultz started.

But Hayes has more of a challenge ahead then just paying homage to the working class. Hayes’s Up formula of intelligent conversation with learned professors, sitting Congressional representatives you’ve never heard of, and double or triple the number of women of color and/or gay and lesbian guests than we see on the other networks, might not play well in prime time. Hayes simply will not have as much time to talk, or to listen, as he did before. As Inside Cable News argued, the secret formula that made Up so great “is nontransferable.” Will Chris Hayes find a new way to be the bleeding-heart brainiac—in 47 minutes—that made Up so watchable?

Part of the problem here may be one of demographics. Did Ed Schultz attract an older, bluer-collar, and less affluent audience than Chris Hayes did? Does Hayes, with his fashionable specs, wry humor, and baby face (he’s only 34), represent the kind of affluent, college-educated viewer that MSNBC wants to attract? Is the working class in the US in decline—so much so that they are not even sought after as an audience for the only liberal cable news outlet on the dial?

Regardless, the MSNBC staff is probably scrambling over at Hayes’s new show, All In, because its ratings have not been great—worse than what Schultz used to pull in. But as political blogger Jason Easley has argued, MSNBC has “time on its side.” While FOX might continue to dominate with older, more conservative viewers, cable news viewers are getting younger, and more progressive, with every passing year.

In the meantime, if you miss your daily dose of the pro-labor grizzly bear, Ed Schultz, check out The Ed Show online or at 5:00 PM on Saturday and Sunday. Schultz claims he will use the freedom of his new schedule to spend more time on the road, talking to the working-class people he continues to see as his special cause. And he still starts every show with his signature tag line “Let’s Get to Work.”

***

Kathy M. Newman was involved in the effort to unionize Teaching Assistants at Yale University in the 1990s. She is finishing a book, Blacklisted and Bluecollared: How Americans Saw Class in the 1950s” and is the author of a book published in 2004, Radio-Active: Advertising and Activism 1935-1947. Professor Newman also writes a bi-weekly media column for The Pittsburgh City Paper.

***

This has been reposted from the Center for Working-Class Studies’ blog.

By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Senior Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

If you’re a jobless person looking for food or a wounded vet who needs health care, 60 Minutes has a solution: Beg a billionaire for it. That was part of the powerful, if covert, message behind last Sunday’s 60 Minutes broadcast.

The rest of Sunday night’s message, which tracks closely with the right-wing agenda promoted by billionaires like Pete Peterson, goes like this: Keep downsizing government. Keep tolerating and promoting the hijacking of our national wealth by the rich, even as it suffocates the middle class and creates soaring poverty rates. Surrender democratic control over the social safety net to wealthy donors.

And whatever you do, keep stroking their insatiable egos.

The Agenda

Did the 60 Minutes staff sit around a table and choose this message? Probably not. Chances are we’re just seeing more evidence of a herd mentality among our well-paid elites. But they might as well have.

This ideological bias agenda was glaringly evident in Lesley Stahl’s “Counterinsurgency Cops” story. Viewers weren’t informed that Stahl is on the board of anti-government billionaire Pete Peterson’s Foundation, for example, or that her foundation works closely with the defense contractors of “Fix the Debt.” Those contractors stand to make billions more in taxpayer-funded profits if America’s cities buy into Stahl’s premise and purchase even more military equipment — including tanks, sniperscopes, full battle regalia, night vision goggles, and drones.

The Peterson anti-government vision dovetails nicely with a conservative fantasy world in which all government spending is bad – but military and police spending somehow isn’t “government,” or “big government,” or whatever it is they’re railing against today. We discussed “Counterinsurgency Cops” in Part 1 of this piece.

Sunday’s broadcast also featured Scott Pelley’s flattering portrait of a hedge fund billionaire’s generosity, which failed to ask the fundamental question: Why do we need to depend on a hedge fund billionaire’s generosity in the first place?

As they say on 60 Minutes: The answer might astonish you.

Say what?

The 60 Minutes website [1] tells us that “Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones’ charity — the Robin Hood Foundation — fights poverty with the hardnosed, business sense of Wall Street.” Say what?  The “hardnosed, business sense” of Wall Street? That “hardnosed business sense” was actually, by any objective measure, fiscal incompetence and gross managerial negligence.

Wall Street’s “business sense” would have driven every single financial institution in the country into catastrophic collapse – that is, if the government (which presumably lacks such “sense”) hadn’t stepped in to rescue them. Not only did Wall Street’s titans grievously mismanage their books.  There is now overwhelming evidence that executives at every major bank criminally and fraudulently deceived their customers.

You could call that latter trait “hardnosed,” I suppose.

Mr. Jones

What about Paul Tudor Jones himself?  We don’t hesitate to trash bankers and hedge funders, and there are plenty of them who deserve it. (See Robespierre of the Hedge Fund Revolution or any of our Jamie Dimon pieces.)  But as hedge fund managers go, Jones seems to be one of the smarter ones.

As hedge fund managers go, that is … Jones’ apparent talent doesn’t change the fact that, based on current incentives, today’s hedge fund industry is unethical by design. We remain unconvinced that hedge funds as they’re currently structured are anything except economically and socially destructive.

That said, Jones the Trader seems to be an intelligent and effective business person. Jones the Political Donor is straight GOP, all the way, but that’s not surprising. And Jones the Philanthropist seems to be well-intentioned enough. He deserves a lot of praise for devoting so much time and energy to good works.

So far, so good.

You Are What You Measure

Even Pelley’s misguided “hardnosed” comment has a kernel of truth to it. There are new and smart initiatives which seek to apply better metrics to philanthropy. They’re sometimes called “SROI” (for “Social Return on Investment”). But, as in business, the value of your measurements is determined by what you choose to measure. Those are the decisions which reflect your values. “Applying business metrics” is a meaningless notion in philanthropy, since profit – the proverbial “bottom line” — is always paramount in business.

Profits are relatively easy to measure, compared to questions like: How many kids did we feed this year? Would they have eaten otherwise? Could we have fed more kids, and more needy kids, with different foods? Different advertising? A different location? There are thousands of questions like these for each charitable venture.

60 Minutes told us that Jones and his Board like to do a lot of measuring, but they didn’t tell us how. The entire issue was glossed over after Jones said “we probably de-fund 5 percent to 10 percent of our grantees.” There’s nothing wrong with that percentage — it’s reasonable and, if anything, on the low side – but the important question was, “How do you decide?” Instead we’re treated to the sight of a starry-eyed Pelley repeating with slack-jawed admiration: “You do that to 5 percent to 10 percent of your projects every year?”

We weren’t told which projects are de-funded or why. Instead the very idea is treated as a novel concept, as if the ordinary concept of withdrawing support for less effective programs is some new visionary breakthrough from the “hardnosed geniuses” of Wall Street.

Government measures its results, and so do independent economists and researchers. Did Paul Tudor Jones and his people find better ways to measure social services? There’s no way to know, because 60 Minutes didn’t tell us. Apparently it was too dazzled to even ask.

The Unasked Question

About the question we asked earlier: Why would New York City need to rely on the generosity of billionaires? Pelley poses it in typically breathless fashion:

“Paul Tudor Jones wonders that if billionaires, like him, are such geniuses, then why do nearly two million people live in poverty [2] in New York City alone?”[3]

We’ll skip lightly over the “geniuses” remark [4] to offer a better answer to that question than Jones and Pelley provide: One of the reasons is because hedge fund billionaires like Paul Tudor Jones don’t pay enough in taxes. 

Paul Tudor Jones, Charity Recipient

When it comes to taxation, Paul Tudor Jones isn’t a philanthropist. He’s the beneficiary of everyone else’s generosity. Let’s do the math. Rather than a invade Jones’ privacy, we’ll run some rough estimates instead [5] for illustrative purposes: What if there had been no hedge fund loophole for people like Paul Tudor Jones and he had paid Obama’s top tax rate of 39.5 percent? Our hypothetical Jones would have paid an additional $1 billion in taxes.  That’s nearly as much as all the donors to the “Robin Hood Foundation,” including Jones, have given in its entire history.

If the top rate were raised to 70 percent, as it was when Ronald Reagan took over, our presumptive Jones would have paid roughly $2.3 billion in additional taxes, nearly doubling the “Robin Hood” figure.

And if it were raised to the 92 percent level, as it was under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower [6], our Mr. Jones would have paid an additional $3.2 billion in taxes.

Taxpayers Are Subsidizing “Robin Hood”

Of course, Paul Tudor Jones doesn’t want to pay more taxes. That’s undoubtedly one reason why he donated to the McCain and Romney campaigns. It’s much more gratifying to give whatever you feel like giving, whenever you feel like it. And it must be way more fun to dictate terms to women running soup kitchens (as portrayed in 60 Minutes), give pseudo-evangelical speeches to adoring crowds, and be lionized on television under the adoring gaze of Scott Pelley.

Can’t blame him for that, I suppose. But why should the rest of us subsidize it?

That’s right. If the “Robin Hood Foundation” has collected $1.2 billion in tax-deductible contributions, that means the US government has given up nearly $200 million in tax income (perhaps much more) as a result. [7] The rest of us are picking up the slack – either with our taxes, or in the loss of needed services. We’re subsidizing the generosity of billionaires.

That’s no reason to end deductions for charitable giving, but here’s a thought: If we’re paying 15 to 40 percent of the pricetag, shouldn’t taxpayers have a voice in how this massive foundation is run?

Robin Hood, My A**

Most Wall Street billionaires are Robin Hoods in reverse. The work of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the Levin Senate Subcommittee, and other investigative bodies have shown that they earned much of their wealth through the duplicitous treatment of bank customers, homeowners, union pension funds, and the plundering of other middle-class financial resources. And over the past several decades leaders in both parties (although the Republicans are far more extreme) have presided over the most extreme upward transfer of wealth in modern history.

“Robin Hood Foundation”? We admire his philanthropic instincts, but Jones should be ashamed of that name. It’s a gesture of supreme arrogance. Robin Hood, as we all know, stole from the rich and gave to the poor.  Far too many of his foundation’s benefactors have done precisely the opposite.

Jones says he wants to be “at the forefront of actually finding a way to kick poverty’s ass.” Gotta love that attitude. But that particular ass-kicking will require systemic change – and  genuine sacrifice from the likes of Paul Tudor Jones.

Nobody wants to steal from the ultra-wealthy class, a group which 60 Minutes shows celebrating itself at a Jones fundraiser. But we do want them to pay their fair share. It would be nice if they stopped stealing from others, too.

Handout Nation

The Jones/60 Minutes vision of America is of that of a nation in which the majority must tolerate the slow siphoning off of its wealth, while hoping against hope that some of the siphoners will then deign to rescue them from poverty. Is that the kind of society we want to become? A “Handout Nation”? A people who must rely on the kindness of strangers?

We’ll close with a few words about the third and final story on last Sunday’s 60 Minutes, entitled “The Invisible Wounds of War.” The producers couldn’t even cover that story without ladling out a thick gravy of anti-government ideology. Instead of covering the Veterans Administration, for example (it’s done some impressive things), the story focuses on yet another private donor. Says host David Martin:

“Head of one of New York’s most successful construction firms, (Art) Fisher offered to build a state of the art brain injury center. His foundation would raise the money. All he asked of the government was to stay out of his way.” (Emphasis ours)

The story never asks why our government doesn’t have the money or resources to treat brain-injured veterans, especially since we supposedly honor and respect their sacrifice. Again: One of the reasons is because people like Art Fisher don’t pay enough in taxes.

The report doesn’t even raise the issue. Instead it gives the floor to Fisher, who sneers that “we can build (a veterans’ brain injury facility) in half the time, half the cost and twice the quality” (as the government can).

The numbers say otherwise. Government health care is more efficient, and more cost-efficient, than its private-sector counterparts. And its greatest cost limitations come from the restrictions which Republicans (beneficiaries of these donors’ generosity) have placed on its ability to negotiate prices and manage its services.

The Kindness of Billionaires

“All he asked of the government was to stay out of his way.”

That’s Art Fisher’s agenda, and it’s Paul Tudor Jones’ agenda too: If you’re nice to us, and if you let us keep siphoning the nation’s wealth, a few of us will help you – just as long as the a) flattery keeps flowing, b) you keep subsidizing our gifts, and c) you relinquish control over your destinies to us. It seems to be the 60 Minutes agenda, too.

60 Minutes was once a shining light of independent journalism. Now it’s a covert mouthpiece for the far-right, anti-government values of the Peterson crowd. Once it spoke to, and for, a majority whose interests it fought to defend. Now it represents an atavistically self-centered billionaire class which expects flattery from its subjects whenever it deigns to take notice of their misery. CBS News, I want my hour back. But then, I want my country back too.

Tick-tick-tick. They’ll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Curiously, the CBS web page which touts his work also tells us that “Bill Clinton tried to get Led Zeppelin back together.” I don’t get the connection between these stories. That group’s bass player was John Paul Jones. Different guy altogether. Maybe the common thread is the Clintons, who have benefited mightily from the generosity of hedge funders. You’re not likely to find them challenging the 60 Minutes narrative.

[2] Twenty percent of New Yorkers – one in five – live in poverty. Neither Pelley nor Jones seems curious about that – at least, not curious enough to investigate it.

[3] I don’t know why the CBS News website uses so many commas in its sentences. It’s distracting and hard to read, but that’s how they transcribe their scripts.

[4] The money-making talent doesn’t always equate with intelligence per se, although there are forms of intelligence that can be used to accumulate great wealth. Some billionaires are very gifted people. But sometimes average intelligence, when combined with rapacious greed, personality quirks, or character defects, can do the trick very effectively. And sometimes “idiot savant” is a better description of their gifts than “genius.”

[5] Let’s assume that Jones’ wealth comes from income taxed at the “hedge fund loophole” rate of 15 percent. (That’s generous, since he and his fellow billionaires often pay far less than that.) That would mean that he earned $4.235 billion and paid $635 million in taxes.

[6] Conservatives love to claim that the actual top tax rate under Eisenhower was much less than that. They base that argument on a simple math error, or deception, which has been explained elsewhere.

[7] Here’s the math: Even if all the donors were hedge funders (which is unlikely), they were able to write $1.2 billion off at a 15 percent rate, which comes to $180 million. At the 35 percent Bush tax-cut rate, the figure comes to $420 million in lost tax revenue. (We’re assuming these deductions came to less than 50 percent of donors’ adjusted gross income, which is the limit for charitable deductions.)

***

Richard (RJ) Eskow is a consultant and writer. This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project. Richard blogs at Campaign for America’s Future’s: No Middle Class Health Tax and A Night Light. His website is Eskow and Associates.

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, Too Much online magazine

The 79-year-old corporate gadfly Robert Monks, the former top federal regulator over America’s pension system, earlier this year opined that Corporate America operates “for the personal enrichment and glorification of its manager-kings.”

Too harsh a judgment? Hardly. Current standard corporate operating procedures only make sense if we acknowledge that America’s biggest private enterprises have essentially become the private preserve of an elite executive class.

How else to explain today’s most routine corporate behaviors? The endless rush to mergers that create little more than chaos in newly consolidated workplaces. The ongoing corporate refusal to invest significantly in research and development and employee training. The billions of dollars corporations spend to “buy back” company shares of stock on the open market.

All these moves leave corporations less equipped to succeed in the long term. But all these moves generate multiple millions, sometimes even billions, in the here and now for the corporate executives who make them.

Corporations, of course, have always done well by the executives who run them. But a half-century ago the United States had institutions that kept this enrichment within somewhat reasonable bounds. Trade unions acted as a brake on executive greed grabs. A progressive tax system — with rates as high as 91 percent on income over $400,000 — discouraged the greed grabbing in the first place.

But both these institutions — trade unions and progressive taxes — have atrophied over recent decades. Income and wealth, without these institutional checks in place, have concentrated at America’s economic summit. Below that summit, daily life for average Americans has become ever more insecure.

The United States, in effect, has slid into what University of Maryland historian and political economist Gar Alperowitz calls a “systemic crisis.” For the nation’s vast majority, America has simply stopped working. Daily life has turned into an ever-faster treadmill. And no real relief looms anywhere on the near horizon.

In this dreary environment, an understandable disillusionment — with our political leaders — runs deep. So does a decapacitating cynicism. Why bother struggling against an unjust status quo when nothing ever changes?

Historian Alperovitz has a new book out that aims to rouse us from this suffocating political stupor. In his new What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution, he endeavors to show that societies in “systemic crisis” can change. Revolutions do happen. Indeed, he suggests, “we may now be well into the prehistory of the next American revolution.”

Just what does Alperovitz mean by that? In any social order, he explains, political power reflects the ongoing distribution of wealth. Meaningful change only begins when that existing distribution starts coming under challenge.

Alperovitz sees the challenge needed today as much more than any single campaign for a candidate or cause. He has something deeper in mind: an “evolutionary reconstruction” of our society, a decades-long shift that aims to democratize wealth, to build “a community-sustaining economy from the ground up.”

Pie-in-the-sky fantasy? We already, Alperovitz stresses, have the seeds of an alternate, wealth-democratizing economy in place. Well over 100 million Americans belong to credit unions and co-ops. Ten million Americans labor in worker-owned enterprises. Millions more Americans live in municipalities where public institutions generate electric power — or even provide Internet service.

Alperovitz envisions a steady expansion of wealth-democratizing institutions like these. Over time, over decades, the people these institutions touch begin to see from their daily experiences that alternatives to our dominant corporate status quo do exist. They begin to hold “clear ideas” about what can be done.

In times of acute crisis — say another banking failure — people with clear ideas about democratizing wealth won’t let their tax dollars bail out billionaires. They’ll demand public banks. They’ll carve away at private corporate power, bit by bit.

What Then Must We Do? mixes these intoxicating visions of a future yet to be with concrete descriptions of wealth-democratizing efforts already underway all across the nation, from Cleveland and Chattanooga to Portland and Sacramento.

These descriptions can surprise. One example: In Texas, the heart of red-state America, Dallas has opted to build a city-owned convention center hotel. Quips Alperovitz: “Everyday socialism, all the time, American-style.”

The pages Alperovitz has penned here hold a promise that goes beyond the compelling clarity of his prose. National networks are already working to advance his strategic vision, efforts like the community wealth-building initiative of the Maryland-based Democracy Collaborative and the New Economy Working Group, a center for both local and global thought and action.

America, Alperovitz reminds us, has become the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. The nation’s annual income, if divided equally, would be enough to bring each family of four $200,000. We can, in other words, do far better for average Americans than we do today. Why not try?

***

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the online weekly on excess and inequality. He is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Last year, heplayed an active role on the team that generated The Nation magazine special issue on extreme inequality. That issue recently won the 2009 Hillman Prize for magazine journalism. Pizzigati’s latest book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (Apex Press, 2004), won an “outstanding title” of the year ranking from the American Library Association’s Choice book review journal.

***

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

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By Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large, The American Prospect

Corporate profits are soaring despite declining sales and temps are working longer hours than regular employees. What gives?

One aspect that defines our current economy is that things are happening that shouldn’t be happening. I don’t mean that things are happening that are illegal or immoral. (Well, some of them are immoral, but that’s not what I mean.) Rather, things are happening that defy economic logic—a slippery term that really means, the economic patterns of roughly the past half-century.

The first such logic-defying thing is that corporate profits are soaring even as corporate revenues limp along. The quarterly reports of S&P 500 corporations for the first three months of 2013 are almost entirely in now, and they show profits rising by more than 5 percent even while revenues have risen by less than 1 percent. Seventy percent of these companies—the largest publicly traded U.S. firms—exceeded the analysts’ profit projections. On the other hand, 60 percent came in under the projections for their sales.

Were this disjuncture just a one-time epiphenomenon, we could pass it off as a statistical oddity, but it’s not. Profits of American corporations have become decoupled from the other indices of American economic well-being with which they’ve historically been linked. They currently comprise the largest share of the nation’s economy that they have since World War II. Yet the increase in consumer spending in the 15 quarters since the recession’s official end is lower than its increase 15 quarters after the recessions of 1982, 1991, and 2001 ended. Similarly, 15 quarters after the recession ended, the increase in GDP is lower than it was in those three preceding recessions. So spending and growth are lagging while profits soar. What gives?

Part of the answer is that the S&P 500 now sell roughly half their wares abroad, so they’re less dependent on the health of the U.S. economy to hit or exceed their profit targets. But how to account for the increase in profits when revenues—which, like profits, are measured globally—also decline?

The answer is that profits are increasing because corporations are getting by with fewer workers than they employed before the crash of 2008, and they’re paying those workers less. Wages and compensation (that is, wages plus benefits) now make up the smallest shares of GDP that they have in 50 years, and their decline has proceeded without interruption since 2001. According to a report from JP Morgan Chase’s Chief Investment Office, two-thirds of the increase in corporate profits between the end of the dot-com bust and the collapse of 2008 is directly attributable to the decline in the wages they paid their employees. As the share going to profits has continued to increase since that report appeared, and the share going to wages has kept on decreasing, the centrality of wage suppression to profit maximization has continued to grow.

Certainly, companies have been replacing workers with machines wherever possible. But they are also replacing their own employees with temps—workers hired from employment agencies to whom they pay no benefits and whose wages can be lower than those of regular employees. Which brings us to the second anomaly in recent economic statistics: For the first time in modern economic history, temps are working longer hours than regular employees. Historically, an employer’s own workers have worked longer hours than those brought in on a temporary basis from employment agencies. But in 2009, the average workweek of temps began to exceed the average workweek of all employees. The average number of hours that Americans work still hovered at 34.4 in March, the latest month for which we have figures. Temps, however, worked an average of 35.2 hours – more than they did not only during the Recession, as The New York Times’ Catherine Rampell points out, but during the years preceding the recession as well. We can reasonably infer that employers are opting to substitute temps for workers they once would have hired outright.

The metrics of the American economy may have gone topsy-turvy on us, but that doesn’t mean they’re inexplicable. If profits are rising while revenues flatline, and if employees from temp agencies are putting in longer hours than anybody else, it’s chiefly because American workers have lost the capacity to defend their interests, and their employers are exploiting their weakness to extract profits they could not otherwise attain. American capitalism has become a zero-sum game, and it’s American workers who’ve been zeroed out.

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Harold Meyerson also is political editor and columnist for the L.A. Weekly, the nation’s largest metropolitan weekly, and a regular contributor to The Washington Post.. In 2009, Atlantic Monthly named Mr. Meyerson one of 50 Most Influential Columnists. He is the author of Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?, a biography of Broadway lyricist Yip Harburg. From 1991 through 1995, Meyerson hosted the weekly show “Real Politics” on radio station KCRW, the Los Angeles area’s leading NPR affiliate. He is a frequent guest on television and radio talk shows.

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This has been reposted from Common Dreams.

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

House Speaker John Boehner set out to preside over a do-nothing Congress, and he has succeeded. As this week’s scheduled repeal vote of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) shows, Boehner is an over-achiever. Depending on who’s counting, this is something like the 38th Obamacare repeal vote.

“We’ve got 70 new members who have not had an opportunity to vote on the president’s health care law,” Boehner said. “Frankly, they’ve been asking for an opportunity to vote on it.”

Boehner has previously acknowledged that the ACA is the “law of the land” and is not likely to be repealed. So this is purely symbolic.

I hope Boehner won’t be holding repeal votes for every “law of the land” that the Republicans don’t like. If that were the standard for what gets a vote in the GOP-controlled House, the Republicans would be doing nothing but pointless votes for a long time.

But if Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor are going to hold symbolic votes, why not vote on issues that would show where they really stand?

For example, if Republican members want to show how strongly they oppose the ACA, they should vote to repeal particular parts of it, like the end of insurance company discrimination against people with health conditions. How about a vote on the provision that allows adult children to stay on a parent’s plan until 26? Or a vote on Paul Ryan’s proposal to end Medicare as we know it?

Better yet, instead of holding meaningless votes, maybe the Republican House could develop real plans to create jobs or repeal the sequester’s across-the-board cuts that are devastating America’s families. But that isn’t very likely, since getting real work done won’t advance the GOP’s 2014 electoral goals or hurt President Obama.

Speaker Boehner said it himself — the vote to repeal Obamacare is not about health care, it’s about politics. It’s also another day wasted doing nothing instead of something for our nation’s seniors and for the middle class and those working their way into it.

Let’s be honest: This repeal vote is sport — a chance for Republicans to demonstrate their gratuitous opposition to this president. There are much better things to do in the Congress than play political games. Congress should focus on creating jobs and helping the economy.

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 Dean Baker is author of the new book, “Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy,” PoliPoint Press, LLC. This piece was first published on the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Jobs Byte. CEPR’s Jobs Byte is published each month upon release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment report. For more information or to subscribe by fax or email contact CEPR at 202-293-5380 ext. 102 or chinku@CEPR.net.

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This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

Mike Lux
Co-founder and CEO, Progressive Strategies

In a speech recently, the influential economist Jeffrey Sachs made the following statement, one that was both remarkable and yet predictable about the culture of Wall Street:

I’m going to put if very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological…these people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients… to counter-parties in transactions.

They are tough greedy aggressive and feel absolutely out of control…and they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. And they have a docile President, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that can’t find its voice. Its terrified of these banks. If you look at the campaign contributions the financial markets are the #1 campaign contributors in the US now.

We have a corrupt politics to the core… and both parties are up to their necks in this. The corruption is as far as I can see everywhere. But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning… and it very unhealthy. I have waited four, five years now to see one figure on Wall St. speak in a moral language and I’ve not seen it once.

And if they won’t I’ve waited for a judge, a President, for somebody and it hasn’t happened, and by the way, it’s not gonna happen any time soon.

It was predictable because in fact any neutral observer who knows anything about the way the big banks on Wall Street work has been saying it for years. But it was remarkable because Sachs is a tried and true member of the American establishment, a widely acclaimed Ivy League professor and New York Times best-selling author, and not exactly a raving populist in his economic or political views. But even the elites are now acknowledging the utter moral bankruptcy of our financial kingpins.

I have been thinking about the pathological moral environment of Wall Street a lot in recent days because of the piece I wrote on Friday about the connection between the kinds of trading Enron was doing in energy markets that got them in so much trouble, and what JP Morgan Chase is currently doing in energy markets. You know, the executives who destroyed Enron were about as despicable people as you can imagine — manipulating energy markets in California to drive up prices and create shortages to the point of complete crisis; stealing money from pension, school, church, and charity funds; cashing out early and leaving the rest of the company’s employees with nothing (and touting the company’s stock to those employees while simultaneously selling off). They destroyed their company (along with the country’s leading accounting firm, Arthur Andersen). They got investigated, indicted and convicted of very serious crimes. But the execs at Enron were pikers compared to the big guns on Wall Street, who are doing everything the Enron guys did in terms of market manipulation, but are involved in all kinds of other financial shenanigans as well. They are being investigated or excoriated by at least different government entities, but their stock price has stayed high, their top execs mostly haven’t lost their jobs, and no one has been convicted or even indicted.

The most amazing thing in my mind is the difference in terms of political influence. It’s not like the Enron team were exactly slouchers in this regard. The CEO was one of President Bush’s best personal friends and was one of his top fundraisers. Enron had 54 people in the Bush administration who had been executives, consultants, or lobbyists for the company, including a cabinet secretary and the head of the main agency that regulated Enron, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. When Enron needed help with a business matter in India in the first months of the Bush administration, Vice President Cheney himself hopped on the phone with people in India and got it done for them.

Yet with all this incredible political muscle, once things began to unravel at Enron, once the company began sinking under the weight of all its corruption, the Bush administration cut them loose: phone calls stopped being returned, and DOJ was unleashed. The subpoenas and depositions started coming too fast to count, and the indictments started piling up shortly thereafter.

Not so much with the Too Big To Fail or Jail banks. HSBC basically admits to laundering money for the worst drug lords and narco-terrorists on the planet for years, and no indictments are issued and no one goes to jail. Bankers admit to probably a million separate counts of perjury in the robo-signing scandal, and get to settle the case for a relatively modest amount of money and no indictments, and then so blatantly and immediately violate the terms of the settlement that New York’s AG has to go to court to try and stop them- but again, no indictments coming. JP Morgan Chase misleads and hides information from regulators, no indictments.

There was a survey done last year that said that 26 percent of senior executives in the financial industry have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing at their company, 24 percent said they thought people in the financial industry had to engage in unethical and/or illegal activity to succeed, and 30 percent said their own compensation structure created pressure to do unethical or illegal things. Those numbers probably understate the problem, because most people tend to rationalize away such issues, and wouldn’t want to admit such things even to themselves, let alone in a survey. When you combine an industry culture where a lack of ethics is practically regarded as the standard way of doing business with an unwillingness by government officials to hold that industry accountable to the law, and then add into the mix that the industry in question has the power to wreck the entire economy, you have the deadliest possible problem. You have Enron-style corruption times ten, with no one prosecuting the crimes being committed.

If this deadly dynamic isn’t solved — if the biggest banks aren’t broken up, if the Department of Justice doesn’t start prosecuting crime in the financial sector — our country will in the not too distant future see a financial crisis far worse than in 2008. We need to solve this problem. NOW. Help start the movement.

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Michael Lux is the co-founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, L.L.C., a political consulting firm founded in 1999, focused on strategic political consulting for non-profits, labor unions, PACs and progressive donors. In November of 2008, Mike was named to the Obama-Biden Transition Team. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Political Action at People For the American Way (PFAW), and the PFAW Foundation, and served at the White House from January 1993 to mid-1995 as a Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison.

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This has been reposted from The Huffington Post.