Survey suggests Great Recession has harmed the health of Kentuckians

A recent poll shows continuation of a trend threatening Kentucky's overall health: as the number of Kentuckians living in poverty goes up, the percentage of adults who report their health as excellent or very good goes down.

Just over four in 10 Kentucky adults in the latest Kentucky Health Issues Poll described their health as excellent or good. In 2008, almost half used those descriptions.

People with higher incomes have consistently reported better health since the poll began tracking the health status of Kentucky adults 2008. Since research has shown a strong link between higher income and better health, the Great Recession and the resulting increases in unemployment, underemployment and poverty appear to be harming the overall health of Kentucky’s population.

In the accompanying graph, showing responses by income categories, FPL stands for federal poverty level, which in 2011 was a yearly household income of $22,350. Among the categories, 58 percent in the highest category said their health is excellent or good, but only 25 percent of those living in poverty used those descriptions.

Although the health status for each income category has remained fairly constant, the poll reflects federal data that show more people living in poverty. More than 33 percent in the latest poll were earning less than the federal poverty level; in 2008, that was only 19 percent. The polls, which used self-reporting of income and survey methods that differ from federal methods, showed much higher poverty rates than federal data.

“We know there is a direct relationship between income and good health, and these data reflect that,” said Dr. Susan Zepeda, president and CEO of the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, a sponsor of the poll. “While changes in our health-care delivery system may provide more health-care opportunities for low-income Kentuckians, these results show how vital a strong economy, and jobs that pay well, are to our population’s health.”

The poll, co-sponsored by the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, was taken Sept. 20 through Oct. 14 by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati. A random sample of 1,680 adults throughout Kentucky was interviewed by landline and cell telephones. The poll's margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

28% of Ky. adults 18-64 say they lack health coverage; 41% lacked it sometime in last year; employer coverage down since '08

Nearly three in 10 working-age adults in Kentucky are not covered by any form of health insurance, and the number who get health insurance from their employer, or their spouse’s employer, has plummeted since 2008, the first year of the Great Recession, according to the latest Kentucky Health Issues Poll. The decline accelerated in the last year, and was accompanied by a big jump in the percentage on public insurance.

The poll, taken Sept. 20 through Oct. 14, found that 28 percent of adults aged 18 to 64 said they had no health insurance at the time they were interviewed, and 41 percent said they had been uninsured at some point in the previous year.

The survey found that 37 percent get their insurance from an employer or spouse’s employer, well below the 55 percent figure in a similar poll in 2008. Conversely, 27 percent are now covered by some form of public insurance, way up from the 10 percent in 2008.

Medicaid in Kentucky covers households with incomes up to 70 percent of the federal poverty threshold; 43 percent of working-age adults living at or below that level reported being uninsured last fall. Among those with incomes more than double the poverty level for their size household, 15 percent said they were uninsured.

The poll was conducted for the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky and the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati. Pollsters contacted a random sample of 1,680 adults throughout Kentucky by telephone, including landlines and cell phones. The poll questioned only working-age adults about insurance because 98 percent of seniors have some form of health coverage. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

Kentuckians think their children's generation will be less healthy and worse off economically than current working-age generation

Forty percent of Kentucky adults think their children's generation will be less healthy than the current generation of working-age Kentuckians, and 61 percent think the newer generation will be worse off economically, according to a statewide poll conducted last fall.

The Kentucky Health Issues Poll also found that 54 percent think their parents' generation was better off economically, and 42 percent thought that generation was healthier than the current generation of Kentuckians.

“It is a cornerstone of the American Dream that, if we work hard, we will get ahead and be better off than our parents were,” said Dr. Susan Zepeda, President and CEO of the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, which co-sponsored the poll. “Our polling suggests that optimism for a better future may be slipping away.”

Zepeda added, “Policymakers in Kentucky and Washington are grappling with economic and health policy issues that have long term impacts. Our polling clearly indicates the concern Kentuckians have, on the need to do better for our kids.”

For details of the poll, go to the foundation's website, www.healthy-ky.org.

The poll was conducted for the foundation and the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati from Sept 20 through Oct. 14 by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati. A random sample of 1,680 adults from throughout Kentucky was interviewed by landline and cell telephones. The margin of error for each figure is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

Health care is strong second to economy among concerns of Ky. registered voters; candidates compared on handling of issues

Health care ranks high among the concerns of Kentucky voters, according to the latest Kentucky Health Issues Poll taken for the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.

The poll, taken Sept. 20 through Oct. 14, asked registered voters to name the two most important issues in the Nov. 6 presidential election. The economy was mentioned by 65 percent; health care was second, with 42 percent. Foreign policy was a distant third, at 21 percent. The error margin on the sample of 1,160 voters is plus or minus 2.88 percentage points.

The poll did not ask voters whom they favored for president, but did ask which candidate they trusted to do a better job on certain issues. Romney, who is considered certain to win Kentucky, had a clear advantage on two issue areas, listed first:

• Dealing with the federal budget deficit: Romney 49%; Obama 36%

• Dealing with the economy and jobs: Romney 48%; Obama 36%

• Dealing with the future of the health reform law: Romney 45%; Obama 40%

• Addressing terrorism: Romney 43%; Obama 42%

• Dealing with the situation in Afghanistan: Romney 42%; Obama 40%

• Improving education: Obama 45%; Romney 40%

• Looking out for the best interests of women: Obama 42%; Romney 40%

• Making decisions about women's reproductive health choices and services: Obama 41%; Romney 38%

"This poll gives us a reliable snapshot of the issues most important to Kentucky voters as they decide who they will vote for on Nov. 6," said Dr. Susan Zepeda, president/CEO of the foundation. "Regardless of the outcomes of the election, our foundation believes it is essential for our elected officials to know what Kentuckians think about these issues." To download the full report by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati, click here.

Reports show impact of health-care industry in each of Kentucky's 120 counties

It's not often that such detailed data is broken down to the county level, but a new report looks at the economic impact of the local health-care system in each of Kentucky's 120 counties.

The reports, compiled at the University of Kentucky, look at the number of health-care jobs, as well as the revenue and income generated by the local health-care system. In many rural counties, the authors note, health care is the second largest industry, second only to local government.

The most important economic role of the health-care sector is to "keep local health-care dollars at home," the report says. If private insurance, consumer out-of-pocket payments and Medicare and Medicaid transfer payments aren't kept local, an outmigration of health-care services can take place. "This bypass of local health care remains an important issue for many rural health care providers and rural communities."

Conversely, if the local health-care sector can attract patients from outside the area, health care "can act as an export industry," the authors note. Because doctors and other providers can help improve the health and productivity of the local workforce, the health-care sector can also help an area recruit new and retain existing business.

The county reports include a comparison of household income with the state and nation, and indicates how that income is earned. In Boyle County, for example, 55.6 percent was earned through place-of-work earnings, while 22.6 percent was from transfer payments, such as those from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The reports also break down how much income is generated according to industry type, from 2000 to 2008.

Income earned by Boyle County residents working in the health-care sector increased 42 percent in those years, one of the largest areas of gains in the county. In all, health care accounted for 13 percent of industry in Boyle and generated more than $322 million in sales, more than $151 million in labor income and nearly 3,500 jobs in the area.

The report, available here, was compiled by Dr. Alison Davis, director of the Community and Ecomomic Development Initiative in Kentucky, part of UK's College of Agriculture. It was funded by the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.

Hopkinsville hospital's credit rating downgraded; part of national trend, but only Kentucky hospital nicked by rating agency lately

Following a national trend stemming from a slowly recovering economy, the hospital in Hopkinsville has had its credit rating downgraded, a possibility many Kentucky hospitals may be facing. "This means the hospital may have to pay a higher interest rate if it needs to borrow money in the near future," reports Nick Tabor, senior staff writer for theKentucky New Era.

Loss of business, a small revenue base and lots of debt were among the reasons Jennie Stuart Medical Center's rating dropped from BBB+ to BBB, Tabor reports. Fitch Ratings, one of the global agencies whose ratings guide investors, said uncertainty about the expansion of Kentucky's Medicaid system and how federal health reform will affect the hospital's finances were other reasons for the downgrade. The hospital has lost money in two of the last four years. Last year, it had a 1.9 percent loss.

Tabor explains there are eight ratings above the BBB level. If the facility's rating "were to slip two levels lower, to BB+, it would be on the level of 'junk bonds,' no longer considered investment grade," he reports.

There are three major rating companies in the U.S.: Fitch, Moody's and Standard and Poor's. Moody's expects downgrades of nonprofit hospitals to outnumber upgrades by the end of 2012, reports Jeffrey Young for The Huffington Post. Fitch expects the same will happen, said Senior Director Emily Wong. Smaller hospitals will especially feel the pinch since they "don't have as much ability to offset expense, inflation or reimbursement reductions," Wong said.

Since October 2011, Fitch has reviewed seven nonprofit hospitals in Kentucky. Five were affirmed, one was upgraded and Jennie Stuart was the lone downgrade. The other facilities reviewed were:
• Norton Healthcare, Louisville: affirmed at A-

• Owensboro Medicald Health System: affirmed at BBB+

• Appalachian Regional Healthcare: upgraded BB from BB-

• King's Daughters in Ashland: affirmed at A+

• Baptist Health Systems: affirmed at AA-

• St. Elizabeth Medical Center: affirmed at AA-

AA- and A-rated facilities are reviewed every two years. BBB and BBs are reviewed once a year, and B- and below-rated facilities are reviewed every six months. This type of story can be localized for any hospital. The easiest way to check ratings for hospitals in your area is to get an account at each of the three major rating companies. "These accounts are free and easy to set up," Tabor said. (Read more)

The Lackluster Jobs Report And GOP Sabotage

In the wake of a dismal jobs report, in which "employers created almost enough jobs to keep up with population growth in June, but not nearly enough to reduce the backlog of nearly 13 million unemployed workers," Republicans are doing two things:  Blaming Obama and trying to repeal health care.  As Steve Benen puts it:  "Eliminating health care benefits, as a practical matter, is the GOP jobs plan."

While the tepid job numbers are generally accepted as "absolute, concrete, incontrovertible proof that the president's jobs agenda isn't working," Benen points out, "we aren't trying Obama's jobs agenda."

Perhaps now would be a good time for a reality check. Last fall, Obama said the job market wasn't nearly strong enough, and he proposed an ambitious jobs plan called the American Jobs Act. Independent estimates showed that the policy, if implemented, would create as many as 1.9 million U.S. jobs in 2012 alone. Congressional Republicans, however, killed it.

ThinkProgress has a helpful list of the five key ways Republicans have sabotaged the economic recovery:

1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.

Sign Krugman's "Manifesto For Economic Sense"

By Isaiah J. Poole, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

Tom Tomorrow

Economists Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, the latter of the London School of Economics, today posted a "Manifesto for Economic Sense" that lays out a sound framework for reviving the global economy.

"I’ve been arguing for a long time that policy makers have misunderstood the nature of our economic crisis, mistaking symptoms for causes, and responding in ways that make the situation worse," Krugman wrote yesterday on his blog at The New York Times. The goal of the manifesto is, in the words of the manifesto itself, to "offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of our problems" and change the direction of the economic debate away from austerity and toward using government as a kindle for rebuilding the middle class.

"A key priority now is to reduce unemployment, before it becomes endemic, making recovery and future deficit reduction even more difficult," the manifesto says.

Many of the signatures on the manifesto are those of economists and policy experts, but you are encouraged to sign the manifesto as well to show your agreement with its basic principles.

In an op-ed in the Financial Times, Krugman and Layard explained the thinking behind the manifesto. "More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world’s major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s," the piece begins, because their economic leaders, and conservatives in the United States, insist on replicating the failed economic strategies of the 1930s before the New Deal.

Instead, the manifesto calls for economic experts and policy makers to speak up more loudly against the arguments that "austerity will increase confidence and encourage recovery"—there is no evidence that austerity policies are having that effect anywhere in the world—and that a key causes of our weak economic recovery are structural, rather than a general lack of spending and demand.

The statement echoes the same themes of our own 2010 "Don't Kill Jobs" economic manifesto, signed by more than 300 economic experts. That statement urged the president and Congress to "redouble efforts to create jobs and send aid to the states whose budget crises threaten recovery by forcing them to lay off school teachers, public safety workers, and other essential workers. It also makes sense to invest in public service jobs—and in infrastructure projects for transportation, water, and energy conservation that will make our economy more productive for years to come."

If our political leadership had taken that message to heart in 2010, it would not have been necessary for Krugman and Layard to post their own manifesto with the same message. But Washington conservatives still refuse to admit the failures of their policies and end their wrong-headed obstruction in Congress. It's exasperating to have to repeat the message over and over, but as the Krugman-Layard manifesto concludes, "The whole world suffers when men and women are silent about what they know is wrong."

Why The Economy Can't Get Out Of First Gear

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

DonkeyHotey

Rarely in history has the cause of a major economic problem been so clear yet have so few been willing to see it.

The major reason this recovery has been so anemic is not Europe’s debt crisis. It’s not Japan’s tsumami. It’s not Wall Street’s continuing excesses. It’s not, as right-wing economists tell us, because taxes are too high on corporations and the rich, and safety nets are too generous to the needy. It’s not even, as some liberals contend, because the Obama administration hasn’t spent enough on a temporary Keynesian stimulus.

The answer is in front of our faces. It’s because American consumers, whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity, don’t have the dough to buy enough to boost the economy – and they can no longer borrow like they could before the crash of 2008.

If you have any doubt, just take a look at the Survey of Consumer Finances, released Monday by the Federal Reserve. Median family income was $49,600 in 2007. By 2010 it was $45,800 – a drop of 7.7%.

All of the gains from economic growth have been going to the richest 1 percent – who, because they’re so rich, spend no more than half what they take in.

Can I say this any more simply? The earnings of the great American middle class fueled the great American expansion for three decades after World War II. Their relative lack of earnings in more recent years set us up for the great American bust.


Starting around 1980, globalization and automation began exerting downward pressure on median wages. Employers began busting unions in order to make more profits. And increasingly deregulated financial markets began taking over the real economy.

The result was slower wage growth for most households. Women surged into paid work in order to prop up family incomes – which helped for a time. But the median wage kept flattening, and then, after 2001, began to decline.

Households tried to keep up by going deeply into debt, using the rising values of their homes as collateral. This also helped – for a time. But then the housing bubble popped.

The Fed’s latest report shows how loud that pop was. Between 2007 and 2010 (the latest data available) American families’ median net worth fell almost 40 percent – down to levels last seen in 1992. The typical family’s wealth is their home, not their stock portfolio – and housing values have dropped by a third since 2006.

Families have also become less confident about how much income they can expect in the future. In 2010, over 35% of American families said they did not “have a good idea of what their income would be for the next year.” That’s up from 31.4% in 2007.

But because their incomes and their net worth have both dropped, families are saving less. The proportion of families that said they had saved in the preceding year fell from 56.4% in 2007 to 52% in 2010, the lowest level since the Fed began collecting that information in 1992.

Bottom line: The American economy is still struggling because the vast American middle class can’t spend more to get it out of first gear.

What to do? There’s no simple answer in the short term except to hope we stay in first gear and don’t slide backwards.

Over the longer term the answer is to make sure the middle class gets far more of the gains from economic growth.

How? We might learn something from history. During the 1920s, income concentrated at the top. By 1928, the top 1 percent was raking in an astounding 23.94 percent of the total (close to the 23.5 percent the top 1 percent got in 2007) according to analyses of tax records by my colleague Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. At that point the bubble popped and we fell into the Great Depression.

But then came the Wagner Act, requiring employers to bargain in good faith with organized labor. Social Security and unemployment insurance. The Works Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. A national minimum wage. And to contain Wall Street: The Securities Act and Glass-Steagall Act.

In 1941 America went to war – a vast mobilization that employed every able-bodied adult American, and put money in their pockets. And after the war, the GI Bill, sending millions of returning veterans to college. A vast expansion of public higher education. And huge infrastructure investments, such as the National Defense Highway Act. Taxes on the rich remained at least 70 percent until 1981.

The result: By 1957, the top 1 percent of Americans raked in only 10.1 percent of total income. Most of the rest went to a growing middle class – whose members fueled the greatest economic boom in the history of the world.

Get it? We won’t get out of first gear until the middle class regains the bargaining power it had in the first three decades after World War II to claim a much larger share of the gains from productivity growth.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage

Government Is Not The Problem

Robbie Conal

Democrats have been on the defensive about the role of government at least since Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address that  "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."  Reagan was so effective in portraying government intervention as nothing more than providing assistance to Cadillac-driving welfare queens that his successor, Bush the Elder, was able to  disparage his opponent Michael Dukakis merely by referring to him as a "liberal."  And when the Democrats finally took back the White House, it was Bill Clinton who boasted in his second State of the Union address that "the era of big government is over." 

E.J. Dionne argues in an excellent column today that we must "turn Ronald Reagan’s declaration on its head: Opposition to government isn’t the solution. Opposition to government was and remains the problem."

Decades of anti-government rhetoric have made liberals wary of claiming their legacy as supporters of the state’s positive role. That’s why they have had so much trouble making the case for President Obama’s stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009. It ought to be perfectly obvious: When the private sector is no longer investing, the economy will spin downward unless the government takes on the task of investing. And such investments — in transportation and clean energy, refurbished schools and the education of the next generation — can prime future growth.

Yet the drumbeat of propaganda against government has made it impossible for the plain truth about the stimulus to break through. It was thus salutary that Douglas Elmendorf, the widely respected director of the Congressional Budget Office, told a congressional hearing last week that 80 percent of economic experts surveyed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business agreed that the stimulus got the unemployment rate lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise. Only 4 percent disagreed. The stimulus, CBO concluded, added as many as 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of 2010, and it may have kept us from lapsing back into recession.

So when conservatives say, as they regularly do, that “government doesn’t create jobs,” the riposte should be quick and emphatic: “Yes it has, and yes, it does!”

Indeed, our unemployment rate is higher today than it should be because conservatives blocked additional federal spending to prevent layoffs by state and local governments — and because progressives, including Obama, took too long to propose more federal help. Obama’s jobs program would be a step in the right direction, and he’s right to tout it now. But he should have pushed for a bigger stimulus from the beginning. The anti-government disposition has so much power that Democrats and moderate Republicans allowed themselves to be intimidated into keeping it too small.

As Dionne concludes, "It is past time that we affirm government’s ability to heal the economy, and its responsibility for doing so."

The Big Lie Coup d'Etat

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

JP Morgan Chase,  Goldman Sachs, BP, Chevron, WalMart, and billionaires Charles and David Koch are launching a multi-million dollar TV ad buy Tuesday blasting President Obama over the national debt.

Actually, I don’t know who’s behind this ad because there’s no way to know. And that’s a big problem.
The front group for the ad is Crossroads GPS, the sister organization to the super PAC American Crossroads run by Republican political operative Karl Rove.

Because Crossroads GPS is a tax-exempt nonprofit group, it can spend unlimited money on politics — and it doesn’t have to reveal where it gets the dough.

By law, all it has to do is spent most of the money on policy “issues,” which is a fig leaf for partisan politics.
Here’s what counts as an issue ad, as opposed to a partisan one. The narrator in the ad Crossroads GPS is launching solemnly intones: “In 2008, Barack Obama said, ‘We can’t mortgage our children’s future on a mountain of debt.’ Now he’s adding $4 billion in debt every day, borrowing from China for his spending. Every second, growing our debt faster than our economy,” he continues. “Tell Obama, stop the spending.”
This is a baldface lie, by the way.

Obama isn’t adding to the debt every day. The debt is growing because of obligations entered into long ago, many under George W. Bush – including two giant tax cuts that went mostly to the very wealthy that were supposed to be temporary and which are still going, courtesy of Republican blackmail over raising the debt limit.

In realty, government spending as a portion of GDP keeps dropping.

As I said, I don’t know who’s financing this big lie but there’s good reason to think it’s some combination of Wall Street, big corporations, and the billionaire Koch brothers.

According to the reliable inside-Washington source “Politico,” the Koch brothers’ network alone will be spending $400 million over the next six months trying to defeat Obama, which is more than Senator John McCain spent on his entire 2008 campaign.

Big corporations and Wall Street are also secretly funneling big bucks into front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that will use the money to air anti-Obama ads, while keeping secret the identities of these firms.

Looking at the all the anti-Obama super PACs and political fronts like Crossroads GPS, Politico estimates the anti-Obama forces (including the Romney campaign) will outspend Obama and pro-Obama groups by 2 to 1.

How can it be that big corporations and billionaires will be spending unlimited amounts on big lies like this one, without any accountability because no one will know  where the money is coming from?

Blame a majority of the Supreme Court in its grotesque 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision — as well as the IRS for lax enforcement that lets political front groups like Crossroads GPS or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pretend they’re not political.

But you might also blame something deeper, more sinister.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist (you can’t have served in Washington and seriously believe more than two people can hold on to a big story without it leaking), but I fear that at least since 2010 we’ve been witnessing a quiet, slow-motion coup d’etat whose purpose is to repeal every bit of progressive legislation since the New Deal and entrench the privileged positions of the wealthy and powerful — who haven’t been as wealthy or as powerful since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

Its technique is to inundate America with a few big lies, told over and over (the debt is Obama’s fault and it’s out of control; corporations and the very rich are the “job creators” that need tax cuts; government is the enemy, and its regulations are strangling the private sector; unions are bad; and so on), and tell them so often they’re taken as fact.

Then having convinced enough Americans that these lies are true, take over the White House, Congress, and remaining states that haven’t yet succumbed to the regressive right (witness Tuesday’s recall election in Wisconsin).

I desperately hope I’m wrong, but all there’s growing evidence I may be right. 


Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage

The Jobs Babble

 By Robert Borosage, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

Anne-Maree Hunter

The Jobs Babble

Everyone is talking jobs and saying nothing. The inadequate recovery is sputtering and no one is doing anything. In the war on unemployment, no one has picked up a gun. We’re going through the motions, waiting for the misery to ratchet up, the cities to blow, corporate profits to tank before anything is done.

Bill Maher captured the reality when he mused that it wasn’t surprising Republicans thought Democrats had a secret plan if Obama were re-elected, because they hadn’t told anyone about what they planned to do. The Democratic appeal, he suggested, is “vote for us, we’re lame, but the other guys are nuts.” And so they are.

Romney’s campaign, of course, is all about jobs, twenty-four seven. Actually, it is all about the absence of jobs. Romney offers no coherent plan to produce jobs, beyond a generic, “Trust me, I’m the man from Bain.” Good luck with that. House Speaker John Boehner is “on message,” as they say, repeating relentlessly his question: “Where are the jobs?” But Boehner and his Tea Party compatriots have no plan for jobs either. Instead they have a plan for austerity – deep cuts in spending in every government service except the military.

Last weekend, Ross Douthat, one of the few pundits for whom the label “thoughtful conservative” isn’t an oxymoron, tried to imagine a Romney recovery. He used the book by Edward Conard, Romney’s former partner at Bain, to suggest the Bain vision: Greed is good. The Bush economy was humming. More inequality, more financialization, more speculation will renew America. So embrace the current Republican agenda – deregulate Wall Street, cut top end taxes, slash government spending, and let her rip.

This is, of course, Romney and Boehner’s agenda. Only problem with it is that, as Paul Krugman has noted, we’re already living in a mild version of that policy. Republicans forced Obama to sustain the top end Bush tax cuts, as a price of getting unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut for workers. Government spending – state, local and federal – is going down, not up, contrary to right-wing fantasies. Government workers are being laid off, not hired.

We know the result. Sputtering growth, record corporate profits, growing inequality, declining household incomes, mass unemployment. Boehner’s “job creators” aren’t creating jobs. Douthat is smart enough to realize that the Bush economy didn’t work for most Americans even before it blew up. So he invokes a study by a Chicago conservative, Luigi Zingales, who suggests that what ails America is a corrupted crony capitalism similar to what plagues his Italian homeland. Zingales, and Douthat call conservatives to embrace a “free-market populism,” that will roll back the subsidies, tax dodges, and cartels in private and public sector.

But even Douthat couldn’t get himself to believe that Romney, much less Boehner’s Republicans, could summon up the courage for that. These Republicans fight to the death in defense of billion dollar subsidies to Big Oil and Big Agra and Big Pharma. The Koch brothers aren’t funding “free market populism;” they are expecting a huge return on their investment – and they’ll get it if Romney wins.

But if Republicans have nothing to say about jobs, neither do Democrats. They are terrified by polls that say voters are concerned about deficits. So every jobs program has to be “paid for” – and almost by definition, small. Obama issues a “to do list” for Congress that even his aides have a hard time pretending to be excited about.

Ironically, there really isn’t much of a secret about what needs to be done. The only question is how deep the crisis must go, how crippling the pain must be, before it gets done.


Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have been campaigning for action. But we don’t need to take Nobel Prize winning economists as our guide. This week the sober conservative editors of the Financial Times detailed the common sense steps that were needed from America.

First, they called on the Federal Reserve to announce another round of qualitative easing. But with interest rates at record lows, there is little scope for monetary policy. With a yield of 1.45%, 10 year Treasury bonds are now cheaper than free. (They are earning less than the inflation rate). Investors are essentially paying the US to hold their money in a safe place.

Those same low interest rates offer the US a remarkable opportunity to rebuild the country. There will never be a better time to do the “internal improvements” that we need to make – rebuilding roads, bridges, mass transit, sewers, fast trains, airports, and retrofitting public buildings, building up renewable energy and more.

This is work that must be done. But now we can borrow the money at virtually no cost to finance it, and put to work a construction industry that is now idled, and help get the economy going. As the editors of the Financial Times conclude, “whatever is invested at these rates is likely to pay for itself in higher growth and revenues. “ This is what most would call a no brainer.

This isn’t all that should be done. Reviving Richard Nixon’s “revenue sharing” – a tip of the hat to E.J. Dionne – would send money to states and localities to rehire teachers and cops. The President has suggested a jobs corps for veterans, so no one who risks their life in battlefields abroad will be cut down in economic crossfire at home. That could sensibly be expanded with urban and green corps, targeted to areas of obscene levels of youth unemployment, to insure that young people under 25 don’t start their lives in idleness, depression, drugs and despair. And we should start making the long term investments – in world class education from pre-K to college, in research and development, in new energy – vital to our economic future.

These can be paid for by ending the subsidies Republicans protect, shutting down corporate tax havens, and fair taxes on Wall Street speculation and the rich.

Most sensibly, this program for revival and renewal would be accompanied by a hard knuckled, no holds barred, everything on the table drive to get our books in order once the economy recovers. That requires unrelenting focus on the three things that drive our budget out of whack. Not Social Security and Medicare, but the real deal: shackling Wall Street which just blew up the economy and effectively doubled our debt to GDP; ending our commitment to endless wars and policing the world which we cannot afford; and fixing our broken health care system, the most corrupted of our crony capitalism, now squandering about twice what other advanced countries spend per capita on health care with worse results. Everything else – the so called “grand bargain” that would trade cuts in Medicare and Social Security for tax reforms – is simply using the crisis to take another hit out of working families. When the rewards aren’t shared, shared sacrifice is for suckers. When you weren’t invited to the party, you shouldn’t be stuck with the bill.

The Bain Of Our Existence

By Mike Lux, cross-posted from Crooks and Liars

I love this Bain debate. It is exactly the kind of debate about the nature of business and job creation we need to be having in this campaign. The Republicans, along with pro-Wall Street Democrats, are squealing like stuck pigs about the Obama campaign “attacking free enterprise” because they want to change the subject fast. They are saying to themselves: please, let’s talk about anything else. Deficits would be their first choice, but anything would be preferable. Maybe we’ll see them start talking about contraceptives and how people shouldn’t have sex again just to change the subject. Because this debate goes straight to the heart of what kind of economy we should be trying to build in this country.

This is isn’t about being for or against free enterprise. This is about how the economy should work better for everyone in it, not just the top 1 percent. The Republicans -- and Democrats like Cory Booker and Harold Ford, who both have raised millions of dollars in Wall Street money (including money from Bain) for their campaigns -- say that it is great when financial corporations like Bain make money by loading up the companies they buy with debt, taking all the tax write-offs the law allows, and then walking away with tons of money whatever happens to the original company. In fact, the companies Bain bought frequently went bankrupt, and Bain usually profited when those companies did go belly-up because of tax write-offs and sucking the companies’ assets dry. But in this line of reasoning, it’s all good, because capitalism should be unrestrained and some people got very rich.

What Obama and other Democrats are arguing is that our government should be on the side of the businesses that create not just wealth for a few at the top, but jobs and incomes for a lot of people. That is why Obama made the incredibly gutsy move to save the American auto industry, a policy that saved 1.45 million jobs in the short run, and kept desperately needed manufacturing jobs in this country for years to come. It is why Obama has made big investments in the budget for Small Business Administration jobs. It is why investments have been made in clean energy jobs of the future. It is why the U.S. Department of Agriculture has emphasized rural economic development and small business development in areas where jobs and incomes are desperately needed.

Democratic policies are in fact far more pro-business than policies like the Romney-Ryan budget, which independent studies estimate would cost the nation more than 4 million jobs in the next two years. That’s a lot of business customers who no longer have money to spend.

The Republican attack machine (helped by Democrats like Booker and Ford who have been feeding at the Wall Street trough for their entire careers) wants to intimidate the Obama campaign by making the claim that any attack on greedy business practices like the ones Romney perfected at Bain is an attack on all business and the market. It’s the same kind of argument Republicans make when they complain about class warfare politics when Democrats suggest that millionaires ought to pay a little more in taxes. It is an utterly soulless, amoral argument. But this is a fight Democrats can and will win if we make our case, because I think most people understand that there are ethical and unethical business practices. And they get that there is a difference between making money by manipulating the tax code and squeezing all the value out of businesses before throwing them away, and making money by making and selling good products that people want to buy. Biden laid this case out beautifully in a speech in Youngstown:





And the President got it right when he said “when you are President, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot.”

This debate about Bain Capital is one we need to have. What kind of business activity, and what kind of government policy, is better for America? Republicans, you better batten down the hatches, because we are going to have this debate. Whiny Wall Street Democrats, get over it, this is a fight we are taking on. This is a make or break moment for America’s middle class, and we aren’t going to let Republican bullies and Wall Street Democrat whiners from making Bain the bain of Romney’s existence.

Of Boardrooms And Bedrooms

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

Mario Piperni

The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms.

Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters will be considering a similar amendment in November. Republicans in Maryland and Washington State are seeking to overturn legislative approval of same-sex marriage there.

Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting womens’ reproductive rights – banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.

The Republican bedroom crowd don’t want to talk about the nation’s boardrooms because that’s where most of their campaign money comes from. And their candidate for president has made a fortune playing board rooms like checkers.

Yet America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.y and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.

What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.

It is immoral that top executives are richly rewarded no matter how badly they screw up while most Americans are screwed no matter how hard they work.

Regressive Republicans have no problem intruding on the most personal and most intimate decisions any of us makes while railing against government intrusions on big business.

They don’t hesitate to hurl the epithets “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “contemptible” at private moral decisions they disagree with, while staying stone silent in the face of the most contemptible violations of public trust at the highest reaches of the economy.

We must protect and advance private rights of individuals over intimate bedroom decisions. We must also stop the abuses of economic power and privilege that are characterizing so many decisions in the nation’s boardrooms and executive suites.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

What America Can Learn From The Revolt In Europe

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

Who’s an economy for? Voters in France and Greece have made it clear it’s not for the bond traders.

Referring to his own electoral woes, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote Monday in an article in the conservative Daily Telegraph: “When people think about the economy they don’t see it through the dry numbers of the deficit figures, trade balances or inflation forecasts — but instead the things that make the difference between a life that’s worth living and a daily grind that drags them down.”

Cameron, whose own economic policies have worsened the daily grind dragging down most Brits, may be sobered by what happened over the weekend in France and Greece – as well as his own poll numbers. Britain’s conservatives have been taking a beating.

In truth, the choice isn’t simply between budget-cutting austerity, on the one hand, and growth and jobs on the other. 

It’s really a question of timing. And it’s the same issue on this side of the pond. If government slices spending too early, when unemployment is high and growth is slowing, it makes the debt situation far worse.

That’s because public spending is a critical component of total demand. If demand is already lagging, spending cuts further slow the economy – and thereby increase the size of the public debt relative to the size of the overall economy.

You end up with the worst of both worlds – a growing ratio of debt to the gross domestic product, coupled with high unemployment and a public that’s furious about losing safety nets when they’re most needed.

The proper sequence is for government to keep spending until jobs and growth are restored, and only then to take out the budget axe.

If Hollande’s new government pushes Angela Merkel in this direction, he’ll end up saving the euro and, ironically, the jobs of many conservative leaders throughout Europe – including Merkel and Cameron.

But he also has an important audience in the United States, where Republicans are trying to sell a toxic blend of trickle-down supply-side economics (tax cuts on the rich and on corporations) and austerity for everyone else (government spending cuts). That’s exactly the opposite of what’s needed now.  

Yes, America has a long-term budget deficit that’s scary. So does Europe. But the first priority in America and in Europe must be growth and jobs. That means rejecting austerity economics for now, while at the same time demanding that corporations and the rich pay their fair share of the cost of keeping everyone else afloat.

President Obama and the Democrats should set a clear trigger — say, 6 percent unemployment and two quarters of growth greater than 3 percent — before whacking the budget deficit.

And they should set that trigger now, during the election, so the public can give them a mandate on Election Day to delay the “sequestration” cuts (now scheduled to begin next year) until that trigger is met.

Welcome To The 2012 Hunger Games

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into The Arena

By Rebecca Solnit, cross-posted from TomDispatch

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital 

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like -- and yet not exactly like -- high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film, and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1%, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1%, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen -- Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one -- who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men, and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties, and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things -- including reality TV, of course.  The US Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.


The Return of Debt Peonage

In The Hunger Games, kids in poor families take out extra chances in their District lottery -- that is, extra chances to die -- in return for extra food rations; in ours, poor kids enlist in the military to feed their families and maybe escape economic doom. Many are seduced by military recruiters who stalk them in high school with promises as slippery as those the slave trade uses to recruit poor young women for sex work abroad.

And then there’s another form of debt peonage that is far more widespread in our strange and ever-changing land: student loans. The young are constantly told that only a college education can give them a decent future. Then they’re told that, to pay for it, they need to go into debt -- usually into five figures, sometimes well into six. And these debts are, in turn, governed by special laws that don’t allow you to declare bankruptcy -- no matter what.  In other words, they are guaranteed to follow you all your life.

One of my close friends wept when her husband began to earn enough money to pay off her $45,000 loan, structured so that it looked like she would continue to pay interest on it for the rest of her life; not so dissimilar, that is, from the debts sharecroppers and workers in company towns used to incur.

In other words, we’re creating a new generation of debt peonage. And she’s not the worst case by far. Early in the Occupy Wall Street moment, she told me, someone arrived at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with markers and cardboard on which participants were to write their debt.  What shocked her was how many of the occupiers in their early twenties were already carrying huge debt burdens.

According to the website for Occupy Student Debt, 36,000,000 Americans have student debts.  These have increased more than fivefold since 1999, creating a debt load that’s approaching a trillion dollars, with students borrowing $96 billion more every year to pay for their educations. Two-thirds of college students find themselves in this trap nowadays. As commentator Malcolm Harris put it in N + 1 magazine:

“Since 1978, the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900%, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the U.S. economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But… wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.”

About a third are already in default. You can only hope that this bubble will burst in a wildcat strike against student debt, and if we’re lucky, a move to force tuition lower and have a debt jubilee.

The rest of us, the 99%, need to remember that, when it comes to public education, the crisis has everything to do with slashed tax rates -- to the wealthy and corporations in particular -- over the last 30 years. We went into bondage so that they might be free. Getting an education to make your way out of poverty and maybe expand your mind is becoming another way of being trapped forever in poverty. For too many, there’s no way out of the hunger labyrinth.

The Labyrinths of Poverty 

Which brings us to the hungriest in our 2012 real-life version of the Hunger Games: the poor. The wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen is full of hungry people. You know it, and you know why. In this vast, bountiful, food-producing, food-wasting nation, it’s a crisis of distribution, also known as economic inequality, described at last with clarity and force by the Occupy movement.

One of the sad and moving spectacles of camps like Occupy Oakland last year was the way they became de facto soup kitchens as the homeless and hungry came out of the shadows for the chance at a decent meal. Some of the camps had really dedicated chefs who cooked superbly.  They also had rudimentary medical clinics where the poor received the healthcare they couldn’t get anywhere else.

We are in a new era of desperation, when lots of people who were getting by these last several decades aren’t anymore. There are no jobs, or the jobs available pay so abysmally that workers can barely survive on them.

Of course, we do have one arena in which meals are guaranteed, and the population there keeps growing. Six million Americans live there, and it often does get gladiatorial inside. It’s called prison, and we have the highest percentage of prisoners per population in the world, higher than in the USSR gulags under Stalin. Half of them are there for drug offenses, 80% of those for simple possession.

Which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs meant to numb the pain we’re so good at creating here.  We should create a measure for Gross National Suffering (GNS) before we even think about the Gross National Happiness they measure in Bhutan.

And once our prisoners get out, they’re a stigmatized caste, uniquely ill-suited to survival in this economy -- speaking of hunger, debt, poverty, being branded for life, and hopelessness. Like universities, prisons are profitable industries, though not for the human beings who are the raw material they process.  In this age, both systems seem increasingly like so many factories.

In the Shadow of 900 Tornados

But if you want to think about all the ways we’re dooming the young, there’s one that puts the others in the shade, a form of destruction that includes not just American youth, or human youth, but all species everywhere, from coral reefs to caribou. That’s climate change, of course.

Our failure to do anything adequate about it has rocketed us into the science-fiction world Bill McKibben so eloquently warned us about in his 2010 book Eaarth. His argument is that we’ve so altered the planet we live on that we might as well have landed on a new one (with an extra “a” in its name), more turbulent and far less hospitable than the beautiful Holocene one we trashed.
There were 160 tornados reported on March 2nd of this year. Remember that, in April of 2011, 900 tornadoes were ripping up interior United States, and this April was similarly volatile.  Remember the unprecedented wildfires, the catastrophic floods, the heat waves, the bizarrely hot North American January and other oddities? That’s science fiction of the scariest sort, and we’re in it. Or on it, on the crazy new planet we’ve made ourselves. Here in the USA sector of Eaarth in the year 2012, 15,000 high-temperature records were broken in March alone, and summer is yet to come. A town in north-central Texas hit 111 degrees -- in April! What turbulent planet is this?

One grain of good news: a lot of us, even in this country, finally seem to be of aware of the strangeness of the planet we’re now on. As the New York Times reported, a new survey “shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer, and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.”
If you want to talk about hunger, talk about the unprecedented flooding that’s turned Pakistan from one of the world’s breadbaskets into a net food-importing nation, with dire consequences for the agricultural poor. Talk about China’s many impending ecological disasters, its degraded soil, contaminated air and water, its many systems ready to collapse. There’s more disruption of food production to come, a lot more, and lots more hunger, too.

Around this point in science fiction books and even history books, a revolution seems necessary. The good news I have for you this May Day is that it’s underway.

Revolution 2012

2011 was the year of strange weather, but it was also the year of global uprisings, and they’re far from over. They erupted in Russia, Israel, Spain, Greece, Britain, much of the Arab-speaking world, parts of Africa, and Chile, among other spots in Latin America (some of which got their revolutions underway earlier in the millennium). Uprisings have blossomed even in what the rest of the hungry world sees as the elite Capitol, the United States, and much of the English-speaking world, from London to New Zealand.

Remember that revolution doesn’t look much like revolution used to. That might be the most retrograde aspect of the very violent Hunger Games trilogy, the way in which the author’s imagination travels along conventional or old-fashioned lines. There, violence is truly the arbitrator of power, along with cunning, whether in the ways the teenagers survive in the gladiatorial arena or the Capitol, or how both sides operate in conflicts between the Districts and the Capitol. In our own world, the state is very good at violence, whether in its wars overseas or in pepper-spraying and clubbing young demonstrators. You’ll notice, however, that neither the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis, nor the Occupiers were subjugated by these means.

Violence is not power, as Jonathan Schell makes strikingly clear in The Unconquerable World, it’s what the state uses when we are not otherwise under control. In addition, when we speak of “nonviolence” as an alternative to violence, we can’t help but underestimate our own power.  That word, unfortunately, sounds like it’s describing an absence, a polite refraining from action, when what’s at stake -- as demonstrators around the world proved last year -- is a force to be reckoned with; so call it “people power” instead.

When we come together as civil society to exercise this power, regimes tremble and history is made. Not instantly and not exactly according to plan, but who ever expected that?

Still, many regimes have been toppled by this power, and the capacity to do so is ours in the present.  As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan point out in their recent Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, since 1900 people-power campaigns have been successful in achieving regime change more than twice as often as violent campaigns.

It’s May Day, a worldwide General Strike has been called, and last week tiny Occupy Norman (Oklahoma) announced that it “had won a major battle”: their city is moving all its money out of Bank of America into a local bank. Last fall’s Move Your Money campaign included city money from the outset and quiet victories like this could begin to reshape our economic landscape. Activism in the streets is so intimidating that next month's G8 Summit scheduled for Chicago will hole up at Camp David instead.

Meanwhile last week, both the Wells Fargo and General Electric shareholders’ meetings were under siege from Occupy activists.  The Wells Fargo meeting and protests took place in San Francisco, and afterward an arrested friend of mine posted this on Facebook: “I forgot to mention that Max gave me the Hunger Games salute in jail today. It was awesome.”

In this way do fiction and reality meld in misery and triumph as, this very day, janitors in California go out on strike, and even Golden Gate Bridge workers will be protesting. May Day actions are planned across the globe.

Still alive and kicking, Occupy is chipping away in a thousand places at the status quo. 350.org, the little organization that defeated the Keystone XL Pipeline (so far), is holding a global Climate Impacts Day on May 5th and plans to take on the petroleum industry in its next round of actions.
Of course, this is only a beginning, and the banking and oil companies, the 1%, and the prison and education rackets are more than capable of pushing back.  So we need one more tool in our arsenal, and that’s a picture of what we want, of what a better world looks like. McKibben’s Eaarth and Deep Economy offer such a picture, as does William Morris’s News from Nowhere, even 120-odd years later, but we won’t get that from The Hunger Games, which, for all its thrilling, subversive, and surly delights, is all dystopia all the way home. We may still get it, however, on our stranger-than-fiction planet.

May Day is a day of liberation -- a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it.  It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.

So skip work, flip a bird at the Capitol, commit your deepest love and solidarity to the young whose lives are being gambled away, feed the hungry, take a long look at how beautiful our planet still is, find your way into solidarity and people power, and dream big about other futures. Resistance is one of your obligations, but it’s also a pleasure and a way of stealing back hope. 

Rebecca Solnit grew up in California public libraries and is thrilled to be revisiting them all over the state as part of the Cal Humanities California Reads project, which is now featuring five books, including her A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. 

The Zombie Rises: The Return Of Simpson-Bowles

By Robert Borosage, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

Take a good look at Europe - bloody riots in Athens and Madrid, rising unemployment, spreading poverty and suicide, and a deepening recession - because the current American elite consensus bizarrely wants to drive America down that same path.

Europe's miseries come from imposing austerity before recovering from the recession caused by the financial collapse. Conservatives in Germany and England inflicted harsh measures to enforce budget discipline - hiking taxes, cutting spending.

In the US, the Obama recovery plan and the deal with Republicans over extending the Bush tax cuts combined to limit and slow the imposition of austerity. The result: Europe is sinking, while the US economy retains slow, but halting growth.

But now the deficit hawks are gearing up for another run at driving the US back into economic recession.

At the end of the year, we face a train wreck. After the November election, the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits expire. The automatic cut - "sequester" in budget speak - of nearly 10% of military and domestic discretionary spending (everything except guaranteed programs like Medicare and Social Security and interest on the national debt) kicks in. We even hit the debt limit to add to the high stakes.

If all this is allowed to occur, it will subtract over 3% of GDP from an economy growing at 2.5% or less. A drop back into recession would be almost inevitable. So a deal is needed.

But the deal in everyone's head is some kind of "grand bargain," like that almost cut by House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama last year, or like that outlined by the co-chairs of the President's deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson (which failed to gain the needed votes to pass the commission).


Centrist Democrat Kent Conrad, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, has announced that he will use the Simpson Bowles recommendations as a guideline for budget negotiations that he assumes will take place in the lame duck Congress have the election.

There's lots not to like in Simpson-Bowles which marches under the banner of "shared sacrifice" at a time when 1% of the population is capturing 93% of the rewards of growth, while paying the lowest tax rates in living memory.

But the horror is less the bad terms of the supposed bargain, than its zombie like infliction of austerity on an economy barely out of the emergency room.
We've still got some 23 million people in need of full time work. We haven't recovered the jobs that were lost in the collapse, much less the jobs needed for young people coming into the economy. Wages are still failing to keep pace. Nearly one in four mortgages are under water; foreclosures are rising.

Yes, we have trillion dollar deficits. But austerity - some deal that raises taxes and cuts spending now - will put more people out of work and make reducing deficits even harder.

After experiencing the horrors of this misguided policy, European leaders will eventually turn back to trying to get their economies moving again. What we need this fall is a different grand bargain - a global agreement, like that that was forged in early 2009, for coordinated action by governments to reflate the economy - to borrow and spend to put people back to work.

For this to occur, the bipartisan elite fixation about inflicting austerity now must be challenged. If we are to avoid a lost decade or worse, we need action to support still weak and staggering economies. Global coordination would be the best way to achieve that. That requires putting a stake in Simpson Bowles, the Boehner-Obama grand bargain and other zombies.

In this country, the necessary remedies are clear. With interest rates near zero, a decrepit infrastructure that must be rebuilt, a construction industry flat on its back, anyone with a whit of business sense would finance a massive Rebuild America program over the next few years, put people back to work, and build the sinews vital for a more competitive economy. We will never have a better opportunity to make the investments that we will have to make anyway.

We should send money to states to rehire teachers, make universities affordable, and strengthen not weaken our public schools. It's simply nuts to make kids pay the price of Wall Street's follies.

And if we could get beyond ideological perversities, we'd set up a green corps, an urban corps, and a jobs corps to guarantee a job for every veteran and young person under 25. No one should risk their life for the country and return to an economy with no place for them. Young people are coming out of school into the worst economy since the Great Depression. Condemning them to idleness is a recipe for depression, drugs, crime, and misery. And we will all pay dearly for a lost generation.

Certainly, we have to be serious about getting our books in order. The wealthy and the corporations should pay more so we can afford the investments we need. But the overwhelming source of our long-term budget woes comes from projections of soaring health care costs. If we paid for health care at the rate other industrial countries do (with better results), we would be projecting surpluses, not deficits.

But right now, the focus should be on putting people back to work and getting the economy moving. Until that happens, austerity - as Europe is now experiencing - is a contagion, not a cure.