Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality

From BIll Moyers.com:

The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill Moyers shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless — who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years — are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps.

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Moyers, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

[Full Transcript below the video]

 

Inequality matters. You will hear people say it doesn’t, but they are usually so high up the ladder they can’t even see those at the bottom. The distance between the first and the least in America is vast and growing.

The Washington Post recently took a look at two counties in Florida and found that people who live in the more affluent St. Johns County live longer than those who live next door in less rich Putnam County. The Post concluded: “The widening gap in life expectancy between these two adjacent Florida counties reflects perhaps the starkest outcome of the nation’s growing economic inequality: Even as the nation’s life expectancy has marched steadily upward…a growing body of research shows that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder.”

That’s true across America. In California’s Silicon Valley, Apple, Facebook and Google, among others, have reinvented the Gold Rush. But down the road in San Jose it’s not so pretty a picture. Do the math: in an area where one fourth of the population earn an average of about $ 19,000 dollars a year, rent alone can average more than $ 20,000 dollars a year, and that difference adds up to homelessness. We talked to Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza, who brought this story to our attention.

MARTHA MENDOZA: I’ve been a journalist in this area for 25 years, and during that time it has gone from having a pretty robust middleclass to being an area where you see this great divide of wealthy and poor, and nowhere do you see that more than in the Silicon Valley, where 25 years ago this was a place of orchards and farms and ranching and small businesses, and it has completely changed now so that you have incredibly wealthy people and incredibly poor people and a growing gap. Homelessness has increased dramatically. In the shadow of Google, in the shadow of Oracle, in the shadow of Apple Computer, you have people who are hungry.

CINDY CHAVEZ: People had this believe that somehow Silicon Valley was paved with gold—and I would even say my parents, coming from New Mexico, all those years ago when I was very small, I mean they came here looking for opportunity. They wanted to be in a place that it didn’t matter what their ethnicity or culture was, it didn’t matter what their class was, that they really could put their stake in the ground, buy a home and grow a family. I think that’s a dream that a lot of people come to Silicon Valley with, and one of the problems is that it’s not like that for everybody. We have really been a tale of two cities for really a long time.

RUSSELL HANCOCK: Our economic expansion is pretty staggering, people have referred to it as the longest, most sustained, largest, legal wealth creation in the history of the planet. We have very high-income, highest in the nation. We also have very low. We’ve got both. And what’s actually happening right now is a hollowing out in the middle. Now, this is a national phenomenon, but it seems to be particularly acute in Silicon Valley. We’re still generating on the high end—engineers and scientists and coders. But the support positions, manufacturing, you’re not going to see that in Silicon Valley anymore.

MARTHA MENDOZA: They would manufacture silicon chips here in the early days. And I was just the other day looking for anybody making wafers anymore, and there’s not.

THERESA FRIGGE: I used to work with National Semiconductor. I worked in masking. I made that silicon chip. I’m the one who put the programs on that chip, I’m the one who inspected them. I’ve cleaned houses, I have taken care of disabled people. I’m 54 years old, I’ve got nothing.

MARTHA MENDOZA: What happened was, in the Silicon Valley 15 years ago, during the first boom, for every five jobs they were adding, they were building two units of housing. So that jacked up the housing prices to what fights for the most expensive housing in the country. Sometimes it’s first place. Sometimes it’s second place. People who had blue-collar jobs were getting paid 10, 15, 20 bucks an hour, and when their jobs went away they were largely unskilled and could take jobs that paid $ 8 an hour. That would be the minimum wage in San Jose for the past 15 years. As of last week, they raised it to $ 10 an hour. Now, on that type of wages, you can’t rent an apartment, you can’t buy food, and you can’t handle the transportation expenses, which can be very high. And so you end up—in some cases you find people living three or four families to an apartment, or people move into homeless shelters or people leave the area.

DANIEL GARCIA: This is my tent. This is where I live. I’ve got my transportation, my bike. I have electricity that I run by car battery. I worked at a restaurant at Google. They have, I don’t know, I guess sixteen or eighteen full-blown restaurants you can go eat at when you work there, for free. I never heard of that in my life. They started doing background checks and they did a background check on me. I’m a convicted felon, so they couldn’t keep me there anymore. Right now, I do yard work for people, stuff like that. I find bikes I fix them up and resell them.

MARTHA MENDOZA: In many communities you see the homeless people, you see them living in the streets, you see them begging downtown, or busking. In the Silicon Valley, this is a lot of freeway living and the homeless people they live along the creeks, or in parks, but where people aren’t going to see them, so it’s more of a hidden problem.

CINDY CHAVEZ: We had a family visit us, mother, father and three children, and they are homeless, and they’re homeless because the father is a gardener, he works three days a week, he makes $ 75 dollars every day he works. The mother lost her job in manufacturing. It took one paycheck to move them from their apartment onto the street. And that’s true for a lot of families in our community. At some point and I do worry about this, like I think is it all sudden that the country splits in half are we creating literally two Americas?

MARTHA MENDOZA: Silicon Valley has the brainpower and has the risky personality to do some really innovative things when it comes to poverty. And I even think there’s a will to do this, but I think there is a lack of awareness, and hopefully a growing awareness because I do think there’s been brilliance out of that region that has changed the world. So wouldn’t it be something if that area could also be the one that sparks the brilliance that starts to solve this really major problem?

BILL MOYERS: Let’s hope so, because inequality in America is now at the greatest level in modern history and shows no signs of abating. And paradoxically, this week it got worse. The stock market reached new levels, making the rich richer and the press euphoric.

NEWS ANCHOR 1: And the gavel goes down on an historic day on Wall Street.

NEWS ANCHOR 2: Roaring stock markets.

NEWS ANCHOR 3: The S&P just hit another record intraday high.

NEWS ANCHOR 4: Dow’s above 14.8.

NEWS ANCHOR 5: The NASDAQ rose about 60 points.

BILL MOYERS: No one stopped to point out that when the market goes up, it can mean companies have fired workers in order to increase investor profits. Sure enough, the latest figures show employment has barely risen and more rank-and-file Americans have gone missing from the job market altogether. The Commerce Department reports that personal income fell 3.6 percent in January – that’s the sharpest one-month dive in twenty years. It sure seems like the Roaring 20s all over again — people at the top living it up while those down below lose their livelihood.

Which brings us to our nation’s capital — rich in alabaster symbols of representative government yet shamelessly cynical in writing laws and bending rules to favor the one percent. And that includes the tax code.

So on Monday, when you send in your tax returns, think about this. Corporate profits are at record highs. But have those companies invested that in new jobs? No. Did they at least give their workers a bump in pay? Hardly. Surely they shelled out a little more in taxes to help refurbish the social structure – highways, bridges, schools, libraries, parks – where they do business! Guess again. Corporations are sitting on $ 1.7 trillion of cash. Look at this report just published by PIRG — the Public Interest Research Group — on how average citizens and small businesses have to make up the $ 90 billion giant companies save by shifting profits to offshore tax havens. Among the 83 publicly traded corporations named: Pfizer, which for the past five years reported no taxable income in the US, even as it made 40 percent of its sales here.

Microsoft, which avoided $ 4.5 billion in taxes over three years by shifting its income to Puerto Rico. Citigroup, which maintains 20 subsidiaries in tax havens and has over 42 and a half billion dollars sitting off-shore. Taxes collected here at home? Zero.

It’s not only corporations stashing their swag abroad. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists recently got their hands on two and a half million files from offshore bank accounts and shell companies set up around the world by the wealthy. Among those documents are the names of 4,000 Americans who hid their money in secret tax havens. Here’s how they do it:

FEMALE VOICE: You can easily set up a secret company using one of hundreds of off-shore agents. Let’s look at the British Virgin Islands, home to half a million offshore companies. That’s about 40 percent of the offshore companies on the planet. You can buy a ready-made shell company or create your own secret company from scratch in about three days, for just over $ 1,000. You may be asked to produce documents to establish your identity and they might check your name in a database, to see if you’re a terrorist. But don’t worry, while the system may catch the big fish, it still lets scores of fraudsters and criminals slip through the net.

BILL MOYERS: So it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that the United States collects less in taxes as a share of its economy than all but two other industrialized countries. Only Chile and Mexico collect less. Chile and Mexico. Right now a powerful group of CEO"s, multi-millionaires and billionaires are calling on Congress to fix the debt. And their enablers in both parties are glad to oblige. Okay. But why not fix the debt by raising more taxes from those who can afford to pay? Close the loopholes. Shut down the tax havens. Cancel the Mitt Romney Clause Congress enacted, allowing big winners to pay a tax rate far less than their chauffeurs, nannies, and gardeners.

Instead, as we speak, our political class in Washington is attempting to fix the debt by sequestration – Washington doublespeak for bleeding services for veterans and the elderly, the sick and poor, for kids in Head Start.

Marching in lockstep beneath a banner that now stands for “Guardians of Privilege” — GOP — Republicans refuse to raise revenues, while Democrats have a president whose new budget contains gimmicks that could lead to cuts in Social Security. Social Security! The one universal safety net — and a modest one at that – and yet the main source of purchasing power for millions of aging Americans. This, from a Democrat – the heir of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who pulled us to our feet when the Great Depression had America on its knees.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

BILL MOYERS: But those were the days when our political system rallied to the defense of everyday Americans. Now a petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government, while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.

Warren Buffett, the savviest capitalist of them all, may have written this era’s epitaph: “If there was a class war, my class won.”

Fri, 04/12/2013 – 14:59

 
AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed

Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality

Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality

From BIll Moyers.com:

The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill Moyers shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless — who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years — are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps.

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Moyers, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

[Full Transcript below the video]

 

Inequality matters. You will hear people say it doesn’t, but they are usually so high up the ladder they can’t even see those at the bottom. The distance between the first and the least in America is vast and growing.

The Washington Post recently took a look at two counties in Florida and found that people who live in the more affluent St. Johns County live longer than those who live next door in less rich Putnam County. The Post concluded: “The widening gap in life expectancy between these two adjacent Florida counties reflects perhaps the starkest outcome of the nation’s growing economic inequality: Even as the nation’s life expectancy has marched steadily upward…a growing body of research shows that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder.”

That’s true across America. In California’s Silicon Valley, Apple, Facebook and Google, among others, have reinvented the Gold Rush. But down the road in San Jose it’s not so pretty a picture. Do the math: in an area where one fourth of the population earn an average of about $ 19,000 dollars a year, rent alone can average more than $ 20,000 dollars a year, and that difference adds up to homelessness. We talked to Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza, who brought this story to our attention.

MARTHA MENDOZA: I’ve been a journalist in this area for 25 years, and during that time it has gone from having a pretty robust middleclass to being an area where you see this great divide of wealthy and poor, and nowhere do you see that more than in the Silicon Valley, where 25 years ago this was a place of orchards and farms and ranching and small businesses, and it has completely changed now so that you have incredibly wealthy people and incredibly poor people and a growing gap. Homelessness has increased dramatically. In the shadow of Google, in the shadow of Oracle, in the shadow of Apple Computer, you have people who are hungry.

CINDY CHAVEZ: People had this believe that somehow Silicon Valley was paved with gold—and I would even say my parents, coming from New Mexico, all those years ago when I was very small, I mean they came here looking for opportunity. They wanted to be in a place that it didn’t matter what their ethnicity or culture was, it didn’t matter what their class was, that they really could put their stake in the ground, buy a home and grow a family. I think that’s a dream that a lot of people come to Silicon Valley with, and one of the problems is that it’s not like that for everybody. We have really been a tale of two cities for really a long time.

RUSSELL HANCOCK: Our economic expansion is pretty staggering, people have referred to it as the longest, most sustained, largest, legal wealth creation in the history of the planet. We have very high-income, highest in the nation. We also have very low. We’ve got both. And what’s actually happening right now is a hollowing out in the middle. Now, this is a national phenomenon, but it seems to be particularly acute in Silicon Valley. We’re still generating on the high end—engineers and scientists and coders. But the support positions, manufacturing, you’re not going to see that in Silicon Valley anymore.

MARTHA MENDOZA: They would manufacture silicon chips here in the early days. And I was just the other day looking for anybody making wafers anymore, and there’s not.

THERESA FRIGGE: I used to work with National Semiconductor. I worked in masking. I made that silicon chip. I’m the one who put the programs on that chip, I’m the one who inspected them. I’ve cleaned houses, I have taken care of disabled people. I’m 54 years old, I’ve got nothing.

MARTHA MENDOZA: What happened was, in the Silicon Valley 15 years ago, during the first boom, for every five jobs they were adding, they were building two units of housing. So that jacked up the housing prices to what fights for the most expensive housing in the country. Sometimes it’s first place. Sometimes it’s second place. People who had blue-collar jobs were getting paid 10, 15, 20 bucks an hour, and when their jobs went away they were largely unskilled and could take jobs that paid $ 8 an hour. That would be the minimum wage in San Jose for the past 15 years. As of last week, they raised it to $ 10 an hour. Now, on that type of wages, you can’t rent an apartment, you can’t buy food, and you can’t handle the transportation expenses, which can be very high. And so you end up—in some cases you find people living three or four families to an apartment, or people move into homeless shelters or people leave the area.

DANIEL GARCIA: This is my tent. This is where I live. I’ve got my transportation, my bike. I have electricity that I run by car battery. I worked at a restaurant at Google. They have, I don’t know, I guess sixteen or eighteen full-blown restaurants you can go eat at when you work there, for free. I never heard of that in my life. They started doing background checks and they did a background check on me. I’m a convicted felon, so they couldn’t keep me there anymore. Right now, I do yard work for people, stuff like that. I find bikes I fix them up and resell them.

MARTHA MENDOZA: In many communities you see the homeless people, you see them living in the streets, you see them begging downtown, or busking. In the Silicon Valley, this is a lot of freeway living and the homeless people they live along the creeks, or in parks, but where people aren’t going to see them, so it’s more of a hidden problem.

CINDY CHAVEZ: We had a family visit us, mother, father and three children, and they are homeless, and they’re homeless because the father is a gardener, he works three days a week, he makes $ 75 dollars every day he works. The mother lost her job in manufacturing. It took one paycheck to move them from their apartment onto the street. And that’s true for a lot of families in our community. At some point and I do worry about this, like I think is it all sudden that the country splits in half are we creating literally two Americas?

MARTHA MENDOZA: Silicon Valley has the brainpower and has the risky personality to do some really innovative things when it comes to poverty. And I even think there’s a will to do this, but I think there is a lack of awareness, and hopefully a growing awareness because I do think there’s been brilliance out of that region that has changed the world. So wouldn’t it be something if that area could also be the one that sparks the brilliance that starts to solve this really major problem?

BILL MOYERS: Let’s hope so, because inequality in America is now at the greatest level in modern history and shows no signs of abating. And paradoxically, this week it got worse. The stock market reached new levels, making the rich richer and the press euphoric.

NEWS ANCHOR 1: And the gavel goes down on an historic day on Wall Street.

NEWS ANCHOR 2: Roaring stock markets.

NEWS ANCHOR 3: The S&P just hit another record intraday high.

NEWS ANCHOR 4: Dow’s above 14.8.

NEWS ANCHOR 5: The NASDAQ rose about 60 points.

BILL MOYERS: No one stopped to point out that when the market goes up, it can mean companies have fired workers in order to increase investor profits. Sure enough, the latest figures show employment has barely risen and more rank-and-file Americans have gone missing from the job market altogether. The Commerce Department reports that personal income fell 3.6 percent in January – that’s the sharpest one-month dive in twenty years. It sure seems like the Roaring 20s all over again — people at the top living it up while those down below lose their livelihood.

Which brings us to our nation’s capital — rich in alabaster symbols of representative government yet shamelessly cynical in writing laws and bending rules to favor the one percent. And that includes the tax code.

So on Monday, when you send in your tax returns, think about this. Corporate profits are at record highs. But have those companies invested that in new jobs? No. Did they at least give their workers a bump in pay? Hardly. Surely they shelled out a little more in taxes to help refurbish the social structure – highways, bridges, schools, libraries, parks – where they do business! Guess again. Corporations are sitting on $ 1.7 trillion of cash. Look at this report just published by PIRG — the Public Interest Research Group — on how average citizens and small businesses have to make up the $ 90 billion giant companies save by shifting profits to offshore tax havens. Among the 83 publicly traded corporations named: Pfizer, which for the past five years reported no taxable income in the US, even as it made 40 percent of its sales here.

Microsoft, which avoided $ 4.5 billion in taxes over three years by shifting its income to Puerto Rico. Citigroup, which maintains 20 subsidiaries in tax havens and has over 42 and a half billion dollars sitting off-shore. Taxes collected here at home? Zero.

It’s not only corporations stashing their swag abroad. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists recently got their hands on two and a half million files from offshore bank accounts and shell companies set up around the world by the wealthy. Among those documents are the names of 4,000 Americans who hid their money in secret tax havens. Here’s how they do it:

FEMALE VOICE: You can easily set up a secret company using one of hundreds of off-shore agents. Let’s look at the British Virgin Islands, home to half a million offshore companies. That’s about 40 percent of the offshore companies on the planet. You can buy a ready-made shell company or create your own secret company from scratch in about three days, for just over $ 1,000. You may be asked to produce documents to establish your identity and they might check your name in a database, to see if you’re a terrorist. But don’t worry, while the system may catch the big fish, it still lets scores of fraudsters and criminals slip through the net.

BILL MOYERS: So it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that the United States collects less in taxes as a share of its economy than all but two other industrialized countries. Only Chile and Mexico collect less. Chile and Mexico. Right now a powerful group of CEO"s, multi-millionaires and billionaires are calling on Congress to fix the debt. And their enablers in both parties are glad to oblige. Okay. But why not fix the debt by raising more taxes from those who can afford to pay? Close the loopholes. Shut down the tax havens. Cancel the Mitt Romney Clause Congress enacted, allowing big winners to pay a tax rate far less than their chauffeurs, nannies, and gardeners.

Instead, as we speak, our political class in Washington is attempting to fix the debt by sequestration – Washington doublespeak for bleeding services for veterans and the elderly, the sick and poor, for kids in Head Start.

Marching in lockstep beneath a banner that now stands for “Guardians of Privilege” — GOP — Republicans refuse to raise revenues, while Democrats have a president whose new budget contains gimmicks that could lead to cuts in Social Security. Social Security! The one universal safety net — and a modest one at that – and yet the main source of purchasing power for millions of aging Americans. This, from a Democrat – the heir of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who pulled us to our feet when the Great Depression had America on its knees.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

BILL MOYERS: But those were the days when our political system rallied to the defense of everyday Americans. Now a petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government, while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.

Warren Buffett, the savviest capitalist of them all, may have written this era’s epitaph: “If there was a class war, my class won.”

Fri, 04/12/2013 – 14:59

 
AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed

Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality

Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality

From BIll Moyers.com:

The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill Moyers shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless — who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years — are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps.

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Moyers, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

[Full Transcript below the video]

 

Inequality matters. You will hear people say it doesn’t, but they are usually so high up the ladder they can’t even see those at the bottom. The distance between the first and the least in America is vast and growing.

The Washington Post recently took a look at two counties in Florida and found that people who live in the more affluent St. Johns County live longer than those who live next door in less rich Putnam County. The Post concluded: “The widening gap in life expectancy between these two adjacent Florida counties reflects perhaps the starkest outcome of the nation’s growing economic inequality: Even as the nation’s life expectancy has marched steadily upward…a growing body of research shows that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder.”

That’s true across America. In California’s Silicon Valley, Apple, Facebook and Google, among others, have reinvented the Gold Rush. But down the road in San Jose it’s not so pretty a picture. Do the math: in an area where one fourth of the population earn an average of about $ 19,000 dollars a year, rent alone can average more than $ 20,000 dollars a year, and that difference adds up to homelessness. We talked to Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza, who brought this story to our attention.

MARTHA MENDOZA: I’ve been a journalist in this area for 25 years, and during that time it has gone from having a pretty robust middleclass to being an area where you see this great divide of wealthy and poor, and nowhere do you see that more than in the Silicon Valley, where 25 years ago this was a place of orchards and farms and ranching and small businesses, and it has completely changed now so that you have incredibly wealthy people and incredibly poor people and a growing gap. Homelessness has increased dramatically. In the shadow of Google, in the shadow of Oracle, in the shadow of Apple Computer, you have people who are hungry.

CINDY CHAVEZ: People had this believe that somehow Silicon Valley was paved with gold—and I would even say my parents, coming from New Mexico, all those years ago when I was very small, I mean they came here looking for opportunity. They wanted to be in a place that it didn’t matter what their ethnicity or culture was, it didn’t matter what their class was, that they really could put their stake in the ground, buy a home and grow a family. I think that’s a dream that a lot of people come to Silicon Valley with, and one of the problems is that it’s not like that for everybody. We have really been a tale of two cities for really a long time.

RUSSELL HANCOCK: Our economic expansion is pretty staggering, people have referred to it as the longest, most sustained, largest, legal wealth creation in the history of the planet. We have very high-income, highest in the nation. We also have very low. We’ve got both. And what’s actually happening right now is a hollowing out in the middle. Now, this is a national phenomenon, but it seems to be particularly acute in Silicon Valley. We’re still generating on the high end—engineers and scientists and coders. But the support positions, manufacturing, you’re not going to see that in Silicon Valley anymore.

MARTHA MENDOZA: They would manufacture silicon chips here in the early days. And I was just the other day looking for anybody making wafers anymore, and there’s not.

THERESA FRIGGE: I used to work with National Semiconductor. I worked in masking. I made that silicon chip. I’m the one who put the programs on that chip, I’m the one who inspected them. I’ve cleaned houses, I have taken care of disabled people. I’m 54 years old, I’ve got nothing.

MARTHA MENDOZA: What happened was, in the Silicon Valley 15 years ago, during the first boom, for every five jobs they were adding, they were building two units of housing. So that jacked up the housing prices to what fights for the most expensive housing in the country. Sometimes it’s first place. Sometimes it’s second place. People who had blue-collar jobs were getting paid 10, 15, 20 bucks an hour, and when their jobs went away they were largely unskilled and could take jobs that paid $ 8 an hour. That would be the minimum wage in San Jose for the past 15 years. As of last week, they raised it to $ 10 an hour. Now, on that type of wages, you can’t rent an apartment, you can’t buy food, and you can’t handle the transportation expenses, which can be very high. And so you end up—in some cases you find people living three or four families to an apartment, or people move into homeless shelters or people leave the area.

DANIEL GARCIA: This is my tent. This is where I live. I’ve got my transportation, my bike. I have electricity that I run by car battery. I worked at a restaurant at Google. They have, I don’t know, I guess sixteen or eighteen full-blown restaurants you can go eat at when you work there, for free. I never heard of that in my life. They started doing background checks and they did a background check on me. I’m a convicted felon, so they couldn’t keep me there anymore. Right now, I do yard work for people, stuff like that. I find bikes I fix them up and resell them.

MARTHA MENDOZA: In many communities you see the homeless people, you see them living in the streets, you see them begging downtown, or busking. In the Silicon Valley, this is a lot of freeway living and the homeless people they live along the creeks, or in parks, but where people aren’t going to see them, so it’s more of a hidden problem.

CINDY CHAVEZ: We had a family visit us, mother, father and three children, and they are homeless, and they’re homeless because the father is a gardener, he works three days a week, he makes $ 75 dollars every day he works. The mother lost her job in manufacturing. It took one paycheck to move them from their apartment onto the street. And that’s true for a lot of families in our community. At some point and I do worry about this, like I think is it all sudden that the country splits in half are we creating literally two Americas?

MARTHA MENDOZA: Silicon Valley has the brainpower and has the risky personality to do some really innovative things when it comes to poverty. And I even think there’s a will to do this, but I think there is a lack of awareness, and hopefully a growing awareness because I do think there’s been brilliance out of that region that has changed the world. So wouldn’t it be something if that area could also be the one that sparks the brilliance that starts to solve this really major problem?

BILL MOYERS: Let’s hope so, because inequality in America is now at the greatest level in modern history and shows no signs of abating. And paradoxically, this week it got worse. The stock market reached new levels, making the rich richer and the press euphoric.

NEWS ANCHOR 1: And the gavel goes down on an historic day on Wall Street.

NEWS ANCHOR 2: Roaring stock markets.

NEWS ANCHOR 3: The S&P just hit another record intraday high.

NEWS ANCHOR 4: Dow’s above 14.8.

NEWS ANCHOR 5: The NASDAQ rose about 60 points.

BILL MOYERS: No one stopped to point out that when the market goes up, it can mean companies have fired workers in order to increase investor profits. Sure enough, the latest figures show employment has barely risen and more rank-and-file Americans have gone missing from the job market altogether. The Commerce Department reports that personal income fell 3.6 percent in January – that’s the sharpest one-month dive in twenty years. It sure seems like the Roaring 20s all over again — people at the top living it up while those down below lose their livelihood.

Which brings us to our nation’s capital — rich in alabaster symbols of representative government yet shamelessly cynical in writing laws and bending rules to favor the one percent. And that includes the tax code.

So on Monday, when you send in your tax returns, think about this. Corporate profits are at record highs. But have those companies invested that in new jobs? No. Did they at least give their workers a bump in pay? Hardly. Surely they shelled out a little more in taxes to help refurbish the social structure – highways, bridges, schools, libraries, parks – where they do business! Guess again. Corporations are sitting on $ 1.7 trillion of cash. Look at this report just published by PIRG — the Public Interest Research Group — on how average citizens and small businesses have to make up the $ 90 billion giant companies save by shifting profits to offshore tax havens. Among the 83 publicly traded corporations named: Pfizer, which for the past five years reported no taxable income in the US, even as it made 40 percent of its sales here.

Microsoft, which avoided $ 4.5 billion in taxes over three years by shifting its income to Puerto Rico. Citigroup, which maintains 20 subsidiaries in tax havens and has over 42 and a half billion dollars sitting off-shore. Taxes collected here at home? Zero.

It’s not only corporations stashing their swag abroad. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists recently got their hands on two and a half million files from offshore bank accounts and shell companies set up around the world by the wealthy. Among those documents are the names of 4,000 Americans who hid their money in secret tax havens. Here’s how they do it:

FEMALE VOICE: You can easily set up a secret company using one of hundreds of off-shore agents. Let’s look at the British Virgin Islands, home to half a million offshore companies. That’s about 40 percent of the offshore companies on the planet. You can buy a ready-made shell company or create your own secret company from scratch in about three days, for just over $ 1,000. You may be asked to produce documents to establish your identity and they might check your name in a database, to see if you’re a terrorist. But don’t worry, while the system may catch the big fish, it still lets scores of fraudsters and criminals slip through the net.

BILL MOYERS: So it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that the United States collects less in taxes as a share of its economy than all but two other industrialized countries. Only Chile and Mexico collect less. Chile and Mexico. Right now a powerful group of CEO"s, multi-millionaires and billionaires are calling on Congress to fix the debt. And their enablers in both parties are glad to oblige. Okay. But why not fix the debt by raising more taxes from those who can afford to pay? Close the loopholes. Shut down the tax havens. Cancel the Mitt Romney Clause Congress enacted, allowing big winners to pay a tax rate far less than their chauffeurs, nannies, and gardeners.

Instead, as we speak, our political class in Washington is attempting to fix the debt by sequestration – Washington doublespeak for bleeding services for veterans and the elderly, the sick and poor, for kids in Head Start.

Marching in lockstep beneath a banner that now stands for “Guardians of Privilege” — GOP — Republicans refuse to raise revenues, while Democrats have a president whose new budget contains gimmicks that could lead to cuts in Social Security. Social Security! The one universal safety net — and a modest one at that – and yet the main source of purchasing power for millions of aging Americans. This, from a Democrat – the heir of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who pulled us to our feet when the Great Depression had America on its knees.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

BILL MOYERS: But those were the days when our political system rallied to the defense of everyday Americans. Now a petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government, while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.

Warren Buffett, the savviest capitalist of them all, may have written this era’s epitaph: “If there was a class war, my class won.”

Fri, 04/12/2013 – 14:59

 
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Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality

Guest Post: We"re Living Through A Rare Economic Transformation

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Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via Peak Prosperity,

In 1993, management guru Peter Drucker published a short book entitled Post-Capitalist Society.  Despite the fact that the Internet was still in its pre-browser infancy, Drucker identified that developed-world economies were entering a new knowledge-based era– as opposed to the preceding industrial-based era, which represented just as big a leap from the agrarian-based one it had superseded.

Drucker used the term post-capitalist not to suggest the emergence of a new “ism” beyond the free market, but to describe a new economic order that was no longer defined by the adversarial classes of labor and the owners of capital. Now that knowledge has trumped financial capital and labor alike, the new classes are knowledge workers and service workers.

As for the role of capital, Drucker wryly points out that by Marx’s definition of socialist paradise – that the workers owned the means of production (in the 19^th century, that meant mines, factories and tools) – America is a workers’ paradise, because a significant percentage of stocks and bonds were owned by pension funds indirectly owned by the workers.

In the two decades since 1993, privately owned and managed 401K retirement funds have added to the pool of worker-owned financial capital.

Drucker’s main point is that the role of finance and capital is not the same in a knowledge economy as it was in a capital-intensive industrial economy that needed massive sums of bank credit to expand production.

How much bank financing did Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, or Google require to expand?  Investment banks reaped huge profits in taking these fast-growing knowledge companies public, but these tech companies’ need for financial capital was met with relatively modest venture-capital investments raised from pools of individuals.

That the dominant knowledge-based corporations had little need for bank capital illustrates the diminished role for finance capital in a knowledge economy.  (This also explains the explosive rise in the 1990s and 2000s of financialization; i.e., excessive debt, risk, leverage, and moral hazard.  Commercial and investment banks needed new profit sources to exploit, as traditional commercial lending was no longer profitable enough.)

In a knowledge economy, the primary asset – knowledge – is “owned” by the worker and cannot be taken from him/her.  Knowledge is a form of mobile human capital.

In Drucker’s view, knowledge, not industry or finance, is now the dominant basis of wealth creation, and this transformation requires new social structures.  The old industrial-era worldview of “labor versus capital” no longer describes the key social relations or realities of the knowledge economy.

The transition from the industrial economy to the knowledge economy is the modern-day equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, which transformed an agrarian social order to an industrial one of factories, workers, and large-scale concentrations of capital and wealth.  These major transitions are disruptive and unpredictable, as the existing social and financial orders are replaced by new, rapidly evolving arrangements.  As Drucker put it, the person coming of age at the end of the transitional period cannot imagine the life led by his/her grandparents – the dominant social organizations that everyone previously took for granted have changed.

Following in the footsteps of historian Fernand Braudel, Drucker identifies four key transitions in the global economy:  in the 1300s, from a feudal, agrarian economy to modern capitalism and the nation-state; in the late 1700s and 1800s, the Industrial Revolution of steam power and factories; in the 20^th century, a Productivity Revolution as management of work and processes boosted the productivity of labor, transforming the proletariat class into the middle class; and since the 1990s, the emergence of the Knowledge Economy.

In Drucker’s analysis, these fast-spreading economic revolutions trigger equally profound political and social dynamics. The dominant social structures that we take for granted – labor and capital, and the nation-state – are not immutable; rather, they are the modern-day equivalent of the late-1200s feudal society that seemed permanent to those who had known nothing else but that was already being dismantled and replaced by the Renaissance-era development of modern capitalism.

From this perspective, the nation-state is no longer indispensable to the knowledge economy, and as a result, Drucker foresaw the emergence of new social structures would arise and co-exist with the nation-state.

Drucker summed up the difference between what many term a post-industrial economy and what he calls a knowledge economy this way: “That knowledge has become the resource rather than a resource is what makes our society ‘post-capitalist.’  This fact changes – fundamentally – the structure of society.  The means of production is and will be knowledge.”

Knowledge and Management

As we might expect from an author who spent his career studying management, Drucker sees the Management Revolution that began around 1950 as a key dynamic in the knowledge economy.  The lessons in management learned from the unprecedented expansion of U.S. production in World War II were codified and applied to post-war industry, most famously in Japan.

This is the third phase of knowledge being applied to production.  In the Industrial Revolution, knowledge was applied to tools and products.  In the second phase, knowledge was applied to work flow and processes, enabling the Productivity Revolution that greatly boosted workers’ productivity and wages.  The third phase is the application of knowledge to knowledge itself, or what Drucker terms the Management Revolution, which has seen the emergence and dominance of a professional managerial class, not just in the private sector but in the non-profit and government sectors.

The nature of knowledge has changed, in Drucker’s analysis, from a luxury that afforded the Elite opportunities for self-development, to applied knowledge.  In the present era, the conventional liberal-arts university education produces generalists; i.e., a class of educated people.  In terms of generating results in the world outside the person, knowledge must be effectively organized into specialized disciplines that incorporate methodologies that can be taught and applied across a spectrum of people and tasks.

Drucker characterizes this as the movement from knowledge (generalized) to knowledges (applied, specialized).  Organizations can then focus this methodical knowledge on accomplishing a specific, defined task or mission.

Though it may seem incredulous to us, Drucker observes that the current meaning of “organization” was not listed in the authoritative Oxford dictionary of 1950. While social groups and organizations have existed for as long as humanity itself, Drucker distinguishes between the traditional “conserving institutions” of family, community, and society, and the destabilizing post-capitalist “society of organizations” that is adapted for constant change.

Organizations require management, and in the knowledge economy, that means managing change and helping the organization learn how to innovate.  Innovation can no longer be left to chance; it must be organized as a systematic process.

Without a systematic process of constant innovation, organizations will become obsolete.

Drucker takes this process of innovation one step further and concludes that this requires decentralization, as this is the only means to reach decisions quickly based on performance, and proximity to markets, technology, and the environment.

Though he doesn’t state it directly, this means that the highly centralized sectors of the economy, from finance to government, will be disrupted by a rapidly evolving, decentralized “society of organizations.”

What Work Will Be In Demand (and What Won’t) in the Future?

So if this is the nature of the new economy, what type of worker will be most in demand?

Will your current industry, job, or skill set be as relevant? Are there steps you can start taking now to defend or increase your future market value?

In Part II: Positioning Yourself to Prosper in the Post-Capitalist Economy, we examine what impact these transformational forces will have on us as individuals, households, and communities, and how we can best prepare for the fast-evolving knowledge economy.

The global economy has only experienced three major transformations in the past 1,000 years, and arguably, we are living through the fourth. Those who understand the nature of this transition and position themselves intelligently will be disproportionately better off – a topic covered fully in my earlier report on The Future of Work.

Zero Hedge

Guest Post: We"re Living Through A Rare Economic Transformation

Guest Post: We"re Living Through A Rare Economic Transformation

Tweet

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via Peak Prosperity,

In 1993, management guru Peter Drucker published a short book entitled Post-Capitalist Society.  Despite the fact that the Internet was still in its pre-browser infancy, Drucker identified that developed-world economies were entering a new knowledge-based era– as opposed to the preceding industrial-based era, which represented just as big a leap from the agrarian-based one it had superseded.

Drucker used the term post-capitalist not to suggest the emergence of a new “ism” beyond the free market, but to describe a new economic order that was no longer defined by the adversarial classes of labor and the owners of capital. Now that knowledge has trumped financial capital and labor alike, the new classes are knowledge workers and service workers.

As for the role of capital, Drucker wryly points out that by Marx’s definition of socialist paradise – that the workers owned the means of production (in the 19^th century, that meant mines, factories and tools) – America is a workers’ paradise, because a significant percentage of stocks and bonds were owned by pension funds indirectly owned by the workers.

In the two decades since 1993, privately owned and managed 401K retirement funds have added to the pool of worker-owned financial capital.

Drucker’s main point is that the role of finance and capital is not the same in a knowledge economy as it was in a capital-intensive industrial economy that needed massive sums of bank credit to expand production.

How much bank financing did Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, or Google require to expand?  Investment banks reaped huge profits in taking these fast-growing knowledge companies public, but these tech companies’ need for financial capital was met with relatively modest venture-capital investments raised from pools of individuals.

That the dominant knowledge-based corporations had little need for bank capital illustrates the diminished role for finance capital in a knowledge economy.  (This also explains the explosive rise in the 1990s and 2000s of financialization; i.e., excessive debt, risk, leverage, and moral hazard.  Commercial and investment banks needed new profit sources to exploit, as traditional commercial lending was no longer profitable enough.)

In a knowledge economy, the primary asset – knowledge – is “owned” by the worker and cannot be taken from him/her.  Knowledge is a form of mobile human capital.

In Drucker’s view, knowledge, not industry or finance, is now the dominant basis of wealth creation, and this transformation requires new social structures.  The old industrial-era worldview of “labor versus capital” no longer describes the key social relations or realities of the knowledge economy.

The transition from the industrial economy to the knowledge economy is the modern-day equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, which transformed an agrarian social order to an industrial one of factories, workers, and large-scale concentrations of capital and wealth.  These major transitions are disruptive and unpredictable, as the existing social and financial orders are replaced by new, rapidly evolving arrangements.  As Drucker put it, the person coming of age at the end of the transitional period cannot imagine the life led by his/her grandparents – the dominant social organizations that everyone previously took for granted have changed.

Following in the footsteps of historian Fernand Braudel, Drucker identifies four key transitions in the global economy:  in the 1300s, from a feudal, agrarian economy to modern capitalism and the nation-state; in the late 1700s and 1800s, the Industrial Revolution of steam power and factories; in the 20^th century, a Productivity Revolution as management of work and processes boosted the productivity of labor, transforming the proletariat class into the middle class; and since the 1990s, the emergence of the Knowledge Economy.

In Drucker’s analysis, these fast-spreading economic revolutions trigger equally profound political and social dynamics. The dominant social structures that we take for granted – labor and capital, and the nation-state – are not immutable; rather, they are the modern-day equivalent of the late-1200s feudal society that seemed permanent to those who had known nothing else but that was already being dismantled and replaced by the Renaissance-era development of modern capitalism.

From this perspective, the nation-state is no longer indispensable to the knowledge economy, and as a result, Drucker foresaw the emergence of new social structures would arise and co-exist with the nation-state.

Drucker summed up the difference between what many term a post-industrial economy and what he calls a knowledge economy this way: “That knowledge has become the resource rather than a resource is what makes our society ‘post-capitalist.’  This fact changes – fundamentally – the structure of society.  The means of production is and will be knowledge.”

Knowledge and Management

As we might expect from an author who spent his career studying management, Drucker sees the Management Revolution that began around 1950 as a key dynamic in the knowledge economy.  The lessons in management learned from the unprecedented expansion of U.S. production in World War II were codified and applied to post-war industry, most famously in Japan.

This is the third phase of knowledge being applied to production.  In the Industrial Revolution, knowledge was applied to tools and products.  In the second phase, knowledge was applied to work flow and processes, enabling the Productivity Revolution that greatly boosted workers’ productivity and wages.  The third phase is the application of knowledge to knowledge itself, or what Drucker terms the Management Revolution, which has seen the emergence and dominance of a professional managerial class, not just in the private sector but in the non-profit and government sectors.

The nature of knowledge has changed, in Drucker’s analysis, from a luxury that afforded the Elite opportunities for self-development, to applied knowledge.  In the present era, the conventional liberal-arts university education produces generalists; i.e., a class of educated people.  In terms of generating results in the world outside the person, knowledge must be effectively organized into specialized disciplines that incorporate methodologies that can be taught and applied across a spectrum of people and tasks.

Drucker characterizes this as the movement from knowledge (generalized) to knowledges (applied, specialized).  Organizations can then focus this methodical knowledge on accomplishing a specific, defined task or mission.

Though it may seem incredulous to us, Drucker observes that the current meaning of “organization” was not listed in the authoritative Oxford dictionary of 1950. While social groups and organizations have existed for as long as humanity itself, Drucker distinguishes between the traditional “conserving institutions” of family, community, and society, and the destabilizing post-capitalist “society of organizations” that is adapted for constant change.

Organizations require management, and in the knowledge economy, that means managing change and helping the organization learn how to innovate.  Innovation can no longer be left to chance; it must be organized as a systematic process.

Without a systematic process of constant innovation, organizations will become obsolete.

Drucker takes this process of innovation one step further and concludes that this requires decentralization, as this is the only means to reach decisions quickly based on performance, and proximity to markets, technology, and the environment.

Though he doesn’t state it directly, this means that the highly centralized sectors of the economy, from finance to government, will be disrupted by a rapidly evolving, decentralized “society of organizations.”

What Work Will Be In Demand (and What Won’t) in the Future?

So if this is the nature of the new economy, what type of worker will be most in demand?

Will your current industry, job, or skill set be as relevant? Are there steps you can start taking now to defend or increase your future market value?

In Part II: Positioning Yourself to Prosper in the Post-Capitalist Economy, we examine what impact these transformational forces will have on us as individuals, households, and communities, and how we can best prepare for the fast-evolving knowledge economy.

The global economy has only experienced three major transformations in the past 1,000 years, and arguably, we are living through the fourth. Those who understand the nature of this transition and position themselves intelligently will be disproportionately better off – a topic covered fully in my earlier report on The Future of Work.

Zero Hedge

Guest Post: We"re Living Through A Rare Economic Transformation

Living with No Future in Today"s Iraq

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Back then, everybody was writing about Iraq, but it’s surprising how few Americans, including reporters, paid much attention to the suffering of Iraqis. Today, Iraq is in the news again. The words, the memorials, the retrospectives are pouring out, and again the suffering of Iraqis isn’t what’s on anyone’s mind. This was why I returned to that country before the recent 10th anniversary of the Bush administration’s invasion and why I feel compelled to write a few grim words about Iraqis today.

But let’s start with then. It’s April 8, 2004, to be exact, and I’m inside a makeshift medical center in the heart of Fallujah while that predominantly Sunni city is under siege by American forces. I’m alternating between scribbling brief observations in my notebook and taking photographs of the wounded and dying women and children being brought into the clinic.

A woman suddenly arrives, slapping her chest and face in grief, wailing hysterically as her husband carries in the limp body of their little boy. Blood is trickling down one of his dangling arms. In a few minutes, he’ll be dead. This sort of thing happens again and again.

Over and over, I watch speeding cars hop the curb in front of this dirty clinic with next to no medical resources and screech to a halt. Grief-stricken family members pour out, carrying bloodied relatives—women and children—gunned down by American snipers.

Continue Reading »

Politics | Mother Jones

Living with No Future in Today"s Iraq

Living with No Future in Today"s Iraq

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Back then, everybody was writing about Iraq, but it’s surprising how few Americans, including reporters, paid much attention to the suffering of Iraqis. Today, Iraq is in the news again. The words, the memorials, the retrospectives are pouring out, and again the suffering of Iraqis isn’t what’s on anyone’s mind. This was why I returned to that country before the recent 10th anniversary of the Bush administration’s invasion and why I feel compelled to write a few grim words about Iraqis today.

But let’s start with then. It’s April 8, 2004, to be exact, and I’m inside a makeshift medical center in the heart of Fallujah while that predominantly Sunni city is under siege by American forces. I’m alternating between scribbling brief observations in my notebook and taking photographs of the wounded and dying women and children being brought into the clinic.

A woman suddenly arrives, slapping her chest and face in grief, wailing hysterically as her husband carries in the limp body of their little boy. Blood is trickling down one of his dangling arms. In a few minutes, he’ll be dead. This sort of thing happens again and again.

Over and over, I watch speeding cars hop the curb in front of this dirty clinic with next to no medical resources and screech to a halt. Grief-stricken family members pour out, carrying bloodied relatives—women and children—gunned down by American snipers.

Continue Reading »

Politics | Mother Jones

Living with No Future in Today"s Iraq

Living with No Future in Today"s Iraq

Tweet

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Back then, everybody was writing about Iraq, but it’s surprising how few Americans, including reporters, paid much attention to the suffering of Iraqis. Today, Iraq is in the news again. The words, the memorials, the retrospectives are pouring out, and again the suffering of Iraqis isn’t what’s on anyone’s mind. This was why I returned to that country before the recent 10th anniversary of the Bush administration’s invasion and why I feel compelled to write a few grim words about Iraqis today.

But let’s start with then. It’s April 8, 2004, to be exact, and I’m inside a makeshift medical center in the heart of Fallujah while that predominantly Sunni city is under siege by American forces. I’m alternating between scribbling brief observations in my notebook and taking photographs of the wounded and dying women and children being brought into the clinic.

A woman suddenly arrives, slapping her chest and face in grief, wailing hysterically as her husband carries in the limp body of their little boy. Blood is trickling down one of his dangling arms. In a few minutes, he’ll be dead. This sort of thing happens again and again.

Over and over, I watch speeding cars hop the curb in front of this dirty clinic with next to no medical resources and screech to a halt. Grief-stricken family members pour out, carrying bloodied relatives—women and children—gunned down by American snipers.

Continue Reading »

Politics | Mother Jones

Living with No Future in Today"s Iraq

ECB To Set "Fair" Cypriot Standard Of Living Via Capital Controls

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As Europe wakes up to what could be a tumultuous day, Handelsblatt reports that the ECB has decided that, due to the “great danger” of a bank run once they reopen next week, it will enforce capital controls independently of Cypriot (elected) officials. With perhaps a nod towards negotiating some ELA funding for Cypriot banks next week (if the government accepts this ECB-enforced ‘program’), the rather stunning restrictions on people’s private property include:

• Freezing Savings – no time-frame (it’s not your money anymore)


• Make bank transfers dependent on Central Bank approval (a money tzar?)


• Lower ATM withdrawal limits (spend it how we say?)

The capital controls will be designed “so that citizens have access to sufficient cash to go about their lives.” So, there it is, a European Union imposed decision on just how much money each Cypriot can spend per day. Wasn’t it just last week, we were told Europe is fixed?

 

Handelsblatt cites unidentified central bank sources so we wonder whether this is yet another strawman shot across the bow as the Cypriot government heads in for an early start of discussions at 10am (GMT)

Zero Hedge

ECB To Set "Fair" Cypriot Standard Of Living Via Capital Controls

Every Living American can be Arrested Right Now for Felony Possession of Drugs Made in their Own Brains

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SHADE the Motion Picture – An Ambellas & Bermas Film — Watch NEW Trailer 3

By Mike Adams
Natural News
February 18, 2013

If you are reading this, you are guilty of felony possession of a Schedule I controlled substance.

This is not a joke.

You, like everyone else who is alive and breathing, can be arrested right now by the U.S. federal government, charged with felony possession, then proven “guilty” of that possession because you do possess a Schedule I substance in your own brain.

What substance is that? Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, sometimes called the “spirit molecule” because of its ability to allow humans to transcend states of consciousness.

U.S. federal code, defines Schedule I drugs as: “Unless specifically excepted or unless listed in another schedule, any material, compound, mixture, or preparation, which contains any quantity of the following hallucinogenic substances:”

(1) 3,4-methylenedioxy amphetamine.
(2) 5-methoxy-3,4-methylenedioxy amphetamine.
(3) 3,4,5-trimethoxy amphetamine.
(4) Bufotenine.
(5) Diethyltryptamine.
(6) Dimethyltryptamine. (DMT)
(7) 4-methyl-2,5-diamethoxyamphetamine.
(8) Ibogaine.
(9) Lysergic acid diethylamide.
(10) Marihuana.
(11) Mescaline.
(12) Peyote.
(13) N-ethyl-3-piperidyl benzilate.
(14) N-methyl-3-piperidyl benzilate.
(15) Psilocybin.
(16) Psilocyn.
(17) Tetrahydrocannabinols.

You are a criminal drug manufacturer

What’s the big deal about this, you say? Well, for starters, DMT is manufactured inside your own brain. As explained by Scientific American:

DMT is the only psychedelic known to occur naturally in the human body. In 1972, the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health discovered DMT in human brain tissue.

Under existing federal law, you not only possess a Schedule I controlled substance, you manufacture it!

Thus, under existing federal law, you can be arrested at any time and charged with felony drug possession.

But wait, it gets even crazier

It turns out you not only manufacture DMT in your brain, by the way. You also cultivate this illegal drug in your own yard.

Yep, DMT is also found in blades of grass, meaning that when you water your law, you are actively cultivating an entire yard of a Schedule I controlled substance.

If you think the government arresting people for growing home gardens on their lawn is bad, just wait until the DEA starts conducting armed drug raids on homeowners with nice lawns. “Freeze! You’re under arrest for felony drug possession!” “But I was just mowing my lawn…” “You mean your DMT FACTORY, slave scum?”

DMT, a neurochemical similar to serotonin, is also manufactured in the brains of cats and other animals. This means that if you breed cats and sell them, you are a drug dealer under U.S. law.

Why this matters

All chemicals in existence are made of the same stuff: elements like hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and so on.

Drug control laws state that a certain arrangement of these elements into a molecule makes that molecule criminal. An “illegal” molecule, however, may have all the same elements of a “legal” molecule, just strung together in a different pattern.

Here’s the molecular map of a “legal” serotonin molecule:

And here’s the molecular map of a “criminal” DMT molecule:

Note that both molecules are very similar and actually made of the same basic stuff (elements). The only thing different is the arrangement of the molecular bonds.

When a government outlaws certain molecules, it is essentially criminalizing the order and arrangement of elements which are, by themselves, completely legal.

This brings up a very important legal argument: Can anyone really criminalize the arrangement of elements which are individually considered perfectly legal?

In other words, if nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon are considered legal, how can it be criminal to merely arrange them in certain formations?

Patents on molecules

In addition to the legal issues state above, intellectual property (patent) laws state that certain arrangements of elements are the monopoly property of corporations such as drug companies.

Under patent laws, arranging nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and other elements into particular structures makes you a thief!

But philosophically, what have you stolen? Nothing! The elements already exist, and all possible combinations of all elements already exist as probabilities or permutations.

To arrange elements in specific ways cannot possibly be “stealing” something, as these are the fundamental building blocks of the universe brought into existence by the Creator for the very purpose ofmaking something.

Governments criminalize fundamental functions of life

Both of these ideas — that arrangements of elements can be made criminal or be granted monopoly protection — are absurd. Elements are the building blocks of matter, and the rearrangement of those elements is absolutely essential to all life. In fact, the very foundation of biological life is the continuous rearrangement of elements through digestion, cellular metabolism, tissue repair and even cognition.

The human body creates elements that the U.S. government says are “criminal.” (DMT, for example.) The human body also creates chemical structures that the U.S. patent office claims are the monopoly property of corporations (gene patenting, for example).

These are both earmarks of a suffocatingly un-free society that has managed to criminalize and control the very building blocks of all matter in the known universe.

In a truly free society, no molecules should ever be criminalized or monopolized. The very idea of patenting genes or molecules is, well, patently absurd. The idea that a plant or a substance can be “criminal” in nature — even when it comes straight from nature — is certifiably insane.

Government’s laws on drugs are artificial constructs… delusional boundaries put in place by delusional, power-hungry bureaucrats who are ultimately trying to separate humanity from its true nature.

In the universe as we know it, there is no universal law “criminalizing” certain arrangements of molecules. That is purely an artificial human construct.

But why, you ask, are such criminalization constructs put into place?

The answer, for DMT at least, is because DMT is the one molecule that allows human consciousness to transcend the mundane and experience a vastly greater experience of reality. Or at least that’s what I’m told.

I’ve never ingested DMT or any other illegal drug, but reports on DMT from those who have experienced it are mind-boggling.

To learn more, you really need to watch this film called The Spirit Molecule, featuring Joe Rogan, Graham Hancock, Dr. Christian Meuli and others:
www.thespiritmolecule.com

The (really) shocking conclusion to all this

This is not the place to lay out the full story on DMT, but based on my own academic research on this subject, I believe DMT has been made illegal in order to suppress human consciousness.

You know how there’s a lot of talk about humanity having a “mass awakening” and maturing to a new consciousness? DMT seems to be the molecule that can initiate that. And so it is suppressed for the same reason fluoride is added to the water: to numb your mind and keep you stupid.

Think about it: Why is a molecule that can expand consciousness such a threat to the government that it must criminalize that molecule and imprison those who attempt to produce it, possess it or use it?

Here are some interesting resources to check out in your search for answers to this question:

DMT: The Spirit Molecule (the book)
http://www.amazon.com/DMT-Molecule-Revolutionary-Near-Death-Experienc…

DMT research volunteers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAMnBuZdYjs

Joe Rogan talks about DMT: (video, explicit)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZXIGxF_ASA

Terence McKenna interview on DMT (compilation video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSsG2sDL1Gg

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Every Living American can be Arrested Right Now for Felony Possession of Drugs Made in their Own Brains