Friday, April 19, 2013
Saturday, April 13, 2013
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
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
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
Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality
Friday, April 5, 2013
What Does the Worst-case Scenario of a Cyberattack on the United States by Another State or by Terrorists Look Like?
Cyber weapons are different from conventional weapons in that their effects do not directly manifest themselves in the “real world.” There are three broad categories of potential effects of cyberattacks: personal, economic, and physical.
Department od Defense (DOD)
CFR.org
April 5, 2013
The personal effects of a cyberattack are the invasion of privacy, and associated embarrassment or shame, that a person endures when their personal data is improperly accessed, disclosed, or tampered with. While the nation as a whole does not suffer from the event, the affected individual may feel that the harm is devastating. Such losses are real but not quantifiable.
The economic effects of a cyberattack can range widely, from minor acts of fraud, to breaches of corporate computer systems that threaten the company’s survival, to the large costs associated with expensive cybersecurity systems. In economic terms, the worst-case scenario would be a cyberattack that triggers or accelerates a liquidity crisis among systemically important financial institutions, potentially catalyzing a financial crisis like that of 2008. This has not happened yet, and there is no publicly available evidence that it is about to happen, but the possibility cannot be ruled out.
To date, cyberattacks have rarely resulted in physical damage to people or tangible assets. The principal exception was the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s centrifuge program, which destroyed a few thousand centrifuges. There is no question that offensive information operations will be a feature of future major conflicts between major states.
But how bad could the worst case be? Given the extremity of the possibilities, the answers to this question are more likely to come from Hollywood than CFR. Indeed, technology gone wrong has been one of the great themes of science fiction, starting perhaps with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. For a more recent depiction of a truly worst-case cyberattack, see James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator and its dystopian sequels.
Intellihub.com
What Does the Worst-case Scenario of a Cyberattack on the United States by Another State or by Terrorists Look Like?
Monday, March 25, 2013
Merkel"s Vision: "United States of Germany"
Following brutal negotiations with EU finance ministers, the IMF and various European government officials, Cyprus finally agreed to measures that her highness, Angela Merkel would accept.
This time she held her ground. Previously, Merkel compromised every key position she has ever held in the sake of political expediency.
For example, Merkel went twice went to the well on Greece to appease her opponents. She repeatedly caved in on demands from French president Nicolas Sarkozy. She reversed her stand on nuclear energy following German polls.
So why did Merkel drew the line at Cyprus?
To Merkel everything is a play to win the next election and ultimately to preserve her legacy. She is willing to play hardball now for one reason only. Public opinion is decisively against further bailouts, and anything but exceptionally harsh terms on Cyprus would hurt her election chances in September.
She fears the rise of the eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party and the best way to take some wind out of the AfD sails is to show she cares about austerity.
Merkel’s Vision
Merkel’s vision is not a United States of Europe. Rather, Merkel’s vision is for a “United States of Germany”.
In this light, every move she has made makes perfect “political” sense, solidarity be damned.
That Cyprus and Greece were ruined in the process is acceptable “collateral damage”. If Spain is not careful, it will become the next “collateral damage”.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis
Merkel"s Vision: "United States of Germany"
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Who Is The Most Active User Of Drones Over The United States?
At this point everyone in the world knows what a drone is: some have been bombarded by one, others, thousands of miles away, have done the bombardment, and everyone else is split whether or not this remote-controlled form of international retribution and global Pax Americna should be allowed over the territory of the US – either for purely peaceful, or outright military, as was the case with the Chris Dorner manhunt, purposes. And as with most issues that polarize US society, the approach is one of form opinion first, and investigate the underlying facts later.
To that end on Friday, the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, issued testimony on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS, or also Drones), titled “Continued Coordination, Operational Data, and Performance Standards Needed to Guide Research and Development” which while full of largely useless information, does have an informative section detailing which entities received Certificates of Waiver or Authorization (COA) or said otherwise “permissions to drone” for a period , from the FAA, which is the ultimate authority granting UAS flyovers in the US. Among the agencies seeking and being granted such permissions are all domestic military; public (academic institutions, federal, state, and local governments including law enforcement organizations); and civil (private sector entities).
So which entity engaged most actively in US-based droning in 2012? It will come as no surprise that of the 391 COAs issued in the past year, the Department of Defense accounted for 201 or, well over half of all authorized droning operations. One can rest assured that America is truly well defended, if mostly from enemies domestic.
The GAO’s take on this:
Currently, FAA authorizes all domestic military; public (academic institutions, federal, state, and local governments including law enforcement organizations); and civil (private sector entities) UAS operations on a limited basis after conducting a case-by-case safety review. Federal, state, and local government agencies must apply for Certificates of Waiver or Authorization (COA), while civil operators must apply for special airworthiness certificates in the experimental category. Because special airworthiness certificates do not allow commercial operations, there is currently no means for FAA to authorize commercial UAS operations.
Since FAA started issuing COAs in January 2007, 1,428 COAs have been issued. At present, under COA or special airworthiness certification, UAS operations are permitted for specific time frames (generally 12 to 24 months); locations; and operations. So, one agency can be issued multiple COAs to operate one UAS for the same purpose. In 2012, FAA issued 391 COAs to 121 federal, state, and local government entities across the United States, including law enforcement entities as well as academic institutions (see fig. 2).
According to an industry forecast, the market for government and commercial use of UAS is expected to grow, with small UAS having the greatest growth potential. This forecast estimates that the worldwide UAS market could be potentially worth $ 89 billion over the next decade. The majority of this estimate is for military-type products (primarily the U.S. military) with the associated research and development for production estimated to be $ 28.5 billion over the next 10 years. As smaller UAS are expected to continue to improve in technology and decrease in price, their prevalence in the national airspace is expected to increase. The forecast also indicates that the United States could account for 62 percent of the world’s research and development investment for UAS technology over the coming decade.
For those not quite up to speed on the whole droning thing, here is a simplified chart explaining it all:
Finally, the risk factors read like a point by point challenge to either every black hat hacker out there, or Iran, whichever responds first.
Command, Control and Communication Systems
Ensuring uninterrupted command and control for both small and large UAS remains a key obstacle for safe and routine integration into the national airspace. Since UAS fly based on pre-programmed flight paths and by commands from a pilot-operated ground control station, the ability to maintain the integrity of command and control signals are critically important to ensure that the UAS operates as expected and as intended.
Lost Link
In a “lost link” scenario, the command and control link between the UAS and the ground control station is broken because of either environmental or technological issues, which could lead to loss of control of the UAS. To address this type of situation, UAS generally have pre-programmed maneuvers that may direct the UAS to hover or circle in the airspace for a certain period of time to reestablish its radio link. If the link is not reestablished, then the UAS will return to “home” or the location from which it was launched, or execute an intentional flight termination at its current location. It is important that air traffic controllers know where and how all aircraft are operating so they can ensure the safe separation of aircraft in their airspace.18 FAA and MITRE have been measuring the impacts of lost link on national airspace safety and efficiency, but the standardization of lost link procedures, for both small and large UAS, has not been finalized. Currently, according to FAA, each COA has a specific lost link procedure unique to that particular operation and air traffic controllers should have a copy for reference at all times. Until procedures for a lost link scenario have been standardized across all types of UAS, air traffic controllers must rely on the lost link procedures established in each COA to know what a particular UAS will do in such a scenario.
Dedicated Radio-Frequency Spectrum
Progress has been made in obtaining additional dedicated radio-frequency spectrum for UAS operations, but additional dedicated spectrum, including satellite spectrum, is still needed to ensure secure and continuous communications for both small and large UAS operations. The lack of protected radio-frequency spectrum for UAS operations heightens the possibility that a pilot could lose command and control of a UAS. Unlike manned aircraft—which use dedicated, protected radio frequencies—UAS currently use unprotected radio spectrum and, like any other wireless technology, remain vulnerable to unintentional or intentional interference. This remains a key security and safety vulnerability because, in contrast to a manned aircraft in which the pilot has direct physical control of the aircraft, interruption of radio transmissions can sever the UAS’s only means of control. UAS stakeholders are working to develop and validate hardware and standards for communications operating in allocated spectrum. For example, FAA’s UAS Research Management Plan identified 13 activities designed to mitigate command, control, and communication obstacles. One effort focused on characterizing the capacity and performance impact of UAS operations on air-traffic-control communications systems. In addition, according to NASA, it is developing, in conjunction with Rockwell Collins, a prototype radio for control and a non-payload communications data link that would provide secure communications.
GPS Jamming and Spoofing
The jamming of the GPS signal being transmitted to the UAS could also interrupt the command and control of UAS operations. In a GPS jamming scenario, the UAS could potentially lose its ability to determine its location, altitude, and the direction in which it is traveling.19 Low cost devices that jam GPS signals are prevalent. According to one industry expert, GPS jamming would become a larger problem if GPS is the only method for navigating a UAS. This problem can be mitigated by having a second or redundant navigation system onboard the UAS that is not reliant on GPS, which is the case with larger UAS typically operated by DOD and DHS.
Encrypting civil GPS signals could make it more difficult to “spoof” or counterfeit a GPS signal that could interfere with the navigation of a UAS. Non-military GPS signals, unlike military GPS signals, are not encrypted and transparency and predictability make them vulnerable to being counterfeited, or spoofed. In a GPS-spoofing scenario, the GPS signal going from the ground control station to the UAS is first counterfeited and then overpowered. Once the authentic (original) GPS signal is overpowered, the UAS is partially under the control of the “spoofer.” This type of scenario was recently demonstrated by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin at the behest of DHS. During the demonstration at the White Sands Missile Range, researchers spoofed one element of the unencrypted GPS signal of a fairly sophisticated small UAS (mini-helicopter) and induced it to plummet toward the desert floor. The research team found that it was straightforward to mount an intermediate-level spoofing attack, such as controlling the altitude of the UAS, but difficult and expensive to mount a more sophisticated attack. The research team recommended that spoof-resistant navigation systems be required on UAS exceeding 18 pounds.
Human Factors
UAS stakeholders have been working to develop solutions to human factor issues for both small and large UAS. According to FAA, human factors research examines the interaction between people, machines, and the environment to improve performance and reduce errors. Human factors are important for UAS operations as the pilot and aircraft are not collocated. The separation of pilot and aircraft creates a number of issues, including loss of sensory cues valuable for flight control, delays in control and communications loops, and difficulty in scanning the visual environment surrounding the unmanned aircraft. As part of its UAS Integration in the National Airspace System Project, NASA is working to develop human factor guidelines for ground control stations and plans to share the results with RTCA SC-203 to inform recommended guidelines. In addition, the Department of the Army is working to develop universal ground control stations, which would allow UAS pilots to fly different types of UAS without having to be trained on multiple configurations of a ground control station.
Source: GAO
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Who Is The Most Active User Of Drones Over The United States?