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Three graphs from Krugman
Exhibit 1 is “deep poverty”, people living below 50 percent of the poverty line:
Exhibit 2 is real income of non-elderly households:
And Exhibit 3 is employment-based health insurance, whose decline has luckily been offset by public provision:
Things were getting worse for lots of Americans even before the slump. Now they’re getting worse faster.
via Paul Krugman
(via sarahlee310)
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'That was my brother's death you were cheering for'
When he had a pain in the butt, he had to wait until early in the morning of December 3rd to present himself at the ER of Highland Hospital, the Alameda County medical facility. There are guards at Highland, and a football field full of plastic chairs for the indigent to use while they wait treatment. He was sent home with a handful of Vicodin and a suggestion to follow up with a pulmonologist for the 3 cm spot the Xray showed on his lung. The soonest appointment was Feb 25.
He was in so much pain that he could not stand up for more than a few seconds at a time. He got Vicodin. And steroid suppositories.
His buddies came up with the $2000 a proctologist wanted to do an outpatient surgery. But the hospital wanted $20,000 for use of the room for the brief procedure because he was uninsured. Because the pain didn’t matter half as much as the profit.
For six weeks he suffered at home. You bastards, you would have liked to watch that, wouldn’t you? Too bad there were no cameras to catch him as he collapsed when he tried to microwave his oatmeal. No microphones to catch his cries of pain or despair.
He was finally admitted to Highland after his heart started to fail in the emergency room one night early in February. The staff there are dedicated, caring, compassionate people who work their hearts out trying to save the sickest and poorest Americans. They have only limited resources with which to do that. And they make every one of those resources count.
By then, of course, the cancer from his lung had spread to his buttock where it attacked the bone. It wrapped itself into the nerves that travelled up his spine. The pain was indescribable. Perhaps his medical records could serve as pornography to sate your sick lust for the pain of others…
I cannot, for the life of me fathom why he is only ashes today and you are walking this earth.
But then, I am not the hero my brother was. He would have forgiven you. He would have understood the source of your fear that caused those cheers. I don’t want to.
I think you are scum.
Just to remind you that this isn’t hyperbole, the below is an actual exchange from the GOP Presidential debate:
BLITZER: A healthy 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, you know what? I’m not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I’m healthy, I don’t need it. But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it.
Who’s going to pay if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that…
PAUL: That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks…
BLITZER: Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?
AUDIENCE: Yeah!
This is a country of sick, disturbing human beings. We cheer putting hundreds of people to death and letting millions more suffer due to lack of health insurance. What kind of twisted people think this is stuff worth cheering over?
Tea bagger republicans, that’s who.
This is so sad and we call ourselves humans.
(via sarahlee310)
Posted on September 15, 2011 via Tumble DC 25 with 361 notes
Source: jonathan-cunningham
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One of the main tenets of capitalism is that it allegedly creates competition, giving consumers higher quality and lower costs. But when competition drops from 37 national banks to 4, that “consumer wins out in the end” theory goes right out the window.
But don’t even think of regulating the banks!
(via ryking)
Posted on September 9, 2011 via The New Republic with 679 notes
Source: thenewrepublic
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Here’s why I find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join.
Andrew Sullivan on the debate crowd’s positive response to the large number of executions that Perry resided over while governor of Texas. (via liberal-life)
THIS!
(via sarahlee310)
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Serfs up: how coddling the rich is destroying the American dream
In 1947, the income of one wealthy person at the 95th percentile was enough to purchase the annual labor of just over five people living at the 20th percentile. For the next 34 years, that relationship stayed almost the same. However, in the 25 years that followed the relationship altered much more radically. Now the income of one person at the 95th percentile is enough to buy the work of more than seven people at the 20th percentile. Relative to the poor, the wealthy are far more wealthy. And relative to those at the top, both the poor and the middle class are far worse off than they were 25 years ago.
For the wealthy, when taxes were relatively high they could see that their interests were best served by making more investments in their business and providing the kind of benefits and training that gave them a long term edge. The only way to do well was by participating successfully in the market, and often doing well also required doing good. There’s no doubt about it, capitalism is driven by enlightened self interest, but the form of enlightenment varies wildly with the limits that society imposes. In a well governed economy, regulations and taxes exist that place responsibilities to community, employees, and the environment on par with those of shareholders and executives. In this kind of system, corporate officers and owners will see that they can build more value for themselves by building for the long term, by placing value in their employees, by sharing benefits and knowledge. An educated, competent workforce is the only way to create the broadly based, durable company needed for those at the top to enjoy the benefits.
However, enlightened self interest can also come in the form of realizing that no one is minding the shop. In such circumstances, it pays to ignore the community, ignore the workers, ignore the rules. When short term gain offers a better return than virtuous participation in the marketplace, enlightenment says “screw it, I’ll take mine now, thank you.” That’s what happened when deregulation of the savings and loans generated a crisis in the 1980s. It’s what built the unsustainable bubble that popped in 2008. And it’s what we’ve been doing to the broader economy since 1982. We’ve deregulated wealth; removed the incentives that made it reasonable for those who had much to invest in those who had little. We screwed up. When taxes drop so far that they cease to be a consideration, the best move is to simply grab all the money while it’s available. Why tempt fate in the marketplace, why risk unforeseen circumstances, why do all that boring old work if you can simply pocket the profits and run?
The current system provides no incentive to build companies and systems that can stand the test of time, companies built around valuable and educated workers who have a stake in the success of the company, community, and society. We’ve built a system that’s tottering on the edge of terminal instability, and those calling for still lower taxes are likely to knock out the last supports holding up the floor.
As it turns out, Ronald Reagan really did stage a second American revolution; a revolution that reversed the original. Because removing any pressure on income at the very top removed the only obstacle to what we have today—a system that inches ever closer to feudalism.
Posted on September 5, 2011 via Our Common Good with 41 notes
Source: sarahlee310
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[The rich] want immortality. They want so much money that their names are all, for prestige they could never get any other way, they could buy with endless money. Because what else could you possibly want? That you would say ‘I want this at the expense of the middle class, of our democracy, of fairness, of clean air, clean water, food safety, public education and the rest of it, clean air, clean water, food safety, reform on Wall Street, protection for citizens, you name it, forget about it. They are de-funding every initiative in that regard, you wonder, do their children breathe air, do they drink water, why do they not care? But they don’t. But they don’t.
[…] When we won the election in 06′, and we came in, the first day, in the first 100 hours we raised the minimum wage. It was the first time the minimum wage was raised in eleven years. I bring that up for this reason, it wasn’t kept down because people just, you know, small businesses said ‘I can’t afford”, it was kept down for a purpose, it was kept down for the purpose that people would not be able to live on that, they’d have to borrow, against home equity loans, against their mortgages, their this and that, they’d have to live on credit cards, and what are they doing when they do that, their paying fees to the banks, their paying fees to them, so it’s a contrived dependence on private credit for millions, tens of millions of working people in our country, and who they are is who they bring to that table, protect the tax breaks for the wealthiest people in our country, do not allow wages to rise with productivity, keep people dependent on paying fees to banks for the use of their own money, for the use of their own money.Nancy Pelosi, on the class warfare being waged by the wealthy via the GOP. (via ryking)Posted on September 1, 2011 via Alexander Ryking with 10 notes
Source: ryking
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This might disturb you at first, but remember: the free market is always right, so clearly we’ve collectively made a rational choice here. We’ve decided that although our healthcare costs are far higher than in Europe, this is worth it in return for far higher death rates from hospital infections.
USA!
(via sarahlee310)
Posted on September 1, 2011 via Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr with 553 notes
Source: motherjones
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Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator
“Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn’t hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president’s leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress’s penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.
What’s costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn’t a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.
What’s costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.
The problem is not that his record is being distorted. It’s that all three have more than a grain of truth. And I say this not as one of those pesky “leftists.” I say this as someone who has spent much of the last three years studying what moves voters in the middle, the Undecideds who will hear whichever side speaks to them with moral clarity.”pretty much all the things i speculated would happen as a new breed of political animal took to the streets with hopeful abandon when obama won.
one of the main problems with the american presidency, the office, not any specific one, is that it isolates the president from the people who elected him (i’d normally write him/her, but lets not go crazy now, overarching misogyny in this country will not let this happen anytime soon).The institutionalized barriers confine the president into daily meetings with only those who hold the reins of power. This of course furthers their hold on power and can do nothing but breed apathy and disillusionment in those seeking better/different options.
