By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Meet the new global elite. They're pretty much the same as the old global elite, only richer and more smug.
Laura Flanders of GritTV interviews business reporter Chrystia Freeland about her cover story in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly on the new ruling class. She says that today's ultra-rich are more likely to have earned their fortunes in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street than previous generations of plutocrats, who were more likely to have inherited money or established companies.
As a result, she argues, today's global aristocracy believes itself to be the product of a meritocracy. The old sense of noblesse oblige among the ultra-rich is giving way to the attitude that if the ultra-rich could do it, everyone else should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Ironically, Freeland points out that many of the new elite got rich from government bailouts of their failed banks. It's unclear why this counts as earning one's fortune, or what kind of meritocracy reserves its most lavish rewards for its most spectacular failures.
Class warfare on public sector pensions
In The Nation, Eric Alterman assails the Republican-controlled Congress's decision to scrap the popular and effective Build America Bonds program as an act of little-noticed class warfare:
These bonds, which make up roughly 20 percent of all new debt sold by states and local governments because of a federal subsidy equivalent to some 35 percent of interest costs, ended on December 31, as Republicans proved unwilling even to consider renewing them. The death of the program could prove devastating to states' future borrowing.
Alterman notes that the states could face up to $130 billion shortfall next year. States can't deficit spend like the federal government, which made the Build America Bonds program a lifeline to the states.
According to Alterman, Republicans want the states to run out of money so that they will be unable to pay the pensions of public sector workers. He notes that Reps. Devin Nunes (R-CA), Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) are also co-sponsoring a bill to force state and local governments to "recalculate" their pension obligations to public sector workers.
Divide and conquer
Kari Lydersen of Working In These Times explains how conservatives use misleading statistics to pit private sector workers against their brothers and sisters in the public sector. If the public believes that teachers, firefighters, meter readers and snowplow drivers are parasites, they'll feel more comfortable yanking their pensions out from under them.
Hence the misleading statistic that public sector workers earn $11.90 more per hour than "comparable" private sector workers. However, when you take education and work experience into account, employees of state and local governments typically earn 11% to 12% less than private sector workers with comparable qualifications.
Public sector workers have better benefits plans, but only for as long as governments can afford to keep their contractual obligations.
Who's screwing whom?
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is calling for a sense of perspective on public sector wages and benefits. In AlterNet he argues that the people who are really making a killing in this economy are the ultra-rich, not school teachers and garbage collectors:
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
Signs of hope?
The economic future looks pretty bleak these days. Yes, the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4% from 9.8% in December, but the economy added only 103,000, a far cry from the 300,000 jobs economists say the economy really needs to add to pull the country out its economic doldrums.
Andy Kroll points out in Mother Jones that it will take 20 years to replace the jobs lost in this recession, if current trends continue.
Worse yet, what looks like job growth could actually be chronic unemployment in disguise. The unemployment rate is calculated based on the number of people who are actively looking for work. Kroll worries that the apparent drop in the unemployment rate could simply reflect more people giving up their job searches.
For an counterweight to the doom and gloom, check out Tim Fernholtz's new piece in The American Prospect. He argues that the new unemployment numbers are among several hopeful signs for economic recovery in 2011. However, he stresses that his self-proclaimed rosy forecast is contingent upon avoiding several huge pitfalls, including drastic cuts in public spending.
With the GOP in Congress seemingly determined to starve the states for cash, the future might not be so rosy after all.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Yes, the GOP’s new chairman needs to raise money. But his biggest challenge will be rebuilding the ground game, which cost Republicans precious seats last fall.
All but a handful of the 168 members of the Republican National Committee (RNC) wanted Michael Steele out, but the race for GOP chairman still took six ballots. While Wisconsin Chairman Reince Priebus led every round, he won the final one with 97 votes, just 12 more than he needed.
Reince Priebus conducts committee business after being elected chairman of the National Republican Committiee during the RNC Winter Meeting on Jan. 14, 2011. (Photo: Alex Wong / Getty Images)
The candidates largely agreed on the problems of the Steele era and many of the answers, but doubts lingered about every contender. Priebus’ advantage came from early endorsements by some of the committee’s respected figures, including Henry Barbour and Alec Poitevint, the national committeemen from Mississippi and Georgia, respectively. Enough committee members concluded if Reince was good enough for Henry and Alec, he was good enough for them.
Now comes the much harder part. The RNC is not just broke: it’s deeply in debt and reportedly without enough money to make payroll when the balloting began last Friday. The RNC has seen a nearly $50 million swing from almost $25 million in the bank when Steele became chairman to more than $21 million in the red when he left. The GOP HQ is likely to see checks roll in this week from donors grateful Steele is out, but it’s hard to raise money to pay off debt.
Priebus has told GOP insiders he understands the RNC’s grave financial position and will work the problem from both ends. He’s already fired Steele’s picks to run the 2012 Tampa Republican Convention. They were hired and dispatched to Florida last summer, more than a year before is customary, and immediately began running up big housing bills and other expenses. Priebus has also begun an extensive outreach to the GOP’s fundraising pooh-bahs to explain there’s a new fiscal regime in place. No more bloated entourages, sweetheart deals, and lack of financial oversight.
Priebus has begun an extensive outreach to the GOP’s fundraising poobahs to explain there’s a new fiscal regime in place. No more bloated entourages, sweetheart deals, and lack of financial oversight.
Despite Chairman Steele’s gaffes and financial shenanigans (like the big bar tab at a lesbian bar in L.A.), the RNC has seen healthy increases in direct mail and Internet giving. But this wasn’t matched by a growing total of larger gifts of up to $30,400, the limit for what the Republican and Democratic National Committees can accept. Steele didn’t do what a national chairman is supposed to do: spend lots of time on the phone begging.
Successful party chairmen spend half of their life on the phone or visiting major donors, making the case for checks from them and others in their rolodexes. This wasn’t Steele’s style. It will have to be Priebus’ style—and the major proven fundraiser he recruits as RNC finance chairman. There’s nowhere to go but up. Steele once tried to recruit a candidate for the finance job by promising to give a speech wherever the prospect wanted him to go. The guy turned Steele down, believing that if the chairman thought his making speeches was what made the cash register ring, Steele didn’t understand fundraising.
Then there’s the RNC’s political role. The good news for the quiet, almost shy but personable new chairman is he doesn’t have to do a lot of television. There is a phalanx of presidential candidates and congressional leaders to take on that task. He must focus on rebuilding the party’s once-vaunted ground-game operations handling voter identification, registration, and get-out-the-vote (GOTV).
The “72-Hour” or “Victory” program depends on volunteers drawn from local and state party committees and candidate campaigns. But only the RNC can provide the direction, training, technology, and metrics to guide these massive efforts. And the RNC’s cash flow is necessary to top off state party budgets in battleground states. Coming from Wisconsin, a place with a strong tradition of grassroots GOTV activity, Priebus knows all this is essential.
The GOP lost dozens of close contests in 2010 because the RNC provided only a fraction of the funding for “Victory” efforts that it has in years past. From more than half a dozen congressional races to gubernatorial contests in Vermont and Connecticut to Senate races in Nevada and Colorado, the RNC was virtually AWOL on get-out-the-vote efforts.
Restoring the RNC’s effectiveness requires time, discipline, leadership, and money. The new Republican national chairman has time and appears to have the needed discipline. Whether he gets the job done will depend on his leadership and fundraising.
Those on the RNC who know the new chairman think Reince is up for the big job. Lots of 2012 Republican hopefuls up and down the ballot hope that’s true. Count me as one. I made my contribution today online. Talk about change bringing hope.
Karl Rove served as senior advisor and deputy chief of staff to former President George W. Bush until 2007.
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Source:http://removeripoffreports.net/
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