Kate Randall, wsws.org

Nearly 50 million people are living in poverty in the United States. This was the dire news delivered eight days after the presidential election in a report from the US Census Bureau.

The new report’s findings—which factor in expenses and government-provided benefits, providing a more accurate picture of US poverty—are a damning indictment of American capitalism. Based on data from 2011, three full years into Obama’s first term, the report is also a commentary on the reactionary character of the administration and its response to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The shocking news that nearly one in six Americans is living in poverty prompted virtually no comment on network or cable news broadcasts. It was met with silence in Washington, where Democratic and Republican politicians are conspiring to implement draconian cuts to social programs that will throw millions more into the ranks of the poor.

Barack Obama has made a practice of all but excluding the word “poverty” from his political vocabulary, and his first post-election press conference, held the same day as the release of the Census report, was no exception. He felt no need to note the dire growth of poverty as he set the stage for negotiations with the Republicans over a multitrillion-dollar austerity package that will savage basic social entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

The sharp growth of poverty, homelessness and hunger in America over the past four years is the result not simply of purely economic forces. It is above all the result of a calculated drive to utilize the crisis to lay siege to the living standards and democratic rights of the working class.

Obama’s first term was devoted to protecting and expanding the wealth of the financial-corporate oligarchy at the expense of the vast majority of the population. His second term will be focused on carrying through a historic retrogression, in which all of the gains won by the working class over a century of struggle are to be reversed.

The multitrillion-dollar bailout of the banks on the one side, and the attack on wages, pensions, health care and working conditions on the other—inaugurated by Obama’s wage-cutting restructuring of the auto industry—are to be intensified and combined with an assault on what remains of social welfare programs.

The most significant finding of the Census report is the sharp growth in the ranks of the working poor. The report takes as its starting point the 144 million people who worked full- or part-time year-round in 2011. Some 9.4 percent of these workers—an estimated 13.6 million people—were living in poverty according to the official poverty threshold (which is absurdly low and dramatically underestimates the real number).

Of the 97 million workers working full-time, 5.1 percent—or about 5 million people—lived in poverty. The poverty rate among the estimated 46.7 million part-time workers was a staggering 18.5 percent—or about 8.6 million people.

According to the Census Bureau, more than a quarter of those living in poverty had a job. But they earned so little—either due to low wages, scant work hours or a combination of both—that even if they were able to qualify for some sort of government benefits, they still subsisted below the poverty line.

For those without jobs, the situation was even grimmer. Of these, fully a third were living in poverty. And with the agreement of Obama and Congress, federally funded extended unemployment benefits are set to expire in January, depriving 2 million jobless workers of cash assistance and plunging even more households into poverty.

The Obama administration has implemented no policies to provide jobs for the unemployed or alleviate the suffering of millions of workers, young people and seniors that is brought into focus by the Census report. No measures have been implemented in the wake of the Wall Street crash and economic slump to provide relief to those who have lost jobs, gone into foreclosure or struggled under the weight of medical bills or massive college debt.

Meanwhile, the rich have grown richer and social inequality has soared.

The new poverty statistics should serve as a stark warning. The mythical “American dream” has become a social nightmare. And this is only the beginning. It is not a temporary change. This—poverty wages and brutal exploitation—is the “new normal” under the profit system and the political domination of two parties controlled by the financial aristocracy.

Decent jobs and living standards are incompatible with the “free market” system routinely eulogized by Obama and defended by both parties. The fight for jobs, decent wages, education, health care and housing is a fight against the capitalist system and all of its political defenders. The urgent issue facing working people and youth is the building of an independent mass socialist movement to fight for a workers’ government and the socialist reorganization of economic life.

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Kate Randall is a sociopolitical analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

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By Pat Garofalo, ThinkProgress.org

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein

Lloyd Blankfein — evidently taking a break from doing “god’s work” as the CEO of Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs — told CBS News’ Scott Pelley that he believes the retirement age needs to be raised because “in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained“:

BLANKFEIN: You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations — the entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to — they’re not going to get it.

PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?

BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. … So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

PELLEY: Because we can’t afford them going forward?

BLANKFEIN: Because we can’t afford them.

Maybe working until a later age is fine for a Wall Street CEO whose net worth is $450 million. But it’s simply nonsense to assert that the retirement age needs to go up because Social Security is no longer affordable.

For starters, Social Security can pay full benefits for decades without any changes at all. (Imagine the accolades that would received if any other federal program had guaranteed funding for that stretch of time.) One simple change, raising the cap on the payroll tax, can guarantee that the program will pay nearly full benefits for three-quarters of a century. In the meantime,

Social Security is statutorily barred from adding one dime to the federal deficit, so cutting it doesn’t change the nation’s deficit or debt picture.

Raising the retirement age, meanwhile, adversely impacts those workers most in need of a robust social safety net. While a year or two of extra work may not seem like much to a Wall Street CEO with his cushy corner office, for a factory worker or janitor, it can mean real problems. Life expectancy is only increasing for wealthier workers in non-physical jobs. Poorer workers doing physical labor have not seen the same gains. Overall, raising the retirement age to 70 would “cut benefits for the average retiree by 19 percent.”

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ROARMAG.org presents: ‘Utopia on the Horizon’, a documentary for those who chose to struggle.

In May 2011, hundreds of thousands of Greeks swarmed into Syntagma Square in Athens to protest against the firesale of their country, their labor rights and their livelihoods to corrupt domestic elites and foreign financial interests.

In a matter of days, a protest camp was set up — organized on the principles of direct democracy, leaderless self-management and mutual aid — providing a glimpse of utopia in the midst of a devastating financial, political and social crisis. On June 28-29, during a Parliamentary vote on further austerity measures, the state finally responded with brutal force, eventually evicting the protesters from the square and crushing the radical potential of their social experiment.

A year later, Leonidas Oikonomakis and Jérôme Roos — PhD researchers at the European University Institute and co-authors of the activist blog ROARMAG.org — returned to Athens to speak to activists involved in the movement and the occupation of Syntagma Square, as well as WWII resistance hero Manolis Glezos. What follows is this dramatic portrait of a country veering on the brink of collapse; and the people who chose to struggle in order to build a new world on the ruins of the old.

Credits—

“UTOPIA ON THE HORIZON”

MADE POSSIBLE BY:
Syntagma Multimedia Team

CAST:
Maria Kanellopoulou
Dimitris Timpilis
Niki Dimitriadi
Manolis Glezos

DIRECTED BY:
Jérôme Roos
Leonidas Oikonomakis

PRODUCED BY:
Jérôme Roos
Andrés Cornejo

EDITED BY:
Andrés Cornejo

SOUND DESIGN BY:
Benjamin Schimpke

MIX AND ADDITIONAL MUSIC:
OddOne Studio

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT:
Tamara Van Der Putten

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE BY:
Syntagma Multimedia Team

SCREENPLAY BY:
Jérôme Roos
Andrés Cornejo
Leonidas Oikonomakis

TRANSLATIONS BY:
Leonidas Oikonomakis
Yorgos Goumas
Maria Pafili
Tamara Van Der Putten
Santiago Carrión
Pedro Noel

MUSIC BY:
Maria Kanellopoulou (soprano) – ‘Astron Ouranion’
Maria Kanellopoulou (soprano) – ‘Pace Pace Mio Dio’
Nikolas Asimos – ‘Den Pa Ma Nas Xrypan’

SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Christos Staikos
Manos Cizek
Geoff Arbourne
Manolis Foinikianakis
Nikolas Leventakis
Boumba Dimitrokali
Felipe Maqui
Gorka Molero
Stavris Chatzivasiliou
Tamara Van Der Putten
Ike Krijnen

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He’s a Big Gas Man

by Joshua Frank, Counterpunch.org
POSTED BY SEAN LENIHAN

Greenhouse gas emissions are hot news these days — especially in the lead up to an election when candidates, at least those who claim to believe in climate science, vow to do something about the biggest environmental crisis facing our little blue planet: climate change.

In early March of this year, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Obama vowed to end $4 billion in Big Oil and Gas subsidies. “You can either stand up for the oil companies, or you can stand up for the American people,” Obama said to an applauding audience. “You can keep subsidizing a fossil fuel that’s been getting taxpayer dollars for a century, or you can place your bets on a clean-energy future.”

That sounds dandy, but ending subsidies to polluters is only half the battle, and Obama’s idea of a “clean-energy future” is tenuous at best. In an attempt to round up the green vote, which he successfully accomplished, President Obama trumpeted his half-hearted attempt to put the breaks on climate change by tapping energy sources here at home and regulating the industry that’s doing most of the damage. Only days after the president announced he was looking to fast-track the southern portion of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, his administration released the first-ever federal standards to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants.

In what’s now become typical Obama fashion, the move was meant to appease environmental critics while at the same time ensure the fossil fuel industry that the so-called New Source Performance Standard would not actually hurt its bottom lines.

Here’s why: the EPA rule would only impact new coal-fired power plants, but only those that break ground in later next year. In all, 15 proposed coal plants in 10 states could be potentially impacted by the rule, even though most are already hung up in court battles. As such, no coal-fired power plants in the United States have broke ground over the past three years and tenacious environmentalists have seen far more victories than defeats when it comes to battling King Coal.

The new greenhouse rule will require fossil fuel-fired electricity generating units to restrict their emissions to 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) per megawatt-hour of electricity produced; a strict standard to be sure, but one that doesn’t come without caveats. All old power plants, some well over 50 years in age, will be exempt entirely from Obama’s greenhouse rule when it comes into effect, despite the fact that these archaic facilities alone account for over 40 percent of carbon emissions in the country. In a nutshell, the biggest coal polluters are being let off the hook altogether.

Five years ago a staggering 151 new coal plants were slated for construction, but with one of the greatest environmental achievements in our history, grassroots activists across the country stopped their development.

Obama is still riding on the coat-tails of these victories, but what’s underlying the greenhouse gas rule is a bit more sinister. As concerns about the impacts of fracking continue to grow, the power plants that burn natural gas extracted through this process of pumping a mix of water, chemicals and sand deep into the earth’s crust, won’t be covered by the rule. Generally, natural gas plants produce less than 900 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. Indeed the limit set by the EPA was not arbitrary; it directly aids and abets the natural gas industry. Obama knows quite well that natural gas is poised to be the fossil fuel of the future and his administration and the EPA are not going to stand in the way of the big boom.

This isn’t to say the effect of natural gas on climate change is benign — far from it. While still producing a large amount of carbon emissions (albeit less than coal), natural gas also spews a whole bunch of methane (natural gas is methane), which is far more potent than CO2 when it comes to the immediate warming of our planet. In fact, it is estimated that methane gas has a global warming potential 25 times that of CO2 (averaged over 100 years). So, in absolute terms, natural gas does contribute substantially to greenhouse gas emissions, and with more production in the works, this contribution is going to grow a lot more in the years to come.

The EPA certainly understands methane is a big contributor to global warming. In an analysis released last year the agency doubled its earlier estimate for the amount of methane that leaks from natural gas wells and pipelines. This leaking is so extensive that it is equal to the annual emissions from over 35 million automobiles. In addition, the EPA reported that the levels of methane release during the fracking of shale gas were actually 9,000 times higher than previously thought.

Methane, unfortunately, is not covered by Obama’s proposed greenhouse gas rule. Perhaps that’s because Obama supports the expansion of natural gas exploration as well as the notion of “safe” fracking — an oxymoron akin to “clean” coal.

“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy,” said President Obama in his last State of the Union address. “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy … it was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock.”

The process Obama is touting is the fracking of natural gas and oil from underground geological formations, like the Marcellus Shale on the East Coast. The procedure has been documented in a draft report by the EPA as causing groundwater pollution in Wyoming, yet fracking remains exempt from the Clean Water Act.

As coal becomes a relic of the past in the U.S., natural gas, with fracking as its main source of extraction, is being set up as the fossil fuel of the future, thanks in large part to Obama’s embrace and the EPA’s blind eye. In 2008 the Obama campaign amassed $884,000 from the oil and gas industry. In 2012 that number topped $2 million.

Often seen as a “bridge fuel” from coal toward renewables, natural gas has not come under the same scrutiny as other fossil fuels. Instead natural gas has been seen as a safer, cleaner burning fuel — an improvement over dirty coal. Hence why the EPA continues to punt on proposing regulations on the industry, as it did for a second at the beginning of last April when it delayed the release of rules for the oil and gas industry. If the EPA caves to the natural gas industry, as it will likely continue to do, the majority of existing fracking wells will be exempt from regulation.

Yet, even if fracking wells begin to receive the regulatory oversight they so gravely deserve, the burning of natural gas is not about to come under intensified scrutiny any time soon. On the contrary, as long as the EPA’s attention remains on curbing coal’s carbon footprint, the natural gas industry is sure to benefit and more methane is sure to seep from the depths of Earth. A recent study by tech billionaire Nathan Myhrvold and climate scientist Ken Caldeira argues that shifting to natural gas “cannot substantially reduce the climate risk in the next 100 years.”

Those fighting the frackers ought to expand their focus from fracking’s immediate dangers, which are very real, to natural gas’ long-term impacts on climate change. Even if fracking were to one day be outlawed, as long as natural gas continues to be burned the planet will continue to heat up. In short, natural gas is not a bridge to renewable energy; it’s a bridge to an even more toxic planet.

Joshua Frank, Managing Editor of CounterPunch, is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, and of Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is now available in Kindle format. He can be reached at brickburner@gmail.com.

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Apparatchiks in a Class War
by ROB URIE

In coming weeks the recently re-elected Barack Obama will propose trimming the vestiges of the New Deal—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, in the decades long effort of bi-partisan Washington to consolidate total control of Western economies in the hands of a corporate plutocracy. The technocratic rationale Mr. Obama will offer is ‘demographics,’ the fact that, class differences aside, people are living longer than we used to. And for the susceptible among us, some misdirection about ‘living beyond our means’ will be added for good measure.

However, people have been living approximately as long as we currently do for several decades now. And the canard that ‘we are living beyond our means’ dates back to the 1960s. What has changed is that the liberal Democrat needed to sell ‘shared’ sacrifice to those on the receiving end of it—labor, the working poor and the poor, has been returned to office to finish the job. Sure Mitt Romney would do the same– there is a long, bi-partisan, history here. But to be clear–this fight is over the allocation of economic resources, not ‘scarcity’ thereof.

When Democrat Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 he did so in the midst of the first ‘jobless recovery’ caused by the massive financial looting of the Savings and Loans and the de-industrialization of America begun in the early 1980s. He ran as a corporatist Democrat under the mantra ‘it’s the economy stupid’ and promised to increase social spending and raise taxes on the wealthy to fund government.

Upon his election Mr. Clinton appointed Goldman Sachs financier Robert Rubin, first to his National Economic Council to coordinate economic policy, and later as Treasury Secretary. It was banker Rubin who ‘discovered’ the national debt ‘crisis’ that required the immediate attention of the Clinton administration. Mr. Clinton promptly abandoned his promise to increase social spending and laid the groundwork for cutting it, or as he put it ‘ending welfare as we know it.’

After Mr. Clinton left office and the budget ‘crisis’ behind, tax rates for the rich and corporations were drastically cut, two phenomenally destructive, expensive and unnecessary wars were undertaken, a massive prescription drug benefit that denies the government the right to negotiate drug prices with drug producers was passed, a corrupt, dysfunctional banking system was bailed out to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars and an infrastructure of domestic surveillance and control was built to ‘prevent’ terrorist attacks that the George W. Bush administration had been fully informed were to be carried out months before they actually were. To state the obvious: the budget ‘crisis’ was not raised to prevent any of these programs from being passed and funded.

As with Bill Clinton’s appointment of Robert Rubin to key economic posts, Barack Obama made his economic agenda known when he created his ‘deficit commission’ and stacked it with know-nothing neo-liberal hack and Morgan Stanley Board member Erskine Bowles and crusty antique Republican Alan Simpson of the public welfare dependent state of Wyoming. The hostility of both men to the social insurance programs now in their purview was a matter of decades-long public records. And in fact, Mr. Bowles had led a Clinton administration effort to ‘privatize’ a portion of Social Security for Wall Street. (The stock market return in the years since that effort was undertaken = 0%).

The coalition to cut social insurance programs runs from true believers who either don’t understand or don’t care about how national accounts work (the U.S. has a fiat currency) to Wall Street insiders who want to earn fees from privatizing Social Security to trans-national plutocrats who want to shift ever more public resources into their own pockets through corporate and individual tax cuts and through ownership and management of private insurance schemes. That a representative of all of these interests—Democrat Erskine Bowles, is Mr. Obama’s ‘lead’ in developing and pushing forward the rationales for cutting social insurance ties Mr. Obama directly to these interests.

Social Security and Medicare are funded with deductions made from the paychecks of working people. (Corporate contributions to these programs are part of the total compensation paid to labor, not the ‘property’ of the corporations). These are insurance programs in significant ways like private insurance, only more efficient and designed to provide a social benefit rather than to enrich insurance executives. Social Security can meet all of its obligations for the next thirty years and most of them thereafter with no changes or cuts to the program. The ‘crisis’ with Medicare is due almost entirely to expected increases in medical costs that a ‘Medicare for all’ healthcare system that has the ability to negotiate prescription drug prices would solve. And by providing pre and post-natal care to the working poor and poor, Medicaid means the difference between first and third world infant mortality rates.

The scare tactics being used to cut social insurance depend on the public’s misunderstanding of several related issues. In the first, the U.S. isn’t ‘broke’ because it can create money as needed—ask yourself: how were the bank bailouts funded? Next: what is an ‘entitlement’ when existing government policy overwhelmingly benefits the rich through favorable tax treatment, cost-plus government contracts, Federal Reserve bailouts and government guarantees of the banks. ‘Free markets’ have nothing to do with how the wealthy became so. The fight over ‘entitlements’ is over how government expenditures are allocated, not over their ‘scarcity.’

Social Security has an income ‘cap’ of $110,000 above which no deduction is made. A billionaire who became rich by sending jobs overseas—by firing and lowering the wages of labor, pays a smaller proportion of his or her income into Social Security than does the worker whose wages have been reduced. And by reducing the wages of labor, workers are left with less to pay in to these social insurance programs through payroll taxes. The problem with Social Security and Medicare is that a small group of connected plutocrats have ‘entitled’ themselves to far more of what labor produces. How often has the deficit ‘crisis’ been raised when there is a war to be fought for multi-national oil companies or a corporate welfare scheme like the bank bailouts to be paid for?

And this all ties back to Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act– if he and his corporate supporters were truly interested in fiscal discipline they would have pushed for far less costly ‘Medicare for all.’ Instead Mr. Obama pursued a deal with private health insurers that includes a ‘profit’ above the cost of a government program. Those wanting to argue the political infeasibility of Medicare for all are now confronted with a ‘liberal’ Democratic President who believes he can cut the programs that most of us have paid into under known terms for decades. If doing this is politically feasible while building a rational public health care system isn’t, we are truly doomed.

Ultimately Mr. Obama, like his ‘opponent’ Mitt Romney, is but an apparatchik in a class war launched by the rich against the rest of us. Left out of the contrived nonsense about an ‘entitlement’ society is who exactly is entitled. Were the government spending the rich live off of under the knife there would be no argument of scarcity—we have the wars, the bailouts and corporate welfare to prove it. But social insurance programs stand between over one hundred million of our citizens and destitution. And these are programs we have collectively paid for—they aren’t a ‘gift’ as the rich and their servants in government would have us believe.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.

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