The Shameful Attack on Public Employees

Image via Wikipedia
Class warfare has been an expertise of the Republican Party for a long time. Since the 60s, Republicans have singled out African Americans with vote suppression,  by requiring photo IDs of all voters knowing that large numbers of blacks born in the rural south have no birth certificate so can't get an ID.
Then Ronald Reagan singled out poor mothers as the "unworthy poor".

Drug laws have been tailored to focus on the minority communities which disproportionately use the cheaper crack, not the suburban power cocaine user.

Now the attack is on public employees, disproportionately women and minority in large urban centers.

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.

It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work - sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees – to call them “faceless bureaucrats” and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican’s Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that’s too big.

Above all, Republicans don’t want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.

But the right’s argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unsupported assertions.

They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That’s untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.

...It’s only average workers – both in the public and the private sectors – who are being called upon to sacrifice.

This is what the current Republican attack on public-sector workers is really all about. Their version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They’d rather set average working people against one another – comparing one group’s modest incomes and benefits with another group’s modest incomes and benefits – than have Americans see that the top 1 percent is now raking in a bigger share of national income than at any time since 1928, and paying at a lower tax rate. And Republicans would rather you didn’t know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.

Related articles

• The Problem Is That America's Richest 1% Are Raking It in -- Not Public Employee Pensions (alternet.org)
• The shameful attack on public employees (salon.com)
• The Shameful Attack on Public Employees (businessinsider.com)
• There Is a Global Aristocracy in the Making -- and the Greedy Super-Rich Think They've Earned It (alternet.org)
• Dave Johnson: Understanding The Attacks On Public Employees (huffingtonpost.com)
• Weekly Audit: We Welcome Our New Plutocratic Overlords (mydd.com)
• The Media Consortium: Weekly Audit: We Welcome Our New Plutocratic Overlords (huffingtonpost.com)

Tsunami Warning: Carbon Capitalists Warming to Climate Market Using Derivatives

You think we've had a financial crisis? Imagine what will happen when carbon futures will become the trade center for derivatives. Everything having to do with fossil fuels, most of our energy will be speculated to the unwitting investor. When another $2 trillion dollar bubble collapses, will the world economy survive? It seems doubtful.


Carbon Capitalists Warming to Climate Market Using Derivatives - Bloomberg.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

"Michelle Chan, a senior policy analyst in San Francisco for Friends of the Earth, isn’t convinced.

“Should we really create a new $2 trillion market when we haven’t yet finished the job of revamping and testing new financial regulation?” she asks. Chan says that, given their recent history, the banks’ ability to turn climate change into a new commodities market should be curbed.

“What we have just been woken up to in the credit crisis -- to a jarring and shocking degree -- is what happens in the real world,” she says.

Even George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator, says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets. “The system can be gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July. “That’s why financial types like me like it -- because there are financial opportunities.”

Masters says U.S. carbon markets should be transparent and regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Standardized derivatives contracts -- securities that can be bought and sold by anyone -- should be traded on exchanges or centrally cleared, she says. The British-born Masters, who has an economics degree from Cambridge University, took over JPMorgan’s commodities business in 2007."

Related articles by Zemanta

• Gryphon Financial Weighs in on Excessive Speculation in the Energy Markets (prweb.com)
• Even if global warming is the problem carbon trading isn't the answer (telegraph.co.uk)
• Soros: 'Market Fundamentalists,' CDS Contributed to Crisis (blogs.wsj.com)
• Cap and Trade Could Be a Boon to New York (online.wsj.com)
• Hedge Fund Financial Model Issues a Public Challenge on Twitter and Radio That its Model Portfolio Will Increase 20 Percent by January (prweb.com)