John Lennon and David Peel

More Proposals From "Aftershock" by Robert Reich(2011)

Other proposals by Robert Reich include a reemployment system rather than an employment system.It is a system that speeds and smooths the way for those who become unemployed to find new jobs.One piece of the reemployment system would be wage insurance.Any job loser who takes a new job that pays less than his/her former job would be eligible for 90% of the difference,for up to two years.Hopefully,after two years,many workers would have acquired enough on-the-job training to render wages nearly as high as their former ones.Wage insurance would speed the movement of laid-off workers into new jobs and save the costs of unemployment benefits and would also generate added revenues as reemployment workers began paying income taxes.

For workers who need additional skills,income support of 90% of the former wages would be provided up to a year while a worker is engaged in full-time training or education programs.Total costs for the reemployment system would be around $3 billion a year which is above the $2.35 billion that the federal government now spends.However,costs would drop as the skills of the labor force improved and the rate of long-term unemployment declined.

Any remaining shortfall in revenues would be made up by a severance tax on profitable corporations that lay off their workers.Companies would be less inclined toward layoffs if they had to pay these costs(this is done in Germany).What is needed,according to Reich,is a one-time severance tax on any layoff equal to 75% of the full cost of the laid-off workers yearly salary for all workers under the median wage,50% for all workers above it,and up to 200% of the median.Such a tax would not only give employers more incentive to keep workers on,but would also help pay for the wage insurance and skill upgrades of the reemployment system.

Reich believes tuition should be free at all public colleges and universities,and borrowers of federal loans should be required to pay a fixed percentage(10%) of their taxable earnings for the first ten years of full time work into a fund that finances public colleges and universities.After that,graduates would have no further obligations.This way,graduates who pursue low income occupations(social work,teachers,legal services) would be subsidized by graduates who pursue high-income occupations including business,finance and corporate law.

More to come in the near future.

"Aftershock" By Robert Reich,The Economic Proposals

Robert Reich has grounded his argument in "Aftershock" for a just society in morality.It is simply unfair for a handful of Americans to take home such a large share of total income when so many others are struggling to make ends meet and survive where the "common good" has been supplanted by "self interest".His proposals are important steps to remedy our current economic problems.He claims the proposals will produce a budget surplus and bring back "the bargain"that lifted the U.S. into prosperity from 1947-1975.

The first proposal is a reverse income tax.Reich wants to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to all Americans earning under $50,000.In 2009,EITC was the nation's largest anti-poverty program.Over 24 million households received wage supplements.Under his plan,workers earning $20,000 or less would receive a wage supplement of $15,000.This supplement would decline incrementally up the income scale to $10,000 for $30,000 earners to $5,000 for $40,000 earners.The tax rate for workers with incomes between $50,000-$90,000(capital gains included) would be 10 percent of earnings.Taxes for incomes between $90,000 and $160,000 would be 20 percent,whatever the income source.The annual cost would be $633 billion.The cost of the tax cuts for the middle-income families would be billions more.These lost revenues would be replaced by a carbon tax and higher taxes on the top 5 percent of incomes.

A carbon tax(coal,oil and gas) would be based on how many tons of carbon dioxide such fuels contain.The tax would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel and would gradually rise over time in order to push energy companies and users to spew less carbon into the atmosphere.Initially set at $35 per metric ton of carbon dioxide,such a tax would raise $210 billion in its first year alone.$115 per ton would yield about $600 billion per year.The public would indirectly pay this tax as prices of goods increase do to how much carbon was used in their production.Gas would go up $1 and an increase of .06/kilowatt hour to the price of electricity.

Higher marginal tax rates would increase on the wealthy to 55 percent for wage earners over$410,000(top1%).Those earning over $260,000 will pay 50 percent and finally earners over $160,000(top 5%) will pay 40 percent.These taxes,Reich's proposals,added to the modest amounts contributed by taxpayers who earned between $50,000 and $160,000,would raise $600 billion and more than our current tax system per year.Added to the $210 billion generated by the carbon tax,the total new revenues would be $810 billion initially and would increase as carbon tax revenues increased.

Under his proposals,income from capital gains would be treated no differently from wages and salaries.These tax rates are not out of line with most of our history over the century.From 1936 to 1980,the top marginal tax rate was 70% or more.During the three decades spanning 1951 to 1980,when the top rate was between 70% and 92%,average annual growth in the American economy was 3.7%.Between 1983 and 2008,when the top rate ranged between 35% and 39%,average growth was just 3%.(supply siders are wrong)

Reich's proposals are initiated to increase spending by the lower and middle class(who spend a much higher percentage of income than the rich) which would help move the economy to full capacity and sustained growth(something we don't have today).Consequently,companies would enjoy higher profits and the stock market would rise.The rich  would pay higher taxes and receive a somewhat smaller share of the economy's overall gains but those gains would be much larger than they would be otherwise.Hence,richer Americans are very likely to come out ahead as they did in the Great Prosperity(1947-1975).

More from "Aftershock" soon.

Marriner Eccles:Architect Of The Great Prosperity 1947-1975

The first chapter of Robert Reich's new book"Aftershock" is titled "Eccles Insight".Marriner Eccles was a Mormon tycoon from Utah who was a director of a railroad,hotel and insurance companies;head of a bank holding company controlling twenty-six banks;and president of lumber,milk,sugar,and construction companies spanning the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada.In the crash of 1929,his businesses were sufficiently diverse and his banks adequately capitalized that he stayed afloat financially.Most economists,leaders of business and Wall St.sought to reassure the country that the market would correct itself automatically and that the governments only responsibility was to balance the budget(sound familiar).Eccles wondered why anyone would invest when the economy was so severely disabled.Investments,according to Eccles,would only take place in a climate of high prosperity,when the purchasing power of the masses increases their demands for a higher standard of living.

Eccles made his national debut before the Senate Finance Committee in Feb 1933,just a few weeks before FDR was sworn in as president.Anticipating what British economist John Maynard Keynes would counsel three years later,Eccles told the senators that the government had to go deeper in debt in order to offset the lack of spending by consumers and businesses(we didn't do enough in 2008).He advised the senators on ways to get more money into the hands of the beleaguered middle class.Eccles connected the dots between how people responded to economic downturn and how his customers reacted to the deep crisis he currently viewed.His proposal included relief for the unemployed,government spending on public works,government refinancing of mortgages,a federal minimum wage,federally supported old-age pensions and higher income taxes and inheritance taxes on the wealthy in order to control capital accumulations and avoid excessive speculation(need most today..conservatives reject all these ideas).Eccles warned that these recommendations should be implemented immediately to restore the economy.

In the first hundred days of FDR's presidency,Eccles proposals were ignored and the president followed the advice of a hodge-podge of ideas cooked up by Wall St. to  keep the economy afloat but nothing else. By mid-December 1933,Roosevelt's Treasury secretary,Henry Morgenthau,asked Eccles to write a report on monetary policy.Morgenthau invited Eccles a few weeks later to join the administration to help alleviate the economic crisis.Eventually,the 1934 budget contained many of Eccles ideas violating FDR's previous promise to balance the budget.According to Eccles,the president swallowed the violation with considerable difficulty.

Eccles knew Wall St. wanted a tight money supply/high interest rates but Main St.of America(real economy) needed a loose money supply and low rates(Wall St.bankers continued this practice in 2008).For the next fourteen years,as governor of the Federal Reserve Board,Eccles continued his vigilance for the welfare of average people and help steer the economy through the remainder of the Depression and WWII.He would also become one of the architects of the Great Prosperity that the nation and much of the world enjoyed after the war.Unfortunately,the likes of Marriner Eccles haven't materialized for the grandchildren of such an insightful businessman.

The Pendulum:Robert Reich and "Aftershock"

The introductory chapter in Robert Reich's new book"Aftershock"(2010,2011) begins with the hope that the economic future will swing back to prosperity for all as it did from 1947-1975.He believes concentration of income and wealth at the top continues to be the crux of America's economic predicament.The economy,according to Reich,will not be strong again until we address this problem.Reactionay politics and social upheaval will be our new pathway if we don't rearrange the amount of money the lower and middle class earns.Reich clams that a pendulum signifies a nation "in it together" or one where the individual goes it alone.We are in the later swing and have been since 1975 when wages began to stagnate for most of America and high income earners increased their assets to enormous heights.

The future is uncertain to Reich and he believes the so-called recovery from the great recession to be anemic for some time.Joblessness will remain for a large percentage of Americans or wages will drop.Either combination slows down the recovery because consumers will not be able to spend enough to keep the recovery going.The lack of sufficient customers will diminish investments that fuel a sustained period of growth.Countries like China will not buy enough American exports to make up for the shortfall because they are concerned with their own unemployment problems.They need to fuel their own economies.The U.S. government will not be able to run deficits large or long enough or keep cheap money sufficient for a long length of time to fill in the purchasing gap.

From 2001-2007,the American economy was running on drained savings,borrowed money through re-financing and credit cards.Families were working more than any nation on earth to make a decent salary but those hours and benefits were at the limit.The underlying problem emerged in the 1980's when the middle class started to be hit with global competition and labor-replacing technologies.Rather than strengthening the safety nets,empowering labor unions,improving education and job training,the nation turned in the opposite direction.Political leaders started to reflect the prevailing faith in the all-knowing free market.They embraced deregulation and privatization,attacked unions,cut taxes on the wealthy and shredded the safety net.The result for most Americans were stagnant wages,increased job security and a steadily widening inequality.

High individual and government debt,claims Reich, is a symptom instead of the cause of our current financial crises.Politicians have escalated the debt problem because they believe in short term fixes instead of tackling  the fundamental problem of wealth redistribution to increase purchasing power to the majority of our population(they spend more of their income).The rich,through political contributions,control the agenda in Congress to keep the disproportional affluence consistent and maintained.

More to come from"Aftershock" in the near future.

Reuters: 21 Journalists Slaughtered in Philippines Massacre

John Boehner:Like Governor Chrisie,Their Policies Violate Basic Catholic Teachings

John Boehner and Chris Christie are Catholics in the world of American politics.They were taught to value the poor first and provide for their needs with action. In every religious lesson, they were instructed by representatives of the religion to be concerned with the hopelessness and desperation of the lower class and give compassion, love,and material resources to meet their needs.Christ was an enthusiastic leader who demonstrated his love for the poor by living, helping and praying for them in their communities with their numerable hardships and anxieties.

More than seventy-five Catholic professors from Catholic University,Xavier,Dayton,Fordham,Marquette, Notre Dame and Santa Clara have signed a letter expressing concerns about budget cuts in programs that aid the poor. The letter writers criticize Mr. Boehner’s support for a budget that cut financing for Medicare, Medicaid and the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program, while granting tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. They call such policies “anti-life,” a particularly biting reference because the phrase is usually applied to politicians and others who support the right to abortion.The letter to Mr. Boehner stated that the Republican-supported budget he shepherded through the House will hurt the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable, and that he therefore has failed to uphold basic Catholic moral teachings.


 The professors wrote that his voting record is at variance from one of the church’s most ancient moral teachings. The letter also stated “From the apostles to the present, the magisterium of the church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.”

I have been making similar observations about the Republican platform for some time.The vast majority of their members are affiliated with churches and religious organizations that have the poor as the focus of individual and community action to fulfill the requirements of the given religion....aid the poor.The Republicans claim they want to help the poor but don't want the government to use revenues to accomplish the task.They believe that donations from the populace will be enough to eradicate the income inequality in America.They also believe the marketplace(without government interference) will provide the needed jobs and earnings to alleviate poverty.This is a malfunctioned approach that increases hopelessness because they continue to ignore the statistics presented by the government they represent.They would rather represent the citizens(upper income) that fund their campaigns rather than the poor who need assistance at every turn.The Republican platform has turned it's back on the religions they participate in.They might give donations at their local churches but these educated souls are misleading the public and undermining the values of the churches they belong to.The Catholic professors should be admired and respected for their insistence that Christie and Boehner follow the basic values of the religion they follow and cherish.

 

Why Socialism?

Why Socialism?

Next Technology:PV Panels to Solar Concentrators

The next technology Chris Goodall writes about in his book"Ten Technologies To Save The Planet" is solar energy. Goodall lists three main ways to capture the sun's energy.The first is to put long tubes containing liquids in direct sunlight that when heated,with a heat exchange,can be used to heat water for showers and washing clothes.The second way is to use photovoltaic cells in panels to turn the photons of light directly into electricity.The third uses solar concentrators which use mirrors to focus large amounts of sunlight onto a small ares,heating fluids and using their energy to drive a turbine or a Stirling engine to generate electricity.

The first of these approaches has been used for centuries.The author's house has forty glass tubes about six feet long on the roof.Inside each tube is a thin,flat foil of copper.This foil is heated by the sun and transfers the energy to a liquid in a thin pipe running in the center of the tube.This liquid is pumped into a heat exchange that transfers the energy to the hot water tank.It captures perhaps 70% of the light energy falling into the glass tubes and no other solar technologies are anywhere near as efficient than this process.

The second approach produces electricity by means of photovoltaic cells which is still expensive compared to fossil fuel generation.The photovoltaic panels are 20% efficient in generating electrical energy.Most solar panels manufactured today are made from expensive slabs of pure silicon.The silicon is derived from a very abundant substance,common sand,but the process of refining it is complex and energy intensive.By 2009,according to Goodall,the panels across the globe could produce about 15 gigawatts of electricity.Solar electricity is growing rapidly(30-40% a year) but today's global output is only equivalent to a couple of very large coal-fired power stations or a small cluster of nuclear plants.

The largest U.S solar panel manufacturer is First Solar.It expects to achieve grid parity by 2012(cost to produce electricity).First Solar will be supplying several gigawatts of PV panels each year by building huge farms of panels in sunny areas.South-facing mountain slopes are ideal(good solar radiation but they are also relatively cool).First Solar uses a semiconductor called cadmium telluride,from which it makes thin inexpensive panels but only moderately efficient at capturing the sun's energy.

Nanosolar,a company funded by Google,are using CIGS(copper,indium,gallium,diselenide)as a semiconductor.It is revolutionary technology that "prints"the semiconductor material onto a flexible metallic backing layer.It could be wrapped around the exterior of millions of buildings across the world.It is using nanotechnology to precisely arrange the atoms on the printed semiconductor surface.

New solar concentrators are being developed by Covalent Solar,a company that has spun out of MIT.Their new devices increase the power obtained from solar cells by a factor of over 40 without needing to track the sun.MIT's version of this device consists of a piece of transparent glass or plastic plate with a thin film of dye molecules deposited on the face and inorganic solar cells attached to the edges. Light is absorbed by the dye coating and reemitted into the glass or plastic for collection by the solar cells.Their version of this device consists of a piece of transparent glass or plastic plate with a thin film of dye molecules deposited on the face and inorganic solar cells attached to the edges. Light is absorbed by the dye coating and reemitted into the glass or plastic for collection by the solar cells. 

George Carlin: The Illusion Of Choice

John Lennon,Nixon and Bin Laden:Radicalism In Different Forms

I just watched the film John Lennon vs The USA(2006) and it brought back many memories of that time period(1971-76) and the influence both Nixon and Lennon had on me and America's cultural toils.Both Lennon and Nixon were radicals,both with very different perspectives on what is important for the survival of the planet and the health of the United States.During this time period,the Viet Nam War was symbolic of the growing polarity among Americans from how we engage in violence to protect our national security to integrated sexual relationships.Nixon demonstrated a total disregard for the laws of our nation when he orchastated the deportation of Lennon because he was a threat to his 1972 election. His self interest directives was as authoritarian as the communists that he loathed and feared.His form of radicalism underminded democracy just as FOX news does today dispersing misinformation throughout the land in every corner of America.Conservative Nixon tried to silence liberal Lennon by manipulating the FBI and the Immigration Dept. because he was against the American right of free speech and assembly.Lennon was a positive symbol for many young people because of his stand on free speech and his desire to see political issues rectified through non-violence.He was loved because he rejected his celebrity and became one of us as best he could considering his great renown.He became friends with David Peel who was a street performer that I saw many times play during lunchtime on Wall St. I believe John played with him in the streets of NYC many times.Lennon loved America because it was so diverse and full of hope for a better world.Unfortunately,America has a dark side,full of violence and elitism,that quickly enveloped John when he spoke out against the war and Nixon's ominous conservative crowd.

As we listen to all the rhetoric concerning the life and death of Osama bin Laden,I start to wonder where he went wrong on his own quest to change the materialistic culture of Saudi Arabia that was influenced by the consumerism of the west.He was on to something positive when he attacked his peer culture that turned its back on Islam and copied the negative attributes of the west.Lennon,as best he could, was part of the American counter culture that dispised the excesses of materialism.Some radicals within the counter culture were violent and used that avenue to stop the funding and support of the war.Osama grew bitter when his own family disregarded his viewpoints that could have pushed him into the distructive force he became.His rebuke of non-violent demonstration was our misfortune on 9/11 and continues to this day in the Islamic learning centers who manipulate the young to use violent force against questionable enemies.Radicalism can have important relevance in the improvement of any society but it has to be non-violent and democratic.It has to protect the rights of all citizens and remain open to debate in a civilized,exposed environment.Nixon and bin Laden failed to give options to the majority and refused to dialogue with opposing viewpoints because they were afraid of their own shortcomings.As Lennon was afraid of American violence when Nixon was trying to deport him,I am concerned about international terrorism but also our internal propaganda machine that tries to control and distort information for the  benefit of the privileged who control the livelihood of the many.I hope the future will bring a new radicalism that will redistribute wealth to the many who have waited too long in the burning sun.