By Michael Collins

Al Franken and other liberals say it’s OK for Obama to spy on us illegally. But wait, it wasn’t OK when Bush did it. What utter hypocrisy.

Senator Al Franken (D-MN), June 11

What a total bullshit artist!  When it was Bush spying on emails and secretly eavesdropping on citizens, Franken and others were outraged.  Now that it’s a Democratic president, well, damn, it’s all good.  Spy away NSA. (Image)

All of this spying on we the little people has to be OK because Obama says so.  Peek in every corner.  Prevent unspecified terrorist attacks that you just can’t mention because, you know, it’s national security.   And never mention that policies like invading nations that pose no threat causing hundreds of thousands to die or sending drone killing machines to foreign countries might have something to do with threats of terrorism here.

“Trust me,” the liberal defenders of Obama ask us.

Sure thing, Al, you hypocrite of the worst order.  Do any of those defending the president have the slightest knowledge of history?  How about this creep, who asked and received the trust of tens of millions:

Speaking before the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, (Feb 9, 1950) Senator [Joseph] McCarthy waved before his audience a piece of paper. According to the only published newspaper account of the speech, McCarthy said that, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”

The great slanderer Joe McCarthy never had a real list.  He changed numbers up, down and sideways.  He hid behind his fake list just like Franken and Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) hide behind unmentionable evidence that justifies their endorsement of spying on citizens for national defense.   When Joe McCarthy did it, there was a name for it – McCarthism.  What do we call it when the Democrats do it?

TPM reported that Franken had a “high level of confidence that the federal government’s collection of phone and Internet data has been effective in thwarting terrorism.” TPM, February 11

That’s great Al but pardon me and everyone else if we don’t trust you or Senator Diane Feinstein or any of the other latter day enablers of civil liberties and privacy violations.

Al, the reason we don’t trust you is simple.  You are every bit as bad on civil liberties and constitutional rights as those you attack on the other side of the aisle.  You enable then endorse the same violations of domestic and international law you opposed under Bush and then justify it because ” it’s your guy, not theirs doing the deed.

We are in the midst of a general decline in the governance of this nation.  The skew is so strong in the direction of the incumbent financial elite that there is little ability to even think of entering government without at least the tacit approval of that elite.  In a way, it is like the process of selecting candidates for elections in Iran.  The rulers in Iran only allow candidates on the ballot who pass the religious litmus test.  In this country, the only people who end up in office, with very few exceptions, are those who prostitute for big money on the big issues.

People like Franken, Feinstein, Lindsay Graham, and John McCain are the force that we struggle against every single day simply to keep our lives, careers, families, and health together.  They’ll do anything to stay in power, to preserve their status and money and that of their patrons, and to avoid what they think would be severe retribution if we ever found out what they were up to.  It’s all about them — their addictions and fears.  They can’t grasp the fact that if they’d just step aside and stop the damage, the vast majority would be glad to simply forget them.

Edward Snowden is a great national hero.  Al Franken and the other liberal hypocrites who justify the crimes that Snowden unveiled are pathetic relics of a system collapsing in upon itself.

END

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Michael Collins is a writer in the DC area who researches and comments on the corruptions of the new millennium. His articles focus on the financial manipulations of The Money Party, the abuse of power by government, and features on elections and election fraud. His articles can be found athere. His website is The Money Party RSS

By William Blum 

What our presidents tell our young people

In this season of college graduations, let us pause to remember the stirring words of America’s beloved scholar, George W. Bush, speaking in Florida in 2007 at the commencement exercises of Miami Dade College: “In Havana and other Cuban cities, there are people just like you who are attending school, and dreaming of a better life. Unfortunately those dreams are stifled by a cruel dictatorship that denies all freedom in the name of a dark and discredited ideology.” 1

 

How I wish I had been in the audience. I would have stood up and shouted: “In Cuba all education is completely free. But most of the young people sitting here today will be chained to a large, crippling debt for much of the rest of their life!”

As the security guards came for me I’d yell: “And no one in Cuba is forced to join the military to qualify for college financial aid, like Bradley Manning was forced!”

As they grabbed me I’d manage to add: “And Congress has even passed a law prohibiting students from declaring bankruptcy to get rid of their debt!”

And as I was being dragged away, with an arm around my neck, I’d squeeze out my last words: “Do you know that $36 billion in student debt belongs to Americans who are 60 or older? … (choke, gasp) … and that students have committed suicide because of their debt?”

I don’t know if Professor Bush would have found any words within his intellect to respond with, but the last words I’d hear from the students, as the handcuffs were being tightened, would be: “If you don’t like it here, why dontya move to Cuba?”

Bad enough they have to pay highway-robbery tuition, but they wind up brainwashed anyhow.

Let us now turn to the current president. Here he is at the May 19 graduation ceremony at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Martin Luther King’s alma mater:

I know that when I am on my deathbed someday, I will not be thinking about any particular legislation I passed; I will not be thinking about a policy I promoted; I will not be thinking about the speech I gave, I will not be thinking the Nobel Prize I received. I will be thinking about that walk I took with my daughters. I’ll be thinking about a lazy afternoon with my wife. I’ll be thinking about sitting around the dinner table and seeing them happy and healthy and knowing that they were loved. And I’ll be thinking about whether I did right by all of them.

And I, like Woody Allen’s Zelig, would have shown up at this graduation as well, and I would have shouted out: “What about the family sitting happy and healthy around the dinner table in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and a missile – your missile – comes screaming through the roof, reducing the precious family to bones and blood and dust. What about the nice happy and healthy families in Yemen and Iraq and Somalia and Libya whom you’ve droned and missled to death? Why haven’t you returned the Nobel Prize? In case you’ve forgotten, it was a PEACE prize!”

Oh, that taser does hurt! Please contribute to my bail fund.

Pipelineistan

I have written on more than one occasion about the value of preaching and repeating to the choir on a regular basis. One of my readers agreed with this, saying: “How else has Christianity survived 2,000 years except by weekly reinforcement?”

Well, dear choir, beloved parishioners, for this week’s sermon we once again turn to Afghanistan. As US officials often make statements giving the impression that the American military presence in that sad land is definitely winding down – soon to be all gone except for the standard few thousand American servicemen which almost every country in the world needs stationed on their territory – one regularly sees articles in the mainstream media and government releases trying to explain what it was all about. For what good reason did thousands of young Americans breathe their last breath in that backward country and why were tens of thousands of Afghans dispatched by the United States to go meet Allah (amidst widespread American torture and other violations of human rights)?

The Washington Post recently cited a Defense Department report that states: The United States “has wound up with a reasonable ‘Plan B’ for achieving its core objective of preventing Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda and its affiliates.”

“Preventing a safe haven for terrorists” – that was the original reason given back in 2001 for the invasion of Afghanistan, a consistency in sharp contrast to the ever-changing explanations for Iraq. However, it appears that the best and the brightest in our government and media do not remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9-11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

President Obama declared in August 2009: “But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.” 2

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

Never mind – even accepting the official version of 9/11 – that the “plotting to attack America” in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why didn’t the United States bomb those countries?

Indeed, what actually was needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with a table and some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere. At the present time there are anti-American terrorist types meeting in Libya, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, London, Paris, and many other places. And the Taliban of Afghanistan would not be particularly anti-American if the United States had not invaded and occupied their country. The Taliban are a diverse grouping of Afghan insurgents whom the US military has come to label with a single name; they are not primarily international jihadists like al-Qaeda and in fact have had an up-and-down relationship with the latter.

The only “necessity” that drew the United States to Afghanistan was the desire to establish a military presence in this land that is next door to the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia – reportedly containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world – and build oil and gas pipelines from that region running through Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is well situated for such pipelines to serve much of South Asia and even parts of Europe, pipelines that – crucially – can bypass Washington’s bêtes noire, Iran and Russia. If only the Taliban would not attack the lines. Here’s Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, in 2007: “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.” 3

Since the 1980s all kinds of pipelines have been planned for the area, only to be delayed or canceled by one military, financial or political problem or another. For example, the so-called TAPI pipeline (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) had strong support from Washington, which was eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran. TAPI goes back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban government held talks with the California-based oil company Unocal Corporation. These talks were conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and were undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society. Taliban officials even made trips to the United States for discussions. 4

Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on February 12, 1998, Unocal representative John Maresca discussed the importance of the pipeline project and the increasing difficulties in dealing with the Taliban:

The region’s total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels … From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders, and our company.

When those talks with the Taliban stalled in 2001, the Bush administration reportedly threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the Afghan government did not go along with American demands. On August 2 in Islamabad, US State Department negotiator Christine Rocca reiterated to the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold [oil], or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.” 5 The talks finally broke down for good a month before 9-11.

The United States has been serious indeed about the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil and gas areas. Through one war or another beginning with the Gulf War of 1990-1, the US has managed to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

The war against the Taliban can’t be “won” short of killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States may well try again to negotiate some form of pipeline security with the Taliban, then get out, and declare “victory”. Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech from his teleprompter. It might even include the words “freedom” and “democracy”, but certainly not “pipeline”.

“We are literally backing the same people in Syria that we are fighting in Afghanistan and that have just killed our ambassador in Libya! We must finally abandon the interventionist impulse before it is too late.” – Congressman Ron Paul, September 16, 2012 6

How it all began: “To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson – that there are things in this world worth defending. To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors.” – President Ronald Reagan, March 21, 1983

A Modest Proposal

Washington’s sanctions against Iran are a wonder to behold, seriously hampering Tehran’s ability to conduct international commerce, make payments, receive money, import, export, invest, travel … you name the hardship and the United States is trying to impose it on the government and the people of Iran. In early May a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress aimed at stopping Iran from gaining access to its billions of dollars in euros kept in overseas banks – money that represents up to a third of Tehran’s total hard-currency holdings. In addition, Congress is looking to crack down on a weakness in current sanctions law that allows Iran to replenish its hard-currency accounts by acquiring gold through overseas markets.

Washington has as well closed down Iran’s media operations in the United States, is putting great pressure on Pakistan to cancel their project to build a pipeline to import natural gas from Iran, and punished countless international companies for doing business with Iran.

After a plane crash in Iran in 2011, the Washington Post reported: “Plane crashes are common in Iran, which for decades has been prevented from buying spare parts for its aging fleet by sanctions imposed by the United States.” 7

There are many more examples of the sanctions of mass destruction.

All this to force Iran to abandon any program that might conceivably lead someday to a nuclear weapon, thus depriving Israel of being the only nuclear power in the Middle East. The United States doesn’t actually say this. It instead says, explicitly or implicitly, that a nuclear Iran would be a danger to attack the US or Israel, without giving any reason why Iran would act so suicidal; at the same time Washington ignores repeated statements from various Israeli and American officials that they have no such fear.

Now, a group of US lawmakers is proposing a more drastic remedy: cutting off Iran entirely from world oil markets. Oil sales provide Iran with the bulk of its foreign-currency earnings. The plan would require all countries to stop buying oil from Iran or risk losing access to the US banking system. 8

And Iran ignores it all, refusing to bend. Islamic fanatics they are.

I have a much simpler solution. Why not cut off all exports of food to Iran? Worldwide. And anything that goes into producing food – seed, fertilizer, farm equipment, etc. Let’s see how good they are at ignoring it when their children’s bellies start to balloon. And medicines and medical equipment as well! Let’s see how good they are at producing whatever they need themselves.

Officials at The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that as many as 6,000 Iraqi children died each month in the early 1990s primarily due to the sanctions imposed by the US, the UK and others. As proof of the lasting effectiveness and goodness of that policy, today blessed peace reigns in Iraq among its citizens.

And if all else fails with Iran … Nuke the bastards! That may be the only way they’ll learn what a horrible weapon a nuclear bomb is, a weapon they shouldn’t be playing around with.

In recent times Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran have been the prime forces standing in the way of USraeli Middle East domination. Thus it was that Iraq was made into a psychotic basket case. Libya’s welfare state was wiped out and fundamentalists have imposed Islamic law on much of the country. The basketizing of Syria is currently in process. Iran’s basketizing has begun with draconian sanctions, the way the basketizing of Iraq began.

It’s worth noting that Iraq, Syria, and Libya were the leading secular states of the Middle East. History may not treat kindly the impoverishment and loss of freedoms that the US-NATO-European Union Triumvirate has brought down upon the heads of the people of these lands.

What are we going to do about our sociopathic corporations?

Scarcely a day goes by in the United States without a news story about serious ethical/criminal misbehavior by a bank or stock brokerage or credit-rating agency or insurance agency or derivatives firm or some other parasitic financial institution. Most of these firms produce no goods or services useful to human beings, but spend their days engaged in the manipulation of money, credit and markets, employing dozens of kinds of speculation.

Consider the jail time served for civil disobedience by environmental, justice and anti-war activists, in contrast to the lifestyle enjoyed by the wicked ones who crashed the financial system and continue to fund the wounding of our bleeding planet.

The federal and state governments threaten to sue the financial institutions. Sometimes they actually do sue them. And a penalty is paid. And then the next scandal pops up. And another penalty is paid. And so it goes.

Picture this: A fleet of police cars pulls up in front of Bank of America’s Corporate Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. A dozen police officers get out, enter the building, and take the elevator to the offices of the bank’s top executives. Minutes later the president and two vice-presidents – their arms tightly bound in handcuffs behind their back – are paraded through the building in full view of their employees who stare wide-eyed and open-mouthed. The sidewalk is of course fully occupied by the media as the police encircle the building with tape saying “No tresspassing. Crime scene.”.

But remember, just because America has been taken over by mendacious mass-murdering madmen doesn’t mean we can’t have a good time.

1. Washington Post, April 29, 2007 ↩
2. Talk given by the president at Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 17, 2009 ↩
3. Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007 ↩
4. See, for example, the December 17, 1997 article in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, “Oil barons court Taliban in Texas”. ↩
5. Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, September 12, 2012 (Information Clearing House) ↩
6. The Hill, daily congressional newspaper, Washington, DC ↩
7. Washington Post, January 10, 2011 ↩
8. Washington Post, May 13, 2013 ↩

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

	June 3, 2013
THIS WEEK
Last week brought disturbing new stats on our unequal times, and we have them all in this week’s Too Much. Last week, on the cheerier side, also brought insightful new commentaries from three of our era’s top inequality analysts.You’ll find all three pieces below in our New Wisdom on Wealth sidebar. And the three certainly do have fresh new wisdom to offer. David Cay Johnson, for instance, helps us see how low taxes on high incomes give our CEOs an ongoing incentive to line their own pockets “at the expense of the enterprises they run.”Chuck Collins, for his part, helps us understand another hidden impact of our top-heavy world, the phenomenon sociologists call the “intergenerational transmission of advantage.” Collins walks us through the games the wealthy play to boost their children’s prospects — at the expense of everyone else’s.Chrystia Freeland, the last of our trio, riffs off recent sexist gabbing by billionaire Paul Tudor Jones to reflect upon our gender and income divides. The more our income gaps widen, Freeland notes, the greater “the social and political sway of those at the very, very top.” Societies that let the rich sway away, she reminds us, invite pathologies we’re only now beginning to understand.	About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy StudiesProgram on Inequality and the Common GoodSubscribe to Too MuchJoin us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
GREED AT A GLANCE
Top U.S. corporate executives are, at last count, averaging 354 times more pay per year than average American workers. These CEOs compete in the same global markets as Norwegian CEOs. How much do big-time CEOs in Norway make? Norwegian CEOs, calculates Norway’s largest daily, average 16 times what their workers earn. Some do make more — and get plenty of grief for making it. Headlines in Norway have recently been bashing Helge Lund, the top exec at Norway’s largest oil company. He’s pulling in $2.4 million a year. That sum strikes Norwegians as outrageous. Lund no doubt considers himself a bargain. Chevron CEO John Watson is pulling in 10 times his compensation . . .No banker in North America, Bloomberg Markets Magazinereported last week, took home more in 2012 than the $26 million that went to Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs. Blankfein guided Goldman to $7.5 billion in profits last year. Along the way he guided 900 Goldman employees into unemployment. The shedding of bank jobs, industry-wide, has continued on into 2013. In this year’s first quarter, America’s six largest banks announced 21,000 layoffs. But banks aren’t just rewarding execs like Lloyd Blankfein for cutting jobs. They’re hiring like crazy at the executive level. The resulting “competition for business leadership” has headhunter firms doing a bang-up business. At the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, revenues from New York bank clients have jumped 25 percent . . .In the race for global supremacy in dissolute extravagance, the Mediterranean deep-pocket playground of Monaco has now trumped the desert oasis of Las Vegas. Both cities have exclusive night clubs that have been offering up — for a mere $500,000 — a nine-bottle “Dynastie Collection” set of Armand de Brignac champagne. Late last month, at Monaco’s “Billionaire Club,” British financial adviser Charles Shaker became the first club patron anywhere in the world to shell out for the nine-bottle collection. The club crowd, one party-goer later told reporters, “went crazy,” with everyone “trying to take pictures, cheering and clapping.” Another “Dynastie Collection” set remains on sale — and unsold — at Hakkasan Las Vegas, a “nightlife mecca” at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino.	Quote of the Week“In most recessions, societies become more equal. Unemployment may rise and wages stagnate. But the gap between the top and the rest narrows as those with the most to lose lose the most. In our time, the gap is widening, and I am tired of hearing lectures on how we can do nothing about it from supporters of the status quo, who have been wrong about everything for years.” Nick Cohen, The Observer,June 1, 2013
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
Tennessee voters elected Stephen Fincher to Congress in 2010 as a Tea Party Republican, and Fincher, a heavyweight in agribusiness, has not disappointed the small-government crowd. Washington, he told a Memphis audience last month,has gone “out of control,” making moves “to steal money” from some to “give it to others.” Fincher has been especially vocal in this year’s food stamp budget debates. He wants two million poor families cut off from food stamp benefits. But Fincher’s commitment to “small government” doesn’t apparently extend up the income ladder. Between 1999 and 2012, the Environmental Working Group reports, Fincher personally collected $3.48 million in federal farm subsidies.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend
IMAGES OF INEQUALITY
The world’s glitterati descended on Monaco at the end of May for the annual auto Grand Prix race. The engines won’t start roaring again until next May. By that time, realtors hope to have sold the five-floor penthouse now under construction in Monaco’s newest high-rise tower. The expected sale price: $386 million.	Web Gem Genuine Progress/ How do we measure progress in a way that takes inequality into account?
PROGRESS AND PROMISE
In New York, a New Lid on Contractor PayNew York governor Andrew Cuomo can’t seem to figure out whether he wants to wink at inequality or fight it. He’s just proposed an ill-advised initiative that wouldflood the state with special zones that exempt corporate execs from sales, property, and income taxes. On the more sensible side: Starting this July 1 New York will be limiting annual CEO pay at nonprofit and for-profit service providers that collect at least 30 percent of their revenues from state tax dollars. Execs at these providers won’t be allowed to grab over $199,000 a year. The loophole: Agencies can use revenue from non-taxpayer sources to boost pay over $200,000. But they first have to file a waiver to gain approval. CEO paychecks at taxpayer-subsidized service providers in New York have in recent years run as high as $3 million. Corporate pay consultants, predictably, are kvetching over the precedent the governor’s porous but still promising pay cap sets.	Take Action on InequalityHelp bring the film version ofThe Spirit Level, this century’s most important book on inequality, to a theater near you. For starters, watch the film’s just-released two-minute trailer.
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
	Stat of the Week Households holding over $1 million worth of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets make up just 0.9 percent of global households,computes the latest annual Boston Consulting Group wealth report.
IN FOCUS
Let’s Talk Taxes, Let’s Talk TrillionsAmerica’s deepest pockets, a new report shows, are saving big bucks from the U.S. tax code’s wide assortment of income tax breaks. They’re saving even more from the absence of a wealth tax.A hundred years ago, in 1913, Congress wrote into law a federal income tax. Lawmakers have been dotting the tax code, almost ever since, with an assortment of “never-minds” that hand most of us, at one time or another, discounts at tax time.These discounts can come in handy. If you buy a home, you get to deduct off your taxes the mortgage interest you pay. If you’re raising a family, you get to claim tax credit for your children. If you retire, you can exclude Social Security income from taxes. And if you make a killing trading on the stock market, you only have to pay taxes on your windfall at half the normal tax rate. How much do all these deductions, credits, exclusions, and preferential tax rates cost the federal treasury? Representative Chris Van Hollen, a lawmaker from Maryland, wanted to know. He asked the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to calculate exactly how much “tax expenditures” — the wonky label in Washington for tax never-minds — were actually costing. Van Hollen also asked the CBO to calculate which American taxpayers, by income level, were benefiting the most from these tax expenditures. Last week, the CBO reported back — with some big numbers: The top 10 special tax breaks in the federal tax code will cost the federal government $900 billion in 2013 and $12 trillion over the next decade. And most of the benefits from all these trillions in tax savings, the CBO found, are cascading down to America’s most comfortable. If tax expenditures operated on a totally neutral basis, America’s most affluent 1 percent would be receiving just 1 percent of the taxpayer savings that tax expenditures generate. In fact, the CBO calculates, the top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers are receiving 17 percent of tax expenditure benefits. Project these numbers over a decade, and the tax savings for America’s most affluent really start to add up. Over the next ten years, if current law remains in effect, tax expenditures will pour $3.6 trillion into the pockets of America’s top 5 percent of income earners — and $1.9 trillion into the pockets of America’s top 1 percent, households that make over $450,000. But the enormity of these trillions only hints at how light a tax burden rests on our rich, suggests another new study released last week, the annual global wealth survey from researchers at the Boston Consulting Group. Just under 5 percent of America’s households, says this new study, now hold at least $1 million each in financial wealth, assets like stocks and other securities, the dollars in savings and checking accounts, and the like. In 2012, the total net worth of these top 5 percent households pumped up America’s total financial wealth to $39 trillion, a total a trillion dollars higher than the combined financial wealth of Japan, China, and Germany, the world’s next three richest nations. Like this article? Sign up to receive the Too Muchweekly in your email inbox. America’s wealthiest households pay no annual federal taxes on any of these trillions. Why? The United States has no annual federal tax onfinancial wealth. We do, on the other hand, have a tax on property wealth. This property tax — a state and local government levy — essentially amounts to a tax on America’s middle class. That’s because residential property makes up the bulk of American middle class wealth — 66 percent, on average, the latest Fed figures show. For households in America’s richest 1 percent, by contrast, home sweet home accounts for only 9.4 percent of household net worth. In other words, in America today, we tax the wealth of the middle class on an annual basis. We essentially give the wealth of the wealthy a free pass. Other nations do tax the wealth of the rich. One of these nations, France, has just upped the rates on its “wealth tax.” French households with over $21.5 million in wealth are now paying this wealth tax at nearly a 2 percent annual rate. How much would an annual 2 percent wealth tax raise from America’s millionaire households? Research from the Deloitte Center for Financial Services can help us here. Deloitte researchers have calculated that American millionaire households in 2011 held $38.6 trillion in total, not just financial, net worth. In 2020, Deloitte estimates, U.S. households worth at least $1 million will hold $87.1 trillion in wealth, over five times the size of that year’s entire estimated federal debt. A 2 percent annual tax on this $87.1 trillion would raise over $1.7 trillion. Some perspective: In 2020, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, the personal income tax bill for all Americans will total $2.16 trillion. The new CBO numbers on tax expenditures, says Representative Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, show clearly that current federal income tax deductions, credits, exclusions, and preferences skew “disproportionately to the highest 1 percent of income earners.” America’s absence of any national annual tax on the wealth of our wealthy skews this lopsided, top-tilting tax picture a good bit more.	New Wisdom on WealthChuck Collins, The Wealthy Kids Are All Right, American Prospect, May 28, 2013. In a tough economy with dwindling social supports, children of privilege have a huge head start.Chrystia Freeland, Sexist Mores of Super-Rich Hurt Us All, Reuters, May 30, 2013. Some deeper reflections on the latest controversy around hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones. David Cay Johnston,Inequality Rising — All Thanks To Government Policies, National Memo, May 31, 2013. How U.S. tax, union bargaining, inheritance, and other rules widen the growing divide between those at the top and everyone else.                                                           Learn more about this new history of America’s first triumph over plutocracy.
NEW AND NOTABLE
Behind All Our Global Immigration DebatesBranko Milanovic, Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now: An Overview, New Economic Thinking and Columbia University, February 2013.Location, location, location. That’s all that matters, goes the old real estate agent bromide. That goes double, says economist Branko Milanovic, for understanding global economic inequality.Milanovic, the lead research economist at the World Bank, prepared this analysis for a conference on global income inequality held this past winter. The journal Global Policy will shortly be publishing an updated version, and the wider circulation of this new version will almost certainly recharge the debate over how we address our globe’s staggering economic inequality. The bottom line as Milanovic sees it: What part of the world your birth places you in matters much more to your economic status than ever before. Asks Milanovic: “Is citizenship — belonging to a given country, most often through birth — something that gives us by itself the right to greater income?” Rich countries are so far answering with a resounding “yes.” The amount of aid the world’s wealthy nations currently lay out for development assistance, Milanovic points out, comes to not much over $100 billion a year, “just five times more than the bonus Goldman Sachs paid itself during one crisis year.” If global economic elites continue to allow location to drive global economic inequality, Milanovic concludes, the tensions that mass global migrations create will only escalate enormously over coming decades.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend who might want to subscribe
ABOUT TOO MUCH
Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies | 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 | (202) 234-9382 | Editor: Sam

By David Cromwell, Media Lens (UK)

Sometimes we get so sick of the phrase ‘history in the making’ that the brain tends to switch off. What is it this time?, we sigh. A new high-tech piece of military technology that will boost US killing power? A big jump in a newspaper’s online advertising revenue? The world’s best footballer, Lionel Messi, joining ‘an exclusive list of adidas athletes to have their own signature product’? Sometimes the ‘history’ in question only stretches back a few years, maybe a century or two. Only very occasionally, if the claim is truly deserved, does it strech back to the earliest era of written records.

But now, with humanity’s huge impact on the planet’s climate becoming ever clearer, we need to go back several million years. Because climate-related news of history being made are about the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) reaching 400 parts per million (ppm). The last time CO₂ was this high was probably 4.5 million years ago, before modern humans even existed.

Throughout recorded history, up till the Industrial Revolution, CO₂ was much lower at around 280 ppm. But large-scale industrial and agricultural activity since then has seen humanity profoundly alter the make-up of the atmosphere and even the  stability of Earth’s climate.

‘We are creating a prehistoric climate in which human societies will face huge and potentially catastrophic risks,’ said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics.

[pullquote] ‘It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. … The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming).’ [/pullquote]

According to Bob Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former UK government chief scientific adviser:

‘the world is now most likely committed to an increase in surface temperature of 3C-5C compared to pre-industrial times.’

As Damian Carrington noted in the Guardian, even just 2C is regarded as ‘the level beyond which catastrophic warming is thought to become unstoppable.’ But social scientist Chris Shaw has warned that even the notion of a single ‘safe’ global temperature rise is dangerous. He observes that:

‘falsely ascribing a scientifically derived dangerous limit to climate change diverts attention away from questions about the political and social order that have given rise to the crisis.’

But for the corporate media, such questions are essentially taboo, and the global corporate and financial juggernaut, driven by the demands of capital, shows no sign of slowing down. Scientists calculate that humans pumped around 10.4 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere in 2011, the most recent year analysed. A Nature news article reports:

‘About half of that is taken up each year by carbon “sinks” such as the ocean and vegetation on land; the rest remains in the atmosphere and raises the global concentration of CO₂.’

[pullquote] [The corporate megamachine] needs to be dismantled and replaced with a cooperative human society that is ecologically sustainable. A good start would be to challenge the corporate media that limits the possibility of even discussing alternatives to the madness of global capitalism. [/pullquote]

‘The real question now’, says environmental scientist Gregg Marland from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina , ‘is how will the sinks behave in the future?’ And biogeochemist Jim White at the University of Colorado in Boulder warns:

‘At some point the planet can’t keep doing us a favour.’

In other words, the ability of the planet’s natural carbon ‘sinks’ to soak up humanity’s CO₂ emissions will diminish, and the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ will rise at an increasing rate. What is so dangerous about climate change is not just the high level of CO₂ today, but the speed at which it is increasing. In other words, climate change is accelerating.

Brian Hoskins, a leading climate scientist based at Imperial College, London, says:

‘To me the striking fact is that human activity has already driven the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide to a level more than 40 per cent above the maximum levels it had during the previous million years, and it is going to stay at least this high for thousands of years into the future.’

The very real risk of climate calamity will not be going away for some considerable time.

‘IT IS IRRESPONSIBLE NOT TO MENTION CLIMATE CHANGE’

On 20 May, a devastating tornado hit Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City, and killed at least 24 people, including nine children, injured around 240 people, and destroyed hundreds of homes and shops, two schools and a hospital. It is not yet clear what the impact of global warming might be on tornadoes. A warmer climate may mean there is more moisture in the atmosphere and therefore more thunderstorms and tornadoes, says Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the UK’s Met Office:

‘But on the other hand, you might get changes in high-level winds which could decrease tornadoes. So it literally could be either way. We don’t know.’ (Pilita Clark, Environment Correspondent, ‘Scientists inconclusive about climate change impact on tornadoes’, Financial Times, May 21, 2013; article behind paywall)

Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, agrees it’s ‘too early to tell’ the impact of global warming on tornadoes, although he added:

‘you’d probably go with a prediction of greater frequency and intensity of tornadoes as a result of human-caused climate change.’

For now, at least, it is not possible to directly attribute a particular tornado, even a large one like the Oklahoma event, to global warming. As Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told the New York Times in 2010:

‘It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.’

Moreover, as science writer Joe Romm notes:

‘When discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented, including deluges, droughts, and heat waves.’

However, he also adds:

‘Just because the tornado-warming link is more tenuous doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes.’

In 2011, after a record series of tornadoes in the US, Trenberth had told Romm:

‘It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. … The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming).’

In the wake of the deaths and devastation wreaked by the Oklahoma tornado, Romm has revisited the scientific evidence on global warming and tornadoes, and again highlights Trenberth’s remark above.

But on the main BBC News television programmes, science correspondent David Shukman brushed the topic away:

‘Tornadoes are nothing new. And so far there’s no evidence that over the past century that climate change is causing more of them.’

There was only the briefest mention of climate change, then, by the BBC, and nothing was heard on the main television news programmes from any of the climate scientists who, as noted above, believe there could be a link with global warming. This is standard treatment. The reluctance or inability of BBC News to discuss fully and responsibly the seriousness of global warming, even when reporting related issues such as energy and industry, is something we noted in an alert earlier this year.

 

‘DENIERS WANT THE PUBLIC TO BE CONFUSED’

But sometimes luck simply runs out for high-profile, highly-paid journalists performing their clunking impressions of ‘balanced’ journalism. This was the fate that befell Sarah Montague of the much-vaunted BBC Radio 4 Today programme when she interviewed James Hansen on May 17. Hansen, the former senior Nasa climate scientist who first warned the world about catastrophic climate change in 1988, corrected the BBC interviewer when she said in her introduction that the global average temperature had not changed in two decades.

‘Well, I should correct what you just said. It’s not true that the temperature has not changed in two decades.’

The BBC interviewer blundered on:

‘But there was a suggestion that we should have been expecting 0.2 of a degree and it has …’

Hansen interjected:

‘No. If you look over a 30 or 40-year period then the expected warming is about two-tenths of a degree per decade. But that doesn’t mean that each decade is going to warm two-tenths of a degree. There’s too much natural variability.’

Hansen continued:

‘In addition, China and India have been pumping out aerosols by burning more and more coal. So you get from that, not only CO₂, but also these particles that reflect sunlight and reduce the heating of the Earth. So […] it’s a complicated system, but there’s no change at all in our understanding of climate sensitivity [to rising levels of CO₂] and where the climate is headed.’

He was clear that the suggestion that global warming has stalled is ‘a diversionary tactic’ by deniers of the science. Why are they doing this?

‘It’s because the deniers want the public to be confused. They raise these minor issues and then we forget about what the main story is. The main story is carbon dioxide is going up and it is going to produce a climate which is going to have dramatic changes if we don’t begin to reduce our emissions.’

The interview was an all-too-rare instance of a BBC journalist being confronted by someone who really knew what they were talking about on a vital issue for humanity, and able to put it across in a calm and articulate way that listeners could easily understand. It’s not the first time the BBC Today programme has been caught out of its depth on climate science.

The false ‘balance’ in climate journalism is heavily skewed by the supposed need to share time between climate science and climate science denial. This is irrational ‘journalism’ by media professionals who have been seduced by a stubborn minority of people who ‘refuse to accept that climate change is happening despite the overwhelming scientific evidence’, notes Ryan Koronowski. This minority, particularly in the United States, are fanatic about fanning the flames of doubt and are often in powerful positions in the political establishment. These climate science deniers are often also free-market ideologues. Koronowski, deputy editor of Climate Progress, cites a recent study by researchers in Australia which found that:

‘people who expressed faith in free-market ideology were also likely to reject [the] scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that burning fossil fuels helps to cause it.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study also showed that irrational scepticism towards scientific evidence extended beyond climate change:

‘Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer.’

Indeed, there is a long and shameful history of corporate disinformation and rearguard campaigns of deception to deny science. (See, for example, Andrew Rowell, Green Backlash, Routledge, London, 1996; and Sharon Beder, Global Spin, Green Books, Totnes, 1997.)

For many years now, there has been an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. A new survey of more than 4,000 peer-reviewed papers showed that 97.1% agreed that humans are causing climate change. Suzanne Goldenberg reported on the Guardian website that:

‘[The] finding of near unanimity provided a powerful rebuttal to climate contrarians who insist the science of climate change remains unsettled.’

Moreover:

‘The study blamed strenuous lobbying efforts by industry to undermine the science behind climate change for the gap in perception. The resulting confusion has blocked efforts to act on climate change.’

This corporate-led blocking strategy is particularly cruel, indeed criminal on a global scale, given the catastrophic consequences of continued carbon emissions.

 

THE PAN-TENTACLED, WALL-EYED AND PARROT-BEAKED GLOBAL KRAKEN

Political, military, industry and financial elites who take science seriously are well aware of the pressing reality of climate change, and worry about what it means for their global grip on power. Nafeez Ahmed observes that the US military is becoming ‘increasingly concerned about the international and domestic security implications of climate change.’ A US Department of Defense (DoD) document, published in February this year, warns that climate change will have ‘significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to greater competition for more limited and critical life-sustaining resources like food and water.’ Climate change impacts will likely also act ‘as accelerants of instability or conflict in parts of the world’ and ‘DoD will need to adjust to the impacts of climate change on its facilities, infrastructure, training and testing activities, and military capabilities.’

The US military’s stance on climate change is, of course, not motivated out of a heartfelt wish to be a benefactor for humanity. As Ahmed points out:

‘The primary goal of adaptation is to ensure that the US armed forces are “better prepared to effectively respond to climate change” as it happens, and “to ensure continued mission success” in military operations – rather than to prevent or mitigate climate change.’

The elite response to impending climate chaos extends to capitalism’s endless drive to burn ever more dangerous quantities of fossil fuel, even to the extent of moving into the Arctic as the ice melts. Ahmed notes that the region likely holds a massive 25 per cent of the world’s remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves. Fossil fuel companies from the US, Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark already have their eyes on this northern prize, ‘sparking concerted efforts by these countries to expand their Arctic military presence.’

Methane hydrates lying beneath the Arctic permafrost and the seafloor are tantalisingly now within reach. An attempt by the Tokyo-based state oil company Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation to extract methane from far below the ocean ‘shows promise’: an odd way to describe a reckless operation that will further tip the balance in favour of climate instability. A Nature news story, ‘Japanese test coaxes fire from ice’, blithely told readers:

‘Reservoirs of methane hydrates — icy deposits in which methane molecules are trapped in a lattice of water — are thought to hold more energy than all other fossil fuels combined. The problem is extracting the methane economically from the deposits, which lie beneath Arctic permafrost and seafloor sediments. But some scientists and policy makers in energy-poor, coast-rich Japan hope that the reservoirs will become a crucial part of the country’s energy profile.’

Methane is an even more potent global-warming gas than carbon dioxide. That a country’s ‘energy profile’ may be pumped up by exploiting methane, even as the planet burns, is surely a form of societal madness. It’s sad that the madness extends even to the most prestigious of scientific journals. A corporate-friendlyNature editorial this month exhorted, ‘Together we stand’. Those are nice-sounding words. But they are an unfortunate echo of the well-known farcical refrain from the UK’s discredited ‘coalition’ government: ‘We’re all in this together’. The propaganda phrase conveys a convenient myth of a shared society with shared aims: a real democracy, in other words.

The Nature editorial springs from a similarly deluded mindset:

‘Protecting the environment is an added cost that many politicians and business leaders would prefer to avoid. Not to bother makes things cheaper. And despite the rhetoric of environmental campaigners, that remains an uncomfortable truth, at least in terms of the climate problem. Carbon emissions are a hallmark of energy use — and it is cheap and available energy that has made the modern world.’

And perhaps destroyed it too. The blinkered editorial continues:

‘The economic currency of gross domestic product, for so long used as a benchmark of a country’s performance, could be tweaked to include social indicators and how well a country respects environmental criteria, such as the concept of planetary boundaries that should not be exceeded.’

The feeble call to ‘tweak’ social indicators, albeit to include ‘the concept of planetary boundaries that should not be exceeded’, is paltry indeed when Nature‘s editors cannot even acknowledge that powerful and destructive state-corporate forces are defending their ‘right’ to exploit the planet’s resources and keep billions in poverty and servitude. The editors of Nature give little sign that they comprehend the inherent unsustainability of global capitalism, and they seem oblivious to the scale of corporate obstructionism and decades-long disinformation campaigns to thwart substantive action on climate. (Again, for example, see the books by Rowell and Beder, as well as our own books.)

If the world’s leading scientific publication has failed us, perhaps we could turn instead to writers such as Edward Abbey. In his classic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey powerfully and poetically rails against the corporate ravaging of the environment. In one vivid scene, the four titular protaganists overlook the devastation wreaked by a huge strip mine in Arizona:

‘Their view from the knoll would be difficult to describe in any known terrestrial language. Bonnie thought of something like a Martian invasion, the War of the Worlds. Captain Smith was reminded of Kennecott’s open-pit mine (“world’s largest”) near Magna, Utah. Dr. Sarvis thought of the plain of fire and of the oligarchs and oligopoly beyond: Peabody Coal only one arm of Anaconda Copper; Anaconda only a limb of United States Steel; U.S. Steel intertwined in incestuous embrace with the Pentagon, TVA, Standard Oil, General Dynamics, Dutch Shell, I.G. Farben-industrie; the whole conglomerated cartel spread out upon half the planet Earth like a global kraken, pan-tentacled, wall-eyed and parrot-beaked, its brain a bank of computer data centers, its blood the flow of money, its heart a radioactive dynamo, its language the technotronic monologue of number imprinted on magnetic tape.’ (Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Avon Books, 1975/76, New York, p. 159)

Abbey memorably sums up the whole corporate-industrial-military system as ‘a megalomaniacal megamachine.’ The strong, image-laden language gives a hint of what humanity is up against. It is not a matter of ‘tweaking’ the system, or asking the megamachine to be nicer. It needs to be dismantled and replaced with a cooperative human society that is ecologically sustainable. A good start would be to challenge the corporate media that limits the possibility of even discussing alternatives to the madness of global capitalism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Cromwell: Editor    editor@medialens.org

Born in Glasgow in 1962; studied natural philosophy and astronomy, then a PhD in solar physics; spell with Shell in the Netherlands, then a research position in oceanography in Southampton; left in 2010 to work full-time on Media Lens; author of Why Are We The Good Guys? (Zero Books, 2012); co-author, with David Edwards, of two Media Lens books: Guardians of Power (Pluto Books, 2006) and Newspeak In the 21st Century (Pluto Books, 2009); author of Private Planet (Jon Carpenter Publishing, 2001); co-editor, with Mark Levene, of Surviving Climate Change (Pluto Books, 2007).