Netanyahu and Abbas leading their people . . to a dead end

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) report on Netanyahu's White House visit (below) emphasizes the critical remarks of the White House press secretary Josh Earnest two hours after the actual visit.  Those disapproving remarks addressed Israel's plan to throw up 2,500 new units in East Jerusalem as well as Israel's allowing Jewish settlers to move into Silwan in East Jerusalem.  (Shocker: the State Department also disapproves!  Thank God it has never been up to State to determine U.S. Israel policy!)

Frankly, I am also critical of those policies of the Israeli leadership. 

However, I honestly don't know what to make of the Associated Press's editorial decision to frame Earnest's remarks as the foreground of the story and to cast the actual meeting of and remarks by the two leaders as merely the incidental background.  Maybe it is a journalistically fair and objective reading by the AP that the administration's reproach -- voiced by the spokesman but absent from Obama's actual post-meeting public remarks -- merits treatment as the lead and totally dominant element of the report. 

Or maybe that slant reflects either an interest in trumpeting U.S.-Israel disharmony or a choice to go with it as the most provocative and sensational way to bring attention to the report -- i.e., marketing.

Nevertheless, whatever drove the AP's take, the stark fact of Netanyahu's building plan is bad news for peace prospects.  Which is not news at all to Netanyahu. 

Meanwhile, as reported in the Boteach article below, Abbas spoke at the UN and showed right off the bat that he will not take a back seat to any "negotiating partner" when it comes to running his mouth with inflammatory invective and throwing said partner under the international bus.  No doubt there were many in that UN audience who already saw the Gazans as victims of Israel's genocidal bloodthirst rather than as victims of Hamas's ruthless strategy of using them as human shields for launching sites and command posts. 

One presumes that the members of the audience left the UN venue that day with the same views of the Gaza debacle that they'd arrived with, but maybe some there left a little more depressed about hopes for progress.

Abbas and Netanyahu deserve each other, but Israelis and Palestinians deserve better (some will say that they chose these guys, but dammit I do think I deserved better than Bush-Cheney).  Netanyahu feeds red meat to his domestic right flank, and Abbas is no better, now appearing to have decided to move away from accommodation for peace and toward Hamas and confrontation/resistance.  They both appear to be taking the cowardly route of shaking their fists at each other and thus bowing to the hatingest haters in their respective bases. 

Abbas says to Netanyahu, "I spit on you and your plans!" 

Netanyahu's reply, "Ha, I piss on your spit!!" 

Abbas: "Oh, yeah?!  I shit on your piss!!!" 

This is where you look to Kurt Vonnegut for the concluding commentary, "And so it goes."
Nurturing a greater constituency for peace among the two populations looks like an impossibly daunting prospect.  The Boteach article on Abbas's earlier speech at Cooper Union campus in New York doesn't touch at any point on finding common ground.  Au contraire, it's about Jewish kids standing up to on-campus anatagonism toward Israel.  Which is something I strongly support, but at the same time it's not altogether clear to me why so many New York college-age kids showed up to hear from Abbas.  Boteach assumes that they are anti-Zionist, but he presents no evidence of that.  The encounters he describes between his son and pro-Palestinians there sound like civil exchanges rather than hissing and spitting matches with BDS bullies.  Absent evidence of an audience hostile to Israel, I would ask, how many in that audience were in fact pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli -- i.e., pro-peace?  I don't know. 

My grandfather Harry Yellin A''H, after whom I'm named, attended Cooper Union, where Abbas spoke.  I'd love to know what in the world all this looks like from his vantage point.  If he is truly resting in peace, you'd have to think that this world is far from his mind, but what do we know?

U.S. criticizes Israel’s new housing project

  The rebuke came hours after Obama and Netanyahu met.

  By Julie Pace ASSOCIATED PRESS

      WASHINGTON — In a striking public rebuke, the Obama administration warned Israel on Wednesday that plans for a controversial new housing project in East Jerusalem would distance Israel from “even its closest allies” and raise questions about its commitment to seeking peace with Palestinians.

   The harsh criticism came just hours after President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met at the White House. Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said the president privately raised his concerns with Netanyahu though the two leaders made no mention of the matter in their public comments to reporters.

   “This development will only draw condemnation from the international community,” Earnest said. “It also would call into   question Israel’s ultimate commitment to a peaceful negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.”

   The new 2,500-unit project is contentious because it would complete a band of Jewish areas that separate Jerusalem from nearby Bethlehem. The United States has repeatedly criticized Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, casting it as damaging to efforts to secure an elusive peace accord with the Palestinians.

   The White House also condemned what it called the recent occupation of residential buildings in Silwan, an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem where several hundred hard-line Israeli settlers have moved in recent  years. Earnest called the occupation “provocative” and said it would “escalate tensions at a moment when those tensions have already been high.”

   Appearing before reporters earlier, Obama and Netanyahu betrayed little of the U.S. displeasure projected by the White House spokesman, as well as officials at the State Department. While the two leaders   have long had a tense relationship, each took a polite and cordial tone in their brief public remarks.

   Still, areas of discord were evident, most notably Obama’s frustration with Palestinian civilian deaths in during the summer war in Gaza and Israel’s wariness of U.S.-led nuclear negotiations with Iran.

   Sitting alongside Netanyahu, Obama said leaders must “find ways to change the status quo so that both Israel citizens are safe in their own homes, and schoolchildren in their schools, from the possibility   of rocket fire but also that we don’t have the tragedy of Palestinian children being killed as well.”

   More than 2,100 Palestinians — the vast majority of them civilians — and more than 70 Israelis were killed during the 50-day war in Gaza.

   Officials said much of Obama and Netanyahu’s private discussions centered on Iran. The U.S. and its negotiating partners — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China — have until Nov. 24 to reach a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, and all sides say significant gaps remain.

From: This World: The Values Network info@thisworld.us
Subject: No holds barred: Abbas the moderate

No holds barred: Abbas the moderate   By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach It took all of two sentences at the UN for the world to discover just what kind of moderate Mahmoud Abbas truly is. Just after saying, “Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,”the Palestinian Authority president followed up with this: “In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.” Now if Abbas says that Israel is guilty of genocide he must be correct, right? He is, after all, an expert on the subject of genocide, having written a doctoral dissertation denying the Holocaust. All of which exposes the farce of those Jewish organizations and leaders who have embraced Abbas over the past few years as a moderate interested in peace. This is the man whose Fatah faction in 2011 named a town square after Dalal al-Mughrabi, the leader of a 1978 bus hijacking that murdered 35 Israelis. Had Netanyahu’s government unveiled a statue to Baruch Goldstein, would anyone claim it was interested in peace? Last week Abbas was given a warm welcome at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, packed with nearly 1,000 people, many of them students from New York University. A large number were Jewish students. Only two groups protested the appearance of the man who five days later would stand before the world and use the rostrum of the UN to propagate a modern blood libel against the Jews, accusing them of mass murder. One was a contingent of Jewish students from Rambam High School in New York. The other was five of my children, led by our son Mendy who is an undergraduate at NYU. Mendy was outraged that Abbas – who has created a unity government with Hamas, a genocidal organization whose stated intention is the annihilation of the Jewish people and Israel – was facing no protest. Abbas, who has robbed the Palestinian people of democracy by refusing to face an election for a decade, was being greeted as a hero at an American campus. The president of the PA, who advocates ethnic cleansing, declaring that in a future Palestinian state no Jews will be allowed, was being cheered at a liberal arts university. So he organized a protest. Unfortunately, few students and Jewish organizations on campus said they would participate. So Mendy went ahead with his protest anyway by calling his siblings – and it helped that he thank God has a few – to join his protest. And there it was. From my second eldest daughter who served in the IDF and is visiting from Israel for the Jewish festivals, down through my two daughters who attend Yeshiva University’s Stern College for women, to my teen daughter at high school, to my son who just had his bar mitzva, Mendy had his protest. He and his siblings organized brilliant, factual and colorful signs protesting Abbas’ intolerance and partnership with terror. A protest of five people. Did it make a difference? The media, spotting the protest, came to him in waves for interviews, in which he calmly, factually and resolutely explained the reason for his protest. A group of Palestinian students walked over to my daughter who served in the IDF and confronted her about her facts. She studies political science and Middle East history at an Israeli university. The media covered that exchange as well. So five people provided a counterpoint to Abbas’ propaganda about Israel rather than Hamas being the obstacle to peace, even as Abbas and his sons are accused by the Palestinian media itself of wide-ranging corruption and theft from the Palestinian people. My son later pointed out to me that President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, whom I hosted on a panel with Elie Wiesel last year at the very same hall at Cooper Union, attracted much more protest than Abbas, even though NYU has the single largest Jewish student population of any private university in America. But more important than the media covering the event, it encouraged other Jewish students to take a stand. The university campus is a place of intimidation for many Jewish students these days. I saw it when it began at Oxford in 1988 and it has gotten so much worse since. Every public act of support for Israel helps to bolster Jewish identity and rally support for the Middle East’s only democracy, where Arabs live with more freedom and rights than in any Arab nation. My purpose in this column is not express parental pride – although my kids have made me proud – but to convey a much more universal point. Like many Jews, I have tried to stand up for Israel. But of late my kids have witnessed as death threats have poured in over my public defense of Israel in the recent war in Gaza. They saw the video of a man publicly attacking me at my speech in Seoul Olympic Stadium in front of 100,000 people. They see the odious anti-Semitic hate speech I face on social media each day. And they also saw that I did not back down. Not because I am particularly courageous – I wrestle with irrational anxiety and fears every day of my life – but because, as the Mishnah says, “In a place where there are no men, stand up and be a man, and if not now, then when?” It’s 70 years after the Holocaust. The Jewish state is in a battle for its very survival. Surrounded by enemies on every side, they seek to delegitimize and make it impossible for the Jewish state to simply defend itself. Will we sit by and watch it slowly succumb to the forces of genocidal hate? Or will we learn from the Holocaust that we have no one to rely on us but ourselves. And when we fight to overcome fear and risk social ostracization to stand up for Israel, our children watch, copy, and slowly stand up themselves, giving us more pride as parents than we can ever imagine. It’s the Jewish new year. We need many qualities to see us through the coming times with so many threats surrounding us. We need hope, we need fortitude, we need vision, and we need charity. But above all else, we need courage. In the coming year may we must all learn to stand up straight. Our children are watching. http://thisworld.us/2014/10/01/no-holds-barred-abbas-the-moderate/ The author, “America’s rabbi,” is founder of This World: The Values Network, the foremost organization influencing politics, media and culture with Jewish values. The international best-selling author of 30 books, he has just published Kosher Lust: Love is Not the Answer. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley

Hobby Lobby's Obsession -- How did Christianity become reduced to this?

The Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision backs religionists' right to disregard federal laws that rub their consciences the wrong way.  Friends of Hobby Lobby are thrilled with what they claim to be a vindication of "Religious Freedom".  The rest of us tend to see the ruling as a victory for religious oppression, empowering employers to impose their religion on employees to deny them rights and protections of federal laws.

 

It strikes many commentators as a crazy state of American affairs that five Catholic justices didn't blush to lay down a decision that might literally have been dictated by a Vatican counsel.  We've apparently come a hell of a long way from 1960 when a Catholic presidential candidate's viability required a forceful disavowal of any Catholic agenda.  

It occurs to me in the midst of all this to wonder how the Catholic Church resolves the apparent inconsistency between its fetishistic focus on the fetus, not to mention on the embryo and the zygote -- to the point of placing its survival above the health and life of the mother -- at the same time as it requires priests and nuns to be celibate.  Presumably the Church's singular obsession with abortion is not driven by the holy imperative to be fruitful and multiply or the same would apply to the clergy -- unless the Church's material self-interest in keeping priests'/nuns' families from inheriting their property trumped high-minded biblical principles.  The Church's history of entwinement with secular power and wealth makes that a rhetorical question, I think. 

My impression's been that the doctrines of the Church are the product of long and intensive philosophical debate, a la Talmudic investigation -- except for the authoritarian spinal structure that requires questions to be resolved ultimately into legal, not to mention lethal, dogma.  But that impression is not based on much learning on my part, and I really don't know the evolutionary pathway of doctrinal, political and institutional debates, struggles, steps that has yielded what seems to me to be the central preoccupation with abortion and contraception, above and beyond all other values. 

I don't know, but maybe I/we could deal more effectively with this issue if we understood its roots better.  Probably not, since the sense is that most of these believers don't have such a nuanced philosophy about it, other than this is the code of mortal sin that was force-fed from the cradle.  Whatever practical import it may have, I'm just trying to understand what has brought these religious groups to where they are.

Evangelicals are of course at least as exercised about abortion and contraception as Catholics.  The source of their abortion/contraception obsession is a total mystery to me -- outside of George Lakoff's characterization of righties in general as patriarchal, tradition-bound and authoritarian.  Curious that authoritarians are so comfortable with hating the gummint, but of course they only seem to rediscover that deep-seated antipathy and mistrust when a Democrat is in the White House.  'Specially a foreign-born one with an Ay-rab name and dark skin.    

 

America the Cruel

Charlie Pierce is a Boston journalist who's had one foot in the sports world and now the other in politics, currently writing the regular political blog for Esquire.  He's been in that role lately as a talking-head guest for progressive TV hosts.  He's a weathered 60, with shaggy-ish gray hair and beard, which go with his attitude of never being fazed by how low people can go.  I grok his writing because I always get the feeling that he's writing from the gut but also balancing his reactions in the broader perspective of having seen many cycles play out.  And that he cares.  

This particular column has Pierce fed up with what this country has devolved into in terms of how, in the name of self-protection, lower taxes, or mindless zero-tolerance justice, we're more than willing to inflict pain on our fellow citizens without a shred of compassion.  The pivotal line of the piece is this one:

"We have politicians, most of whom will never have to work another day in their lives, making the argument seriously that there is no role in self-government for the protection and welfare of the political commonwealth as that term applies to the poorest among us."

These are the patriots who never appear in public without a flag pin on their chests.  They love America to death, but Americans, not so much.  

BY THE WAY, five of the six Catholics on the SCOTUS (the five Repubicans, shock) today released their decision in favor of Hobby Lobby.  So employers can assert their religious beliefs to nullify their employees' insurance coverage for contraception. 

According to the report, the decision carves out this singular discretion for employers and bars exercise of such discretion in line with any other possible religious objections!  Sounds to a constitutional scholar like myself (not) like a decision that would never stand up to review . . .  if there were a Super-supreme Court to appeal to, that is. 

This horsepile comes on the heels of last week's decision to invalidate Massachusetts' abortion-clinic-buffer-zone law enacted to protect women seeking treatment.  Alito and Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Roberts rule that I have the constitutional right to counsel you in your face as you walk to your appointment at the women's health clinic.  I assume you're seeking an abortion, and I can legally get in your space to make my case! 

Makes me wonder how much longer the Catholic Church can be viable in a world that's progressing in the opposite direction.  The lead story in Philly over the weekend is the closing of parish churches that the diocese can't afford to keep open.  The Pope himself urges Catholics to focus more on helping people and less on forcing the rest of the world to conform with Catholic doctrines, but in America they're not listening, and the cruel impact on those deprived of reproductive autonomy makes hardly a ripple here when the big splash is the day's toll of gunshot victims.
 

Graffiti in Detroit. (photo: Getty Images)

The United States of Cruelty

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

26 June 14

We are cheap. We are suspicious. We will shoot first. It does not have to be this way. Like Lincoln before us, it is time to do something about it.

while back, we noted the story of the toddler who was severely injured when, during a drug raid, a local SWAT team came busting in and someone threw a flash-bang grenade into his crib. Well, his mother has written a chilling first-hand account of what happened to her son, and to her, during their encounter with one of our insanely militarized police forces.

My husband's nephew, the one they were looking for, wasn't there. He doesn't even live in that house. After breaking down the door, throwing my husband to the ground, and screaming at my children, the officers - armed with M16s - filed through the house like they were playing war. They searched for drugs and never found any. I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn't see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he'd just lost a tooth.

This didn't happen in Mosul. This didn't happen in Jalalabad. It happened in Atlanta. Keep this in mind.

In related news, up in Detroit, we discover that drinking water is considered to be a privilege, especially if you're poor. And, if you happen to be in arrears, it's time to pull yourself up by your thirsty bootstraps .

There are 323,900 DWSD accounts in Detroit. Of those, 150,806 are delinquent. Some of those delinquencies are low-income customers who are struggling to keep their utilities on, said some who work in providing assistance to those in need. "The need is huge," said Mia Cupp, director of development and communications for the Wayne Metropolitan Community Action Agency. "There are families that have gone months and months without water." The group is among a handful of local agencies that provide assistance to those who need help with their water bills. The Water Access Volunteer Effort, a Detroit-based nonprofit, is another. Going without water can be dangerous, Cupp said. "You can only imagine, how do go to the bathroom? How do you take showers? How do you clean yourself?" she said. "You can't conduct the normal daily things that you would do." The organization has very limited resources. Cupp said the group raised about $148,000 during a charity walk; that money could go to helping people pay water bills.

There is a new kind of systematized cruelty in our daily lives, in how we relate to each other, and in how we treat our fellow citizens, and, therefore, there is a new kind of systematized cruelty in our politics as well. It is not as though there haven't been times in the history of our country in which cruelty was practiced for political or pecuniary advantage. It is not as though there haven't been times in our history when the circumstances in people's lives did not conspire cruelly against them, or when the various systems that influenced those lives did not conspire in their collective cruelty against their seeking any succor or relief. There was slavery, and the cruel war that ended it. There was the organized cruelty that followed Reconstruction, and the modern, grinding cruelty of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age that followed it. There were two World Wars, the first one featuring a new era in mechanized slaughter and the second featuring a new era in industrialized genocide. There was the Great Depression. There was McCarthyism, and the cruelty that was practiced in Southeast Asia that ended up partly dehumanizing the entire country. There always has been the cruelty of poverty and disease.

 

But there is something different abroad in the politics now, perhaps because we are in the middle of an era of scarcity and because we have invested ourselves in a timid culture of austerity and doubt. The system seems too full now of opportunities to grind and to bully. We have politicians, most of whom will never have to work another day in their lives, making the argument seriously that there is no role in self-government for the protection and welfare of the political commonwealth as that term applies to the poorest among us. We have politicians, most of whom have gilt-edged health care plans, making the argument seriously that an insurance-friendly system of health-care reform is in some way bad for the people whom it is helping the most, and we have politicians seriously arguing that those without health-care somehow are more free than the people who have turned to their government, their self-government, for help in this area. In the wake of a horrific outbreak of violence in a Connecticut elementary school, we have enacted gun laws now that make it easier to shoot our fellow citizens and not harder to do so. Our police forces equip themselves with weapons of war and then go out and look for wars to fight. We are cheap. We are suspicious. We will shoot first, and we will do it with hearts grown cold and, yes, cruel.

 

We cheer for cruelty and say that we are asking for personal responsibility among those people who are not us, because the people who are not us do not deserve the same benefits of the political commonwealth that we have. In our politics, we have become masters of camouflage. We practice fiscal cruelty and call it an economy. We practice legal cruelty and call it justice. We practice environmental cruelty and call it opportunity. We practice vicarious cruelty and call it entertainment. We practice rhetorical cruelty and call it debate. We set the best instincts of ourselves in conflict with each other until they tear each other to ribbons, and until they are no longer our best instincts but something dark and bitter and corroborate with itself. And then it fights all the institutions that our best instincts once supported, all the elements of the political commonwealth that we once thought permanent, all the arguments that we once thought settled -- until there is a terrible kind of moral self-destruction that touches those institutions and leaves them soft and fragile and, eventually, evanescent. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like hot blood, and we call it our politics.

 

Because of that, the daily gunplay no longer surprises us. The rising rates of poverty no longer surprise us. The chaos of our lunatic public discourse no longer surprises us. We make war based on lies and deceit because cruelty is seen to be enough, seen to be the immutable law of the modern world. We make policy based on being as tough as we can on the weakest among us, because cruelty is seen to be enough, seen to be the fundamental morality behind what ultimately is merely the law of the jungle. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like a cold river, and we call it our politics.

 

It does not have to be this way. After the greatest exercise of systematized cruelty in the country's history, Abraham Lincoln gave the greatest speech ever given by an American president, and in its greatest passage, he called hold, enough.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

On one of the cruelest nights of 1968—which was a very cruel year; indeed, a year the cruelty of which eventually would claim his own life—Robert Kennedy stood in the dark in Indianapolis and offered a similar gathering hymn.

And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

The time for camouflage is over. Cruelty is cruelty. It should be recognized as a fundamental heresy against the political commonwealth and wrung out of all its institutions. That is the only way out.

Saving America: the crisis of inequality and what's necessary to reverse it

I believe this Bob Reich article from The Nation, "How to Shrink Inequality", is especially important.  He writes a finely honed and -- considering the breadth that he's taking on with it -- terrifically concise piece that analyzes the economic/political dynamics at the heart of the American crisis.  Extreme inequality generates -- and/or blocks our ability and will to solve -- almost all of our social, political, environmental and economic problems.   

This piece focuses in turn on the historical severity of the inequality, root causes of the inequality, and then the cancerous effects of the inequality to date and into the future (a four foot rise in sea level could have been included, but it is damn well implicit).  All of which is prelude to his laying out the "How-to" plan of the title -- a ten-part model for how we can dig ourselves out of this very sick situation.   

This article is a well-crafted paper written for a specific purpose and audience -- for the purpose of spurring understanding, an acute sense of threat and an urge for action among us, the American people. 

Paul Krugman's been trying to focus us on the same concerns.  In related op-eds ("Now That's Rich", "The Undeserving Rich") expanding on parts of our polarized right-left politics, Krugman drills down into the belief among plutocrats and their political and media idolizers that the rich deserve to hold onto every penny by dint of working ten thousand times harder than the rest of us lazy asses.   In fact, the biggest earners in the country basically siphon cash from the system and create neither jobs nor value.

Underneath the Reich article, I'm pasting in a brief report that speaks to the worst of our good old "American exceptionalism" -- i.e., the part of it that reflects our tolerance of such extreme and destructive levels of inequality.  It's about a survey showing how we (don't) support families in the costly process of becoming families.  The report says that the U.S. ranks with Oman and Papua New Guinea at the bottom of 185 nations surveyed as to maternity benefits and leave. 

At the end, Reich says his proposals for reversing inequality can only be realized if WE THE PEOPLE fight for it.  The key phrase he uses is "shared prosperity", echoing his earlier point that there is no long-run prosperity when all the goodies go to those who have the capital.  Capitalism in the current run-amok version is destroying value across the collective economy, not creating it.  His last words in the piece go like this:

 "... I know how difficult it is to get anything done unless the broad public understands what’s at stake and actively pushes for reform.

"... we need a movement for shared prosperity—a movement on a scale similar to the Progressive movement at the turn of the last century, which fueled the first progressive income tax and antitrust laws; . . . and other critical legislation.

"Time and again, when the situation demands it, America has saved capitalism from its own excesses. . . . We will reverse the trend toward widening inequality eventually. We have no choice. But we must organize and mobilize in order that it be done."

Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)

How to Shrink Inequality

By Robert Reich, The Nation

09 May 14 

It’s not inevitable. Here are ten practical steps to reverse the growing trend.

ome inequality of income and wealth is inevitable, if not necessary. If an economy is to function well, people need incentives to work hard and innovate. The pertinent question is not whether income and wealth inequality is good or bad. It is at what point do these inequalities become so great as to pose a serious threat to our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy.

We are near or have already reached that tipping point. It is incumbent on us to dedicate ourselves to reversing this diabolical trend. It will not happen automatically, because the dysfunctions of our economy and politics are not self-correcting when it comes to inequality. In order to reform the system, we need a political movement for shared prosperity. Herewith, a short summary of what has happened, why it has happened, how it threatens the foundations of our society, and what we must do to reverse it.

The data on widening inequality are remarkably and disturbingly clear. The Congressional Budget Office has found that between 1979 and 2007, the onset of the Great Recession, the gap in income—after federal taxes and transfer payments—more than tripled between the top 1 percent of the population and everyone else. The after-tax, after-transfer income of the top 1 percent increased by 275 percent, while it increased less than 40 percent for the middle three quintiles of the population and only 18 percent for the bottom quintile.

The gap has continued to widen in the recovery. According to the Census Bureau, median family and median household incomes have been falling, adjusted for inflation; while according to the data gathered by my colleague Emmanuel Saez, the income of the wealthiest 1 percent has soared by 31 percent. In fact, Saez has calculated that 95 percent of all economic gains since the recovery began have gone to the top 1 percent.

Wealth has become even more concentrated than income. An April 2013 Pew Research Center report found that from 2009 to 2011, “the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

This trend is now threatening the three foundation stones of our society: our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy.

In the United States, consumer spending accounts for approximately 70 percent of economic activity. If consumers don’t have adequate purchasing power, businesses have no incentive to expand or hire additional workers. Because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their incomes than the middle class and the poor, it stands to reason that as a larger and larger share of the nation’s total income goes to the top, consumer demand is dampened. If the middle class is forced to borrow in order to maintain its standard of living, that dampening may come suddenly—when debt bubbles burst.

Consider that the two peak years of inequality over the past century—when the top 1 percent garnered more than 23 percent of total income—were 1928 and 2007. Each of these periods was preceded by substantial increases in borrowing, which ended notoriously in the Great Crash of 1929 and the near-meltdown of 2008. 

The anemic recovery we are now experiencing is directly related to the decline in median household incomes after 2009, coupled with the inability or unwillingness of consumers to take on additional debt and of banks to finance that debt—wisely, given the damage wrought by the bursting debt bubble. We cannot have a growing economy without a growing and buoyant middle class. We cannot have a growing middle class if almost all of the economic gains go to the top 1 percent.

Widening inequality also challenges the nation’s core ideal of equal opportunity, because it hampers upward mobility. High inequality correlates

with low upward mobility. Studies are not conclusive because the speed of upward mobility is difficult to measure. But even under the unrealistic assumption that its velocity is no different today than it was thirty years ago—that someone born into a poor or lower-middle-class family today can move upward at the same rate as three decades ago—widening inequality still hampers upward mobility. That’s simply because the ladder is far longer now. The distance between its bottom and top rungs, and between every rung along the way, is far greater. Anyone ascending it at the same speed as before will necessarily make less progress upward.

In addition, when the middle class is in decline and median household incomes are dropping, there are fewer possibilities for upward mobility. A stressed middle class is also less willing to share the ladder of opportunity with those below it. For this reason, the issue of widening inequality cannot be separated from the problems of poverty and diminishing opportunities for those near the bottom. They are one and the same.

The connection between widening inequality and the undermining of democracy has long been understood. As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is famously alleged to have said in the early years of the last century, an era when robber barons dumped sacks of money on legislators’ desks, “We may have a democracy, or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

As income and wealth flow upward, political power follows. Money flowing to political campaigns, lobbyists, think tanks, “expert” witnesses and media campaigns buys disproportionate influence. With all that money, no legislative bulwark can be high enough or strong enough to protect the democratic process.

The threat to our democracy also comes from the polarization that accompanies high levels of inequality. Partisanship—measured by some political scientists as the distance between median Republican and Democratic roll-call votes on key economic issues—almost directly tracks with the level of inequality. It reached high levels in the first decades of the twentieth century when inequality soared, and has reached similar levels in recent years.

When large numbers of Americans are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and see most of the economic gains going to a small group at the top, they suspect the game is rigged. Some of these people can be persuaded that the culprit is big government; others, that the blame falls on the wealthy and big corporations. The result is fierce partisanship, fueled by anti-establishment populism on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

Between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, the median wage grew in tandem with productivity. Both roughly doubled in those years, adjusted for inflation. But after the 1970s, productivity continued to rise at roughly the same pace as before, while wages began to flatten. In part, this was due to the twin forces of globalization and labor-replacing technologies that began to hit the American workforce like strong winds—accelerating into massive storms in the 1980s and ’90s, and hurricanes since then.

 Containers, satellite communication technologies, and cargo ships and planes radically reduced the cost of producing goods anywhere around the globe, thereby eliminating many manufacturing jobs or putting downward pressure on other wages. Automation, followed by computers, software, robotics, computer-controlled machine tools and widespread digitization, further eroded jobs and wages. These forces simultaneously undermined organized labor. Unionized companies faced increasing competitive pressures to outsource, automate or move to nonunion states.

These forces didn’t erode all incomes, however. In fact, they added to the value of complex work done by those who were well educated, well connected and fortunate enough to have chosen the right professions. Those lucky few who were perceived to be the most valuable saw their pay skyrocket.

But that’s only part of the story. Instead of responding to these gale-force winds with policies designed to upgrade the skills of Americans, modernize our infrastructure, strengthen our safety net and adapt the workforce—and pay for much of this with higher taxes on the wealthy—we did the reverse. We began disinvesting in education, job training and infrastructure. We began shredding our safety net. We made it harder for many Americans to join unions. (The decline in unionization directly correlates with the decline of the portion of income going to the middle class.) And we reduced taxes on the wealthy.

We also deregulated. Financial deregulation in particular made finance the most lucrative industry in America, as it had been in the 1920s. Here again, the parallels between the 1920s and recent years are striking, reflecting the same pattern of inequality.

Other advanced economies have faced the same gale-force winds but have not suffered the same inequalities as we have because they have helped their workforces adapt to the new economic realities—leaving the United States the most unequal of all advanced nations by far.

What We Must Do 

There is no single solution for reversing widening inequality. French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that rich nations are moving back toward the large wealth disparities that characterized the late nineteenth century, as the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. His monumental book Capital in the Twenty-First Century paints a troubling picture of societies dominated by a comparative few, whose cumulative wealth and unearned income overshadow the majority who rely on jobs and earned income. But our future is not set in stone, and Piketty’s description of past and current trends need not determine our path in the future. Here are ten initiatives that could reverse the trends described above:

 

1) Make work pay. The fastest-growing categories of work are retail, restaurant (including fast food), hospital (especially orderlies and staff), hotel, childcare and eldercare. But these jobs tend to pay very little. A first step toward making work pay is to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, pegging it to inflation; abolish the tipped minimum wage; and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. No American who works full time should be in poverty.

 

2) Unionize low-wage workers. The rise and fall of the American middle class correlates almost exactly with the rise and fall of private-sector unions, because unions gave the middle class the bargaining power it needed to secure a fair share of the gains from economic growth. We need to reinvigorate unions, beginning with low-wage service occupations that are sheltered from global competition and from labor-replacing technologies. Lower-wage Americans deserve more bargaining power.

 

3) Invest in education. This investment should extend from early childhood through world-class primary and secondary schools, affordable public higher education, good technical education and lifelong learning. Education should not be thought of as a private investment; it is a public good that helps both individuals and the economy. Yet for too many Americans, high-quality education is unaffordable and unattainable. Every American should have an equal opportunity to make the most of herself or himself. High-quality education should be freely available to all, starting at the age of 3 and extending through four years of university or technical education.

 

4) Invest in infrastructure. Many working Americans—especially those on the lower rungs of the income ladder—are hobbled by an obsolete infrastructure that generates long commutes to work, excessively high home and rental prices, inadequate Internet access, insufficient power and water sources, and unnecessary environmental degradation. Every American should have access to an infrastructure suitable to the richest nation in the world.

 

5) Pay for these investments with higher taxes on the wealthy. Between the end of World War II and 1981 (when the wealthiest were getting paid a far lower share of total national income), the highest marginal federal income tax rate never fell below 70 percent, and the effective rate (including tax deductions and credits) hovered around 50 percent. But with Ronald Reagan’s tax cut of 1981, followed by George W. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the taxes on top incomes were slashed, and tax loopholes favoring the wealthy were widened. The implicit promise—sometimes made explicit—was that the benefits from such cuts would trickle down to the broad middle class and even to the poor. As I’ve shown, however, nothing trickled down. At a time in American history when the after-tax incomes of the wealthy continue to soar, while median household incomes are falling, and when we must invest far more in education and infrastructure, it seems appropriate to raise the top marginal tax rate and close tax loopholes that disproportionately favor the wealthy.

 

6) Make the payroll tax progressive. Payroll taxes account for 40 percent of government revenues, yet they are not nearly as progressive as income taxes. One way to make the payroll tax more progressive would be to exempt the first $15,000 of wages and make up the difference by removing the cap on the portion of income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.

 

7) Raise the estate tax and eliminate the “stepped-up basis” for determining capital gains at death. As Piketty warns, the United States, like other rich nations, could be moving toward an oligarchy of inherited wealth and away from a meritocracy based on labor income. The most direct way to reduce the dominance of inherited wealth is to raise the estate tax by triggering it at $1 million of wealth per person rather than its current $5.34 million (and thereafter peg those levels to inflation). We should also eliminate the “stepped-up basis” rule that lets heirs avoid capital gains taxes on the appreciation of assets that occurred before the death of their benefactors.

 

8) Constrain Wall Street. The financial sector has added to the burdens of the middle class and the poor through excesses that were the proximate cause of an economic crisis in 2008, similar to the crisis of 1929. Even though capital requirements have been tightened and oversight strengthened, the biggest banks are still too big to fail, jail or curtail—and therefore capable of generating another crisis. The Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial- and investment-banking functions, should be resurrected in full, and the size of the nation’s biggest banks should be capped.

 

9) Give all Americans a share in future economic gains. The richest 10 percent of Americans own roughly 80 percent of the value of the nation’s capital stock; the richest 1 percent own about 35 percent. As the returns to capital continue to outpace the returns to labor, this allocation of ownership further aggravates inequality. Ownership should be broadened through a plan that would give every newborn American an “opportunity share” worth, say, $5,000 in a diversified index of stocks and bonds—which, compounded over time, would be worth considerably more. The share could be cashed in gradually starting at the age of 18.

 

10) Get big money out of politics. Last, but certainly not least, we must limit the political influence of the great accumulations of wealth that are threatening our democracy and drowning out the voices of average Americans. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision must be reversed—either by the Court itself, or by constitutional amendment. In the meantime, we must move toward the public financing of elections—for example, with the federal government giving presidential candidates, as well as House and Senate candidates in general elections, $2 for every $1 raised from small donors.

It’s doubtful that these and other measures designed to reverse widening inequality will be enacted anytime soon. Having served in Washington, I know how difficult it is to get anything done unless the broad public understands what’s at stake and actively pushes for reform.

That’s why we need a movement for shared prosperity—a movement on a scale similar to the Progressive movement at the turn of the last century, which fueled the first progressive income tax and antitrust laws; the suffrage movement, which won women the vote; the labor movement, which helped animate the New Deal and fueled the great prosperity of the first three decades after World War II; the civil rights movement, which achieved the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts; and the environmental movement, which spawned the National Environmental Policy Act and other critical legislation.

Time and again, when the situation demands it, America has saved capitalism from its own excesses. We put ideology aside and do what’s necessary. No other nation is as fundamentally pragmatic. We will reverse the trend toward widening inequality eventually. We have no choice. But we must organize and mobilize in order that it be done. 

U.S. lags on paid maternity leave

Only two others, Oman and Papua New Guinea, rank as low in a 185-nation survey.

By John Zarocostas McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

     GENEVA, Switzerland — The United States is the only Western country — and one of only three in the world — that does not provide some kind of monetary payment to new mothers who have taken maternity leave from their jobs, a new U.N. study reports.

   Two countries share the U.S. position of giving “no cash benefits during maternity leave,” said the report, released Tuesday by the International Labor Organization: Oman, an absolute monarchy; and Papua New Guinea, where the State Department says violence against women is so common, 60 percent of men in a U.N. study acknowledged having committed a rape.  

   The 182 other countries surveyed provide either a Social Security-like government payment to women who have recently given birth or adopted a child, or require employers to continue at least a percentage of the worker’s pay. In 70 countries, paid leave is also provided for fathers, the report said, including Norway, which expanded its paternity leave from 12 to 14 weeks.

   The United States also provides for fewer weeks of maternity leave than what other Western countries mandate, the report said.

   Under U.S. law, businesses are required to allow a new mother to take as many as 12 weeks of unpaid leave. The report noted five states do mandate paid maternity leave, including New Jersey, which allows up to 18 weeks of partial pay.

   Government provides the payments in most of the surveyed   countries, the report said, with 107 nations making cash benefits available through social security plans. In 45 countries, benefits are paid solely by employers; in 30 countries employers and social security plans bear the costs.

   The International Labor Organization, which has promoted better working conditions since it became the U.N.’s first specialized agency in 1946, said it prefers leave mandates that do not saddle individual companies with costs, saying such requirements hurt businesses and potentially lead to bias against hiring women.  
   The report held out the prospect that the United States might one day join the rest of the world through proposed legislation to establish a national paid family-leave insurance program for 12 weeks of paid leave. It was introduced in December, but prospects are uncertain.