FAIR USE NOTICE

FAIR USE NOTICE

A BEAR MARKET ECONOMICS BLOG


This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates
FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates

All Blogs licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Frozen Out: Is Congress About to Slash Heating Assistance Funds Just as Temperatures Plummet?

AlterNet.org


Frozen Out: Is Congress About to Slash Heating Assistance Funds Just as Temperatures Plummet?

As the heating assistance lifeline is cut away, the depth of fuel poverty in the United States is being revealed, and it is not a pretty picture.

Photo Credit: MidnightComm via Flickr

A cold snap in January 2010 revealed the dangers of inadequate heating as residents across the South died in extreme weather conditions. As a winter that is predicted to be especially harsh settles in across the United States this year, the federal government is proposing to cut the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) budget to the bone. It proves to be an especially sharp bone in the Northeast, where residents are expressing alarm about losing fuel assistance they rely on to make it through the winter and are asking for help from their legislators. LIHEAP funding provides a critical lifeline for people who might otherwise be faced with difficult choices between heat and other life expenses like food, medications, and rent. As that lifeline is cut away, the depth of fuel poverty in the United States is being revealed, and it is not a pretty picture.

Significant slashes are being proposed for LIHEAP in this fiscal year, which could create a catastrophe for low-income people already struggling to pay their heating bills and balance other critical household expenses. Last year’s $4.7 billion dollar budget is slated for a $1 billion cut and the House and Senate are currently wrangling over rival funding bills. Meanwhile, constituents cry out for assistance with rising heating costs, concerned about the growing cold temperatures creeping across the United States.

Fuel poverty, defined as an inability to keep a home warm at an “affordable cost,” is a growing issue with an increasing number of US households living in poverty paired with rising costs for fuels used in home heating. In the UK, where fuel poverty has been a political topic since the 1980s, there’s a more formal definition: using more than 10% of household income on heating bills. There’s growing concern this year that thousands of Britons may die due to a fatal combination of high heating bills, drops in government assistance, and rising unemployment.

In the United States, it’s becoming a hot issue with temperatures on the plunge and fuel costs on the rise. The Energy Information Administration estimates that heating oil prices will rise by 8% this winter, and people will also be spending 5% more on propane. For those already spending thousands on home heating costs over the course of the winter, these increases will be significant. They also come at a particularly bad time, as the United States is in the middle of what is being politely termed a “wageless recovery.”

While economists claim the nation is recovering from the economic meltdown that started in 2008 and got progressively worse, many people on the ground are seeing no sign of this alleged recovery. Unemployment is still high, although some statistics have it trending downward, and wages fell over the course of several months in 2011. Those who have jobs are earning less at them, which helps to explain why the Census Bureau estimates that almost 50 million people, or 16% of the population, are living in poverty. Many of them are children.

For corporate interests in the United States, the wageless recovery is excellent news, of course. They’re spending less on labor at the same time they get to pick and choose between highly qualified job applicants, thanks to the huge numbers of unemployed people seeking work in a highly competitive market. Soft market conditions also make it easier to cut benefits, suppress unions, and exploit workers, because the ones who speak up can be easily exchanged for those who won’t. Economic conditions are ideal for big business, but it isn’t passing the benefits on to the rest of the country. This includes, of course, the utilities and refineries that determine heating costs.

The numbers on fuel costs and unemployment are bad, but it gets worse; 2011 has been a year of recordbreaking severe weather, and forecasters predict this winter will be very cold, in the Northeast in particular. Residents of Northeastern states can expect heavy snow and harsh conditions, and will need to turn their thermostats up to cope, particularly if they are older or disabled and need warm homes to prevent medical complications. Whether home heating means getting the house to a comfortable temperature or a tolerable one, it’s going to be expensive.

Which is where LIHEAP is supposed to come in, to bridge the gap between the cost of energy and what people can afford. This federally funded program provides funding for individual states, territories, and tribes to distribute among residents who need assistance with heating prices. These critical monies are available to people making between 110% and 150% of the poverty level, depending on policies at individual state agencies responsible for disbursing them, and can help relieve energy burdens on low-income households. LIHEAP funding can be life and death for some families.

Statistically, some households are more likely to spend a high percentage of their income on home heating than others. The less a household makes, the more money has to be dedicated to heating costs. The Department of Housing and Urban Development notes that families making a median income pay 4% of their income on utilities, including heating in contrast with older adults living on Social Security (19%) and people with disabilities (25%), many of whom are also surviving on government benefits programs that are inadequate for their needs. In the United Kingdom, the fuel poverty crisis began spreading to the middle class earlier this year and the United States is likely to see a similar trend. This issue is one that affects a broad range of social classes, and it cannot be ignored forever.

We learned this when the cold snap last January proved fatal for some Americans who couldn’t afford their heating bills or were stranded without electricity. Homelessness in cold weather can often be deadly, because shelters cannot accommodate everyone who needs assistance, and people turned away in severe weather may not survive. Unsurprisingly, one factor in homelessness can be utility bills; evictions related to unpaid utility services disproportionately impact low-income families and can leave them in a vulnerable position, unable to locate new housing with an eviction history and limited income.

Not all of the deaths associated with cold weather events have to do with exposure. House fires are more common in extreme cold, especially in homes occupied by people who cannot afford to maintain heating units and their accompanying ventilation systems. Renters rely on landlords to perform this vital safety maintenance, which is often left far too long, particularly in low-income housing units. Furthermore, people who can't afford heating fuel are more likely to rely on unsafe methods of heating, like propane cookstoves, poorly-maintained electric heaters, and similar devices. Fire departments across the country are preparing for house fires related to defective or poorly maintained heating units, even as they, too, have to cope with funding cuts.

Failing to provide assistance with energy costs also contributes to the creation of serious health problems; people with chronic illnesses, as well as older adults, are at increased risk of medical complications in the cold. Improperly heated homes can contribute to the development of severe illness that may linger untreated as people huddle under the covers to make do. When those patients do finally receive care because they’ve reached critical condition, the costs for their treatment can high—certainly higher than their heating bills would have been.

According to Andrew Miga at the Associated Press, residents of the Northeast can expect to spend an average of $3,300 for home heating fuel oil over the winter months, up $500 from last winter. That’s a large bill to cover in a very short time span. Lingering cold snaps into the spring in some regions could drive the overall expense up even higher, increasing the burden on low-income households attempting to recover from the winter months. As it is, there are more applicants for LIHEAP assistance than funds available, and Congress is apparently proposing to increase the intensity of that disparity with its proposed cuts.

Senators Olympia Snowe (D-ME), Jack Reed (D-RI), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), are pushing for action on this issue for their constituents before it’s too late and applicants are left literally out in the cold. They’ve been joined by Rhode Island’s Attorney General, Peter Kilmartin, who points out that: “More Rhode Island families than ever before rely on federal food assistance benefits and local food pantries to put enough food on the table. And still, too many children and adults in Rhode Island will go hungry tonight. I urge you not to let them go to bed cold too.” State governors are also joining the chorus, expressing their concerns about making up funding shortfalls if LIHEAP is cut, given that many states are already making significant budget cuts to meet their expenses.

Senator Sanders proposes maintaining funding at its current level, rejecting the calls for cuts to keep houses warm through the winter. Last year, LIHEAP helped almost nine million US households pay their fuel expenses, and it’s clear that many more could have benefited from that assistance, making the proposed cut clearly a bad idea. The Senator’s counterpart in the House, Representative Peter Welch, is also pushing to keep the funding at its current level. Meanwhile, Vermont is already thinking ahead with schemes to address high heating bills in the event the LIHEAP proposals fall through. Other states are doing the same, as they’ve learned the hard way that Congress may not necessarily be there for them in their time of need.

Inaction on LIHEAP in Congress is condemning Americans to death this winter, adding to the expenses of the already struggling health care system, and increasing the risk that more people will become homeless. Members of Congress have a relatively comfortable position from which to negotiate; none of them need to debate whether they should take the thermostat above 60 if they’re feeling a little chilly. They also don’t need to add blankets to the bed and swaddle themselves in sweaters indoors to survive the winter, unlike their constituents, who are counting on them to be their advocates in Washington.

How many people the United States government is willing to allow to freeze to death this winter remains to be seen, but it is a slap in the face to know that federal funds are apparently available to bail out banks, but not to heat the homes of the American people. It’s going to be a long, hard winter in many parts of the US, and some of us are not going to make it to the other side.

s.e. smith is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Bitch, Feministe, Global Comment, the Sun Herald, the Guardian, and other publications. Follow smith on Twitter: @sesmithwrites.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Republican Party’s War on America’s Working Class

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


Republican Party’s War on America’s Working Class

If organized labor were to list the three worst things that could happen to it, one of them would surely be having the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board, established in 1935) close up shop. While the NLRB hasn’t always performed to labor’s satisfaction (indeed, its reluctance to act has been the source of consternation and heartburn), it has, nonetheless, proven itself indispensable.

When companies purposely sabotage union elections, or when they refuse to recognize a legal vote to join or form a union, or when they fail to enter into the collective bargaining process in good faith, or when they violate federal labor law by firing employees engaged in union membership drives, it’s the Labor Board who hears the complaint. Without the NLRB, none of these ULPs (Unfair Labor Practices) can be addressed.

Yet, as critically important as the NLRB is, there’s a chance it will be put out of business come the first of the year. Due to a 2010 ruling by the Supreme Court, unless the 5-member NLRB has a quorum (i.e., a minimum of three members), it is illegal for it to hand down decisions. In other words, unless there are at least three members present, the NLRB has no power to stop management from violating federal labor law. They can violate it with impunity. Without the NLRB, employees could vote overwhelmingly to join a union, and the company could simply ignore them. Who’s to stop them?

Here’s how it stands. Republicans have not only steadfastly refused to confirm President Obama’s appointees (leaving the Board without a quorum), but they have threatened to strip the Board of its operating budget, basically wiping it out. No money, no NLRB. Incredibly, with the whole country watching from the sidelines—with unemployment still high and the gap between rich and poor continuing to widen—the Republican Party has audaciously and fearlessly declared war on America’s working class.

As gutless as President Obama has been in regard to labor (e.g., backing away from the EFCA, abandoning striker replacement legislation, failing to respond to attacks on the teachers’ union, et al), he’s been caught in the middle of this NLRB deal. On the one hand, by nominating solidly pro-union people to the Board he has acceded to organized labor demands, but on the other hand, he has energized and mobilized Republican opposition.

In truth, this is a bit of a false dichotomy. After all, is it not Obama’s job to behave like a traditional, pro-labor Democrat? If anything, he has been woefully derelict in that regard. Also, despite the Republican’s hysterical smear campaign, we shouldn’t allow them to pretend that the people Obama has nominated are “radicals.” In the 1960s and 1970s these same folks would have been considered “enlightened centrists,” plain and simple. And in the 1940s, they would’ve been considered “pro-business.”

Unfortunately, some nominal “pro-labor” activists have publicly criticized Obama for not being more accommodating, for not being more pragmatic, more practical. They’ve criticized him for failing to appoint Board members who would automatically appeal to the Republicans, as if it were Obama’s job to abandon America’s working class in order to please John Boehner and his corporate sponsors.

But let’s be honest. If the Republican Party had its way, there would be no NLRB, no OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), and, very likely, no Department of Labor. What prevented the elimination of those agencies was America’s political landscape. Those agencies were viewed as overwhelmingly beneficial. But, alas, the contour of the landscape has changed.

In the 1970s the Republican Party wouldn’t have dared suggest, not in its wildest dreams, that the NLRB and OSHA be dismantled. For one thing, it was a Republican administration that created OSHA. Considering the country’s mood at the time, coupled with organized labor’s influence, along with, arguably, the respect that working people still enjoyed, eliminating the Labor Board would have been considered, among other things, “unpatriotic.”

David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author (It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor), was a former union rep. He can be reached at: dmacaray@earthlink.net. Read other articles by David.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

S 1867: Killing The Bill of Rights and Declaring War on Americans



December 2, 2011 at 17:19:46

S 1867: Killing The Bill of Rights and Declaring War on Americans



By (about the author)


Anti-Torture by Shrieking Tree

This is an article that I MUST write about. If I don't write this article than I have no right to ever write another. The reason is because the most despicable and damaging piece of legislation ever passed was passed in the Senate late last night without hardly a whimper in the morning from the American mainstream press. Under the cover of darkness, the United States Senate virtually declared war on the people of this nation by passing the darkest piece of legislation ever passed in America.

If the House of Representatives passes its version and the President then puts his signature on it and turning it into law, almost every right under the Bill of Rights will be stripped away from the people of the United States. This will be the final nail in the coffin of democracy in America. We will become a military police state and cease to be a democracy or a representative republic or whatever else it has been called. According to the definition under this amendment to the military appropriations bill, the nation will become a part of a world-wide "battle zone"." If this is signed into law, it will shred the remaining tenants of the Bill of Rights and unleash upon America a total military dictatorship, complete with secret arrests, secret prisons, unlawful interrogations and indefinite detainment without people ever being charged with a crime. It will cause the torture of Americans and even the "legitimate assassination" of U.S. citizens overseas and also right here on American soil!

If you have not yet woken up to the reality of this looming police state we've been morphing into, the police state that so many have warning about, I sincerely hope that most of you realize that we are fast running out of time. Once this becomes law, you will be living in a different kind of America, one that no longer guarantees certain inalienable rights. Americans will have no rights whatsoever in America -- no due process, no First Amendment speech rights, no right to remain silent or to be tried by a jury of your peers. You will only have the right to a military tribunal with a military judge and a military lawyer. In other words, Americans will be afforded the same rights as an enemy combatant in the "battlefield" of America.

Some of you may be wondering why you haven't been told about this by the major news networks? That is a legitimate question. The information about this bill, S.1867, is conflicting. According to "Wired"

"Here's the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year's defense bill: They don't force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And even though the leaders of the military and the spy community have said they want no such power, the Senate is poised to pass its bill as early as tonight. There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is "a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force" can be held in military custody "without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force." Those hostilities are currently scheduled to end the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects".

The language of the bill is ambiguous. Also from "Wired" " So despite the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it's pretty likely to pass."

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus both say that they are opposed to the bill. Why then is it being written into the Defense Budget that is very likely to pass? Who is behind this most brazen attack on the rights of Americans in history? Senator Carl Levin is the architect of this bill but the two men that are really behind this savaging of American's basic rights are Senators John McCain and Senator Lindsay Graham along with Joe Liebermann according to InfoWar's Alex Jones. Levin defends the bill by claiming that "The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States." Still, while the bill would not force the government to try American citizens by military tribunal, it nevertheless would allow them to do so.

Civil libertarians aren't so sure. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said it "denigrates the very foundations of this country." Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added, "it puts every single American citizen at risk."

http://liberalpro.blogspot.com

Former Chairman of the Liberal Party of America, Tim is a retired Army Sergeant. He currently lives in South Carolina. A regular contributor to OpEdNews, he is the author of Kimchee Days or Stoned Cold Warriors and is currently at work on a new (more...)

Friday, November 25, 2011

I'm Bipolar, You're Bipolar, We're Bipolar, They're Bipolar


Post Normal

I'm Bipolar, You're Bipolar

Your mental illness is their financial gain.

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen , 02 Mar 2011

I'm Bipolar, You're Bipolar

Jim Hogshire (Feral House 1999)

Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

Early in the morning of December 13, 2006, police officers from the small town of Hull, MA, near Boston, arrived at the home of Michael and Carolyn Riley in response to an emergency call. Their four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years earlier. When the officers reached the house, they found Rebecca sprawled out on the floor next to her teddy bear. She had died from an overdose of the medication cocktail prescribed to her by her psychiatrist, Dr. Kayoko Kifuji. At the time of her death, Rebecca was taking Seroquel®, a powerful antipsychotic drug, Depakote®, a no less powerful anticonvulsant and mood-stabilizing drug, and clonidine, a hypotensive drug used as a sedative.

Rebecca’s parents were charged with first-degree murder, but her doctor’s role must also be questioned. How could she have prescribed psychotropic medications normally intended for adults suffering from psychotic mania to a two-year-old? Yet the medical center where Rebecca had been treated issued a statement describing Dr. Kifuji’s treatment as “appropriate and within responsible professional standards.” In an interview with the Boston Globe, Dr. Janet Wozniak, director of the Pediatric Bipolar Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, went even further: “We support early diagnosis and treatment because the symptoms of [bipolar] disorder are extremely debilitating and impairing. […] It’s incumbent on us as a field to understand more which preschoolers need to be identified and treated in an aggressive way.” On July 1, 2009, a Plymouth County Grand Jury dropped all criminal charges against Dr. Kifuji.

How did we come to this? As the psychiatrist and historian David Healy points out in his latest book, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), very few people had heard of bipolar disorder before 1980, when it was introduced in the DSM-III – the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association – and it was only in 1996 that a group of doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Joseph Biederman and Janet Wozniak, first proposed that some children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might in fact suffer from bipolar disorder. But whoever googles “bipolar disorder” today is likely to learn that the illness has always been with us. It’s just a new name, we are told, for what used to be called manic depression, a severe mood disorder characterized by oscillations between states of manic hyperactivity and deep depression.

Healy has no trouble demonstrating that this is a retrospective illusion. “Manic-depressive insanity” (a term coined in 1899 by Emil Kraepelin) was a relatively rare illness – ten cases per one million people each year, Healy claims, or 0.001 percent of the general population. By contrast, the prevalence of bipolar disorder is supposed to be much higher. In 1994, the US National Comorbidity survey estimated that 1.3 percent of the American population suffered from bipolar disorder. Four years later, the psychiatrist Jules Angst upped the figure to 5 percent: 5,000 times higher than the figure suggested by Healy. Are we really talking about the same thing? Or did the name create a new thing?

Healy favors the second hypothesis. The term bipolar disorder, he explains, was simultaneously introduced in 1966 by Jules Angst and Carlo Perris, who proposed cleanly separating unipolar depressions from bipolar disorders (they were contradicting Kraepelin, who believed that both sets of disorders were presentations of one and the same manic-depressive illness). While their conceptual move has been hailed as a breakthrough, it is hard to understand what the point is – it muddles the diagnosis instead of clarifying it. In practice, how are we to distinguish a unipolar depression from a bipolar disorder in a patient who has yet to experience a manic episode? Nonetheless, instead of seeing this incoherence as a reason for rejecting the new paradigm, psychiatrists have since done their utmost to patch it up with all sorts of ad hoc innovations.

First a distinction was made between “bipolar disorder I,” which applied to patients hospitalized for both depressive and manic episodes, and a brand new “bipolar disorder II,” which referred to patients hospitalized solely for a depressive episode. In other words, any person hospitalized for depression could now be diagnosed as bipolar. Then the reference to hospitalization was dropped for bipolar disorder II, which meant it could now include less severe forms of depression and hyperactivity, as well as all sorts of neurotic disorders that Kraepelin would never have dreamed of calling manic-depressive insanity. One now speaks of a “bipolar spectrum,” which includes, along with bipolar disorders I and II, cyclothymia (a mild form of bipolar II) and bipolar disorder “not otherwise specified” (an all-purpose category in which practically any affective instability can be placed) – to which some add bipolar disorders II ½, III, III ½, IV, V, VI, and even a very accommodating “subthreshold bipolar disorder.”

The category has expanded so much that it would be difficult to find anyone who couldn’t be described as “bipolar,” especially now that the diagnosis is liberally applied to all ages. Conventional wisdom once had it that manic depression burns out with age, but geriatric bipolar disorder is now the talk of psychiatric congresses. Elderly people who are depressed or agitated find themselves being diagnosed with bipolar disorder for the first time in their lives and are prescribed antipsychotics or anticonvulsants that have the potential to drastically shorten their life expectancy: according to David Graham, an expert from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), these psychotropic medications are responsible for the deaths of some 15,000 elderly people each year in the United States. Likewise, it has been assumed since the work of Biederman and Wozniak that bipolar disorder can strike in early childhood and not just with the onset of adolescence. As a result, the prevalence of pediatric bipolar disorder multiplied by a factor of 40 between 1994 and 2002.

How, then, did we come to apply such a serious diagnosis to vaguely depressed or irritable adults, to unruly children and to nursing home residents? Is it simply that psychiatric science has progressed and now allows us to better detect an illness that had previously been ignored or misunderstood? Healy has another, more cynical explanation: The never-ending expansion of the category of bipolar disorder benefits large pharmaceutical companies eager to sell medications marketed with the disorder in mind. Psychiatric research doesn’t evolve in a vacuum. Behind the psychiatrists’ constant redrawing of the map of mental illnesses in a sincere effort at better understanding, there are enormous financial and industrial interests that steer research in one direction rather than another. For researchers, mental illnesses are realities whose contours they attempt to define; for pharmaceutical companies, they are markets that can, thanks to marketing and branding techniques, be redefined, segmented and extended in order to make them ever more lucrative. The uncertainties of the psychiatric field present in this respect a magnificent commercial opportunity, since illnesses can always be tailored to better sell a particular molecule under a particular patent.

In the case of bipolar disorder, this conceptual gerrymandering has involved stretching and diluting the definition of what used to be called manic-depressive illness so that it might include depression and other mood disorders, thus creating a market for “atypical” antipsychotic medications such as Lilly’s Zyprexa®, AstraZeneca’s Seroquel® or Janssen’s Risperdal®. Even though these medications were initially approved only for the treatment of schizophrenia and acute manic states, they were marketed for the treatment of bipolar disorder and by extension mood disorders in general. The same was done to anticonvulsant medications, which are strong sedatives prescribed for epileptic attacks. In 1995 Abbott Laboratories succeeded in obtaining a license to offer its anticonvulsant drug Depakote® for the treatment of mania. Depakote®, however, was marketed not as an anticonvulsant but as a “mood stabilizer” – a term without any clinical meaning that is misleading insofar as it suggests a preventive action against bipolar disorder that has never been established in any study.

In the wake of this brilliant terminological innovation, other anticonvulsants such as Warner Lambert/Parke Davis’s Neurontin® were aggressively marketed for mood disorders when they hadn’t been approved even for manic states. But what did it matter, since the meteoric success of the concept of “mood stabilization” made this step useless? The suggestion to doctors was that they prescribe anticonvulsants or atypical antipsychotics to “stabilize” the moods of depressive patients who had never before displayed any manic hyperactivity, the idea being that these people had been misdiagnosed as suffering from unipolar depression while in fact being bipolar. Anyone who knows how lucrative the market was for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants such as Prozac® or Paxil® in the 1990s will immediately see the point of the exercise. While most SSRIs are now off patent, the market for atypical antipsychotics is currently worth $18 billion – twice as much as that of antidepressants in 2001.

It is easy to see that the redefinition of manic depression into the much wider concept of mood disorders neatly mirrors the marketing of anticonvulsants and atypical antipsychotics as mood stabilizers. The question, of course, is whether the pharmaceutical industry’s marketers actually created bipolar disorder or merely exploited tentative psychiatric research. Strictly speaking, we must grant it was opportunism: The research of Angst and Perris on bipolar disorder dates from 1966, well before the development of atypical antipsychotics and “mood stabilizers.” But the reality of the contemporary medical-industrial complex is that their hypothesis would not have survived, let alone prospered, had it not been “recruited” at a particular moment by the pharmaceutical industry and thrust forcefully on the public with the help of the most sophisticated marketing and advertising techniques.

This is what Healy calls the “manufacture of consensus”: By subsidizing one research program instead of another, one conference or symposium, one journal, one publication, one learned society and so on, the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t just make precious allies among the “key opinion leaders” of the medical establishment, it also gains a very efficient means of steering the academic discussion toward the illnesses that interest it at any given moment. Healy provides a detailed description of how bipolar disorder was launched at the end of the 1990s, from the avalanche of publications ghostwritten by specialized PR agencies to the sponsoring of bipolar patient advocacy groups and the creation of websites where people could fill out “mood assessment questionnaires” that inevitably dispatched them to the nearest doctor. Following this marketing blitz, no one could ignore bipolar disorder any longer. As a Practical Guide to Medical Education intended for industry marketers explains, “It is essentially like setting a snowball rolling down a hill. It starts with a small core of support: maybe a few abstracts presented at meetings, articles in key journals, focuses for discussion amongst ‘leading experts’ […] and by the time it reaches the bottom of the hill the noise should be coming from all sides and sources.” Pharmaceutical companies today launch diseases in the way fashion companies launch a new brand of jeans: creating needs that align with industrial strategies and the duration of patents.

The techniques Healy describes are the same as those used by the pharmaceutical industry to sell, or oversell, conditions as diverse as depression, osteoporosis, hypertension, social phobia, metabolic syndrome, high cholesterol, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, fibromyalgia, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, panic attacks, restless leg syndrome and so forth. In each case the existence and risks of one condition or another are amplified in order to better persuade us to swallow chemical products that may be either useless or, often, potentially toxic.

In the case of bipolar disorder, the medications on offer come with significant risks. Anticonvulsants are liable to cause kidney failure, obesity, diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome, and they are among the most teratogenic drugs. Atypical antipsychotics, once reputed to be less toxic than first-generation “typical” antipsychotics, are now known to have very serious side effects: significant weight gain, diabetes, pancreatitis, stroke, heart disease and tardive dyskinesia (a condition involving incapacitating involuntary movements of the mouth, lips and tongue). They can, in some circumstances, cause neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a life-threatening neurological disorder, and akathisia, whose sufferers experience extreme internal restlessness and suicidal thoughts. Prescribing such toxic medications to patients suffering acute mania may be unavoidable, but as a prophylactic to be given to depressed pensioners and hyperactive kids?

A series of prominent lawsuits has been brought over the past few years in the United States against the manufacturers of anticonvulsants and atypical antipsychotics for having hidden their side effects and for having marketed them “off label” to patient populations not approved by the FDA. The sums paid out in fines or settlements by the companies involved are staggering (a total of $2.6 billion for the illegal marketing of Zyprexa® by Lilly, for example), and they give an idea of how disastrous the effects of the medications actually have been. In a related development, Dr. Joseph Biederman, director of the Johnson & Johnson Center for Pediatric Psychopathology Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and the main academic advocate of pediatric bipolar disorder, has been subpoenaed in a federal investigation to account for the $1.6 million he received between 2000 and 2007 from Johnson & Johnson and other pharmaceutical companies likely to benefit directly from his research.

But the marketing of bipolar disorder itself has not been put on trial, and probably never will be. This is the perfect crime. Bipolar disorder I, II, III, etc., remain on the books and doctors continue to exercise their freedom of judgment in prescribing Zyprexa® and Seroquel® off label to their “bipolar” patients. An extended release version of Seroquel®, Seroquel XR®, was approved in December 2009 by the FDA for the treatment of depression. As for sales of Zyprexa®, they are up 2 percent compared to 2007, when the medication generated $4.8 billion in sales.

Who remembers Rebecca Riley now?

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen teaches comparative literature at the University of Washington. His latest book is Making Minds and Madness: From Hysteria to Depression (Cambridge University Press). A longer version of this article was published on October 7, 2010 in the London Review of Books.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

More on Police Departments' Collusion in Defense of 1%: Who's the Organization Coordinating Those Crackdown Calls?

AlterNet.org

Interesting report this evening in the San Francisco Bay Guardian suggesting that big city mayors have not been the only ones making conference calls in an effort to coordinate crackdowns on Occupy Movement encampments:

...a little-known but influential private membership based organization has placed itself at the center of advising and coordinating the crackdown on the encampments. The Police Executive Research Forum, an international non-governmental organization with ties to law enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has been coordinating conference calls with major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs to advise them on policing matters and discuss response to the Occupy movement. The group has distributed a recently published guide on policing political events....

The coordination of political crackdowns on the Occupy movement has been conducted behind closed doors, with city officials and PERF refusing to say how many cities participated in the conference calls and the exact nature of the discussions. Reports of at least a dozen cities and some indication of as many as 40 accepting PERF advice and/or strategic documents include San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Portland [Oregon], Oakland, Atlanta, and Washington DC....PERF coordinated a November 10 conference call with city police chiefs across the country – and many of these cities undertook crackdowns shortly afterward.

We can take an educated guess at "the exact nature of the discussions" by looking at the leadership of the Police Executive Research Forum:

PERF’s current and former directors read as a who's who of police chiefs involved in crackdowns on anti-globalization and political convention protesters resulting in thousands of arrests, hundreds of injuries, and millions of dollars paid out in police brutality and wrongful arrest lawsuits.

These current and former U.S. police chiefs -- along with top ranking police union officials and representatives from Canadian and British police -- have been marketing to municipal police forces and politicians their joint experiences as specialists on policing mass demonstrations.

Chairing PERF's board of directors is Philadelphia Police Commissioner and former Washington D.C. Metro Police Chief Charles Ramsey, who was responsible for coordinating the police response to protests against international banking institutions including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Those protests, and Ramsey's response to massive anti-war demonstrations in Washington DC in the lead up the the Iraq War, often resulted in preemptive mass arrest of participants that were later deemed to be unconstitutional.

Ramsey's predecessor as organization chair is former Philadelphia Police Commissioner and former Miami Police Chief John Timoney, who is responsible for the so called “Miami Model,” coined after the police crackdown on the 2003 Free Trade Agreement of the Americas protest. The police response to protesters in Miami lead to hundreds of injuries to protesters. The ACLU won multiple suits against the Miami P.D. over abuse to protesters and free speech concerns....Timoney arrived in Miami with plenty of baggage. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Timoney coordinated a crackdown that resulted in more than 420 arrests with only 13 convictions, none of which resulted in jail time. As in Miami, there was well documented abuse of some of the people arrested.

Also among PERF's directors is Minneapolis police chief Tim Dolan, who was responsible for the crackdown on protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention. That event also resulted in lawsuits, protester injuries and an outcry from the national press about police brutality and the preemptive nature of the police action.

PERF has also been sharing its expertise other ways:

As the occupation movement grew, PERF began circulating a publication titled Managing Major Events: Best Practices from the Field. The manual...amounts to a how-to guide for policing political events, and gives special attention to policing “Anarchists” and “Eco Terrrorists” at political events.

The guide encourages the use of undercover officers and snatch squads to “grab the bad guys and remove them from the crowd.” It urges local law enforcement to use social media to map the Occupy movement.

An earlier PERF guide, Police Management of Mass Demonstrations, advocates the use of embedded media to control police messages, the use of undercover cops to infiltrate protest groups, the use and pitfalls of preemptive mass arrest, an examination of the use of less-than-lethal crowd control weapons, and general discussion weighing the use of force in crowd control.

Dollars to cop donuts this just scratches the surface of the sort of back-channel, hidden-from-public-view communications that have been triggered by the alarming - to some - emergence of the Occupy movement as a force with which much of the American public sympathizes. In addition to a political (mayors) and law enforcement (PERF) response, undoubtedly there is a communications strategy unfolding, too, and fine journalistic efforts such as those Booman cites are likely a product of it. Certainly they all sound oddly similar.

The ante in all of these arenas has been upped considerably in the last week, with camp evictions and police confrontations across the country. In general, thanks to images like this, those crackdowns have not played well with much of the public and likely have only redoubled the determination of protesters. Following on actions marking Thursday's two-month anniversary of the original Zuccotti Park occupation, Saturday is planned as yet another day of widespread actions. It will be interesting to see whether cities and police pull back, fearing a PR backlash, or double down on the repression.

If history teaches us anything, it's that the repression can get a lot worse. As Glenn Greenwald noted astutely today,

Law enforcement officials and policy-makers in America know full well that serious protests — and more — are inevitable given the economic tumult and suffering the U.S. has seen over the last three years (and will continue to see for the foreseeable future). A country cannot radically reduce quality-of-life expectations, devote itself to the interests of its super-rich, and all but eliminate its middle class without triggering sustained citizen fury.

The reason the U.S. has paramilitarized its police forces is precisely to control this type of domestic unrest, and it’s simply impossible to imagine its not being deployed in full against a growing protest movement aimed at grossly and corruptly unequal resource distribution.

Put another way: "Dancing With the Stars" can only keep so many people anesthetized for so long. Or, as Gandhi described it, in a situation where people knew they'd been colonized: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they crack down..."

We know what happens after that.

By Geov Parrish | Sourced from Booman Tribune

Posted at November 19, 2011, 7:46 am

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Extreme Poverty Is Now at Record Levels -- 19 Statistics About the Poor That Will Absolutely Astound You

AlterNet.org


In 2010, we were told that the economy was recovering, but the truth is that the number of the "very poor" soared to heights never seen previously.


According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty than they have ever measured before. In 2010, we were told that the economy was recovering, but the truth is that the number of the "very poor" soared to heights never seen previously. Back in 1993 and back in 2009, the rate of extreme poverty was just over 6 percent, and that represented the worst numbers on record. But in 2010, the rate of extreme poverty hit a whopping 6.7 percent. That means that one out of every 15 Americans is now considered to be "very poor". For many people, this is all very confusing because their guts are telling them that things are getting worse and yet the mainstream media keeps telling them that everything is just fine. Hopefully this article will help people realize that the plight of the poorest of the poor continues to deteriorate all across the United States. In addition, hopefully this article will inspire many of you to lend a hand to those that are truly in need.

Tonight, there are more than 20 million Americans that are living in extreme poverty. This number increases a little bit more every single day. The following statistics that were mentioned in an article in The Daily Mail should be very sobering for all of us....

About 20.5 million Americans, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, make up the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 per cent or less of the official poverty level.

Those living in deep poverty represent nearly half of the 46.2 million people scraping by below the poverty line. In 2010, the poorest poor meant an income of $5,570 or less for an individual and $11,157 for a family of four.

That 6.7 percent share is the highest in the 35 years that the Census Bureau has maintained such records, surpassing previous highs in 2009 and 1993 of just over 6 percent.

Sadly, the wealthy and the poor are being increasingly segregated all over the nation. In some areas of the U.S. you would never even know that the economy was having trouble, and other areas resemble third world hellholes. In most U.S. cities today, there are the "good neighborhoods" and there are the "bad neighborhoods".

According to a recent Bloomberg article, the "very poor" are increasingly being pushed into these "bad neighborhoods"....

At least 2.2 million more Americans, a 33 percent jump since 2000, live in neighborhoods where the poverty rate is 40 percent or higher, according to a study released today by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Of course they don't have much of a choice. They can't afford to live where most of the rest of us do.

Today, there are many Americans that openly look down on the poor, but that should never be the case. We should love the poor and want to see them lifted up to a better place. The truth is that with a few bad breaks any of us could end up in the ranks of the poor. Compassion is a virtue that all of us should seek to develop.

Not only that, but the less poor people and the less unemployed people we have, the better it is for our economy. When as many people as possible in a nation are working and doing something economically productive, that maximizes the level of true wealth that a nation is creating.

But today we are losing out on a massive amount of wealth. We have tens of millions of people that are sitting at home on their couches. Instead of creating something of economic value, the rest of us have to support them financially. That is not what any of us should want.

It is absolutely imperative that we get as many Americans back to work as possible. The more people that are doing something economically productive, the more wealth there will be for all of us.

That is why it is so alarming that the ranks of the "very poor" are increasing so dramatically. When the number of poor people goes up, the entire society suffers.

So just how bad are things right now?

The following are 19 statistics about the poor that will absolutely astound you....

#1 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of "very poor" rose in 300 out of the 360 largest metropolitan areas during 2010.

#2 Last year, 2.6 million more Americans descended into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.

#3 It isn't just the ranks of the "very poor" that are rising. The number of those just considered to be "poor" is rapidly increasing as well. Back in the year 2000, 11.3% of all Americans were living in poverty. Today, 15.1% of all Americans are living in poverty.

#4 The poverty rate for children living in the United States increased to 22% in 2010.

#5 There are 314 counties in the United States where at least 30% of the children are facing food insecurity.

#6 In Washington D.C., the "child food insecurity rate" is 32.3%.

#7 More than 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.

#8 One out of every six elderly Americans now lives below the federal poverty line.

#9 Today, there are over 45 million Americans on food stamps.

#10 According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly 15 percent of all Americans are now on food stamps.

#11 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.

#12 The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.

#13 We are told that the economy is recovering, but the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by another 8 percent over the past year.

#14 Right now, one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#15 It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their lives before they reach the age of 18.

#16 More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid. Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

#17 One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least onegovernment anti-poverty program.

#18 The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006.

#19 It is estimated that up to half a million children may currently be homeless in the United States.

Sadly, we don't hear much about this on the nightly news, do we?

This is because the mainstream media is very tightly controlled.

I came across a beautiful illustration of this recently. If you do not believe that the news in America is scripted, just watch this video starting at the 1:15 mark. Conan O'Brien does a beautiful job of demonstrating how news anchors all over the United States are often repeating the exact same words.

So don't rely on the mainstream media to tell you everything.

In this day and age, it is absolutely imperative that we all think for ourselves.

It is also absolutely imperative that we have compassion on our brothers and sisters.

Winter is coming up, and if you see someone that does not have a coat, don't be afraid to offer to give them one.

All over the United States (and all around the world), there are orphans that are desperately hurting. As you celebrate the good things that you have during this time of the year, don't forget to remember them.

We should not expect that "the government" will take care of everyone that is hurting.

The reality is that millions of people fall through the "safety net".

Being generous and being compassionate are qualities that all of us should have.

Yes, times are going to get harder and an economic collapse is coming.

That just means that we should be more generous and more compassionate than we have ever been before.

Michael Snyder is an attorney, a blogger, a writer, a speaker and an activist. He is currently the publisher of The Economic Collapse blog.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Class War Winner: It Isn't Us

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


Class War Winner

Much is being said by Republicans about a class war being waged by President Obama and Democrats. In their fantasy world this class war is attacking so called job creators. All this talk is pure nonsense, absolutely false and misleading, intentional political garbage designed to intentionally mislead gullible Americans stupid enough to believe the lies. Here is the truth: There has, indeed, been a class war waged in the US; it has been going on for a good thirty years. And this real war has been won.

There are official data over time called the Gini index or coefficient between zero and one that is a statistical measure of economic inequality. When it is zero national income is evenly distributed among all citizens, and when it is one all the income goes to one person. Obviously the Gini figure will be somewhere between zero and one. Some nations have very low values and others very high ones. In the high category is the US. But more important is that the index has changed over time, rising from about 1980 to current times, after it had remained fairly stable over several decades. That significant rise from about .37 to .45 shows unequivocally that the rich got richer as most of the population in the middle class and below lost ground.

To truly appreciate what has happened you must seriously examine some data. For example, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That is very slow growth, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II when inequality actually decreased. More importantly, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. Absorb that number for a few moments. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million. Those numbers describe the true class war in which the rich and powerful were the clear winner.

Presently, according to new estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, one-fourth of those with incomes of more than $1 million a year pay income and payroll tax of 12.6 percent of their income or less, putting their tax burden below that of many in the middle class who are likely pay twice that amount or even more. The class war winners are clear.

Need more convincing? Consider data from the Tax Foundation. Between 1987 and 2008, the share of income controlled by the top 1 percent grew to 20 percent from 12 percent. That equates to a total share growth of 67 percent. During the same period, their share of taxes went to 28 percent from 24 percent, indicating a share growth of 17 percent. Follow that? The top 1 percent share of income grew nearly five times faster than their share of taxes: 67 percent versus 17 percent. Pretty darn good deal. So forget all that malarkey from Republicans that the rich pay so much of the nation’s taxes unfairly. The class war winners are reaping the rewards of a two-party plutocracy that they own.

Here is another dose of class war reality. The top 1 percent share of total pre-tax income rose from about 10 percent in 1980 to 21 percent in 2008, a nice doubling that helps explain the rise in economic inequality. It really pays to win the class war.

The idea that raising taxes on the rich in these dismal economic times in any way represents some injustice is such baloney that one should wonder how any American can possibly eat this Republican garbage. Similarly, the nonsense about job creators somehow not creating new jobs because of higher taxes flies in the face of reality, because very low taxes have not caused them to create significant new jobs. Nor did higher taxes for some decades after World War II stop high rates of new job creation.

The rich class own most of the wealth of the nation after winning the class war for some thirty years. They accomplished this victory by using money to buy and corrupt the political system. The most perplexing aspect of all this is why most Americans have not risen up in revolt against the political system that has so screwed them. Those on the right keep supporting Republican candidates that lie to them and actively work against the economic interests of all but the rich. Those on the left fall victim to the lies of Obama and other Democrats that promise much but deliver next to nothing to bring economic justice to most Americans. Democrats have also contributed to the killing of the middle class.

Odds are that those who have lost the real class war will continue to suffer until they wake up to the need to overthrow the political system. The only peaceful strategy being use of the Article V convention option in the Constitution by which state delegates could propose amendments that would reform the political and government system to take away the power used by the rich to steal the wealth of the nation. Do not ever believe that voting for new Democrats or Republicans will fix our corrupt and dysfunctional system.

One important thing to keep in mind: Raising taxes on the rich is necessary but not sufficient to turn the class war already won by the rich around.

Finally, the path to economic justice must include what Dylan Ratigan is advocating, a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics, which I urge readers to support. This is the way to remove the key tool used by the rich and powerful to pervert the economy in their favor. Congress will never propose such an amendment, only a convention will.

Joel S. Hirschhorn has a new book, Delusional Democracy: Fixing the Republic Without Overthrowing the Government, which supports constitutional conventions and other peaceful ways to restore American democracy. Read other articles by Joel, or visit Joel's website.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Inside the Belly of the Beast: Wall Street Protests: An Eyewitness Account of Police Crackdown on Peaceful Demonstrators

AlterNet.org




Protesters from the week-old "occupation" in New York's financial district were arrested, penned up, and Maced on Saturday when the NYPD showed up to their march.

Protester arrested by NYPD. Via @NYCRevMedia on Twitter.
Photo Credit: @nycrevmedia on Twitter

Deep in the belly of the beast, among the financial district’s skyscrapers, next to derivatives traders in business suits and Rolex watches, you will find a one-block large democratic society, governed by consensus, whose features include free food, free professional childcare, an arts and culture area, medical and legal teams, a media center, constant music, a library and a stand with refreshments for the many police stationed to supervise the area. This is the one-week-old occupation of Wall Street, located at Liberty Plaza Park.

A group of protestors from the camp ventured outside the park and marched on Union Square Saturday morning, and around 100 of them were arrested. Police sprayed peaceful protestors in the face with pepper spray, threw them to the ground and assaulted them with elbows, dragged a woman around by the hair, jumped over barricades to grab and rough up young people, and, when all was said and done, laughed to themselves triumphantly. This is exactly the sort of violence and brutality American authorities routinely condemn when perpetrated against non-violent civilians demonstrating for democracy in Middle Eastern dictatorships, even as they employ horrifying cruelty right here.

Filmmaker Marisa Holmes was recently in Egypt, documenting the revolutionary movement there in its attempt to transform the ouster of Hosni Mubarak into a democratic society. Inspired by the movement there, she became involved with the group organizing the Wall Street occupation, hoping to emulate the Egyptians’ success in mobilizing the public to wrest their country from the brutal forces in power. Video shows police abusing her, confiscating her belongings and falsely alleging that she had resisted arrest.

In the aftermath of the mass arrests, Liberty Plaza was gripped by an agitated nervousness. Would the cops move in on us in an attempt to seize the square? What was in store for our comrades? Some of them texted people back at camp, giving brief glimpses into the fate they were meeting – a concussion incurred from police brutality on a marcher denied access to medical attention, a group locked in a van parked at Police Plaza, people clubbed about the head and chest with police batons.

As the reports came in and people in the camp began to see video and photos of the violence, nervousness turned to anger. These were our friends who had been brutalized for no reason apart from their earnest desire to avail themselves of their guaranteed First Amendment rights in order to call for a more just, more humane, more equal America. One young man implored those assembled, “There are people right now bleeding in handcuffs! Let’s march!”

As tempers rose, the NYPD let us know that they were, as one friend put it, “playing for keeps,” standing shoulder to shoulder and occupying every inch of the block of Broadway adjacent to the square, displaying the orange nets the same police force had used to corral demonstrators at 2004’s Republican National Convention. During a shift change, as the sun dropped behind the buildings to the west, dozens of cop cars, sirens and lights blazing, began to circle the plaza, intimidating its denizens. Rumors began to circulate that the cops were waiting for cover of dark to invade the square and avoid the watchful eye of the media.

After all, they had targeted the internal media team in the arrests, capturing, among others, Marisa. That would have been bad enough, but the cops stationed at Liberty Plaza were also spotted harassing the mainstream media and prohibiting news vans from parking in convenient locations. (One candidate response to having been busted being sadistic and pitiless by the media is to stop being sadistic and pitiless; another is to eliminate the media).

In a true democracy, though, knee-jerk reactions don’t happen. A consensus eventually emerged that a hastily-organized march to the precinct would divide the group, leave the marchers vulnerable to arrest and the camp vulnerable to seizure by the police, and heads began to cool and focus on the task at hand. A lawyer addressed the general assembly and reviewed the proper procedure for dealing with hostile police. Some campers volunteered to surround the media center to protect the livestream from potential police encroachment for as long as possible; an outreach committee went to work trying to recruit more occupiers. Community is a magical thing, and social solidarity is a reliable antidote to the aggressive impulse.

As of today, most of those arrested have been released; the rest, including Marisa, await arraignment. But the mood back at camp is defiantly jovial. The occupation will not be intimidated by state violence, will not be suppressed by a hostile police force and will not be discouraged by snarky hack journalism like that in the New York Times.

This group remembers that tea party dissenters were allowed to bring guns brazenly to town hall meetings, without being subjected to mace and arrest. Similarly, the crooked Wall Street thugs who obliterated the economy and then extorted the country for staggering sums of money have never faced police brutality or even justice. And the congress (a subsidiary of Wall Street), as it proposes huge budget cuts, is even jeopardizing the pensions of those cops whose batons bloodied my friends’ face.

If only they knew what really needed to be smashed.

J.A. Myerson is the executive editor of The Busy Signal and a frequent contributor of Foreign Policy in Focus.

6 Ways the Rich Are Waging a Class War Against the American People

AlterNet.org

ECONOMY
Denying the very existence of an entire class of citizens? That's waging some very real warfare against them.


There hasn't been any organized, explicitly class-based violence in this country for generations, so what, exactly, does “class warfare” really mean? Is it just an empty political catch-phrase?

The American Right has decided that returning the tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans from what it was during the Bush years (which, incidentally, featured the slowest job growth under any president in our history, at 0.45 percent per year) to what they forked over during the Clinton years (when job growth happened to average 1.6 percent per year) is the epitome of class warfare. Sure, it would leave top earners with a tax rate 10 percentage points below what they were paying after Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, but that's the conservative definition of "eating the rich" these days.

I recently offered a less Orwellian definition, arguing that real class warfare is when those who have already achieved a good deal of prosperity pull the ladder up behind them by attacking the very things that once allowed working people to move up and join the ranks of the middle class.

But there's another way of looking at “class war”: habitually vilifying the unfortunate; claiming that their plight is a manifestation of some personal flaw or cultural deficiency. Conservatives wage this form of class warfare virtually every day, consigning millions of people who are down on their luck to some subhuman underclass.

The belief that there exists a large pool of “undeserving poor” who suck the lifeblood out of the rest of society lies at the heart of the Right's demonstrably false “culture of poverty” narrative. It's a narrative that runs through Ayn Rand's works. It comes to us in bizarre spin that holds up the rich as “wealth producers” and “job creators.”

And it effects our public policies. In his classic book, Why Americans Hate Welfare, Martin Gilens found a striking disconnect: significant majorities of Americans told pollsters that they wanted public spending to fight poverty to be increased at the same time that similar majorities said they were opposed to welfare. Gilens studied a number of different opinion polls and concluded that the disconnect was driven by a widespread belief that “most welfare recipients don't really need it,” and by racial animus – “perceptions that welfare recipients are undeserving and blacks are lazy.”

That narrative ignores two simple and indisputable truths. First, contrary to popular belief, we don't all start out with the same opportunities. The reality is that in the U.S. today, the best predictor of a newborn baby's economic future is how much money his or her parents make.

It also ignores the fact that living in an individualistic, capitalist society carries inherent risk. You can do everything right – study hard, work diligently, keep your nose clean – but if you fall victim to a random workplace accident, you can nevertheless end up being disabled in the blink of an eye and find yourself in need of public assistance. You can end up bankrupt under a pile of healthcare bills or you could lose your job if you're forced to take care of an ailing parent. Children – innocents who aren't even old enough to work for themselves – are among the largest groups receiving various forms of public assistance.

Of course, there are always people who game the system, but they represent a tiny minority of recipients; a Massachusetts study found that fully 93 percent of all cases of “welfare fraud” were committed not by the “undeserving poor,” but by vendors – hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes, etc.

Smearing those who face real structural barriers to achievement or who will inevitably face real and random misfortunes in a “dynamic,” capitalist society – that's some real class warfare. Here are six excellent examples of the form.

1. Registering the Poor to Vote is 'UnAmerican'

Matthew Vadum is a very special wingnut. His current pre-occupation is attacking Zombie ACORN -- an organization that sane people know to have been killed off last year by James O'Keef's selectively-edited videos but which Vadum insists is alive and well and looking to undermine America by organizing poor communities.

Vadum recently wrote a very special column in The American Thinker, in which he railed against efforts to get poor people registered to vote. What made the column noteworthy is that Vadum skipped the usual conservative blather about “voter fraud” – a problem that's virtually nonexistent – and offered a refreshingly honest take on the subject. The problem, according to Vadum, is that “the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.”

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

Rarely has so much wrongness been packed into so few words. Less than half of those receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) – the most significant anti-poverty program remaining in our welfare system after the Clinton-era “reforms” – are unemployed. About a quarter work jobs that earn poverty wages, and the rest aren't in the workforce because they're disabled, caring for a relative or they're children. In fact, almost half (48.1 percent) of all TANF families receive benefits only for the kids, not the adults. It's true that children are, in strictly economic terms, “nonproductive,” but they will be productive someday, and more so if they receive adequate nutrition, housing, health care and the like.

The other problem with this argument is the idea that the poor vote for “redistributionist politicians.” First, because all politicians are ”redistributionist” – it's what government does – and second, because, as Martin Gilens discovered, while Americans hate the word “welfare,” large majorities – 71 percent of Americans; not just the poor – believe that spending on anti-poverty programs should be increased (as long as you don't call it welfare).

Contrary to Vadum's beliefs, there is only a small number of true reactionaries who desire to live in a society that doesn't care for the poor and disabled, and it is in fact they who are “profoundly antisocial.”

2. Unemployment Benefits Have Created a 'Nation of Slackers'

Media Matters says, “It's taken three years, but America has finally graduated from being 'a nation of whiners' in 2008 to 'a nation of slackers' in 2011 — at least, that's what Rep. Steve King (R-IA) believes we've accomplished.” King, a right-winger's right-winger, took to the floor of the House to deliver this word-salad:

The former speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, has consistently said that unemployment checks are one of those reliable and immediate forms of economy recovery, that you get a lot of bang for your buck when you pay people not to work, and they will go out and spend that money immediately, therefore we should pass out unemployment checks and stimulate the economy. That statement is ridiculous where I come from, Mr. Speaker. To pay people not to work, and somehow in that formula it stimulates the economy.…

The 80 million Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce need to be put to work. We can't have a nation of slackers... We've gotta get this country back to work and get those people out of the slacker rolls and onto the employed rolls.

Here, too, we have a shining gem of wrongness. And a common one – the belief that unemployment benefits discourage people from working is widespread on the Right.

Here's a simple reality-check: there are no jobs! According to the Economic Policy Institute, “there are 6.9 million fewer jobs today than there were in December 2007.” Of course, the working-age population has grown by over 4 million in that same time. Do the math. As Mike Thornton noted on AlterNet, when you add people who are working a part-time gig but want a full-time job to the unemployed, you get 25.4 million workers vying for 3.2 million full-time job openings, “or 8 unemployed or underemployed workers per job.”

This is more of the same: King's painting a picture of the undeserving poor living the good life on the tab of hard-working Americans. So it's worth noting that among developed countries, the US offers some of the stingiest unemployment benefits around – only two countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) replaced a smaller share of a worker's earnings than the U.S. in 2004, and only the Czech Republic offered unemployment coverage for a shorter time.

In 2008, those unemployed Americans who qualified for benefits got $293 per week, or about 35 percent of their lost income, and that's why conservative spin that the jobless are living it up on their unemployment checks instead of trying to find work is so ludicrous. (There is, however, some evidence that this is actually true in places like Scandinavia, where people who lose their jobs still take in 70 percent or more of their income, and in some cases can do so for an unlimited amount of time.)

King drives his point home using a classic tactic: take big numbers out of context to distort reality. There are in fact 85 million “Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce,” and he would have you believe they're all “slackers.” But that figure includes stay-at-home spouses, people who live off of investment income rather than a job, entrepenuers, and of course the disabled and ill – people who can't work. Back in January 2001, when the unemployment rate was just 4.2 percent, there were 69 million working-age adults who weren't in the labor force. And the working-age population has grown by about 22 million since then.

And, of course, Nancy Pelosi was right that unemployment benefits have a huge amount of stimulus bang-for-the-buck -- King is not only a brazen class warrior, he's also economically illiterate.

3. You Can't Really Be Poor if You Have a Color TV!

Is it not the height of class war to make a conscious effort to erase the poor from the public's view? That has been a longterm project on the Right, and one of the classic, if shopworn arguments goes like this: back in the 1930s (or 1950s, or 1970s, depending on the speaker), most poor people didn't own color TVs, but now 97 percent of them do! So the poor really should stop bitching – they're living the high life!

Now, as of this writing, Craigslist offers the following items for free in the San Francisco Bay area: several TVs, multiple armchairs, a set of swivel bar stools, a stainless steel refrigerator, a Nordictrak elliptical trainer, a bunch of sofas and bed-sets – including a “like new” leather couch – a countertop grill, a ”beautiful pine armoir” and some “Hydro Massage Soaking Tub and Sinks.” Those are just the listings posted in one morning. We create a lot of goods and people want the shiniest, newest things, so there are a ton of obsolete but still functional items like TVs and washer-dryers out there that one can get for nothing or next to nothing.

Perhaps my favorite example of the genre is the claim, accurate but divorced from context, that our poor have it good because they don't necessarily live in shoe-boxes. As the Wall Street Journal was happy to point out, “The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.” Case closed! American-style capitalism for the win!

Well, not really. This is a simple matter of population density: in the EU-15, there are 120 people per square kilometer; in the United States, we only have 29 people per kilometer. And that average obviously includes people living in sparsely populated rural expanses. I live in a tightly packed U.S. city, and given that most middle-class people here can’t even dream of affording 1,200 square feet, I don’t think our poor folks can either.

4. Food-Stamps: 'A Fossil That Repeats All the Errors of the War on Poverty'

Sometimes what passes for an “argument” is just stating a simple reality in an ominous tone. Consider this string of English words, offered by the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector:

"Some people like to camouflage this by calling it a nutrition program, but it's really not different from cash welfare," said Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, whose views have a following among conservatives on Capitol Hill. "Food stamps is quasi money."

There are strict limits on what can be purchased with food stamps, which isn't true of money, but, yes, they do contribute to a household's financial health in the same way that cash does. That doesn't negate the fact that it is, indeed, a nutrition program. But Rector wasn't done – it gets better:

Arguing that aid discourages work and marriage, Mr. Rector said food stamps should contain work requirements as strict as those placed on cash assistance. "The food stamp program is a fossil that repeats all the errors of the war on poverty," he said.

Perhaps this works in the same magical way that gay marriage “discourages marriage” – I don't know. But what is clear is that, in the words of one anti-hunger activist, "Without food stamps, we'd have starvation." According to the USDA, “14.5 percent of households were food insecure at least some time during” the past year, and “5.4 percent of households experienced food insecurity in the more severe range, described as very low food security.” It's also the case that about a third of those who are eligible to receive nutritional assistance don't, in part because of the stigma that people like Robert Rector has worked so hard to encourage.

These are real people experiencing very real problems making ends meet, yet Rector and his ilk would make it more difficult to get assistance because they've embraced the fact-free idea that the poor are plagued with a “culture of dependency.” That's some serious class warfare.

5. 'The Main Causes of Child Poverty Are Low Levels of Parental Work and the Absence of Fathers.'

On Wednesday, the New York Yankees clinched the American League East title. On Thursday, it rained in New York. There is a correlation here, but only a fool would suggest that the Yanks' victory caused it to rain the following day.

Yet, the Heritage Foundation (it happens to be Robert Rector again) sees a lot of poor, single-parent households, and would have you believe that “the main causes of child poverty are low levels of parental work and the absence of fathers.”

This gets the causal relationship wrong. The number of single-parent households exploded between the 1970s and the 1990s – more than doubling -- yet the poverty rate remained relatively constant. In fact, before the crash of 2008, the poverty rate was lower than it had been in the 1970s. So, as the rate of single-parent households skyrocketed, poverty declined a little bit. Saying single-parent homes create poverty is therefore like claiming that the Yankees victory caused the sun to shine the next day.

As I noted recently, this is an essential piece of the “culture of poverty” narrative, and it is nonsense. Jean Hardisty, the author of Marriage as a Cure for Poverty: A Bogus Formula for Women, cited a number of studies showing that poor women have the same dreams as everyone else: they “often aspire to a romantic notion of marriage and family that features a white picket fence in the suburbs.” But low economic status leads to fewer marriages, not the other way around.

In 1998, the Fragile Families Study looked at 3,700 low-income unmarried couples in 20 U.S. cities. The authors found that 90 percent of the couples living together wanted to tie the knot, but only 15 percent had actually done so by the end of the one-year study period. And here’s the key finding: for every dollar that a man’s hourly wages increased, the odds that he’d get hitched by the end of the year rose by 5 percent. Men earning more than $25,000 during the year had twice the marriage rates of those making less than $25,000.

Writing up the findings for the Nation, Sharon Lerner noted that poverty itself “seems to make people feel less entitled to marry.” As one father in the survey put it, marriage means “not living from check to check.”

6. Taxing Working People Less Than the Rich Is 'Perverse'

That half of Americans “pay no taxes” is a simple lie that will never die, regardless of how frequently it is debunked. It's pure class-war, feeding into the narrative of the parasitic poor feeding off the blood of the industrious. And it is totally divorced from reality – in the real world, the working poor and the wealthy have virtually the same tax rates.

Yet the belief that only a minority pay taxes is ubiquitous among conservatives. Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said last month, "I don't want to tax the truly poor, those who would help themselves if they could, but you can't tell me that 51 percent of all households are the truly poor.” And here's where the lie was created: “No matter what these Democrats tell you,” he said, “the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the nation's tax burden and 51 percent pay absolutely nothing in income taxes."

Note the slight-of-hand. Federal income taxes make up only 18 percent of the taxes collected in this country. It also happens to be among the more progressive taxes, and with median wages stagnating for years, many people today don't earn enough to have to pay them.

Hatch takes this fact, which again pertains to less than a fifth of the country's total tax burden, and transforms it into “the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the nation's tax burden” – completely and totally untrue. If we looked only at the regressive payroll tax, and dishonestly pretended that no other taxes exist, we could make a similarly twisted argument that the wealthy pay virtually nothing in taxes – billionaire investor Warren Buffett doesn't pay a penny in payroll taxes.

When you include all taxes – not just those that erase working people's contributions – you see that we really have something close to a flat tax. That’s the conclusion of a 2007 study by Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson, who found that when you add it all up — state and local taxes, federal taxes and excise fees – “The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.”

Class War

All of these narratives are designed to protect a status quo that's serving the interests of a rarified elite, but is obviously not working well for the working majority in this country. All are intended to distract from the structural causes of poverty and inequality, or to ignore the fact that some people will always experience genuine misfortune – the myriad surprises in life that can happen to anyone – because they'd choose low taxes over caring for them.

But it's also a narrative that denies the very existence of class differences in this country. As noted earlier, the United States is anything but a true meritocracy. What millions of white working-class Americans understand – intuitively, even if they can't articulate it – is that class still matters. And by erasing the very idea of class, of structural barriers to getting ahead in this economy, they are left with a nagging sense of grievance against those they perceive to be bringing them down: foreign powers, immigrants, people of color and liberals, with their “job-killing” regulations and the like.

Ultimately, to deny the very existence of an entire class of citizens is to wage some very real warfare against them.