I don’t normally link to anything that has my real name from this site, but I couldn’t help myself this time. I’m the top letter in the “Voice of the People” in today’s NY Daily News!
The letter is about what I discussed earlier, that I find it outrageous that the Bush administration knew about North Korea’s nuclear program before the vote on the Iraq resolution, but didn’t tell Congress until afterward.
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Paul Krugman has the cover article in this week’s NY Times Magazine, on how America is becoming a plutocracy, and that the days of America as a middle-class society are ending. He also points out that all of our arguments about America being the richest country, and benefitting from it, don’t really hold once you realize that we’re now at that point because the rich have so much, not because the average American does.
One criticism: He barely mentions the role of organized labor in the creation of a middle-class America in the 1950s and 1960s.
Over the past 30 years most people have seen only modest salary increases: the average annual salary in America, expressed in 1998 dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), rose from $32,522 in 1970 to $35,864 in 1999. That’s about a 10 percent increase over 29 years — progress, but not much. Over the same period, however, according to Fortune magazine, the average real annual compensation of the top 100 C.E.O.’s went from $1.3 million — 39 times the pay of an average worker — to $37.5 million, more than 1,000 times the pay of ordinary workers.
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One ploy often used to play down growing inequality is to rely on rather coarse statistical breakdowns — dividing the population into five ”quintiles,” each containing 20 percent of families, or at most 10 ”deciles.” Indeed, Greenspan’s speech at Jackson Hole relied mainly on decile data. From there it’s a short step to denying that we’re really talking about the rich at all. For example, a conservative commentator might concede, grudgingly, that there has been some increase in the share of national income going to the top 10 percent of taxpayers, but then point out that anyone with an income over $81,000 is in that top 10 percent. So we’re just talking about shifts within the middle class, right?
Wrong: the top 10 percent contains a lot of people whom we would still consider middle class, but they weren’t the big winners. Most of the gains in the share of the top 10 percent of taxpayers over the past 30 years were actually gains to the top 1 percent, rather than the next 9 percent. In 1998 the top 1 percent started at $230,000. In turn, 60 percent of the gains of that top 1 percent went to the top 0.1 percent, those with incomes of more than $790,000. And almost half of those gains went to a mere 13,000 taxpayers, the top 0.01 percent, who had an income of at least $3.6 million and an average income of $17 million.
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You might think that 1987, the year Tom Wolfe published his novel ”The Bonfire of the Vanities” and Oliver Stone released his movie ”Wall Street,” marked the high tide of America’s new money culture. But in 1987 the top 0.01 percent earned only about 40 percent of what they do today, and top executives less than a fifth as much. The America of ”Wall Street” and ”The Bonfire of the Vanities” was positively egalitarian compared with the country we live in today.
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Canadians can expect to live about two years longer than Americans. In fact, life expectancy in the U.S. is well below that in Canada, Japan and every major nation in Western Europe. On average, we can expect lives a bit shorter than those of Greeks, a bit longer than those of Portuguese. Male life expectancy is lower in the U.S. than it is in Costa Rica.
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Although America has higher per capita income than other advanced countries, it turns out that that’s mainly because our rich are much richer. And here’s a radical thought: if the rich get more, that leaves less for everyone else.
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Many Americans assume that because we are the richest country in the world, with real G.D.P. per capita higher than that of other major advanced countries, Americans must be better off across the board — that it’s not just our rich who are richer than their counterparts abroad, but that the typical American family is much better off than the typical family elsewhere, and that even our poor are well off by foreign standards.
But it’s not true. Let me use the example of Sweden, that great conservative bete noire.
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But life expectancy in Sweden is about three years higher than that of the U.S. Infant mortality is half the U.S. level, and less than a third the rate in Mississippi. Functional illiteracy is much less common than in the U.S.
How is this possible? One answer is that G.D.P. per capita is in some ways a misleading measure. Swedes take longer vacations than Americans, so they work fewer hours per year. That’s a choice, not a failure of economic performance. Real G.D.P. per hour worked is 16 percent lower than in the United States, which makes Swedish productivity about the same as Canada’s.
But the main point is that though Sweden may have lower average income than the United States, that’s mainly because our rich are so much richer. The median Swedish family has a standard of living roughly comparable with that of the median U.S. family: wages are if anything higher in Sweden, and a higher tax burden is offset by public provision of health care and generally better public services. And as you move further down the income distribution, Swedish living standards are way ahead of those in the U.S. Swedish families with children that are at the 10th percentile — poorer than 90 percent of the population — have incomes 60 percent higher than their U.S. counterparts. And very few people in Sweden experience the deep poverty that is all too common in the United States. One measure: in 1994 only 6 percent of Swedes lived on less than $11 per day, compared with 14 percent in the U.S.
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I ignored Dan as he kept screaming about Ralph Nader supposedly costing Al “can’t wait to talk about God and morality again” Gore the election.
Now he’s ranting about how liberals should be FOR the war in Iraq because it will liberate the Iraqi population from a terrible dictator. He thinks this administration is capable of pulling of a post-WWII Japan trick on Iraq!
Did aliens replace his brain? It’s more fun to read David Ehrenstein’s discussion of it than it is to read the actual column.
Oh, and he’s tired of worrying about AIDS too:
“I used to think about AIDS all the time, read about AIDS constantly, and do a lot of writing about AIDS. But in the last few years, I’ve found it harder and harder to give a shit about AIDS. Instead, I want to write about the monorail or Iraq — this despite the fact that two of my best friends in the whole world are infected with HIV.”
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Where are our priorities? I just read this letter in the NY Times.
Re “The Forgotten Domestic Crisis,” by Marcia Angell (Op-Ed, Oct. 13): In addition to placing health care increasingly out of the economic reach of individuals and businesses, our commodity approach guarantees that the pool of insurable individuals will continue to shrink, thereby undermining the very essence of affordable insurance.
Insurance works because a lot of people pay premiums and not everyone uses services. The more healthy people insured, the stronger the system. A single-payer, broadly financed health insurance system is hardly socialism; it is the only way health care can become universally accessible and even remotely cost-effective.
SUSAN POOR
San Francisco, Oct. 15, 2002
My first reaction was that we’re going to have national terrorism insurance before we have national health insurance!
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So, the Bush administration knew about North Korea’s admission concerning its nuclear program one week before the vote on Iraq in Congress. Were they waiting because they were afraid that Congress would raise questions about the logic of bombing Iraq but negotiating with North Korea?
Good letter in the NY Times today:
In “North Korea Says It Has a Program on Nuclear Arms” (front page, Oct. 17), you say “the administration’s decision to keep news of the North Korean admission secret for the past 12 days while it fashioned a response appears significant for several reasons.”
One reason not directly addressed in the article is the timing of the admission in relation to the Iraq resolution that was debated in Congress.
The administration withheld its announcement about the North Korean nuclear program until the day President Bush signed the resolution.
If this announcement had been made just a few days earlier, it would have been yet another reason for members of Congress to question the wisdom of invading Iraq over its hypothetical nuclear program when a real one exists in a different hostile government.
The administration’s decision to withhold this information was apparently another cynical ploy to force a vote in Congress about Iraq while withholding critical and relevant facts.
JEREMY E. MEYER
Haverford, Pa., Oct. 17, 2002
Interesting fact: When the Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly returned from his trip to North Korea on October 5, he canceled his planned press conference.
I can’t believe anyone trusts this administration at all.
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I just read a column in the NY Daily News by Juan Gonzalez about Silvestre Reyes, a conservative Democrat from El Paso (and former Marine captain in Viet Nam, 1968-1969).
“Thirty-five years ago, I found myself half a world away in a place called Vietnam,” Reyes said during the Iraq debate. Now, he went on, “mothers and fathers and veterans come to me and tell me, ‘Please, do not let us get back into a war without exhausting all other avenues.’”
“As a member of the Committee on Intelligence, I have asked consistently the question. … What is the the connection between 9/11 and Iraq and Saddam Hussein? None.
“What is the connection between Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda? Very little, if any. As to the weapons of mass destruction … there is a lot of speculation.”
Even a top general who testified before the committee expressed severe doubts about a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Reyes said.
Quite simply, the congressman concluded, “the case has not been made.”
One of the other things that struck me, and should be bigger news, is this: 47 of the 52 members of the House that are either Hispanic or African-American voted against the Iraq war resolution. The news media should be asking why. Is it because they realize that their constituents will suffer so that more powerful people can get richer from the war?
One reason for war you won’t hear from the White House is spelled O-I-L. Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia, about 11% of the world’s total.
Kenneth Derr, the former CEO and chairman of Chevron, said it best in a 1998 speech at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.
“Iraq possess huge reserves of oil and gas – reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to,” said Derr.
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Yes, sometimes their owner/publisher, and columnists like Zev Chafets (blaming Jerrold Nadler for not caring about the safety of American Jews) make me want th throw the paper across the room. But then they do something like this:
Gay rights overdue
State Republicans are signaling that a gay rights bill stalled in Albany for three decades may finally come to a vote. Why now? It’s obvious. Election Day is a month away, and Gov. Pataki’s efforts to get the legislation passed this year have come to naught. Gay and lesbian voters comprise a sizable, focused chunk of the voting public.
And so the GOP is scrambling: Pataki’s angling for a preelection Senate vote on the bill. State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno hints that a vote could actually happen – after the November election. Mayor Bloomberg insists the measure will be passed before the end of the year, thanks (of course) to Pataki’s support.
Pataki’s name was booed by many when Bloomberg mentioned it recently at a major gay event, and the frustration is understandable. After 30 years, you’d think that adding two little words – sexual orientation – to the list of personal qualities protected from discrimination under state law would be a no-brainer. Twelve states and 20 New York localities, including the city, have managed to do it. The holdup in Albany? While Pataki has supported the bill for several years, though initially he opposed it, Bruno, who is allied with some of the state Senate’s most conservative Republicans, hasn’t yet struck a deal.
The bill, like so many pieces of legislation that languish in Albany limbo, should have been approved long ago. It should be passed as soon as a new session can be convened. But meanwhile, let’s hear – pardon us – straight talk from state leaders, starting with Bruno: Will the gay rights bill, a matter of simple decency, be passed or won’t it? If they can’t deliver, surely they understand: Voters, gay or straight, can swing both ways.
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Maybe they should spend some time reading about world history, other cultures, and an intelligence report or two.
White House staffers gather for Bible study
(via TBOGG)
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Wow! Salon has the text of the speech he gave on the floor of the House yesterday opposing the Iraq war resolution.
“Let us not forget that our president — our commander in chief — has no experience with, or knowledge of, war. In fact, he admits that he was at best ambivalent about the Vietnam War. He skirted his own military service and then failed to serve out his time in the National Guard. And, he reported years later that at the height of that conflict in 1968 he didn’t notice ‘any heavy stuff going on.’”
“So we have a president who thinks foreign territory is the opponent’s dugout and Kashmir is a sweater.
I’ve resisted the temptation to quote more, so go on over there and read it!
I worked on one of his campaigns when I lived in Texas.
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