by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:

John Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” But maybe not forever…

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

See also the interview with Stiglitz at Democracy Now! and check out his latest book, Freefall America ( Norton Books ).

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.

First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.

Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead.

None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to redistribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.

Economists are not sure how to fully explain the growing inequality in America. The ordinary dynamics of supply and demand have certainly played a role: Labor-saving technologies have reduced the demand for many “good” middle-class, blue-collar jobs. Globalization has created a worldwide marketplace, pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled workers overseas. Social changes have also played a role—for instance, the decline of unions, which once represented a third of American workers and now represent about 12 percent.

But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.

When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that.

Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: The erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: The chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: Rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.

In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.

As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.

Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: Looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

by Barry Grey in the World Socialist Web site:

Ford CEO Alan Mulally received a pay package worth $26.52 million in 2010, a 48 percent raise from the previous year, according to a Friday filing by the US auto company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is in addition to a stock bonus of $56.6 million the chief executive was awarded in March, bringing his total take for the year to more than $83 million.

Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr. also received a hefty raise to $26.46 million on top of a stock award of $42.2 million, for a total of nearly $69 million.

These obscene sums were revealed only days after the United Auto Workers union announced that it would seek to expand the $14-an-hour wage for new-hires to more auto workers in upcoming contract talks. The aim of the union is to convince auto makers that they can make more money by shifting production to low-wage UAW plants, thereby increasing the UAW executives’ dues income.

The Ford bosses’ display of greed is not an aberration. The heads of major US corporations received their biggest raises in recent memory last year. Median CEO pay (not counting stock awards and other perks) jumped 27 percent to $9 million. The Detroit News reported Saturday that “$25 million is the pay level top companies performing well are paying their chief executives…”

Among the companies that have handed out huge executive bonuses is Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded nearly a year ago, killing 11 workers and sending oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. In a filing Friday, Transocean reported that it had awarded safety bonuses to its executives as a reward for the firm’s “best year in safety performance.” CEO Steve Newman’s safety bonus was over $374,000, part of a total compensation package of $5.8 million.

Two-and-a-half years after the Wall Street crash and taxpayer bailout of the banks, the corporate looting of America is accelerating. The executives are rewarding themselves for soaring profits and a corporate cash hoard in the trillions—achieved almost entirely through downsizing and cost cutting. Firms in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index registered a 47 percent growth of profits in 2010, while their revenues increased by only 7 percent.

To place the compensation of Ford’s two top executives in perspective, their combined payout of $152 million is equivalent to the annual wages of 5,241 hourly workers earning the coming industry benchmark of $14 an hour—i.e., the wage bill for a large auto plant.
These facts expose the fraud of the claims that “there is no money” for jobs, decent wages and vital social needs such as education, health care and housing. The Ford announcement came as the Obama administration and congressional Democrats were offering to cut a record $33 billion from social programs in the current year’s federal budget and as the Republicans were preparing to unveil a plan to slash trillions of dollars, gutting Medicaid and privatizing Medicare, beginning in fiscal year 2012.
At the state and local level, Democrats and Republicans alike are carrying out savage austerity measures—slashing public workers’ jobs and wages, closing schools and libraries, and reducing Medicaid benefits—even as they continue to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy.

A significant factor in the fiscal crisis is the fact that US corporations pay little or no federal or state taxes. Just last month it was reported that General Electric, the largest US corporation, which took in $14.4 billion in profits in 2010, paid no income tax last year. In fact, it is expecting a $3.2 billion tax credit from the federal government.

GE is the rule, not the exception. A 2008 study by the Government Accountability Office showed that nearly 70 percent of American corporations paid no corporate income tax.

Meanwhile, with mass unemployment a permanent feature of economic life, workers’ wages are declining. According to the Labor Department’s employment report released Friday, average hourly wages for private-sector workers, including salaried employees, were only 1.7 percent higher last month than in March of 2010. But with the official inflation rate above 2 percent—and the prices of basic necessities such as fuel and food rising much faster—the real wages of American workers are falling.

That this trend is bound up with the policies of the Obama administration is indicated by the following anomaly: average hourly earnings rose over 3 percent annually during most of the 18-month official recession from December 2007 to June 2009. Then wage growth slowed sharply.

This shift corresponds to the bankruptcy and restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler carried out under the auspices of Obama’s Auto Task Force and with the full support of the UAW.

The Obama administration insisted as a condition for loans to the auto companies the imposition of drastic cuts in auto workers’ benefits and a 50 percent wage cut—to $14 an hour—for new-hires. This was a signal for the corporate elite to launch a wage-cutting drive in every sector of the economy—a process that has now been expanded to encompass the public sector as well.

The working class is being impoverished in order to further enrich the financial aristocracy. A study released Friday by the nonprofit group Wider Opportunities for Women concluded that less than 13 percent of the jobs expected to be created by 2018 will provide economic security to a single parent raising two or more children. Only 43 percent of these jobs, according to the study, will pay wages sufficient to provide economic security for two workers raising two children.

The resources exist in abundance to provide a secure, good-paying job to all who want to work as well as quality education, housing, health care and a comfortable retirement. But under the capitalist system they are monopolized by a parasitic ruling elite that owns the means of production and controls both political parties and all of the levers of state power.

The month-long struggle in Wisconsin signaled the reemergence of the working class into mass struggle in America, after decades during which it was suppressed by the official trade unions. But the betrayal of that struggle by the unions, working in league with the Democratic Party, underscores the critical need for the development of a new, revolutionary leadership in the working class. This is the essential requirement for the independent mobilization of the working class and the development of a mass socialist movement.

The Socialist Equality Party, the International Students for Social Equality and the World Socialist Web Site are holding a series of conferences this month in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Los Angeles and New York City on “The Fight for Socialism Today,” beginning with the Ann Arbor conference this coming Saturday and Sunday.

These conferences will discuss a socialist program to secure the basic social rights of the working class, oppose imperialist war, and halt the assault on democratic rights. We urge all of our readers and all those looking for a perspective to fight the attacks on working people and youth to make plans to attend.

Barry Grey

from Democracy Now! (please check out the 16-minute interview).

Now watch me argue with my strawman:

This, in spite of the current dirty-bomb event brought on by the quake/tsunami, in spite of the pollution involved in uranium mining. Consider, too, that the waste is dangerous for many times longer than human civilization has existed on the planet. Civilization of some sort has been around for maybe 6,000 years. Fissile fuels commonly found in spent fuel rods are plutonium-239 with a half life of 80,000 years (13.3 times the current age of civilization), uranium-233 with a half-life of 159,000 years (26.5 times civilization). and uranium-235 with a half life of 704 million years (117,333.3 times civilization). Mostly it is uranium used today. So, even if there is some kind of deep, lead-insulated vault for all the rods (after hazardously transporting them to the disposal site), how do you communicate with our remote descendants a million years from now (when current earth languages are forgotten)–in order to warn them not to open up the vault?

But what about my need to watch TV and so on? Don’t we either have to have greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuels or nuclear power?

There are alternatives to fossil & fissile: solar, wind, geothermal, conservation. Yes, yes, I know, no infrastructure, no feasibility… But, with a will similar to the 1960s race to the moon, moving priorities from endless war to sustainable energy, getting corporations and super-rich to pay their fair share, and taxing carbon realistically (to pay for the real costs pollution charges), well then, maybe the alternatives would be realistic, wouldn’t they? As for the “if pigs could fly” rejoinder, that’s the retort offered to abolitionists, to freedom riders, to protesters against the Vietnam War.

But consider the TVA and rural electrification in this country, and then cast an eye at China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. Aren’t they, with little government restraint, going to need a mind-numbingly large amount of power? Surely a bunch of windmills aren’t going to be enough. Nuclear power is like a knife in the kitchen: It is going to be used, so we had better learn to use it correctly or we are going to get hurt.

Well, so far (and, from what i see, well into the future), in this kitchen we have an 18-month-old fooling around with a very sharp knife. And as for those big countries mentioned–China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil–let’s be aware how that is pretty much the position of the U.S. delegation at Copenhagen and Cancun, representing the greatest polluter in the world: “Why should we bother doing anything at all until we know those other places are cleaning up their act?” A great man once told us that we need to get the beam out of our own eye before we discuss the speck in the other’s eye–and once we make progress there, we are in a stronger position to scold and cajole.

One more little thing on the nukes, by the way–and this from economist Joseph Stiglitz: “Nuclear power is a really interesting case, because that industry has never been commercially viable. It has always existed on the back of a government-provided insurance, that we provide as taxpayers, that they don’t pay for. And we see now in Japan that, you know, they did the same thing, and we see the cost of that. The rest of society is paying an enormous price. There is no way that the slight savings in energy cost can make up for the loss to the Japanese economy that has resulted from the nuclear explosion. And the same thing could happen here in the United States…. If the industry really believed that the Japan scenario could not happen here, let them make an unlimited liability and provide us with a guarantee that they would pick up for the financial cost of the kind of disaster that Japan is facing. And I can tell you that if you made them bear those costs, if we didn’t give them that free ride of limited liability, that industry would not exist in the United States today.”

At tax-filing time, why not calculate precisely how much you paid for war in the 2010 tax year, whether you are single, married filing jointly, married filing separately, or head of household: War Tax Calculator

by Chris Hedges at truthdig.

Here is a suitable introduction to the article by Veterans for Peace activist Tarak Kauff:

$$$$ for wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, $$
$ to support Israel’s occupation and oppression of Palestine, $$$$ in
bailouts to make those at the top of the food chain even more
powerful, but pennies for our children’s education, for adequate and
real health care, for infrastructure, for housing, yet big corporate
banks are thriving and like Bank of America, pay no taxes. But you do,
and I do, and working people all across this country pay taxes. I
ask, what are we paying for and into whose pockets is it going? The
wealth of this country is going down the tubes into the already
stuffed pockets of the few. We are being bled dry while people of the
world are literally bleeding and dying from U.S. made weapons. Do we
not see the connection? This has got to stop and we are the ones who
can and will stop it. Believe in our united strength and join us on
April 15th.

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,” which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated, the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in” in your neighborhood.

Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.

“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,” Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.”

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.

Chris Hedges’s column appears every Monday at Truthdig. Hedges, a fellow at The Nation Institute and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of Death of the Liberal Class.

from Democracy Now!, this interview with Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich:

“Simply put, the President has no constitutional authority to do what he’s done. He has changed the Constitution, in effect, by saying that he has an executive privilege to wage war. He’s ignored Article I, Section 8. He’s ignored the War Powers Act. He’s even exceeded the U.N. mandate. And so, this administration has taken this country on a path that is profoundly anti-democratic, and it needs to be challenged….

“Look, there’s not going to be an impeachment, but someone has to say that what the President is doing is fundamentally wrong, if we have any understanding of the way this country was founded. The founders did not want to create, in the executive, another British king who could wage war at his whim and caprice.

“This president has assumed power that no president, not even President Bush, has assumed. And I think that we need to focus on this, not as a matter of whether we like President Obama or not, not as a matter of whether we are Democrats or not, but whether or not we understand the basic constitutional principles of the separation of power, of the separation of the war power, and that the president’s role as commander-in-chief has nothing to do with an ability to make war. He just simply doesn’t have that power…

“[W]hat other presidents have done, you know, frankly, that’s neither here nor there. If there’s an argument that, well, Congress didn’t assert its authority before, and so what’s happened is that we—as I think Glenn Greenwald argued this, as well, in a recent column—it doesn’t follow that the consistent acquiescence to an executive usurpation of congressional power nullifies the founding document. It doesn’t. At some point you have to say, “Wait a minute here.” And so, that’s what I’m doing.

“Now, to look at the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8 firmly defined the war power. You read the sense of Washington and Jefferson, you read The Federalist Papers, Number 69, what Hamilton wrote about it, it makes it clear. That’s where the war powers is. Now, the War Powers Act was an attempt to define better the relationship between Congress and the presidency by, you know, carving out circumstances under which the president can take action before going to Congress and providing for notification later on.

“The President has not met the requirements of the War Powers Act with respect to that, in terms of the definition of there being an attack on the United States, or the threat of one. So, this is a circumstance where this administration is redefining the presidency in the same way that John Yoo, the attorney for President Bush, redefined it. We’ve got a presidency here that is becoming to be—is beginning to be indistinguishable from that of the Bush White House with respect with its use of war power, with respect to its interpretation of executive power, with respect to the role of the president in defining all national security issues without consulting with Congress at all….”

Check out the entire interview, concerning any intervention on supposed “humanitarian” grounds.