EFTA01195689.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 03/23/2014 Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 08:34:32 +0000 Attachments: These_9_Maps_Should_Absolutely_Outrage_Southemers_Emily_Cohen_Huff Post_March _6,_2014.docx; Two_Charts_That_Will_Enrage_Everyone,_Well,_Except_Bankers_Maxwell_Strachan_Mar ch_ I 3,_2013.docx; The2Paid-What-You're- WorthiMyth_Robert_Reich_Huff Post_03_14_2014.docx; Money_Pit,_The_Monstrous_Failure_of US_Aid_to_Afghanistan_Joel_Brinkley_World_Af fairs_January.February_2013.docx; Landmark_Alzheimer's_Study_Pinpoints_Protein_That_Protects_Aging_Brain_Shelley_Eml ing_Huff Post_03_19_2014.docx; 11 Reasons We CantIgnore_Alzheimer's_Anymore_The_Fisal_Times_March_17,2014. docx; That_Old-time_Whistle_Paul_Krugman_NYT 03_16_2014.docx; Ukraine's_amputation_The_Economist_March_17,_2014.docx; Crimea,_Scotland...now_Venice_votes_on_breakaway_Katrina_Bishop_March_21,_2014.do cx; Chicago_bio.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(I).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(14).png; image(I5).png DEAR FRIEND Final results of the referendum in Crimea showed that more than 97 percent of voters supported leaving Ukraine to join Russia, the head of the referendum election commission said Monday, March 17, 2014. Mikhail Malyshev told a televised news conference that the final tally from Sunday's vote was more than 9 percent in favor of splitting from Ukraine. He also said that the commission has not registered a single complaint about the vote. The referendum was widely condemned by Western leaders who discuss economic sanctions to punish Russia throughout the week. Ukraine's new government in Kiev called the referendum a "circus" directed at gunpoint by Moscow. After the referendum the Crimean parliament declared that all Ukrainian state property on the peninsula will be EFTA01195689 nationalized and become the property of the Crimean Republic. Lawmakers then asked the United Nations and other nations to recognize it and began work on setting up a central bank with $30 million in support from Russia and Putin formally recognized Crimea as an independent state. Moscow, meanwhile, called on Ukraine to become a federal state as a way of resolving the polarization between Ukraine's western regions — which favor closer ties with the 28-nation EU — and its eastern areas, which have long ties to Russia. In a statement Monday, Russia's Foreign Ministry urged Ukraine's parliament to call a constitutional assembly that could draft a new constitution to make the country federal, handing more power to its regions. It also said country should adopt a "neutral political and military status," a demand reflecting Moscow's concern about the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO and possibly integrating closer politically and economically with the EU. Russia is also pushing for Russian to become one of Ukraine's state languages alongside Ukrainian. In Kiev, Ukraine's new government dismissed Russia's proposal Monday as unacceptable, saying it "looks like an ultimatum." Immediately, Western leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Prime Minister, David Cameron and President Obama raged against both the election and its results, threatening to place sanctions on Russia and freeze assets of its Oligarchs, as well as promising that there would be "a price to pay." In the most comprehensive sanctions against Russia since the end of the Cold War, President Barack Obama on Monday froze the U.S. assets of seven Russian officials, including top advisers to President Vladimir Putin, for their support of Crimea's vote to secede from Ukraine. The U.S., EU and Ukraine's new government immediately said that they would not recognize the referendum held Sunday in Crimea, which was called hastily as Ukraine's political crisis deepened with the ouster of pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych following months of protests and sporadic bloodshed. In addition to calling the vote itself illegal, the Obama administration said there were "massive anomalies" in balloting that returned a 97 percent "yes" vote for joining Russia. The problem is that we forget how things started. In 2010 Viktor Yanukovych (who was Ukraine's most popular politician at the time), soundly defeated Yulia Tymoshenko to win the Presidency. During his first several years as President, Mr Yanukovych steered Ukraine towards a closer relationship with the EU making Brussels his first foreign visit as President instead of Moscow. But then, days before it was due to be signed, he rejected an association agreement with the EU in November 2013, To counter attempts by Western powers to woo Ukraine away from the Russian orbit with billions of dollars in financial assistance and the possibility of its entry into NATO and the EU, Putin was forced to offer the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych almost $14 billion in financial assistance. And when Yanukovych signed an agreement with Putin in January Ukrainians went into the streets in protest which continued for months, reaching a bloody climax between 18-22 February. Lets remember that until Yanukovych re-embraced Putin late last year, Western powers said little about the rampant corruption in Ukraine and its President's opulent lifestyle. But the moment that he refused to accept the EU's terms and instead signed a new trade-pack (financing) with Putin, he was demonized by the West for the culprit that he is. We then encouraged protesters to overthrow Yanukovych and when they did, we rubbed it into the face of Putin. At least Putin had the people in Crimea vote for the referendum, (no matter how coerced). Whereas, we celebrated the overthrow of a democratically elected President. There is a bit of hypocrisy there, that even our constitutionally legally trained President seems to have ignored. It is not like the United States hasn't used shaky premises to invade other countries, without ever apologizing. So if you want to see where Vladimir Putin got his playbook, you need to look no further than Washington, D.C. Ukraine is not our problem and Putin would have gotten positive referendum results in Crimea, even if Russian tanks and troops had not crossed the border. So let's stop being hypocritical and let the Ukrainians and Crimeans sort out their own problems. EFTA01195690 Last week I read a review in The Economist on Thomas Piketty's new book — Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which they describe as "excellent and extremely thought-provoking" and "might turn out to be one of the most significant economics books that have been produced since 2000." And if that sounds like hocus pocus, for now specialist and laymen like me, it is a study of the correlation between population growth and economic growth; in particular the links between demography, growth and inequality. The consensus among economist is that growth comes from two sources; having more workers and making those workers more efficient (productivity), with roughly speaking, these two forces have been equally important from oAD - 1700 (o.1 World Output to 0.1 Population) and 1700 - 1700 - 2012 (1.6 to 0.8) and 1913 - 2012 (3.0 to 1.4). This data in the abstract is completely confusing but Piketty's premise is that in periods of stagnation, "in a quasi-stagnant society, wealth accumulated in the past will inevitably acquire disproportionate importance. The return to a structurally high capital/income ratio in the twenty-first century, close to the levels observed in the eighteenth century, can therefore be explained by a the return to a slow- growth regime. Decreased growth - especially demographic growth - is thus responsiblefor capital's comeback." But why I was interested in the article is that the writer suggested that Piketty's thesis fit into Tyler Cowen and Thomas Freeman's "Average is Over" argument about how a tech-savvy elite will inevitably dominate the low-skilled masses (and the associated argument that inequality is down to skill-biased technological change). So again let's get away from the boring data and examine Average if Over. Jobs lost in the recession Jobs gained in the recovery Higher-wage occupations Mid-wage occupations Lower -wage occupations a:t WE I SIC.11) ax0.1.1 infaX Ct..> 103 ea) 1,0000.1) IAMM t %Olio Net change In occupational employment Some: NUP analysis ofCurrent Population Survey Recession Is 2008 Ctl to 2010 O1; recovery is 201001 to 2012 el A key claim made by economist Tyler Cowen is that the US middle class is thinning out due to job polarization and that the trend will continue in the coming decades as routine middle-wage jobs are automated. Cowen: Of the jobs lost during the recession about 60 percent of them were in what are called "mid-wage" occupations. What about the jobs added since the end of the recession? Seventy- three percent of them have been in lower-wage occupations defined at $13.52 or less. This general trend, namely more rapid job growth in low—paying jobs, can be seen in the numbers from 1999-2007 so we can't blame it on the financial crisis or the particular problems of today. EFTA01195691 In another article the writer says that Cowen used 2on data from the National Employment Law Project. The NELP has since updated its numbers through the first quarter of last year, finding that things have improved a bit with lower third of jobs now accounting for 58% of the new jobs versus 73% in Cowen's book. While, middle-wage occupations — which, again, constituted 60% of the recession losses — accounted for just 22% of the recovery job gains. More recent numbers from a new research note from Goldman Sachs also support Cowen. Using Department of Labor data, the bank first ranked loo industries by their prerecession wages and then divided them by fifths. GS finds that although the "hollowing out in the middle is real, it is not unique to the post-crisis period." Each recession has sharp drops in the middle with no accompanying sharp rebound during the recovery. GS: First, the decline in employment during the recession was sharpest in middle-wage industries. Second, employment growth has been considerably more even during the recovery, with slightly faster growth in low-wage industries. Third, the net effect since the recession began—a moderately greater decline in employment in middle-wage industries than in low- and high-wage industries—is quite similar to the longer-term trend prior to the recession (that is, the group of bars on the left follow the same pattern as the group of bars on the right). Exhibk 1: Employment Gains in Middle-Wage Industries Have Been Weaker Since the Recession Began, but the Trend Is Long-Standing Percent annualized Percent annualized 3 3 2- 2 1 0 tA 0 MP -1 Employment growth for industries -2 grouped by wage percentile -2 4 0-20 -3 20-40 -4 -4 40-60 -5 60-80 -5 • 80-95 -6 -6 • 95-100 -7 7 1990-2007 Recession Recovery Recession and Recovery Net Source: Deparensntot Labor. Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. Looked at occupation-level trends, (a) ranking occupations based on median weekly earnings, and then (b) calculating employment growth. GS: This occupation-level view sends a similar but slightly stronger message. Once again, growth at the extremes—service employment at the low end of the wage distribution, professional and management employment at the upper end—outpaced growth in the middle in the decades prior to the recession. EFTA01195692 As I read more and found that there are many skeptics of Piketty's thesis. Philip Delves Broughton wrote in the Wall Street Journal - "As a parent of two young boys, who will, I dearly hope, step into the workforce in the next two decades, I read Tyler Cowen's latest book, "Average Is Over," with a deepening sense of dread. With every page, my knuckles whitened, my shoulders sagged and my blood pressure rose. This is what economists can do to you. They gaze down on the worldfrom way up there, caress their crystal balls, tell you you're doomed and retirefor lunch. To sum up, Mr. Cowen believes that America is dividing itself in two. At the top will be io96 to 15% of high achievers, the "Tiger Mother" kids if you like, whose self-motivation and mastery of technology will allow them to roar away into thefuture. Then there will be everyone else, slouching into an underfundedfuture of lower economic expectations, shantytowns and an endless diet of beans. I'm not kidding about the beans." Poor Americans, writes Mr. Cowen, will have to "reshape their tastes" and live more like Mexicans. "Don't scoff at the beans," he says. "With an income above the national average, I receive more pleasurefrom the beans, which I cook withfreshly ground cumin and rehydrated, pureed chilies. Good tacos and quesadillas and tamales are cheap too, and that is one reason why they are eaten so frequently in low-income countries." So what am I to do to save my sons from this bean-filled future? The first thing, it seems, is to have them play more chess. Mr. Cowen is an avid player, and the first half of his book is taken up with an argument for how freestyle chess, in which humans play alongside machines, rather than against them, is a model for the economy. His point, and it is a good one, is that the future belongs to those of us able to work best with machines. The author roves broadly and interestingly to make his case, outlining the radical economic transformations that lie in store for us, predicting the rise and fall of cities depending on their capacity to adapt to this machine-driven world and offering policy prescriptions for preserving American prosperity. But as New York Times columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, recently wrote about three recent advances in technology -- self-driving cars, robotic factories and artificial intelligence. The (present and near future) result of these incredible advances has been (will be) the replacement of human labor with "machines." He then added another recent development -- the internationalization of the labor market, meaning that Americans are now competing for jobs, manufacturing as well as software development, with people throughout the world. This column interested me to the point that I did a piece on it earlier this year in my Weekend Readings because of three words in Thomas L Friedman's column were "average is over." These words reflect the state of global competition for jobs as well as the new age of smart technologies that permit only the best educated to have well-paying jobs. The message for American education can't be clearer: Either we step up to the plate, or much of our population will lead unproductive lives with terribly paying jobs. Business and national government leaders understand this, and so do many educators. But too many parents refuse to accept that their children must demand more of themselves. And too many workers don't understand that the landscape is drastically changing. Most of all, average is not enough and you don't need to be Thomas Piketty to figure this out however the data is framed. EFTA01195693  U BEIOSTAN TAJIKIST- N TURKMENISTAN BAr IS l•Paiw HIRAT NANC;ARIIA PAKISTAN AFGHANISTAN o Noboru' 00tal • PrOvin0al MAI o Town/a890 + ..own aftI NIMROZ Man road Searcury IOW named One of my new favorite television shows in HBO documentary series VICE which like one of my other favorite television series PBS/WGBH's FRONTLINE focuses on the underbelly of issues often glossed over after the fickle public has move onto the next headline. This week's show - Afghan Money Pit - the title tells it all — The U.S. has spent $93 billion on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan since invading the country in 2OO1. It is the most costly rebuilding of a single country in history. It is also the most wasteful and most fraudulent use of American tax dollars of all time. John Sopko is the man responsible for investigating this clusterfuck, a job that entails pissing off everyone from the president of Afghanistan to American four-star generals. VICE traveled to Kabul and beyond to expose American money going down the drain -- from the comical to the deadly -- with the Special Investigatorfor Afghanistan Reconstruction. Web link: http://unvw.frequency.comividecilvice•editor-america-is-spending-moneyn 55772990/45-2499 and http://www.hbo.comiviceithice/episodes/02/1 I -afghan-moneypit/video/debriefafghan•money-pit As the war in Afghanistan is transitioning to its endgame the drawdown hasn't stopped the billions in U.S. aid flowing into the country, and after 12 years of spending on this scale, we're still losing money— hundreds of millions (if not billions) unaccounted for—almost as fast as we can write the next check. The spotty oversight of U.S. aid to Afghan forces is now set to get even worse as the main auditing group is in the country is about to have its presence dramatically reduced. The majority of the Department of Defense money spent in Afghanistan that doesn't pay for U.S troops goes into projects for infrastructure and funding the Afghan security forces. The U.S. legacy in Afghanistan will be defined in large part by the success of those institutions, the Afghan army most of all, where we have focused our funding and resources. EFTA01195694 A series of recent reports detailing the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the U.S. cornerstone efforts—some of it gone to waste, corruption, and misallocation, the rest simply missing and unaccounted for—offer a troubling picture of the return on U.S. investments and underscore how deeply the key Afghan institutions still rely on U.S. funding for daily operations. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an independent agency created by Congress to monitor U.S. spending in Afghanistan, has detailed the money wasted in the Afghan supply process in a series of audits focused on procurement of fuel and vehicle parts for Afghan security forces. As of March 2013, the U.S. has spent about $54 billion funding security forces in Afghanistan and $92 billion on reconstruction, agriculture, and other development projects, according to a SIGAR report. Two October reports on funding and supply of the Afghan National Security Forces highlight the severity of the oversight problems in transactions in Afghanistan. In Afghan bases funded by the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A), SIGAR counted about $370 million in unaccounted spare vehicle parts for the Afghan army and found that fuel purchases and budget needs had been overestimated by nearly a third. Since 2010, America's mission in Afghanistan had moved away from unilateral military operations. The first shift was to training and developing Afghan forces. Now, in the war's final stage, the focus is on supporting those forces as the Afghans take the lead in security operations and building up the civic and economic institutions that were neglected when the country was too violent for them to take root. The DOD's own funding request for 2014) lays out the realignment of U.S. priorities in Afghanistan: "The campaign in Afghanistan has shifted, with the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) taking over the primary responsibilityforfighting insurgents and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) moving into a supporting role. Although the ANSF is already leading over 8o% of operations they remain dependent on ISAFfor many supportfunctions." "The U.S. government is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Afghan government without even knowing if they're in the right ballpark of what they actually need." "The strength and success of the (Afghan National Security Forces] is critical to the overall success of the reconstruction effort, so they want to make sure they have the supplies they need," said Elizabeth Field, the assistant inspector general for audits and inspections for SIGAR who played a key role in both the fuel purchases audit as well as the spare parts audit. The problem of money disappearing into Afghan projects without anyone being held accountable for the loss is not new, but the widespread acknowledgement of past losses has not prevented the same funding processes from being repeated throughout the course of the war. According to Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the problem is ingrained in the U.S. approach to funding in Afghanistan. "A lot of the money is spent with little regardfor the effectiveness of it," Harrison said. "We don't actually try to do small-scale experiments tofigure out what type ofprograms are effective at achieving our objectives before rolling out large programs." In one case, the U.S. purchased $138 million worth of spare parts for the ANA despite not being able to account for $200 million worth of parts that had already been purchased. According to Field, the SIGAR auditor, the disappearing funds stem from U.S. forces' heavy reliance on Afghan record- keeping without measures to ensure that the money appropriated is being spent as originally intended. In an October 10 letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, SIGAR inspector general John Sopko said auditors' access to U.S. construction projects, some totaling more than $72 million, is dwindling to an EFTA01195695 all-time low for SIGAR investigators. "It is clear that everyone working in Afghanistan, including SIGAR, will struggle to continue providing the direct U.S. civilian oversight that is needed in Afghanistan," Sopko wrote in his letter, projecting that oversight will fall to 21 percent of Afghanistan territory post-2014. Of the chances that U.S. would be able to stem the continuing loss of aid in the war's final year, Todd Harrison, the defense budget expert, said: "We're on our way out of Afghanistan now, so it's too late tofundamentally reform the way we do things there." With a history of warlords and tribal leaders ruling almost autonomously in their regions no matter what we do most experts believe that the Taliban will take over. The Taliban is just the last reiteration of this form of leadership. And with the rampant corruption of the ICarzai government, which really only controls the capital city and is supported by the US military, few people believe that it will be able to survive after US troops depart. And when this happens, whatever we build and leave will be taken over by the Taliban. For more information please feel free to read attached Joel Brinkley article from WORLD AFFAIRS - Money Pit: The Monstrous Failure of USAid to Afghanistan. We have to ask ourselves first of all why we really went into Afghanistan. Secondly why didn't we use a proportional response? Experts say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately cost between $4 trillion and $6 trillion, with medical care and disability benefits weighing heavily for decades to come, according to a new analysis. The bill to taxpayers so far has been $2 trillion, plus $260 billion in interest on the resulting debt. If we can't afford to upgrade our public schools in the United States, can we really afford wars of choice in Afghanistan, Syria or in the Ukraine? Remember that the reason that the Bush/Cheney administration used to justify invading Afghanistan was because the Taliban had refused to turnover Osama bin Laden. Obviously there had to be a cheaper way to make our point and continuing pouring money into this sinkhole as we leave is just adding insult to injury. ****** Bill Maher God Mass Murderer This May Be Bill Maher's Most Intense Rant Against Religions - All Of Them - Yet Web Link: You're probably going to be hearing a lot about Bill Maher's latest "New Rule" in the coming days. Mostly because in it, he not only takes aim at almost every religion (Bahat you got lucky) but also because he calls God a "psychotic mass murderer." The rant kicks off with Maher explaining that he's sick of seeing ads for Darren Aronofsky's 'floating piece of giraffe crap" "Noah." While he allows that the film "must be doing something right," since it's already angering both Christians and Muslims, the fact that 6o% of adult Americans believe that the story of Noah is literally true is proof enough for Maher that "this is a stupid country." But more important than the implausibility of the tale, Maher says it's immoral. "It's about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it, and his name is God." And the sure-to-offend-Christians zingers keep coming from there: EFTA01195696  • "What kind of tyrant punishes everyone just to get back at the few he's mad at? I mean, besides Chris Christie." • "Hey, God, you know you're kind of a dick when you're in a movie with Russell Crowe and you're the one with anger issues." • "You know conservatives are always going on about how Americans are losing their values and their morality, well maybe it's because you worship a guy who drowns babies." • "If we were a dog and God owned us, the cops would come and take us away." Lamenting that anyone would take their moral marching orders from the Bible, Maher wraps things up by hammering almost every religion as irrational, especially in light of conservative political ideology: • "I'm reminded as we've just started Lent, that conservatives are always complaining about too much restraining regulation and how they love freedom, but they're the religious ones who voluntarily invent restrictions for themselves. On a hot summer day, Orthodox Jews wear black wool, on a cold winter night Mormons can't drink a hot chocolate... isn't life hard enough without making shit up out of thin air to fuck with yourself?" I grew up in the Seventh Day Adventist church and I loved the religion but long before I read Darwin, in my young mind I questioned the vitality of the Noah's Ark story, as well as Adam and Eve, especially when no one could explain to the satisfaction of a nine year old what happened after Cain killed Able? Did Adam and Eve have girl children? And if not how did their family procreate? There are many good parables and lessons in the Bible, but to take it literally is as ridiculous as believing that Noah and his family could build a boat large enough to accommodate two of every species of animals and somehow the lions didn't eat the cows. I say this because American Christians needs to understand that religion should be based on good, evil and tolerance and not on fables that even a nine year-old can see through. I started out my weekly readings last Sunday with the issue of RACE because it is one of the Big Uglies in America. My piece was inspired by a by a two-part interview on Moyers & Company, whereby Bill and Ian Haney Lopez discussed how "dog-whistle" politics uses race to influence vote through coded stereotypes. I was inspired again this week by an op-ed in the New York Times by Thomas Friedman — That Old-Time Whistle — who seized on Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.'s de facto intellectual leader recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a "culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working." When later challenged, he said that he was simply being "inarticulate." To this I say BULSHIT. Just to be clear, there's no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and he can legitimately claim that his dog-whistle was not deliberate. But it doesn't matter. He said what he said because that's the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taldng away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People. As Friedman said, "race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics." We are told, for example, that conservatives are against big government and high spending. Yet even as Republican governors and state legislatures block the expansion of Medicaid, the G.O.P. angrily denounces modest cost-saving measures for Medicare. How can this contradiction be explained? Well, what do many Medicaid recipients look like — and I'm talking about the color of their skin, not EFTA01195697 the content of their character — and how does that compare with the typical Medicare beneficiary? Mystery solved according to Paul Ryan and other conservative dog whistlers. Or we're told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it's hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees. Instead, all the movement's passion, starting with Rick Santelli's famous rant on CNBC, has been directed against any hint of financial relief for low-income borrowers. And what is it about these borrowers that makes them such targets of ire? You know the answer. One odd consequence of our still-racialized politics is that conservatives are still, in effect, mobilizing against the bums on welfare even though both the bums and the welfare are long gone or few existed. Mr. Santelli's fury was directed against mortgage relief that never actually happened. Right-wingers rage against tales of food stamp abuse that almost always turn out to be false or at least greatly exaggerated. And Mr. Ryan's black-men-don't-want-to-work theory of poverty is decades out of date. Let's realize that the average entry level drug dealer spend 8 to 12 hours slinging dope on their assigned street corners/territory, and does it in all types of weather, hiding from the police and in consent fear of reprisals from rivals outside and within their gang -- it isn't an easy vocation. And for the average underclassed African American who toils as a dead-end job as a janitor, loading dock jockey, manual laborer at minimum wage, often working two or more jobs trying to feed their family — they are ignored by Mr. Ryan and his conservative friends. So having started working full time at 14 years old, in a factory on the grave-yard shift, doing double and triple shifts on the weekend making minimum wage, I speak from experience. In the 197os it was still possible to claim in good faith that there was plenty of opportunity in America, and that poverty persisted only because of cultural breakdown among African-Americans. Back then, after all, blue-collar jobs still paid well, and unemployment was low. The reality was that opportunity was much more limited than affluent Americans imagined; as the sociologist William Julius Wilson has documented, the flight of industry from urban centers meant that minority workers literally couldn't get to those good jobs, and the supposed cultural causes of poverty were actually effects of that lack of opportunity. Still, you could understand why many observers failed to see this. But over the past 4o years good jobs for ordinary workers have disappeared, not just from inner cities but everywhere: adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen for 6o percent of working American men. And as economic opportunity has shriveled for half the population, many behaviors that used to be held up as demonstrations of black cultural breakdown — the breakdown of marriage, drug abuse, and so on — have spread among working-class whites too. These awkward facts have not, however, penetrated the world of conservative ideology. Earlier this month the House Budget Committee, under Mr. Ryan's direction, released a 205-page report on the alleged failure of the War on Poverty. What does the report have to say about the impact of falling real wages? It never mentions the subject at all. And since conservatives can't bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of what's happening to opportunity in America, they're left with nothing but that old-time dog whistle. Mr. Ryan wasn't being inarticulate — he said what he said because it's all that he's got. And I am glad that Mr. Friedman called Ryan on his racist code/dog whistling because this type of behavior should not be tolerated. And the War on Poverty was working well until it was undermined and gutted by Republicans under Reagan, Bush and Bill Clinton. EFTA01195698  WEEK's READINGS These 9 Maps Should Absolutely Outrage Southerners Last week in the Huffington Post journalist Emily Cohn wrote an interesting article — These 9 Maps Should Absolutely Outrage Southerners — that brings to light the reality that the South is suffering disproportionately compared to the rest of the country, and a lot may have to do with economic policies that are not in the interest of people living in those states such as absence of a minimum wage, rejection of the Affordable Healthcare Act and cutting social policies that are the safety net of the poor. Web Link: Intpliwww.huffingtonixist.comi2014/03/06/inaps-of-thc-south-bad-place n 485519 .html Look, there are lots of things to love about the South. It's clean and quiet. There's delicious food, good people and often amazing weather. But that's exactly why it makes us so sad to think about all the ways in which the region is struggling today. First off, poverty rates are a lot higher in the South. EFTA01195699  Source: USDA In fact, as many as one in four southern kids lives in poverty, compared to the national average of one in five. In the map above, red shading indicates a poverty rates between 17.9 and 22.8 percent. Orange indicates 15.9 to 17.8 percent; light orange, 12.2-15.8 percent; pale yellow, 9 to 12.1 percent. As you can see, there's a lot of high-poverty red in the south. And minimum wages are much lower. Source: Department Of Labor Virtually no southern states, with the exception of Florida, have a minimum wage higher than the federal floor of $7.25 an hour. Many southern states do have relatively low living costs. But they are not dramatically lower than costs of living in other states, such as Ohio and Missouri that have set minimum wages at least slightly higher than the national limit. The southern states are doing the absolute minimum for their poorest citizens by keeping the minimum wage at the lowest levels possible. And people living in the South are a lot less likely to move up the economic ladder. EFTA01195700  62.4 65.0 48 9- 524 463 - 489 447.463 436 44 7 f.I422 - 43.6 M40.8 • 422 X39.2.40.8 ▪ - 392 . 28.0 37A If you want to achieve the American Dream, don't move to the South. That's because states in the South have extremely low levels of economic mobility. In the map above, pale yellow represents places with higher mobility, while red indicates low mobility. For more information please see all of the graphs, see the attached Huffington Post article or download it via the above weblink. This week Robert Reich wrote an interesting article in The Huffington Post - The 'Paid-What- You're-Worth' Myth - which he calls a dangerous myth. Based on the often assumed that people are paid what they're worth. According to this logic, minimum wage workers aren't worth more than the $7.25 an hour they now receive. If they were worth more, they'd earn more. Any attempt to force employers to pay them more will only kill jobs. While according to this same logic, CEOs of big companies are worth their giant compensation packages, now averaging 3oo times pay of the typical American worker. They must be worth it or they wouldn't be paid this much. Any attempt to limit their pay is fruitless because their pay will only take some other form. Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker got paid $35 an hour in today's dollars. Today, America's largest employer is Walmart, and the typical Walmart worker earns $8.8o an hour. Reich: Does this mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was worth four times what today's typical Walmart employee is worth? Not at all. That GM worker wasn't much better educated or productive. He often hadn't graduated from high school. And today's Walmart worker is surrounded by digital gadgets -- mobile inventory controls, instant checkout devices, retail search engines -- making him or her highly productive. EFTA01195701 Reich believes that the real difference is the GM worker a half-century ago had a strong union behind him that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members. And because more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union, the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they'd be unionized if they didn't come close to matching the union contracts.Today's Walmart workers don't have a union to negotiate a better deal. They're on their own. And because fewer than 7 percent of today's private-sector workers are unionized, non-union employees across America don't have to match union contracts. This puts unionized firms at a competitive disadvantage. The result has been a race to the bottom. By the same token, today's CEOs don't rake in 300 times the pay of average workers because they're "worth" it. They get these humongous pay packages because they appoint the compensation committees on their boards that decide executive pay. Or their boards don't want to be seen by investors as having hired a "second-string" CEO who's paid less than the CEOs of their major competitors. Either way, the result has been a race to the top. If you still believe people are paid what they're worth, take a look at Wall Street bonuses. Last year's average bonus was up 15 percent over the year before, to more than $164,000. It was the largest average Wall Street bonus since the 2008 financial crisis and the third highest on record, according to New York's state comptroller. Remember, we're talking bonuses, above and beyond salaries. All told, the Street paid out a whopping $26.7 billion in bonuses last year. Are Wall Street bankers really worth it? Not if you figure in the hidden subsidy flowing to the big Wall Street banks that ever since the bailout of 2008 have been considered too big to fail. People who park their savings in these banks accept a lower interest rate on deposits or loans than they require from America's smaller banks. That's because smaller banks are riskier places to park money. Unlike the big banks, the smaller ones won't be bailed out if they get into trouble. This hidden subsidy gives Wall Street banks a competitive advantage over the smaller banks, which means Wall Street makes more money. And as their profits grow, the big banks keep getting bigger. How large is this hidden subsidy? Two researchers, Kenichi Ueda of the International Monetary Fund and Beatrice Weder di Mauro of the University of Mainz, have calculated it's about eight tenths of a percentage point. This may not sound like much but multiply it by the total amount of money parked in the ten biggest Wall Street banks and you get a huge amount -- roughly $83 billion a year. Recall that the Street paid out $26.7 billion in bonuses last year. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or even a Wall Street banker to see that the hidden subsidy the Wall Street banks enjoy because they're too big to fail is about three times what Wall Street paid out in bonuses. Without the subsidy, no bonus pool. By the way, the lion's share of that subsidy ($64 billion a year) goes to the top five banks -- JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo. and Goldman Sachs. This amount just about equals these banks' typical annual profits. In other words, take away the subsidy and not only does the bonus pool disappear, but so do all the profits. The reason Wall Street bankers got fat paychecks plus a total of $26.7 billion in bonuses last year wasn't because they worked so much harder or were so much more clever or insightful than most other Americans. They cleaned up because they happen to work in institutions -- big Wall Street banks -- that hold a privileged place in the American political economy. And why, exactly, do these institutions continue to have such privileges? Why hasn't Congress used the antitrust laws to cut them down to size so they're not too big to fail, or at least taxed away their EFTA01195702 hidden subsidy (which, after all, results from their taxpayer-financed bailout)? Perhaps it's because Wall Street also accounts for a large proportion of campaign donations to major candidates for Congress and the presidency of both parties. America's low-wage workers don't have privileged positions . They work very hard -- many holding down two or more jobs. But they can't afford to make major campaign contributions and they have no political clout. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the $26.7 billion of bonuses Wall Street banks paid out last year would be enough to more than double the pay of every one of America's 1,085,000 full-time minimum wage workers. The remainder of the $83 billion of hidden subsidy going to those same banks would almost be enough to double what the government now provides low-wage workers in the form of wage subsidies under the Earned Income Tax Credit. But I don't expect Congress to make these sorts of adjustments any time soon. The "paid-what-you're-worth" argument is fundamentally misleading because it ignores power, overlooks institutions, and disregards politics. As such, it lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing whatever should be done to change what people are paid, because nothing can be done. ****** Two Charts That Will Enrage Everyone (Well, Except Bankers) Harrington Post — Maxwell Strachan Take every single dollar made by full-time workers earning the federal minimum wage last year. Now double that pile of cash. OK, now we're in Wall Street bonus territory. Wall Street pulled in $26.7 billion in cash bonuses last year, according to estimates revealed Wednesday by the New York state comptroller. That's up about 15 percent from the previous year, and amounts to $164,530 per person when split up among the industry's 165,20o employees in New York. In a new report the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think-tank that advocates for pay fairness, paints those bonuses in a rather startling way: Wall Street's cash pile is now nearly double what the country's 1.085 million full-time minimum wage workers made all of last year.