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• Do you work at a GDF? If you do, please contact me, Lee Conrad of Alliance@IBM, at ibmunionalliance@gmail.com
• To Alliance@IBM supporters: The Alliance is the only organization that advocates and supports IBM employees and ex-employees. In fact, there are few like it in the Information Technology field. It is always difficult to keep an organization like this alive, but as a supporter you know how important it is that we exist. We are calling on you today to help keep us alive another year by joining as a member or associate member. See our online forms below. As our membership has dropped, it is imperative that we gain new members or this organization and web site will cease to exist. Help us keep our organizing and advocacy work alive!
• General Visitor Comments: Due to a lack of membership growth the comment sections will be closed until we see sufficient growth in full membership, associate membership or donations. Many of you that visit our site have not yet joined, but seem to value its existence. The only comment section that will remain open will be Job Cuts Reports. If you have information that you want the Alliance to know about please send to ibmunionalliance@gmail.com. Information of importance will be put on the front page of this web site. To join go here: Join The Alliance! or here: Join The Alliance!
• Job Cut Reports
  • Comment 9/13/10: I worked for IBM as a contractor for 2 and a half years. Worked for the ITD. Job was moved to Dubuque Iowa. I even had to go out there and train my "replacements". They don't know jack out there. They are hiring people directly out of college and sometimes with no college whatsoever. Finally found a way out and I have never looked back in regret. Took a pay cut but its totally worth it. Only reason I stayed on was because they kept dangling the full timer carrot in my face every few months. If you can, get the hell out of there asap, not worth it at all. -Former IBM Contractor-
  • Comment 9/14/10: The big announcement was no more AWS for 2011. Only overtime will be pay, in CO by law overtime is paid anything over 40 hours and/or 12 hours a day. No even shift premiums for second shift and weekends. What else is next? who knows... -Rocky Mountains-
  • Comment 9/14/10: IBM's employee's everywhere do not have a voice in decisions made by IBM that effect the employees. 100 years ago, that's what unions wanted. To give employees a voice. That's what The Alliance is trying to do, give IBM employee's a voice. While it's true that modern unions have somewhat moved away from that premise, it's very clear that IBM's employees desperately need a voice. It's sad that IBM employees cant hear that very simple message. -Union Yes-
  • Comment 9/14/10: In the continuing saga of" What will they take away next ?" The answer becomes obvious. Whatever is left to take away. Hate the way every time there is a change you lose something? Wouldn't it be nice to have shift premiums and AWS defined in a contract? You can bet Sammy' contract defines every penny he will get. . Why don't you have a contract also? I know. Its too much effort to sign up for the Alliance as even a free member. It may take a few keystrokes on your own time to join with others who are tired of being cheated. There will never be a union vote if YOU do not sign up in some fashion so the abuse will NEVER end for you. I know. Maybe you can pick a benefit you really like and start an office pool to guess when IBM will take it away or charge so much for it you will be better off without it. The one who comes closest to the date and time splits the pot with you. Better hurry though because the benefits you could bet on are leaving fast! Remember the old joke about the beatings will continue until morale improves. Looks like it wasn't a joke. Live Better. Work Union. -Doyathink?-
  • Comment 9/15/10: There you have it. A pay cut coming soon. If you had a union contract right now you would assure yourself of getting premium pay and AWS. Do something now folks. You have waited too long but it is not too late. Join your union or have IBM continue to chop you bit by bit. -chopchop-
  • Comment 9/15/10: Got to talk to a couple of people on the State of Texas account telling us during a meet up about how badly IBM Screwed up including asking any and all for 35% cuts in hours and pay on acct to having Arch's working 30-40 jobs at one time and all with one week turnarounds including cutting more PM's and sending all possible work to Dubuque GDF. Fun part was telling us about the GDF PM's working for less than 44K a year and one PM Contractor asked to come back at $ 22 a hr after working for $ 44 a hr before being RA'd. One of the GDF PM's was from Russia and barely spoke English and didn't even know a single thing about her job or even what servers were but took over for a Senior IT PM who got yanked and had the DIR people asking what happened. IBM said to cut more over next couple of months on the account as SoT starts talking to DELL and HP mostly to get other work done away from IBM, way to go for screwing up an account. -IBM UC'd-
  • Comment 9/18/10: I was RA'ed on 3/31/2010. I was a deskside support tech working in NJ. I have yet to find a job. I receive a daily job search report from the NJ State Dept of Labor and Workforce Development and in today's search there are TWO deskside support job in NJ listed with IBM for full time employment. I did a quick search and found that in Sept alone there are 4 of the same jobs and over 20 more posted in the"work in any city" category. What is the deal? Why would they let go of techs with 10+ years of experience and then go out and look for more full time people. I would have preferred to have taken a pay cut than get laid off. I know IBM is not a great place to work but being unemployed is even worse. -Confused RA in NJ-
  • Comment 9/19/10: TO -Confused RA in NJ- You obviously don't understand the politics (i.e. cost analysis of an SSR vs EXECUTIVE bonuses). In their view, the10+ year experienced person COSTS too much. Replace you with 2 to 3 new hires and their bonus goes up. Replace you with 1 to 2 new hires and their bonus goes up a lot. Quality of Service; Do you hear them laughing??? -no_ky- Alliance reply: To paraphrase the movie line: "We don't need no stinkin' QoS, man!"

News and Opinion Concerning Health Savings Accounts, Medical Costs and Health Care Reform

News and Opinion Concerning the U.S. Financial Crisis

"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.

• Salon: Why are Democrats terrified of taxing the rich? By Alex Pareene. Excerpts: The worst and scariest thing in the world is the deficit, and before we do anything to help people without jobs, we must make sure it is "deficit-neutral," and also now is probably a good time to think about some long-term entitlement cuts. Also raising taxes during a recession is madness, and we must not do so, under any circumstances, even if it makes the deficit larger.

  That is basically the official view of the mainstream political establishment, most of whom are, like 20-something idiots who claim to read the Economist and Michael Bloomberg, "socially liberal and fiscally conservative." ("Fiscally conservative" just means worrying about the deficit, a lot.) That "mainstream" view permeates the supposedly non-ideological press, and members of the press tend to believe that America is made up of "independents" with similar beliefs.

  In fact, most Americans are more or less the opposite. (Most conservatives get this!) When they claim to have a problem with government spending, or taxation, it is a problem with getting taxed and perceiving the spending as being done on someone else. What they would like is for the government to spend money on them, using money seized from the wealthy.

  Meanwhile, Democrats are terrified of taxing rich people. At least a dozen House Democrats, several Democratic candidates and four Democratic senators -- Evan Bayh of Indiana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Kent Conrad of North Dakota -- have said they won't go along with the president's plan to allow the cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans. Why? ...

  But it is not a particularly courageous political act to restore the top marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans to 90s levels. Jon Chait adds that these people's worldviews are so warped by their bubbles of privilege that they don't understand that six figures doesn't qualify as struggling. Matt Yglesias blames media framing of deficit issues. Everyone is probably right.

• New York Times: Retiring Later Is Hard Road for Laborers. By John Leland. Excerpts: At the Cooper Tire plant in Findlay, Ohio, Jack Hartley, who is 58, works a 12-hour shift assembling tires: pulling piles of rubber and lining over a drum, cutting the material with a hot knife, lifting the half-finished tire, which weighs 10 to 20 pounds, and throwing it onto a rack. Mr. Hartley performs these steps nearly 30 times an hour, or 300 times in a shift. “The pain started about the time I was 50,” he said. “Dessert with lunch is ibuprofen. Your knees start going bad, your lower back, your elbows, your shoulders.”

  He said he does not think he can last until age 66, when he will be eligible for full Social Security retirement benefits. At 62 or 65, he said, “that’s it.”

  After years of debate about how to keep Social Security solvent, the White House has created an 18-member panel to consider changes, including raising the retirement age. Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio and the House minority leader, has called for raising the age as high as 70 in the next 20 years, and many Democrats have endorsed similar steps, against opposition from some liberal groups. The panel will report by Dec. 1, after the midterm elections. ... ...

  Mr. Hartley had planned to retire at 58, but he and his wife had high medical expenses, and the company froze one year of its pension plan, reducing benefits. He is, he said, “stuck here.” ...

  “People who need to retire early — and they need to — are folks that start working in their late teens, whereas people who are promoting raising the retirement age are people who were in graduate school or professional school and got into jobs that would logically take them into their late 60s and 70s,” she said.

  Selected reader comments follow:

  • Companies are already kicking anyone over 50 out the door no matter what profession. How on earth are people going to work until they're 68? Where will they work?
  • I get so irritated when Congress talks about raising the retirement age. We have lost our pensions, lost our jobs, lost our health insurance and now they want to take away our social security which we have paid into our entire work lives. Instead why don't we take away all benefits paid to members of Congress so they can see what they have done to the average American worker?
  • I would love to work until I am 70. Unfortunately, I am currently "between positions", and no one will hire a person my age. This is the moral equivalent of inviting your elders to take a long walk in the blizzard because you no longer want to feed them. What kind of savages are we?
  • If members of Congress (most of whom will enjoy generous taxpayer-provided retirement) would quit funding wars for the futile sake of nation-building, there would be plenty of money to leave the Social Security promise to the American people alone.
  • The workplace doesn't like people over age 50 now. What's going to happen to people over age 65? I know several people, who had great careers and once they turned 50, were harassed out of their jobs. Employers made their lives so miserable they couldn't take it anymore. Its a cute trick invented by management to avoid unemployment claims. Congress doesn't have a clue about the American workplace and office politics. Retirement planning now becomes pick your bridge and find a really good cardboard box. That's what you have to look forward to.
  • As a higher income worker, I would find it more appealing to pay social security taxes for the full year than having the retirement age raised on other Americans who work in labor-intensive jobs. Simply eliminating the cap on social security taxes is a simple way to address much of the funding shortfall. The cost to me is the price I should pay for living in a decent society.
  • The conservatives drum beat to diminish social security benefits keeps on. Under Bush their plan was to privatize it which would have been brilliant leading into the 2008 financial collapse. That surely would have killed retirement for middle America.

    Now the plan is to scare Americans into believing the only way to SS solvency is to raise the retirement age. The fact that Alan Greenspan in 1983 was the great mind behind SS overhaul tells us why the SS tax rate on low and middle income Americans but has been capped for anyone making over $100K!! So while Bush and his Republican Congress cut dividend tax rate by 50%, Social Security taxes from 1983 to 2009 have tripled. Now we see why the standard of living of middle income is dropping but for the super rich it has been increasing.

    The solution? Simple. Drop the Social Security tax rate by 50% for all individuals and employers. Pay for this cut by eliminating the salary cap and income all income (interest, dividend and wages) in the Social Security tax. That will put the SS system immediately into the black.

    Democrats need to do something dramatic like a permanent SS tax break in order to save the economy and save middle income families.

  • Don't talk to me about cutting social security when tax rates for the very rich are way too low and while wasting trillions on useless wars and a bloated military. In addition, Social Security was put in place when workers had employer pensions as their main retirement income. Since the greedy corporate elite eliminated those (except for themselves, of course), Social Security benefits need to be increased, not decreased. Cutting Social Security will start another revolution to replace our corporate controlled government with one that works for the people again. Go ahead Congress. Make our day!
  • This is just another attack by the affluent on the working/middle class. For the last 35 years the Republican mentality (and that of their Democratic collaborators) has been to take as much as possible from the working classes and transfer it to the pockets of their wealthy contributors. The evidence of that is that since 1975 all gains in income have gone into the pockets of the top 20 percent of American households. The top 1 percent of households get 24 percent of all income. In 1915 the top 1 percent got 18 percent. If America wants to avoid the specter of class warfare, we need to find ways to pay workers more and CEO and management less. If Social Security is diminished or eliminated we will see a staggering growth of the poverty rate. And for those who say that Social Security won't be there in 30 years - that's up to you. The fixes are easy. You just need to elect people who believe in that.
  • I wanted to add that a big reason for discrimination for people over the age of 50 has to do with the cost of providing health insurance. A person can agree to accept reduced wages, but can't require an insurer to lower the cost of insurance for them. Paradoxically, that makes people over 65 a better bargain, because they have Medicare. As a society, we barely seem to understand or acknowledge how our private, employer based health insurance arrangements distort the lives and livelihoods of so many people.

• New York Times op-ed: A Recovery’s Long Odds. By Bob Herbert. Excerpts: Americans are not being honest with themselves about the structural changes in the economy that have bestowed fabulous wealth on a tiny sliver at the top, while undermining the living standards of the middle class and absolutely crushing the poor. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have a viable strategy for reversing this dreadful state of affairs. (There is no evidence the G.O.P. even wants to.)

  Robert Reich, in his new book, “Aftershock,” gives us one of the clearest explanations to date of what has happened — how the United States went from what he calls “the Great Prosperity” of 1947 to 1975 to the Great Recession that has hobbled the U.S. economy and darkened the future of younger Americans. He gives the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve credit for moving quickly in terms of fiscal and monetary policies to prevent the economic crash of 2008 from driving the U.S. into a second great depression. “But,” he writes, “we did not learn the larger lesson of the 1930s: that when the distribution of income gets too far out of whack, the economy needs to be reorganized so the broad middle class has enough buying power to rejuvenate the economy over the longer term.”

  The middle class is finally on its knees. Jobs are scarce and good jobs even scarcer. Government and corporate policies have been whacking working Americans every which way for the past three or four decades. While globalization and technological wizardry were wreaking employment havoc, the movers and shakers in government and in the board rooms of the great corporations were embracing privatization and deregulation with the fervor of fanatics. The safety net was shredded, unions were brutally attacked and demonized, employment training and jobs programs were eliminated, higher education costs skyrocketed, and the nation’s infrastructure, a key to long-term industrial and economic health, deteriorated. It’s a wonder matters aren’t worse. ...

  There was plenty of growth, but the economic benefits went overwhelmingly — and unfairly — to those already at the top. Mr. Reich cites the work of analysts who have tracked the increasing share of national income that has gone to the top 1 percent of earners since the 1970s, when their share was 8 percent to 9 percent. In the 1980s, it rose to 10 percent to 14 percent. In the late-’90s, it was 15 percent to 19 percent. In 2005, it passed 21 percent. By 2007, the last year for which complete data are available, the richest 1 percent were taking more than 23 percent of all income.

  The richest one-tenth of 1 percent, representing 130,000 households, took in more than 11 percent of total income in 2007. ...

  A male worker earning the median wage in 2007 earned less than the median wage, adjusted for inflation, of a male worker 30 years earlier. A typical son, in other words, is earning less than his dad did at the same age. This is what has happened with ordinary workers as the wealth at the top has soared into the stratosphere.

• Jim Hightower: A Gross Insult to Unemployed Americans. Excerpts: At last, Obama is getting serious about America's jobs crisis, proposing a $50-billion effort to put Americans to work repairing our national infrastructure. Of course, congressional Republicans have responded as they always do: petulantly shouting "no" and plopping their fat butts down in the middle of the legislative path to block progress.

  But Obama could take one symbolic step on his own that would create jobs for about a dozen American workers. It involves the construction of a memorial and statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. on our National Mall. After all, King's historic 1963 march on Washington was about jobs and poverty – so why not have some of our highly-skilled bricklayers and stone masons who're now unemployed build this monument in honor of King's legacy?

  Seems sensible, but guess what? The quasi-governmental foundation overseeing the King memorial project doesn't seem to have much sense. It is importing eight to 12 workers from – believe it or not – China to do this job!

  Why don't they just poke every out-of-work American in the eye with a sharp stick? As the Bricklayers union said in exasperation, this is "wrong, wrong, wrong."

  Well, sniffed a spokeswoman for the foundation, only the centerpiece of the memorial is outsourced to Chinese craftworkers, so stop your griping. Ironically, that centerpiece is named the "Stone of Hope," but apparently no one at the foundation has any grasp of irony, so they are proceeding to obtain work visas to bring the Chinese into our nation's capital and construct King's monument. Presumably, America's vast pool of jobless workers will be allowed to watch them.

• USA Today editorial: Our view on the federal budget: Tax debate reflects breathtaking disconnect. Excerpts: When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he inherited a federal budget surplus so robust that then-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan worried aloud about the consequences of paying off the national debt.

  Talk about your misplaced concern.

  Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress promptly slashed taxes by $2.3 trillion over 10 years, then dramatically increased the rate of federal spending to finance wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, build up an intelligence-industrial complex in response to 9/11, start a costly Medicare prescription benefit and do a hundred other things with little regard for the cost. The Great Recession, the Bush bank rescue and President Obama's stimulus program pushed already-scary deficits to Third World levels.

  So with the Bush tax cuts set to expire at year's end, Washington is consumed with debate. Not over how to restore responsibility and salvage the USA's financial future, but over whether the tax cuts should be extended for everyone or just the 96% of taxpayers making less than $200,000. The disconnect is breathtaking.

  Tax-cut supporters routinely decry deficits, but then do the very things that make them worse. Republicans, in particular, have elevated lower taxes to a sort of religious truth — always good, always necessary, always effective. When House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said over the weekend that, if push came to shove, he'd vote to raise taxes on the wealthy, he was roundly denounced by members of his own party. Americans are "tired of Democrat leaders in Washington pursuing the same government-driven programs that have done nothing but add to the debt," Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declared Monday as he announced legislation to keep the tax cuts for everyone. Never mind his own votes creating the debt, or that he's offering no way to pay for them. ...

  The most frequently repeated claim about raising taxes on the wealthy is that it's a job killer, because those taxpayers include many small-business owners. This is clever but misleading. A report from Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation shows that the top two tax brackets — which begin at about $172,000 — account for just 3% of taxpayers with net positive business income. Judging by tax-cutters' rhetoric, higher rates for the best-off Americans would throttle the economy. How come, then, that when tax rates were higher for everyone in the 1990s, the debt fell, unemployment plunged and the economy thrived? Or that the economy prospered in the 1950s, when the top rate exceeded 90%? ...

  The truth is that the modest tax hikes being debated make little difference compared with enormous economic forces such as the housing bust, technological disruption and global labor markets. An even more inconvenient truth is that the Bush tax cuts are no longer affordable. Not for the wealthy. Not for anyone else. Even Greenspan now says all the tax cuts should expire as a way to preserve the nation's economic viability.

• TPM: Meet The Democrats Who Want To Preserve Tax Cuts For The Rich. By Brian Beutler. Excerpts: Rep. Michael McMahon (D-NY), who is fighting to preserve the top-bracket tax cuts for at least a year, says he has somewhere between 25 and 50 members on his side. "I think the difference is there," he told TPM after a House vote yesterday afternoon.

  McMahon is a signatory to a letter authored by Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL) and others designed to pressure leaders to give wealthy Americans another tax break. His view represents a political and policy consensus shared by a significant, and vocal faction of the Democratic party -- a consensus that party leaders are doing little to weaken.

  "Sometimes we forget how we became the majority. We did it by winning some affluent districts," Rep. Gerry Connolly told reporters earlier this month. ...

  In McMahon's district, he says, a couple making $300,000 might still be living paycheck to paycheck. But freezing tax rates is important, in his view, to speed up the recovery nationally.

• New York Times op-ed: The Tax-Cut Racket. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: “Nice middle class you got here,” said Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. “It would be a shame if something happened to it.”

  O.K., he didn’t actually say that. But he might as well have, because that’s what the current confrontation over taxes amounts to. Mr. McConnell, who was self-righteously denouncing the budget deficit just the other day, now wants to blow that deficit up with big tax cuts for the rich. But he doesn’t have the votes. So he’s trying to get what he wants by pointing a gun at the heads of middle-class families, threatening to force a jump in their taxes unless he gets paid off with hugely expensive tax breaks for the wealthy. ...

  So, about those tax cuts: back in 2001, the Bush administration bundled huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans with much smaller tax cuts for the middle class, then pretended that it was mainly offering tax breaks to ordinary families. Meanwhile, it circumvented Senate rules intended to prevent irresponsible fiscal actions — rules that would have forced it to find spending cuts to offset its $1.3 trillion tax cut — by putting an expiration date of Dec. 31, 2010, on the whole bill. And the witching hour is now upon us. If Congress doesn’t act, the Bush tax cuts will turn into a pumpkin at the end of this year, with tax rates reverting to Clinton-era levels.

  In response, President Obama is proposing legislation that would keep tax rates essentially unchanged for 98 percent of Americans but allow rates on the richest 2 percent to rise. But Republicans are threatening to block that legislation, effectively raising taxes on the middle class, unless they get tax breaks for their wealthy friends. That’s an extraordinary step. Almost everyone agrees that raising taxes on the middle class in the middle of an economic slump is a bad idea, unless the effects are offset by other job-creation programs — and Republicans are blocking those, too. So the G.O.P. is, in effect, threatening to plunge the U.S. economy back into recession unless Democrats pay up. ...

  Polls show that a majority of Americans are opposed to maintaining tax breaks for the rich. Beyond that, this is no time for Democrats to play it safe: if the midterm election were held today, they would lose badly. They need to highlight their differences with the G.O.P. — and it’s hard to think of a better place for them to take a stand than on the issue of big giveaways to Wall Street and corporate C.E.O.’s.

• Wall Street Journal: Lost Decade for Family Income. By Conor Dougherty and Sara Murray. Excerpts: The downturn that some have dubbed the "Great Recession" has trimmed the typical household's income significantly, new Census data show, following years of stagnant wage growth that made the past decade the worst for American families in at least half a century.The bureau's annual snapshot of American living standards also found that the fraction of Americans living in poverty rose sharply to 14.3% from 13.2% in 2008—the highest since 1994. Some 43.6 million Americans were living below the official poverty threshold, but the measure doesn't fully capture the panoply of government antipoverty measures.

  The inflation-adjusted income of the median household—smack in the middle of the populace—fell 4.8% between 2000 and 2009, even worse than the 1970s, when median income rose 1.9% despite high unemployment and inflation. Between 2007 and 2009, incomes fell 4.2%.

• Vermont Public Radio: Sanders Opposes Tax Cut On Incomes Over $200K. By Bob Kinzel. Excerpts: Speaking on VPR's Vermont Edition, Senator Bernie Sanders argued that it makes no sense to cut tax rates for wealthy people:

  "At a time when we have the most unequal distribution of income and wealth in any major country on earth; when, during the Bush years the top two percent did extraordinarily well while they have seen a lowering - a substantial lowering - of their tax rates... No, I don't believe we can afford over a ten year period to give $700 billion in tax relief to the top two percent."

• Wall Street Journal: Economic Ride Turns Bumpier for the Rich. By Mark Whitehouse. Excerpts: It's not as easy to be rich as it used to be. In the past, America's wealthiest people barely felt the ups and downs of the economy. Over the past few decades, though, the roller-coaster ride has become more extreme for them than for any other income group, according to a new paper by two Northwestern University economists.

  In the first year of the recession that began in 2007, the top 0.01% of earners in the U.S. saw their pretax income fall by an average of 12.7%, compared with 2.6% for all earners, according to an analysis of data from income-tax returns by economists Jonathan Parker and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, in a paper presented Thursday at a Brookings Institution conference.

  The richest also did better on the way up. In the four years leading up to the recession, their income rose at an annualized rate of 13.9%, compared with 1.8% for everyone. ...

  To be sure, the greater volatility doesn't mean poorer folks should feel sorry for the rich. On average, the people in the top 1% and 0.01% had pre-tax incomes of about $900,000 and $17 million, respectively, in 2008. So they were well able to absorb big losses. "It's hard to think of that as being really hard," says Mr. Parker.

  Selected reader comments concerning the above article follow:

  • This article should have run in The Onion. How absurd to characterize the situation of the extremely rich as "risky." Does it mean that some years they can buy new yachts, and other years have to make-do with last year's model? Compare this with the real risks borne by poor and working-class people: unemployment, homelessness, inability to afford medical care. How appropriate this piece should run on the same day as two related headlines: "Millionaire Population Soars-Again" and "U.S. Poverty Rate Rises to 14.3%.'
  • Has anyone checked out the ridiculous price for truffles these days?
  • Uh oh! The rich experiencing a ripple against their yachts from Hurricane MultinationalCorporationAbandoningAmerica? How can this be? Didn't they make sure all the Americans were laid off and all their investments were made in China?!?!?!?

• Huffington Post: Poverty Rises as Wall Street Billionaires Whine. By Les Leopold. Excerpts: While 43.6 million Americans live in poverty, the richest men of finance sure are getting pissy. First Steve Schwartzman, head of the Blackrock private equity company, compares the Obama administration's effort to close billionaires' tax loopholes to "the Nazi invasion of Poland." Then hedge fund mogul David Loeb announces that he's abandoning the Democrats because they're violating "this country's core founding principles" -- including "non-punitive taxation, Constitutionally-guaranteed protections against persecution of the minority, and an inexorable right of self-determination." Instead of showing their outrage about the spread of poverty in the richest nation on Earth, the super-rich want us to pity them?

  Why are Wall Street's billionaires so whiny? Is it really possible to make $900,000 an hour (not a typo -- that's what the top ten hedge fund managers take in), and still feel aggrieved about the way government is treating you? After you've been bailed out by the federal government to the tune of $10 trillion (also not a typo) in loans, asset swaps, liquidity and other guarantees, can you really still feel like an oppressed minority?

  You'd think the Wall Street moguls would be thankful. Not just thankful -- down on their knees kissing the ground taxpayers walk on and hollering hallelujah at the top of their lungs! These guys profited from puffing up the housing bubble, then got bailed out when the going got tough. (Please see The Looting of America for all the gory details.) Without taxpayer largess, these hedge fund honchos would be flat broke. Instead, they're back to hauling in obscene profits.

  These billionaires don't even have to worry about serious financial reforms. The paltry legislation that squeaked through Congress did nothing to end too big and too interconnected to fail. In fact, the biggest firms got even bigger as they gobbled up troubled banks, with the generous support of the federal government. No bank or hedge fund was broken up. Nobody was forced to pay a financial transaction tax. None of the big boys had a cap placed on their astronomical wealth. No one's paying reparations for wrecking the US economy. The big bankers are still free to create and trade the very derivatives that catapulted us into this global crisis. You'd think the billionaires would be praying on the altar of government and erecting statues on Capital Hill in honor of St. Bailout. ...

  Dwight D. Eisenhower was no radical, but he accepted the reality: If America was going to prosper -- and pay for its costly Cold War -- the super-rich would have to pony up. It was common knowledge that when the rich grew too wealthy, they used their excess incomes to speculate. In the 1950s, memories of the Great Depression loomed large, and people knew that a skewed distribution of income only fueled speculative booms and disastrous busts. On Ike's watch, the effective marginal tax rate for those earning over $3 million (in today's dollars) was over 70 percent. The super-rich paid. As a nation we respected that other important American value: advancing the common good.

  It's time to take Eisenhower's cue and redeploy the excessive wealth Wall Street's high rollers have accumulated. If we leave it in their hands, they'll keep using it to construct speculative financial casinos. Instead, we could use that money to build a stronger, more prosperous nation. We could provide our people with free higher education at all our public colleges and universities -- just like we did for WWII vets under the GI Bill of Rights (a program that returned seven dollars in GDP for every dollar invested). We could fund a green energy Manhattan Project to wean us from fossil fuels. An added bonus: If we siphon some of the money off Wall Street, some of our brightest college graduates might even be attracted not to high finance but to jobs in science, education and healthcare, where we need them.

  Of course, this pursuit of the common good won't be easy for the billionaires (and those who identify with them.). But there's just no alternative for this oppressed minority: They're going to have to learn to live on less than $900,000 an hour.