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• 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 11/07/10: "I just saw the following report and am disgusted that IBM is considered in the top 10 of working mother-friendly employers. This is far from the truth. What a joke!" I would agree with you. The working moms that I know all hate their jobs at IBM and are worried about getting laid off. Frankly, the way the mom is holding her baby in that pic as she fiddles with her cell phone makes me think that I would not want to be on this list. That poor kid looks like he/she could fall any moment. It reminds me of the pic of Britney Spears holding her kid while she fumbles with her Starbuck Vente Latte. What a joke is right. -Shocked dad-
  • Comment 11/07/10: -RAed in 10- I hear ya! Let's see if the new Republican controlled House passes a bill cutting H1B visas. That will be the only way to preserve more jobs in the USA. Sammy can't outsource all of the USA IBMers just yet. -anonymous-
  • Comment 11/08/10: My manager called to say that there is a Resource Action taking place today in ITD. I work in a dept of project managers. I was not selected, but he said that some people in our dept are. The cuts are across ITD. He would not give any numbers or percentages. -anonymous-
  • Comment 11/08/10: I was just called, I've been cut. Between GR and GDF, I figured it would happen eventually. -John-
  • Comment 11/08/10: I was told this morning by my manager that I got cut. Worked for IBM 7 years with numerous OT, hardwork. -7-year IBMer- Alliance Reply: We are sorry for your job loss. We've seen so many good IBMers fired, just like you. Are you an Alliance member? If not, did you ever think being fired, couldn't happen to you? This is why we continue to repeat ourselves, ad nauseam: Organize organize organize! IBMers need to join Alliance@IBM and then get to work gathering your co-workers to join. Organize openly, publicly. Show IBM Executives that there ARE many IBMers that want a contract and a voice in the workplace. Grow the membership, grow the numbers until we have a majority. It is the only answer, other than quitting or letting them fire you. If unions go away because no one believes in a contract for employees; then there will be no way for employees to ever truly have a voice in their workplace. Who here thinks that will be good?
  • Comment 11/09/10: Was cut today in IBM Canada. Part of GDF, manager didn't say much. Indicated HR took PBC into consideration. 2 years ago I disputed my PBC result....was told just to accept it, wouldn't matter...guess it came back. Anyway with GDF knew it was a matter of time. 12 years with the company...but it has changed for the worse...not a good or productive workplace any longer. -ibm canada-
  • Comment 11/09/10: Hi I am an IBM contractor, and I am sorry for all of you guys, but you should get organized and pass a law saying outsourcing should be illegal, should be treated the same way as hiring illegals -forzan-
  • Comment 11/10/10: "Found out this AM in PBC discussion with mgr that HR is present at the final department wide rollup. Why? -Anon- Alliance Reply: Can you say 'RA List'? " The Alliance reply is right. IBM has had several age discrimination lawsuits in the past with these RAs and as far as I know settled out of court. The problem was the distribution of RAed employees was skewed to the older employee population. You better believe that HR will be scrubbing the numbers to make it a normal "bell shaped curve" distribution. Sick, I know. But IBM has become a sick company. Each time IBM has an RA those are people they are putting on the unemployment line. The US economy is already in an economic crisis. Don't let IBM fuel the fire with this abuse and misuse of power. Sammy is doing it just to make the quarterly bottom line look better for Wall Street. A union would help put a stop to this insanity. -on the Titanic-
  • Comment 11/10/10: Was notified 09/11/2010 that I was RA'ed. Was not given a opportunity to find another job within IBM. Mgr said it was I was not contributing as much since GDF came into effect and our roles have been expanded to take on more work without the training needed. I was doing fine in the previous role where my skills was utilized in the area I was trained and had experience. GDF is really a bad idea that will be the down fall of my unit. -Anonymous-
  • Comment 11/11/10: To those about to be RAed or thinking that being RAed is not that bad: Open enrollment for medical COBRA after your severance is over is over $1000 a month for a family of four or more. But IBM can't afford to pay in any more since they need money for executive bonuses and stock buybacks. IBM is sick. It can make you very unhealthy too. If you have a union contract it would be less per month. -beamerhealth-
  • Comment 11/11/10: Outsourcing can probably not be made illegal, but it can be made more expensive. Severance packages in Europe are larger for long-term employees. I've even heard as much as 2 years pay for some countries. Both EU rules and UNIONS work to protect worker rights. You can bet that Sam and his cronies would layoff very few of us if it cost them 2 years pay. He's looking for the quick turnaround... and you can't get short-term cost savings from laying off a European. That said, more contractors are now being hired in Europe because THEY still can be laid off with relative impunity. So much that Sam does is to tweak short-term profits... after all he and his cronies reap millions off the misery of thousands of the 1st world IBMers without Union or government protection.

    Meanwhile he's got billions in spare cash he absolute fritters away on frivolous tricks like buying back shares of stock. WE the employees, the real creators of value, are the rightful heirs to these billions that were stolen from us over the years. And now we're told that that new class of superwealthy - all the new VPs and upper-echelon managers - should have their tax-break because otherwise they won't grow jobs. That money for their obscene salaries was stolen from you.

    Getting it back through expiring tax-cuts on the wealthy is not socialism. It was our money, our benefits, our raises, our pensions to begin with. A Union is our only chance to force IBM to honor its obligations to employees. Wasting 10 billion on buying back shares may not even raise share price but it doesn't matter to Sam - as long as no union stands in his way, he'll keep stealing our money so he can have more billions to waste on buybacks. And the board is only too happy to enable him in his extreme greed. -Anonymous-

  • Comment 11/11/10: @titanic - that just goes to show that performance, for the most part, means absolutely nothing when it comes to RAs....so if the company needs a yellow male in their 20s from dept XYZ to layoff, and you're the only one, sorry Charlie.....sure does suck. -Follower-
  • Comment 11/12/10: Dear -ibm canada- and other Canadian RA's don't feel bad as I was cut (consultant not renewed) in IBM Canada ITD Nov 8th. I too knew with GDF it was a matter of time and yes this place has changed for the worse... Funny thing is my group has been so cut that now they are hitting high rate consultants such as myself who billed more then IBM willing to pay. Thankfully I saw the writing on the wall as FTE's were walked out the door over the last year and had a gig lined up... It was only a matter of time before consultants got it too when there was no longer any FTE's left... -Buh-bye-

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

• Newsweek: Repeal and Replace? Not so fast. An insurance-company defector explains why the most controversial provision of the health-care law will survive. By Michael Reynolds. Excerpts: Conservatives who voted for congressional candidates because they pledged to repeal and replace the health-care-reform law are in for a rude awakening. Once those newly elected members of Congress have a little talk with the insurance industry’s lobbyists and executives, they will back off from that pledge. They will go through the motions, of course. They’ll hold hearings and take to the floor of both Houses to rail against the new law, and they’ll probably even introduce a bill to repeal it with much fanfare—but it will all be for show. That’s because health insurers, one of Republican candidates’ biggest and most reliable benefactors—the industry contributed three times as much money to Republicans as to Democrats since January—can’t survive without it.

  Despite all the attacks on “Obamacare,” the new law props up the employer-based system that insurers and large corporations benefit from so greatly. It also guarantees that private insurers will get billions of dollars in new revenue. And the insurers won’t have to share a penny of that windfall with a government-run public option the president once said was necessary “to keep insurers honest.”

  I know what the insurers are thinking because, not long ago, I was on their side. I am sorry to admit it, but over nearly two decades I had a hand in planning the industry’s PR and public-policy strategies to either kill or shape any health-care reform proposal that might hinder profits. I was part of the strategic-communications team that planned and carried out the successful attack on the Clinton plan in the 1990s as well as the one that killed the patients’ bill of rights a few years later. I left my job handling communications for Cigna in 2008 because I didn’t have the stomach to be part of yet another spin campaign to cheat Americans out of the reform they needed.

  For months before I left my job, I worked closely with my counterparts at the other big insurers to develop the list of must-haves our well-connected army of lobbyists would take to Capitol Hill when lawmakers began drafting reform legislation. Despite their public statements to the contrary, insurance companies really liked much of what was in both House and Senate versions of the bill—big chunks of which they actually wrote behind the scenes—especially the requirement that all Americans buy insurance if they’re not eligible for an existing public program like Medic-aid or Medicare. ...

  It is ironic, of course, that the requirement to purchase insurance has become the centerpiece of Republicans’ condemnation of the new law and their court challenge of its constitutionality. Insurers have no reason to worry, however, because they fare very well when the Republicans are in charge. Their profits soared—as did the number of Americans who are uninsured and underinsured—during the Bush years and Republican control of Congress.

  The real reason insurers want the GOP leading Congress again is not to repeal “Obamacare,” but to try to gut some of the provisions of the law that protect consumers from the abuses of the industry, such as refusing to cover kids with preexisting conditions, canceling policyholders’ coverage when they get sick, and setting annual and lifetime limits on how much they’ll pay for medical care. Insurers also hate the provision that requires them to spend at least 80 percent of premium revenues on medical care, as well as the one that calls for eliminating the billions of dollars that the government has been overpaying them for years to participate in private Medicare plans. (Be on the lookout for a death panel–like fearmongering campaign to scare people into thinking, erroneously, that Granny and Pawpaw will lose their government health care if Congress doesn’t restore those “cuts” to Medicare.)

• New York Times: High-Risk Insurance Pools Are Attracting Few. By Kevin Sack. Excerpts: After the health care law passed, concerns emerged immediately that a $5 billion appropriation would not be nearly enough to cover the hordes expected to enroll in a network of new insurance pools for people with pre-existing conditions. The government’s health care actuary projected that hundreds of thousands of otherwise uninsurable people would rush to gain coverage this year, and that the money would be exhausted by 2012.

  Instead, after two or three months of operation in most states, the plans have enrolled only 8,011 people, according to figures made available for the first time by the Department of Health and Human Services. Although there are notable exceptions, enrollment in most states as of Nov. 1 was well below 10 percent of capacity. New York and Florida, for instance, have each enrolled fewer than 300, and 21 states have fewer than 50.

  The slow start-up, which officials believe will accelerate next year, is cause for concern not only for the Democratic administration but also for the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Although Republicans opposed the health care law as a whole, they have long embraced high-risk pools as an answer to the plight of the chronically uninsured.

  The party’s presidential nominee in 2008, Senator John McCain of Arizona, called for a vast expansion of the pools, and House Republicans in this year’s campaign reiterated the call in their “Pledge to America.” “The pools are our major solution,” said Representative John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican who is in line to become chairman of the health subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Mr. Shimkus said Republicans had proposed spending $25 billion on risk pools over 10 years.

• Washington Post op-ed: Boehner's health delusion. By Richard Cohen. Excerpts: With a John Boehner speakership fast approaching, I dutifully read up on the man. I learned he is a Midwestern fellow, born (like us all) into the virtuous lower middle class, one of 12 siblings and a man whose early career, in an unironic homage to "The Graduate," was in plastics. What I did not know - what was missing entirely from my reading - is that he might be French.

  Or Japanese. Or Finnish or British or even German. Whatever the case, this much is clear: No American, certainly not one about to occupy a leadership position in our government, could possibly call the American health-care system "the best health care system in the world." Boehner did just that last week. He was having an out-of-country experience.

  For statistical refutation, we need only refer to the CIA's World Factbook (no lefty think tank, to be sure) and check the health statistics. The United States is 49th in life expectancy. Our proud nation bests the Libyans in this category but not Japan, France, Spain, Britain or, of course, Italy. You not only live about two years longer in Italy, but you eat better, too.

  The same doleful situation applies to infant mortality. This is the saddest of all categories since it relates to infants who don't make it to their first birthday. The CIA tells us that the nations that do the worst in this category are, not surprisingly, mostly in Africa. Then comes much of Asia and parts of South America, but when you start getting up there a bit, Cuba does better than the United States and so do Italy, Hungary, Greece, Canada, Portugal, Britain, Australia and Israel, among others. This should be an embarrassment to us all - but, clearly, it is not. To Boehner, these figures - infants dying before they can get a cupcake with a single candle - don't exist. Rather than improve the situation, he might want to cut the CIA's appropriation. ...

  Boehner's Panglossian sentiment is shared by Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader who has vowed to roll back the Obama health-care program. If McConnell thinks America has the best of all health systems, who can blame him? When in 2003 he underwent heart bypass surgery, it was at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. This is a government facility staffed by government employees - what is sometimes called socialized medicine. His heart did fine, but he left the hospital untreated for Rampant Endemic Hypocrisy, a communicable disease that has swept the GOP and left it vulnerable to irrationality. Michele Bachmann, who peddled the absurdity that President Obama's overseas trip was costing $200 million a day, stands in mortal peril of succumbing to it. ...

  The United States spends upward of 17 percent of its gross domestic product on health care. European nations spend about 8 percent - and their citizens are actually healthier. Republicans oppose Obamacare. Fine. But where is their plan? Not the lauded status quo. As we can see, that's a terminal disease.

  For Democrats, there's hope in Boehner's chirpy pronouncement. It shows a GOP out of touch with reality, a party of Marie Antoinettes, babbling total nonsense about health care. The same swing voters who used the election to hurt the Democrats might learn that America's health-care system is No. 1 only in health-related bankruptcies. It is best in the world only for the rich and the amply insured. Everyone else can crawl away, unseen by the next speaker of the House of Representatives - a jolly, detached fellow who thinks he lives in another country entirely.

• Kaiser Health News: CDC Report: 50 Million Americans Uninsured. Excerpts: "According to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 49.9 million people ages 18 to 64," or about 26.2 percent of the adult population, "had no medical coverage for at least part of the past 12 months. … Moreover, when children 17 and under are factored in, the number of Americans uninsured for at least part of a year span numbered 59.1 million." Most people over age 64 have "universal coverage, thanks to Medicare," but older adults who skip doctor's visits because they lack insurance "are sicker when they reach 65," which "further taxes Medicare." The silver lining: "Public programs such as Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Program have reduced the number of children without medical insurance from ten million two years ago to 8.7 million"

  The CDC analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and the first quarter of 2010. The survey covered 90,000 individuals from 35,000 households. The findings revealed that 3 million more people "went for a year or more with no health insurance" in the first quarter of 2010 than in 2008, and that half of the uninsured were above the poverty level. One in three adults under 65 who made between $44,000 and $65,000 a year, the "middle income range," were uninsured at some point during the year. The findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "have implications for U.S. healthcare reform efforts. ... Experts from both sides predict gridlock in Congress for the next two years in implementing healthcare reform's provisions".

• New York Times: Some Companies Shift Health Costs to Better-Paid. By Reed Abelson. Excerpts: With health care costs climbing even higher during this enrollment season, more employers are adopting a tiered system to pass on the bulk of those costs to their employees by assigning bigger contributions to workers in top salary brackets and offering some relief to workers who make less money. For years, employees have seen what they pay toward health care go up as companies ask them to contribute more to premiums and deductibles. But now, as people enroll in health plans for the coming year, the sticker shock is more jolting than ever because so many companies are passing on to their workers most, if not all, of the higher costs. ...

  More and more companies in the last year or so have begun signaling their recognition of the added burden shouldered by workers in low- and middle-income jobs by varying the premiums they pay based on salary. Consultants say the trend is likely to continue, as employers devise various ways of spreading increased health care costs among their staff and balancing that side of the ledger against fewer raises and other compensation. ...

  Companies have also become increasingly creative in the ways they shift costs. Instead of simply raising premiums or increasing the size of the deductible workers must pay before their coverage kicks in, employers are increasingly asking their workers to pay more of the cost of coverage for their dependents, or to pay more of their share of a hospital stay or an emergency room visit. “Employers do a bit here and do a bit there,” said Gary Claxton, a policy expert at Kaiser. The result is that employees may be paying more, but they may not know how much. Mark Rukavina, the director of the Access Project, an advocacy group, said, “You need multiple spread sheets to figure this out.” ...

  More companies are adopting plan designs that require employees to pay more of their own medical bills under specific circumstances so workers are increasingly feeling the pinch. Companies “are taking the usual cost-trend reduction measures, but more of them are doing it,” said Beth Umland, director of health and benefits research at Mercer, the consulting firm. This has clouded exactly how much more workers are paying. “Employers have shifted costs for the past 10 years,” Mr. Miley said. “The confusion allows them to push it further.”

News and Opinion Concerning the "War on the Middle Class"

"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.

• New York Times op-ed: Our Banana Republic. By Nicholas D. Kristof. Excerpts: In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.

  But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

  The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

  C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

  That’s the backdrop for one of the first big postelection fights in Washington — how far to extend the Bush tax cuts to the most affluent 2 percent of Americans. Both parties agree on extending tax cuts on the first $250,000 of incomes, even for billionaires. Republicans would also cut taxes above that. The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings.

• truthout: Tax System Favors Wealth Over Work. By Gerald E. Scorse. Excerpts: Tea Partiers rage against taxes and say they’re too high. Wrong, says billionaire Warren Buffett: on the rich, they’re too low. The tax code holds the answer to this standoff, and the code backs Buffett. Taxes may be the bane of the Tea Party, but they’re a relative boon for the wealthy. Let’s look at some of the ways America’s tax system keeps Warren Buffett’s fortune in Warren Buffet’s hands.

  The major vehicle is George W. Bush’s 15 percent levy on long-term capital gains - the lowest since FDR’s first term - and on corporate dividends. The top 1 percent of US households owns nearly 40 percent of all privately held stock, from which the dividends flow. Similarly, the super-rich get more than half their income from capital gains, as documented by tax expert David Cay Johnston in his book “Perfectly Legal.” In the meantime, for the working middle-class, the tax rate on wages is 25 percent. ...

  In 2006, Buffett told an interviewer that his tax bill was “far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office” (and he repeated the statement only recently). His shame in 2006 hits home still: “How can this be fair? How can this be right?”

  The tax code sets marginal rates too, and these were gutted by President Reagan in 1981 and again in 1986. He slashed the top rate from 70 to 28 percent, and made the code even less progressive by cutting the number of brackets from 15 to four. The yearning for tax simplification (fewer brackets) trumped the case for progressivity (more brackets). There are six today, with the top four taxed at 25, 28, 33 and 35 percent - a narrow spread, easily offset by provisions like the capital gains rate. The top rate kicks in at about $400,000 of taxable income, a practice Johnston told Truthout he finds “bizarre.” It’s a long way, he argued in a recent email, from $400,000 to $1 million, $5 million, $100 million and hedge-fund billions: “Why don’t we have higher rates for those incomes?” he asked. ...

  It’s taken a fortune in lobbying and campaign contributions, but America’s tax system is bearing golden fruit. As even a conservative can see, it’s shifting income to the wealthy.

• McClatchy Newspapers, courtesy of truthout: GOP: No Compromise on Tax Cut for Wealthiest Taxpayers. By Renee Schoof. Excerpts: Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate said Sunday there would be no compromise with Democrats on whether to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the nation's wealthiest taxpayers. President Barack Obama has said he wants to extend the tax cuts for taxpayers with a combined annual income of less than $250,000, but that the cuts should be eliminated for people making more than that. He's suggested there might be room for compromise in discussions with Republicans on other tax issues.

  But both Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., who's expected to become the majority leader in the House when the new Congress is sworn in next year, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Sunday news programs that they'd insist on an extension of the tax cuts for wealthy.

• New York Times op-ed: The Impossible Dream. By Bob Herbert. Excerpts: One of the most frustrating tendencies of mainstream leaders in the United States is their willingness, year after debilitating year, to embrace policies that have no hope of succeeding. ...

  Ronald Reagan told us he could cut taxes, jack up defense spending and balance the budget — all at the same time. How’d he do? As his biographer Garry Wills tells us, the Gipper “nearly tripled the deficit in his eight years, and never made a realistic proposal for cutting it.” ...

  The deficit hawks want to radically cut budgets and shrink the government, which they assure us will not only get the economy moving again but will eventually bring budgets into balance as neatly as some ideal middle-class family balances its checkbook.

  This will somehow be achieved, we’re told, without raising taxes. And Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, a darling of the Tea Party, said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he was not in favor of cuts in benefits to senior citizens, meaning Social Security and Medicare, or any reductions in veterans’ benefits.

  You can’t have a coherent conversation about deficit reduction if tax increases are off the table and the country is still at war. This is fantasyland economics, the equivalent of believing that John Boehner can fly.

  People traveling in the real world understand that the federal budget deficits are sky high because of the Bush-era tax cuts, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the spending that was needed to keep the Great Recession from spiraling into another Great Depression.

  Even if deficit reduction right now were a good idea — which it is not, given the sorry state of the economy and the vast legions of the unemployed — the deficit zealots have no viable plan for getting their misguided mission accomplished. What’s needed now is the same thing that has been needed for the past two years and more, a bold plan to put millions of Americans back to work and paying taxes, and a careful, thoughtful, strategic but unequivocal withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

• Washington Post: How to truly honor Veterans Day? Give them more jobs.
• alterNet: How the Wealthy Organized to Rip Everyone Else off -- And What You Can Do to Stop It. The policies that benefit a tiny fraction of Americans resulted from a long-concerted effort by the wealthy to thwart laws that might give the rest of Americans a chance. By Maria Armoudian. Excerpts: LIKE THIS ARTICLE ? Join our mailing list: Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email. For years, wealth has been increasingly concentrated at the very top of the income pyramid with the super-rich owning a larger and larger share of wealth, benefits and power. But while much attention has been focused on fixing a flawed economy, other experts suggest the problem would be better addressed by examining the politics and policies behind the phenomenon. Those policies that continue to benefit a tiny fraction of Americans resulted from a long-concerted effort by the very wealthy who organized campaigns to thwart those laws that might give the rest of Americans a chance. The history and policies are detailed in a book by professors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson titled Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class. ...

  What we find is that the wealth is going not just to the top 10 percent of Americans, but really to the tiny slice at the very top, the top one tenth of one percent, even the top one hundredth of one percent. The Congressional Budget Office, using these income tax statistics, calculated that in 2005, the top 100th of one percent, the richest 11,000 households -- had an after-tax income that averaged $24 million a year. That was up from a $4 million average for this group back in 1979. That’s a remarkable change. In contrast, the middle fifth, the middle 20 percent of Americans, saw their incomes over this 1979-2005 period go from $41,000 a year to $50,000 a year.

• truthout: Soft Landing for Bankers, Hard Times for Everyone Else. By Jim Hightower. Excerpts: I've seen some truly amazing feats of magic, but here's one that beats them all. Right before your eyes, this thing rises into the air on its own, with no wires or mechanical devices giving it lift. And it hovers there effortlessly. But it's not magic, for magic is an illusion, and this gravity-defying phenomenon of perpetual levitation happens to be real. What is this "it" that keeps floating up, up, up? The annual bonuses paid to Wall Street's top bankers.

  By the laws of economics, if not physics, those bonuses should fall to earth this year, because the bankers have performed poorly. Trading is down, profits are flat (despite being given trillions of dollars in almost-interest-free money through the back door of the Federal Reserve), firms are handing out pink slips to lower-level employees, and the blatant greed of bank honchos have ruined the public reputations of their financial outfits.

  Who cares, shriek the big-shots, we make our own laws -- it's bonus time, baby, so grab all you can! Sure enough, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and others have set aside billions of dollars to flood their executive suites with bonus cash at the end of this year -- money that rightfully should go to shareholders.

  Their claim is: "We deserve it, for we took low pay during the crash of 2008-2009." For example, Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs' boss, was paid a mere $9 million last year, so now he wants that "sacrifice" made up to him.

  Lest you worry that poor Lloyd's family had to resort to food stamps to make ends meet with that tough $9 million year, note that he had a bit of a cushion, having pocketed a record Wall Street payday of $68 million in 2007 -- even as his the financial condition of his bank was crumbling.

  One banker-pay analyst says he had assumed that bonuses would go down this year. But, he said, "I underestimated the industry's resiliency." By "resiliency," I assume he was referring to the industry's incurable greed. ...

  The only thing "soft" in today's economy are the heads of economists who keep blaming consumers, rather than fingering the big bankers and corporate CEOs who continue to knock down America's wages, the middle class ... and America itself.

• BuzzFlash: Senator Bernie Sanders Denounces Proposed Cuts on Social Security and Medicare. Full excerpt: "The Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan is extremely disappointing and something that should be vigorously opposed by the American people. The huge increase in the national debt in recent years was caused by two unpaid wars, tax breaks for the wealthy, a Medicare prescription drug bill written by the pharmaceutical industry, and the Wall Street bailout. Unlike Social Security, none of these proposals were paid for. Not only has Social Security not contributed a dime to the deficit, it has a $2.6 trillion surplus.

  "It is reprehensible to ask working people, including many who do physically-demanding labor, to work until they are 69 years of age. It also is totally impractical. As they compete for jobs with 25-year-olds, many older workers will go unemployed and have virtually no income. Frankly, there will not be too much demand within the construction industry for 69-year-old bricklayers.

  "Despite all of the right-wing rhetoric, Social Security is not going bankrupt. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security can pay every nickel owed to every eligible American for the next 29 years and after that about 80 percent of benefits.

  "If we are serious about making Social Security strong and solvent for the next 75 years, President Obama has the right solution. On October 14, 2010, he restated a long-held position that the cap on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes, now at $106,800, should be raised. As the president has long stated, it is absurd that billionaires pay the same amount into the system as someone who earns $106,800.

  "With the richest people in this country getting richer and the middle class in decline, it is absurd that billionaires pay the same amount into the Social Security system as someone who earns $106,800."

• New York Times op-ed: The Hijacked Commission. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.

  My misgivings increased as we got a better feel for the views of the commission’s co-chairmen. It soon became clear that Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chairman, had a very Republican-sounding small-government agenda. Meanwhile, Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chairman, revealed the kind of honest broker he is by sending an abusive e-mail to the executive director of the National Older Women’s League in which he described Social Security as being “like a milk cow with 310 million tits.” ...

  Start with the declaration of “Our Guiding Principles and Values.” Among them is, “Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P.” This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue?

  Matters become clearer once you reach the section on tax reform. The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh.

  So how, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates, with deficit reduction literally at the bottom of the list?

  Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.

  It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction? ...

  It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net. Can anything be salvaged from this wreck? I doubt it. The deficit commission should be told to fold its tents and go away.

• truthout: Businesses Do Not Create Jobs. By Dave Johnson. Excerpts: Businesses do not create jobs. In fact, the way our economy is structured the incentive is for businesses to get rid of as many jobs as they can.

  Demand Creates Jobs. A job is created when demand for goods or services is greater than the existing ability to provide them. When there is a demand, people will see the need and fill it. Either someone will start filling the demand alone, or form a new business to fill it or an existing provider of the good or service will add employees as needed. (Actually a job can be created by a business, a government, a non-profit organization or just a person doing the job, depending on the nature of the good or service that is required.) ...

  Businesses Want To Kill Jobs, Not Create Them. Many people wrongly think that businesses create jobs. They see that a job is usually at a business, so they think that therefore the business "created" the job. This thinking leads to wrongheaded ideas like the current one that giving tax cuts to businesses will create jobs, because the businesses will have more money. But an efficiently-run business will already have the right number of employees. When a business sees that more people are coming in the door (demand) than there are employees to serve them, they hire people to serve the customers. When a business sees that not enough people are coming in the door and employees are sitting around reading the newspaper, they lay people off. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.

  Businesses have more incentives to eliminate jobs than to create them. Businesses in our economy exist to create profits, not jobs. This means the incentive is for a business to create as few jobs as possible at the lowest possible cost. They also constantly strive to reduce the number of people they employ by bringing in machines, outsourcing or finding other ways to reduce the payroll. This is called "cutting costs" which leads to higher profits. The same incentive also pushes the business to pay as little as possible when they do hire. (It also pushes businesses to cut worker safety protections, cut product quality, cut customer service, "externalize" costs by polluting, etc.) ...

  Corrupted Obviously businesses in our system must be kept from having any ability whatsoever to influence government decision-making in any way, or the system breaks down. When businesses are able to influence government, they will influence government in ways that provide themselves - and only themselves - with more profits, meaning lower costs, meaning fewer jobs at worse pay and not protecting workers, the environment or other businesses. And, they will fight to keep their ability to influence government, using the resulting wealth gains to increase their power over the government which increases their wealth which increases their power over the government which increases their wealth which increases their power over the government which increases their wealth which increases their power over the government which increases their wealth which increases their power over the government ... Unfortunately this is the system as it is today.

• New York Times op-ed: Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich? By Frank Rich. Excerpts: The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.

  he Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

  It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.

  On last Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Obama was already wobbling toward another “compromise” in which he does most of the compromising. It’s a measure of how far he’s off his game now that a leader who once had the audacity to speak at length on the red-hot subject of race doesn’t even make the most forceful case for his own long-held position on an issue where most Americans still agree with him. (Only 40 percent of those in the Nov. 2 exit poll approved of an extension of all Bush tax cuts.) The president’s argument against extending the cuts for the wealthiest has now been reduced to the dry accounting of what the cost would add to the federal deficit. As he put it to CBS’s Steve Kroft, “the question is — can we afford to borrow $700 billion?”

  That’s a good question, all right, but it’s not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich. That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness. Incredibly, the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970.

  “How can hedge-fund managers who are pulling down billions sometimes pay a lower tax rate than do their secretaries?” ask the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker (of Yale) and Paul Pierson (University of California, Berkeley) in their deservedly lauded new book, “Winner-Take-All Politics.” If you want to cry real tears about the American dream — as opposed to the self-canonizing tears of John Boehner — read this book and weep. The authors’ answer to that question and others amounts to a devastating indictment of both parties.

  Their ample empirical evidence, some of which I’m citing here, proves that America’s ever-widening income inequality was not an inevitable by-product of the modern megacorporation, or of globalization, or of the advent of the new tech-driven economy, or of a growing education gap. (Yes, the very rich often have fancy degrees, but so do those in many income levels below them.) Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election.

  The book deflates much of the conventional wisdom. Hacker and Pierson date the dawn of the collusion between the political system and the superrich not to the Reagan revolution, but to the preceding Carter presidency and its Democratic Congress. They also write that contrary to the popular perception, America’s superhigh earners are not mostly “superstars and celebrities in the arts, entertainment and sports” or the stars of law, medicine and real estate. They are instead corporate executives and managers — increasingly (and less surprisingly) financial company executives and managers, including those who escaped with outrageous fortunes as their companies imploded during the housing bubble. ...

  Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation? American companies seem intent on sitting on trillions in cash until the economy reboots. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ranks the extension of any Bush tax cuts, let alone those to the wealthiest Americans, as the least effective of 11 possible policy options for increasing employment. ...

  As “Winner-Take-All Politics” documents, America has been busy “building a bridge to the 19th century” — that is, to a new Gilded Age. To dislodge the country from this stagnant rut will require all kinds of effort from Americans in and out of politics. That includes some patriotic selflessness from those at the very top who still might emulate Warren Buffett and the few others in the Forbes 400 who dare say publicly that it’s not in America’s best interests to stack the tax and regulatory decks in their favor.