Welcome to IBM Employee News and Links

New on the Alliance@IBM Site

• IBM Global Union being formed! Full excerpt: A network of IBM unions worldwide, including the Alliance@IBM CWA Local 1701, will meet in Switzerland in May to form the IBM Global Union Alliance.

  For many years IBM unions, including the Alliance, have worked together as a network of information and cooperation. The new Global Union Alliance, under the umbrella of the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF) and Union Network International (UNI) takes that network to another level and will include many more IBM unions. This past year new IBM unions have formed in Bulgaria, Chile and Argentina. In a statement from the IMF and UNI about the new Global Union to IBM unions:

  As IBM has set itself up as a truly global company, trade unions also need to set up a truly global alliance cooperating to the maximum extent for the benefit of their members and IBM employees. This meeting creates an IMF/UNI Global Union Alliance at IBM of trade unions with members working for companies owned by IBM or companies in which IBM has a significant interest.

  The purpose is to express the determination/commitment of trade unions at IBM to work together at global level based on shared values and objectives to strengthen communication and cooperation and to implement action coordinated by IMF/UNI global union.

  The objectives are:

  • To engage IBM in dialog at global level.
  • To pursue agreements with IBM at global level to improve working conditions of IBM employees worldwide.
  • To raise levels of trade union membership at IBM.

  The partners of the Alliance will work together with the aim of protecting and furthering the interests of IBM employees throughout the world.

  The partners will take concrete action to enlarge the network by improving contacts with unions in countries where employees are unionized and make every effort to organize unorganized plants/locations.

  The Alliance@IBM looks forward to the forming of this new organization for IBM employees and their unions.

  As many of you know, we have lost many members due to job cuts at IBM US.

  Please help us build the American section of the new IBM Global Union Alliance. If you are not a dues paying member of the Alliance, please consider joining today at: https://afl.salsalabs.com/o/4004/donate_page/alliance-join

• 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 4/18/11: GBS operations will likely see layoffs End of 2Q or beginning of 3Q. Don't know much more. -Anon-
  • Comment 4/19/11: From a worker in the UK. 'We were handed a sheet of paper with what the IBM employees receive, which is less than £200 a month, with a rice allowance and a laundry allowance' - An anonymous worker at Orange's Darlington office tells the Northern Echo that about 40 staff have been offered a 'generous' rice allowance to encourage them to relocate to Manila to work for service partner IBM. -anon-
  • Comment 4/19/11: Now that IBM engineered another stellar quarter by offshoring to the cheapest labor after continued cost cuts bet on more USA RAs. Sam and his cronies want to be billionaires and you folks will do that for them by not unionizing. Enjoy you 0% raise. Be wary of losing your job to an RA. -anonymous-
  • Comment 4/19/11: I second the other Anon about GBS layoffs. I work in GBS and all of the R.A. signals are there: managers behind closed doors and completely unavailable, no conference rooms available, extreme pressure to get work to India, etc etc. People are freaking out over mandatory meeting requests for tomorrow. -ANON-
  • Comment 4/20/11: There were a number of jobs cut at the software group 500 Bldg, in RTP on March 31st 2011. At least 50...could be much more. -Anonymous IBMer-
  • Comment 4/23/11: -irRational- All True! IBM doesn't valuate intellectual capital as a profit engine. IBM says their most important asset is their people. I think the only people in IBM they are referring to are those Band D and above now. These are the people that have the most to gain from a high stock price. -anonymous-
  • Comment 4/23/11: It would be nice if IBM would stop treating the rank-and-file employees like interchangeable bags of meat. It would be nice if the company would grow profits by increasing revenue, not by decreasing expenses to the point of no return. It would be nice if IBM would then get back to some form of profit sharing, which has been missing for a few years now. But these things are not going to happen any time soon. I gave up. After nearly 20 years I've decided to take my cash balance plan and my dignity and give somebody else the benefit of my experience. Internally IBM will get more and more stressed as veteran employees lose patience and move on. If the constant focus on expense cuts doesn't let up parts of IBM will start imploding. Development is extremely sensitive to this kind of pressure. I wish we didn't even have to think about needing a union. But here we are. I'd like to thank the Alliance for keeping us informed all of these years. -VotedWithMyFeet-
  • Comment 4/23/11: IBM has lost the Astrazenaca account. That is a fact. 12-15 months the account will have transitioned out. Over 1 billion dollar account. -Bye Bye Birdie-

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

• Consumer Reports Health: What's this I hear about a plan to privatize Medicare? By Nancy Metcalf. Excerpts: The Republican plan, conceived by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee and passed last week by the House on a party-line vote, would eliminate the government-run Medicare program that's been around since 1965 and replace it with private insurance that would push more costs onto Medicare recipients. It would also increase the Medicare eligibility age by two months a year starting in 2022 so that by 2033 it would be 67 instead of the current 65. ...

  When fully phased in, in 2022, the Ryan plan would give people on Medicare a voucher that they could use to buy private health insurance on a special exchange similar to the exchanges to be set up for working-age adults under the Affordable Care Act. The size of the voucher would vary according to the person's health, age, and income. Plans couldn't turn people down on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

  The problem, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan and authoritative Congressional Budget Office, is that the Ryan plan would be more expensive overall than traditional Medicare, and individuals would have to bear almost all of that extra cost themselves. The nonpartisan, nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation (no relation to the HMO) estimates that in 2022 the average 65-year-old Medicare recipient would be personally paying $12,500 of the typical plan's total cost of $20,500. Out-of-pocket costs would be even higher in the years beyond, because the Ryan plan is set up so the value of the vouchers won't increase as fast as the price of health care. ...

  So, would the plan help reduce the deficit? Yes. According to the CBO analysis, if the Ryan plan were to be adopted, by 2030 the government would be spending only about 6 percent of our nation's Gross National Product on health programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. If the current system stays in place, government spending on health would total between 8.75 and 9.75 percent of GNP in 2030, the CBO said.

  But overall health spending, both public and private, would be higher—and more of it would come out of your pocket.

• New York Times op-ed: Patients Are Not Consumers. By Paul Krugman. Here's my question: How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as "consumers"? The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car — and their only complaint is that it isn't commercial enough.

  What has gone wrong with us? ...

  About that advisory board: We have to do something about health care costs, which means that we have to find a way to start saying no. In particular, given continuing medical innovation, we can't maintain a system in which Medicare essentially pays for anything a doctor recommends. And that's especially true when that blank-check approach is combined with a system that gives doctors and hospitals — who aren't saints — a strong financial incentive to engage in excessive care.

  Before you start yelling about "rationing" and "death panels," bear in mind that we're not talking about limits on what health care you're allowed to buy with your own (or your insurance company's) money. We're talking only about what will be paid for with taxpayers' money. And the last time I looked at it, the Declaration of Independence didn't declare that we had the right to life, liberty, and the all-expenses-paid pursuit of happiness. ...

  Now, what House Republicans propose is that the government simply push the problem of rising health care costs on to seniors; that is, that we replace Medicare with vouchers that can be applied to private insurance, and that we count on seniors and insurance companies to work it out somehow. This, they claim, would be superior to expert review because it would open health care to the wonders of "consumer choice."

  What's wrong with this idea (aside from the grossly inadequate value of the proposed vouchers)? One answer is that it wouldn't work. "Consumer-based" medicine has been a bust everywhere it has been tried. To take the most directly relevant example, Medicare Advantage, which was originally called Medicare + Choice, was supposed to save money; it ended up costing substantially more than traditional Medicare. America has the most "consumer-driven" health care system in the advanced world. It also has by far the highest costs yet provides a quality of care no better than far cheaper systems in other countries. ...

  Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made. Yet making such decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge. Furthermore, those decisions often must be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.

  That's why we have medical ethics. That's why doctors have traditionally both been viewed as something special and been expected to behave according to higher standards than the average professional. There's a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don't have TV series about heroic middle managers.

  The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just "providers" selling services to health care "consumers" — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society's values.

• Washington Post: Poll shows Americans oppose entitlement cuts to deal with debt problem. By Jon Cohen and Dan Balz. Excerpts: The survey finds that Americans prefer to keep Medicare just the way it is. Most also oppose cuts in Medicaid and the defense budget. More than half say they are against small, across-the-board tax increases combined with modest reductions in Medicare and Social Security benefits. Only President Obama's call to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans enjoys solid support. ...

  In his speech last week, the president renewed his call to raise tax rates on family income over $250,000, and he appears to hold the high ground politically, according to the poll. At this point, 72 percent support raising taxes along those lines, with 54 percent strongly backing this approach. The proposal enjoys the support of majorities of Democrats (91 percent), independents (68 percent) and Republicans (54 percent). Only among people with annual incomes greater than $100,000 does less than a majority "strongly support" such tax increases. ...

  There is broad support for keeping Medicare structured the way it has been since it was instituted in 1965: as a defined-benefit health insurance program. Just 34 percent of Americans say Medicare should be changed along the lines outlined in the Ryan budget proposal, shifting it away from a defined-benefit plan. Under that proposal, recipients would select from a group of insurance plans providing guaranteed coverage, and the government would provide a payment to the insurer, subsidizing the cost. Advocates say this approach is more sophisticated than a pure voucher plan.

• In These Times: Rep. Ryan's Free-Market 'Death Panels'. By Robert Parry. Excerpts: The consequences of three decades of anti-government Reaganism and free-market extremism are now coming clearly into view, a cruel and brutish America split sharply between a few lucky haves and many desperate have-nots. As Rep. Paul Ryan proudly declared in unveiling the Republican budget plan for fiscal 2012, "This is not a budget; this is a cause."

  It is the "cause" advanced in the modern era by President Ronald Reagan and economist Milton Friedman. It calls for further slashing the tax rate for the richest Americans by another ten percentage points, from 35 percent to 25 percent, while enacting a wide range of domestic spending cuts, including phasing out the Medicare health program for the elderly as it has existed since the 1960s.

  Under Ryan's plan, senior citizens in the future would have to select a private health insurance policy with the government paying "premium support" worth about $8,000 to the company, thus shifting a heavier, even crushing, financial burden onto the elderly.

  And, since Ryan's plan also would repeal President Barack Obama's health reform, which prohibits insurance companies from excluding coverage of "preexisting conditions," senior citizens suffering from chronic illnesses might find themselves unable to get coverage of those ailments and likely consigned to a premature death. ...

  Even today, people just shy of Medicare's 65-year-old threshold find themselves either shunned by insurance companies or paying exorbitant amounts. Yet Ryan envisions thrusting Americans over 65 into that same predicament, only worse because they are more likely to have health problems and are less likely to be under a company plan. ...

  "For older people the prospect of getting and paying for private health insurance is daunting," Guilloton wrote "For instance, in Connecticut a PPO with a $5,000 deductible would cost a 60-64 year old and spouse between $1,400 and $1,900 a month. And that cost presumes that they either are part of a company group plan or have no pre-existing conditions. ...

  Yet, even as Ryan touts his goal of cutting government spending by more than $6.2 trillion over the next decade, compared to Obama's budget, Ryan's plan would still not result in a balanced federal budget for nearly three decades, let alone pay off the accumulated national debt. That's because Ryan would accompany his steep spending cuts with lower tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. And those lower tax rates – based on an ideological devotion to Reagan's "trickle-down economics" and Friedman's "free-market" extremism – have been a principal cause of the debt problem.

• Talking Points Memo (TPM): Will Anyone Even Insure Seniors if Paul Ryan's Medicare Plan Passes? By Benjy Sarlin. Excerpts: At first glance, Paul Ryan's plan to send millions of seniors into the free market with dwindling vouchers in hand might seem a boon to the private insurance industry. But would companies even want to participate?

  Unlike the Affordable Care Act, which mandated that millions of young and healthy Americans purchase insurance with government subsidies, the Paul Ryan plan would instead bring the oldest, sickest, and least profitable demographic to the table. And with the CBO projecting that the average senior would be on the hook for over two-thirds of their health care costs within just 10 years of the plan's adoption -- a proportion that is projected to worsen in the long run --- the government subsidies backing them up may not bring in enough profitable customers to make things worthwhile. ...

  Insurers have successfully demanded funding hikes to other programs even as their clients faced far less dire circumstances than projected under Ryan's plan, raising the question of whether Ryan's savings would ever come to pass. Take Medicare+Choice, a private exchange for seniors created in 1997 by the GOP Congress. Under the program, the government paid the equivalent it would use to fund Medicare coverage to reimburse private HMOs instead under the theory that the free market would operate more efficiently and produce better results. Instead, insurers found they were unable to sustain a profit and began pulling out en masse. In 2000, more than 900,000 patients were dropped as HMOs deserted the program, citing inadequate federal backing and a lack of a prescription drug benefit.

  "Year after year, the reimbursement rates were cut for these plans, making it increasingly unattractive for private providers to offer plans," one Republican congressman recalled in 2009, adding that for seniors who lost coverage "the consequences were painful and the vocal anger was justified."

  That congressman was none other than Paul Ryan. And he put his money where his mouth was in 2003 by voting for President Bush's Medicare law, which replaced Medicare+Choice with the more costly Medicare Advantage and added a pricey prescription drug benefit. The more generous system brought insurance companies back to the table, but ended up spending 14% more per patient than regular Medicare in the process.

  "In theory the idea of a more competitive market would have a lot to recommend it," MIT economist Jonathan Gruber told TPM, "But in fact it just simply hasn't worked. We have the example, we've lived it, it's Medicare Advantage, and it hasn't worked"

• Albany Times-Union: A tale of two nations. America's widening income gap shows the very rich prospering, others struggling. By Alex Wynnyczuk. Excerpts: The growth in income inequality in America over the past 30 years has been well-documented. Reversing a trend toward less inequality from the end of World War II to the 1970s, income differences today are as large or even larger than in 1928, when they reached their previous peak. The disparity is even greater than it was during the Gilded Age of the robber barons. ...

  Saez also found that a considerably larger share of the top income receivers comes from salaries and bonuses, rather than from dividends, rents and capital gains that the very rich also depended upon in the past. In addition, the tax system has become less progressive. Who are the people in the top 1 percent, with incomes of more than $368,000?

  Certainly not the small businessmen so routinely touted by our politicians when they discuss tax changes. They are probably CEOs of large corporations, investment bankers, Wall Street traders, hedge fund managers, university presidents, Hollywood stars and famous athletes. ...

  It may be debated to what degree the changing income distribution is just or morally justified, and to what degree it may lead to social stress. What is clear is that it affects the current and future performance of the economy. The increased income inequality helped cause the recent financial crises. Excess borrowing by people whose real incomes were declining but who wanted to maintain their living standard most probably would not have happened if incomes were growing in a more uniform manner.

  Also, the growing income disparities are prolonging the recession, since aggregate consumer spending is being held back by insufficient incomes of a large segment of the population. Finally, future economic growth is not being helped by the shrinking of the middle class. Historically, income distribution has been more uneven in less developed countries than in rich countries. That implies that as economies grow, new income is spreading more evenly than before.

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: The Pirates of Capitol Hill. By Charles M. Blow. Excerpts: Corporations are roaring. Wall Street is rolling in cash. C.E.O. bonuses are going gangbusters. It's a really good time to be rich!

  If you're poor, not so much. The pall of the recession is suffocating. The unemployment rate is still unbearably high. The Census Bureau reported in September that the poverty rate for 2009 was 14.3 percent, higher than it has been since 1994, and the number of uninsured reached a record high. And the Department of Agriculture has reported record "prevalence of food insecurity."

  So in a civil society, which of these groups should be expected to sacrifice a bit for the benefit of the other and the overall health and prosperity of the nation at a time of great uncertainty? The poor, of course. At least that seems to be the Republican answer.

  Under the guise of deficit reduction, the Republicans are proposing to not only make the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, but to reduce their taxes even more — cutting the top individual rate from 35 percent to 25 percent to "promote growth and job creation." And they plan to pay for this by taking a buzz saw to programs that benefit the poor, elderly and otherwise vulnerable.

  But the spurious argument that cutting taxes for the wealthy will somehow stimulate economic growth is not borne out by the data. A look at the year-over-year change in G.D.P. and changes in the historical top marginal tax rates show no such correlation. This isn't about balancing budgets or fiscal discipline or prosperity-for-posterity stewardship. This is open piracy for plutocrats. This is about reshaping the government and economy to benefit the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor and powerless.

  And it's not that the rich haven't already gotten their tax cuts. According to an analysis released Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute, the average tax rate for the top 1 percent of households dropped by about 20 percent from 1979 to 2007, while the average tax rate for all Americans dropped by just 8 percent over that time. However, in just the period from 1992 to 2007, the tax rate on the top 400 households in America — those with an average annual income of nearly $350 million — fell by more than a third. In fact, the tax rate for these supermillionaires is now less than the tax rate for average Americans.

• AlterNet: Our Phony Budget Battles Are All Smoke and Mirrors. Both parties in Washington have supported and sustained massive ongoing deficits propping up a crippled, state-dependent capitalism. By Richard D. Wolff. Excerpts: In fact, both sides never actually engaged the deficit and the debt. They limited themselves to purely cosmetic, symbol-laden cuts (Republicans) and refusals to cut (Democrats). Aiming at the 2012 election, both parties used the deficit and budget debates purely to impress their voters. Basic numbers tell the true story. The current (Fiscal Year 2011) budget spends about $3.5 trillion while receiving $2.0 trillion in tax revenues. The difference of $1.5 trillion (the equivalent of $1,500 billion) is this year's deficit. The US Treasury must borrow that from whoever will lend to the US government. After much hot air, Republicans and Democrats reached a "historic compromise," namely a spending cut of $38 billion. That will reduce this year's deficit from $1,500 billion to $1,462 billion, an economically insignificant sum. The sound and fury of Washington's debates signified nothing was to be done about the actual deficit. ...

  The problems with these liberals' logic are many. First, if the government taxed corporations and the wealthiest individuals more, it could maintain high spending without having to incur huge deficits. One recent calculation showed that if corporations and individuals earning over $1,000,000 per year paid the same rate of taxes today as they paid in 1961, the US Treasury would collect an addition $716 billion per year. That would cut the 2011 deficit by half and likewise its interest costs. Second, consider who lends to the US government. Major creditors include the People's Republic of China, Japan, large corporations and wealthy individuals in the US and abroad. The greater our deficits, the more of everyone's taxes go to pay interest to those creditors. Third, consider the basic injustice of deficits: (1) Washington taxes corporations and the rich far less than it used to in, say, the 1960s, (2) Washington therefore runs a deficit and (3) the US Treasury then borrows from corporations and the rich the money that the government allowed them not to pay in taxes.

• AlterNet: The Execs at GE Are Laughing at What a Bunch of Suckers We Are for Filing Our Taxes -- Let's Make Them PAY. The joke's on us, folks. GE and tons of other corporations will have a tax bill for 2010 of ZERO. By Michael Moore. Excerpts: Do you wonder (like I do) what the tax accountants and executives are doing over at GE this weekend? Frantically rushing to fill out their IRS returns like the rest of us? Hardly. They're taking the weekend off to throw themselves a big party and have a hearty laugh at all of us. It must really crack them up to see us like suckers scurrying around to make sure we report everything to Uncle Sam -- and even send him a check, if necessary. ...

  In the latest budget deal, our politicians could have tackled the deficit by stopping the flow of these ill-gotten billions to corporations. Instead they cut billions from "wasteful" programs that do "wasteful" things, like create new jobs, drive economic growth, and help the needy and our nation's children. It's Democracy in reverse and it sickens me. ...

  We're doing this because we don't buy into the Big Lie: that greedy teachers caused the crash on Wall Street! That the selfish firefighters sent millions of jobs overseas! That pregnant woman, infants, and children are sending us into deficit!

  No, it was the big corporations that did this. It was the CEOs and the top 1% of the country. THEY brought on the mortgage crisis. THEY made off with trillions of dollars from our economy. THEY are systematically destroying the middle class. And THEY have bought and sold the very people elected to represent us!

• Washington Post editorial: As in 1984, we need the courage to raise taxes. By Walter Mondale. Many have described my 1984 presidential campaign promise to raise taxes as exemplifying the folly of proposing tax hikes during an election. Although the rebounding economy and improving job picture that year probably had more to do with President Ronald Reagan's reelection than my pledge did, there are certainly political lessons for anyone considering tax increases today. In particular, avoid generalities, and clearly link taxes to addressing concrete national needs.

  Taxes reveal who we are as a people and what we value. Polls consistently show that majorities of Americans are willing to pay taxes and even have them increased when the revenues are devoted to their priorities, such as education, health care and deficit reduction. The public's support is greatest for raising taxes on the affluent, but it extends to hikes tied to popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare. ...

  I told the truth in 1984. "The American people will have to pay Mr. Reagan's bills," I said in my acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. "The budget will be squeezed. Taxes will go up... It must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did."

  I lost the election, but I won the debate. Reagan ended up increasing taxes in 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1987 to mend the budget and tax systems. ...

  It makes sense to seize today's bipartisan support for cutting tax exemptions as a way to increase revenue. I also believe that we must eliminate Bush's tax cuts for the rich. Where is the decency in cutting taxes for those making tens of millions while middle America struggles? This is a fight over fairness that Americans can understand.

  Republicans are not risk-free in the tax debate. GOP politicians promise to reduce the deficit, but the indisputable record of Bush shows that his first priority was cutting taxes for the super-rich, even when that brought higher deficits. This record has bred distrust among the conservative base, including tea party sympathizers. One of Reagan's domestic policy advisers, Bruce Bartlett, wrote a book in 2006 titled "Impostor," decrying Bush's phoniness on deficits and spending. Talking about shrinking deficits while cutting taxes for the the wealthiest does not attract conservative populists or swing voters.

• TruthDig: The False Debate on the Debt. By Robert Scheer. Excerpts: In the ever-so-smug company of the rich and powerful, it is a given that there is never to be any expression of remorse or other acknowledgment of the pain they have inflicted on the lesser mortals they so cavalierly plunder. It's convenient for them that the media and the politicians, which they happen to own, rarely connect the dots between the scams that made the rich so rich and the alarming rise in the federal debt that is crushing this nation.

  The result of this purchased public myopia is that we are left with an absurd debate over how deeply to cut teachers' pensions and seniors' medical benefits while preserving tax breaks for the superrich and their large corporations. At a time when 10 million American families will have lost their homes by year's end, when $5.6 trillion in home equity has been wiped out, when most Americans face steep unemployment rates and stagnant wages, a Democratic president is likely to compromise with Republican ideologues who insist that further cuts in taxes for the rich is the way to bring back jobs.

  Let's deal right off with that canard. There is currently no shortage of corporate profits or excessive executive compensation to explain away the failure of the private sector to create jobs. On the contrary, as The New York Times reports, "In the fourth quarter, profits at American businesses were up an astounding 29.2 percent, the fastest growth in more than 60 years. Collectively, American corporations logged profits at an annual rate of $1.678 trillion." And to add insult to injury, the top executives, who seem unable or unwilling to create jobs or adequately reward their workers, have increased their own compensation by a whopping 12 percent over the previous year, setting the median pay at $9.6 million per year for those in control of the leading 200 companies. The Times adds that "C.E.O. pay is also on the rise again at companies like Capital One and Goldman Sachs, which survived the economic storm with the help of all of those taxpayer-financed bailouts."

  Lost in this faux debate is the reality that our debt now looms so large because the government had to bail out many of those same corporations, quite a few of which, like General Electric and AIG, pay no taxes and have no problem paying truly obscene amounts to their top executives. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, whom President Barack Obama named chairman of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, is making as much as he did before the recession hit, a recession that his GE Capital division did much to cause with its reckless loans. AIG, saved with a government infusion of $170 billion, has just lavishly rewarded its top executives but has provided no relief for the homeowners ripped off by its phony credit default swaps.

  Continued tax breaks for the 1 percent of the population that controls 40 percent of the nation's wealth will do nothing to restore the confidence of the other 99 percent of consumers who are suffering so. This at least Obama seems to understand, but count on him to betray his own better instincts by once again following the advice of his treasury secretary and the Wall Street crowd that contributed so lavishly to his first presidential campaign and whose support he seeks once again.

• New York Times op-ed: Let's Not Be Civil. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: Now, Republicans claim that last year's midterms gave them a mandate for the vision embodied in their budget. But last year the G.O.P. ran against what it called the "massive Medicare cuts" contained in the health reform law. How, then, can the election have provided a mandate for a plan that not only would preserve all of those cuts, but would go on, over time, to dismantle Medicare completely?

  For what it's worth, polls suggest that the public's priorities are nothing like those embodied in the Republican budget. Large majorities support higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthy. Large majorities — including a majority of Republicans — also oppose major changes to Medicare. Of course, the poll that matters is the one on Election Day. But that's all the more reason to make the 2012 election a clear choice between visions.

  Which brings me to those calls for a bipartisan solution. Sorry to be cynical, but right now "bipartisan" is usually code for assembling some conservative Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans — all of them with close ties to the wealthy, and many who are wealthy themselves — and having them proclaim that low taxes on high incomes and drastic cuts in social insurance are the only possible solution.

  This would be a corrupt, undemocratic way to make decisions about the shape of our society even if those involved really were wise men with a deep grasp of the issues. It's much worse when many of those at the table are the sort of people who solicit and believe the kind of policy analyses that the Heritage Foundation supplies.

  So let's not be civil. Instead, let's have a frank discussion of our differences. In particular, if Democrats believe that Republicans are talking cruel nonsense, they should say so — and take their case to the voters.

• Huffington Post: Cost Of Tax Cuts For America's Rich Exceeds Value Of Budget Cuts. By William Alden. Excerpt: Today, as Americans submit their tax returns, the wealthiest earners will each reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax savings. As part of a law passed late last year, the Bush-era tax cuts for the richest Americans were extended for two years. The estimated cost to the government of that portion of the tax deal, $42 billion this fiscal year, exceeds the stated $38 billion value of the savings from the federal budget cuts lawmakers approved last week.
• The New Yorker: Deepest Cuts. By George Packer. Excerpts: The Republicans now hold just one house of Congress, yet they have controlled the terms of the debate, because they understand that budget battles are about far more than numbers, and they've made the ideology behind their various bargaining positions startlingly clear: government should be reduced to gasping for air. What's more, they're willing to deploy legislative terrorism—threatening to shut down the government and to allow the United States to default on its debt—to get their way. In politics, the side with a fixed notion of ends and an unscrupulous approach to means always has the advantage.

  A decade and a half after Clinton and Gingrich, Republicans are once again trying to privatize Medicare, gut Medicaid (by turning it into block grants), cut education spending and regulations that protect the environment, and give yet another round of tax cuts to the rich. They continue to insist—despite years of evidence to the contrary—that market forces will lower health-care costs and that tax cuts will create economic growth and lift all incomes. "Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits," the late Daniel Bell wrote. "One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae." Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. ...

  The impetus for Obama's return to politics was the budget plan of Representative Paul Ryan, the doe-eyed Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee. The Ryan plan, which claims to cut the deficit by $4.4 trillion over the next decade (and was passed by the House last Friday, along party lines), contains every Republican dogma about political economy, and Obama, in his speech, pointedly called them out, while Ryan sat seething in the audience: "There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don't think there's anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don't have any clout on Capitol Hill." Obama then offered a counter-plan, vague on details, that would combine spending cuts and tax increases in roughly equal measure, imposing cost controls on health care but preserving entitlement programs, while claiming to arrive at roughly the same savings as Ryan, but guided by vastly different principles. ...

  All this suggests, not for the first time, that the President might be a better tactician than his critics. But outmaneuvering his political opponents is not the same thing as achieving a country that, as he said last week, "values fairness." The most persistent and corrosive feature of American life over the past three decades is income inequality: it rose steeply during Clinton's first term, and, despite his budget victory, it continued to go up in his second. Obama often discussed inequality during the 2008 campaign, and his health-care plan represented the most serious effort in a generation to reverse it. But last week he mentioned it only in passing. As he knows, the reform stage of his Presidency lasted less than two years. We have now entered the period of rearguard defense.

• truthOut: The New Corporate World Order. By Robert Scheer. Excerpts: The debate over Republicans' insistence on continued tax breaks for the super-rich and the corporations they run should come to a screeching halt with the report in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal headlined "Big U.S. Firms Shift Hiring Abroad." Those tax breaks over the past decade, leaving some corporations such as General Electric to pay no taxes at all, were supposed to lead to job creation, but just the opposite has occurred. As the Journal put it, the multinational companies "cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show."

  General Electric, which was bailed out by taxpayers and which stored so much of its profit abroad that it paid no taxes for the past two years, was forced to tighten up, but while cutting its foreign workforce by 1,000 it cut a far more severe 28,000 in the United States. Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, recently appointed by President Barack Obama as his chief outside economic adviser, admits that this does not involve poorly paid work that Americans don't want, but instead prime jobs: "We've globalized around markets, not cheap labor. The era of globalization around cheap labor is over. Today we go to China, we go to India, because that's where the customers are." ...

  Of course it will be argued that multinational corporations have the right to arrange their business as they see fit in order to maximize profit. But if that is the case, do beleaguered American taxpayers have to foot the bill? When those corporations run into trouble overseas because of financial hustles or hostile locals and need the diplomatic and military might of the U.S. government to protect their interests abroad, it is again the U.S. taxpayer who must pay to maintain this new world order. It is an order, as we see with three current wars and a military budget that rivals Cold War highs, that is contributing mightily to the U.S. government debt. More than half of all discretionary spending, the dollars that the Republicans in Congress now want to take out of needed domestic programs, is accounted for by defense spending. That defense spending to support a massive network of military bases and deployed weapons and troops is key to establishing an order in which the interests of American corporations are attended to. If the companies don't feel that way, let them operate under the flag of Liberia or the Cayman Islands.

  Big government, the devil that Republicans love to inveigh against, is big precisely because it is so active in so many costly ways in serving the interests of our biggest corporations. Corporate lobbyists attest with their every breath that big government and big business are bedmates in a bountiful venture that impoverishes the rest of us. It is time to admit that we are, in practice if not surface appearance, close to the Chinese communist model of state-sponsored capitalism that sacrifices the interests of ordinary workers, be they in the public or private sector, for the exorbitant profits of the super-rich. It is the corporations that need big government to protect their interests, and one would hope they would be willing to pay for the services that their government so faithfully renders to make them obscenely wealthy as it studiously ignores the well-being of the rest of us.

• Smirking Chimp: Representative Ryan Puts the Republicans on the Record. By Dean Baker. Excerpts: For years people have accused the Republican Party of being the servants of the rich and powerful at the expense of the broader public. In the past, they would deny this charge and claim that they just had a different view of how the economy works.

  Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan sought to eliminate any confusion on this point. He proposed, and last week the Republican House approved, a budget bill that will transfer tens of trillions (yes, that is "trillions" with a "T") of dollars from ordinary working people to the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and generic rich people from any industry. This money will come in the form of higher payments by seniors in their old age for health insurance and another round of tax breaks for the country's richest people. ...

  The main reason that retiree health care costs will increase is that the private sector is less efficient at delivering care than the existing Medicare program. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that, under the Ryan plan, the increase in the cost of buying Medicare equivalent policies would be more than $30 trillion over Medicare's planning horizon.

  This additional waste comes to almost $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. It is approximately equal to six times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall. This waste is a direct transfer from retirees to the insurance industry and the health care industry. ...

  The tax breaks would be real money for the people who get them. For example, Representative Ryan's tax breaks could give Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, another $3 million a year based on his $20 million annual paycheck. That's the equivalent of more than 2,600 monthly Social Security checks.

• Wall Street Journal: Gingrich Steps Away From Ryan Budget. By Jonathan Weisman. Excerpt: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is distancing himself from the House-passed budget plan that would end fee-for-service Medicare in favor of private insurance plans for seniors partially subsidized by the federal government. In a post on his Facebook page Wednesday, Mr. Gingrich – a likely presidential candidate – instead embraced a voluntary plan that would give seniors the option to choose private plans without explicitly abolishing Medicare as we know it. That is in line with a Medicare proposal by former Democratic Congressional Budget Office director Alice Rivlin and former Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, once embraced, then rejected by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan.