IBM Employee Highlights | October 8, 2011

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Highlights—October 8, 2011

Retirement Heist:

Throughout the IBM Pension heist, Ellen E. Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter with the Wall Street Journal, exposed IBM's and other companies shenanigans that have cost retirees millions and millions of dollars, while enriching corporate executives.

Ms. Schultz has just published a book that every IBMer should read: Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers. Many IBMers are aware of the "cash balance heist" of 1999. However, IBM has been stealing money from the pension plan dating back to 1991, well before the Gerstner era.

""Retirement Heist takes a provocative look at the unseen corporate forces that have weakened our nation's employer provided retirement benefits. Ellen E. Schultz documents an emerging corporate culture - spurred on by benefit consultants - that places shareholder value and executive compensation above employee retirement security. Retirement Heist shows how the growing retirement insecurity of today is a direct outgrowth of the hidden manipulation of plan benefits for other corporate purposes. David Certner, Legislative Policy Director for AARP.

New on the Alliance@IBM Site

Job Cut Reports
- Comment 10/04/11: RA for 1st week in Nov. packets being printed and bound. S&D will be hit. No further details... -ChopChop-
- Comment 10/06/11: -ChopChop-: Did your manager tell you the RA would come in Dec? I heard it's coming in Dec. -B-
- Comment 10/07/11: Will any groups beyond S&D be hit by the RA? IBM is making big bucks right now, and the stock sky high. Why do they have to do this to their people? -Anonymous- Alliance Reply: IBM does it because they can. If you want to stop them, you need to organize and fight for a contract. No amount of complaining to any of the executives will make any difference. Fight back. Occupy IBM USA with Alliance and a union contract. Organize.
- Comment 10/07/11: Like biker'mike (somewhere in the recent thread) I also joined in 1999 and had an actual telegraph sent to my then manager that I was an official union organizer. I've told several managers since the same thing, (4 or 5 managers) and made no secret of it as I've handed out thousands of flyers, often to people I know were managers, (never my own) and we both had a bit of a laugh about it on some occasions.
  I also filed labor charges against my second line who basically told me to take down my union signs or risk being 'written up' (whatever that implies, the court took it as a veiled threat) the case was eventually won in our favor, a nationally recognized/Federal case.
  
  I also confronted Gerstner and and Sam at various Shareholder meetings, the last meeting Sam actually refused to call on me at the microphone, skipping the normal functioning of the shareholder meeting, which tells an awful lot about him in my opinion.
  
  I get along well with my managers, (even the one in the Fed case mentioned) as I can tell them quite honestly I have nothing to hide and don't consider management the problem. Management doesn't send thousands of jobs offshore, Armonk executives do. Management didn't decide to replace thousands of Americans with visa workers as is ongoing, Armonk executives did. Managers aren't fleecing workers pensions and cutting benefits and keeping raises down, Armonk executives are.
  
  Managers are in many cases just as screwed as we are in terms of benefits and retirement issues and have even more difficult rights to pursue if they wanted to, and some have even told me they wanted their own union! Managers and we are basically in the same position, financially screwed.
  
  My ratings have been consistent 2-2+ for my career and didn't change since joining. I'm often approached by the fearful wondering why I keep my job while thousands keeping their head down and hiding their frustrations are fired. While there are many reasons, the main ones are I am a solid contributor and follow the legal rules regarding organizing, no bending things, just stick to the laws and be ready to fight legally if the company ties to violate your rights. This removes a big incentive for the company to target organizers as the company can fire hundreds who won't make a peep about leaving.
  
  You don't have to do what others like me have done, you can join and support the cause anonymously, but either way, stand up for yourselves and gain some self respect while you're at it. You have nothing to lose but your self imposed chains!
  
  POKJournal IBM Labor Group Sees Growth
  
  The story I'm in above notes about some workers who were fired, who tried to use union rules while not being involved with the union:"They were not involved with a union, the board said, and thus lacked the rule's protection." So if you want to stand up for your rights, smarten up and join the Alliance, regardless of the long term outcome, you can be proud of yourself for standing up while others hide or pretend they don't care about where things are heading. I wear my union button daily and my alliance tee-shirt every Friday, if you're in Fishkill, NY, look me up and say hello anytime, we can take a break and head to a break area and have a legal and protected conversation about workers rights! Plus I've met hundreds of CWA workers and even joined them on the picket lines on several occasions, my Union Brothers really are a part of my family now, I know they can be counted on, unlike the Armonk bunch.... -Bill Costine-
  
  Alliance reply: To clarify our membership number in the linked article: The 6000 were both supporters and members. Dues paying members at that time were about 450. Currently, we have about 200 members and 4000 supporters.

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

Wall Street Journal: Home-Health Firms Blasted. Senate Panel Alleges Big Providers Abused Medicare by Tailoring Patient Care to Maximize Profits. By John Carreyrou. Excerpts: An inquiry by the Senate Finance Committee has found that the nation's three largest home-health companies tailored the care they provided to Medicare patients to maximize their reimbursements from the federal program.
The three companies, Amedisys Inc., LHC Group Inc. and Gentiva Health Services Inc., get most of their revenues from Medicare. Home-health care, which involves sending nurses to patients' homes in an effort to cut down on costly hospitalizations, is one of the fastest-growing areas of spending for the $524 billion-a-year health plan for the elderly and disabled. The Senate committee, citing emails and other internal documents obtained from the companies, alleges that they encouraged employees to make enough home-therapy visits to reach thresholds that triggered bonus payments, whether or not the visits were medically necessary. ...

Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), the Senate Finance Committee's chairman, said "the gaming of Medicare by these companies represents serious abuse of the home-health program." Elderly patients "should not be used as pawns to increase a company's profits," and "in these tough economic times, taxpayers simply cannot afford for their dollars to be wasted on unnecessary care," he added. "The reimbursement policy encourages gaming, and gaming is what's occurred," said Sen. Charles Grassley, the committee's senior Republican member. "The federal government needs to fix the policy that lets Medicare money flow down the drain."
New York Times editorial: Your Soaring Insurance Premiums. Excerpts: Annual premiums for employer-sponsored health coverage soared by 9 percent for families and 8 percent for individuals this year from 2010, far faster than wages or inflation. Republicans, predictably, blamed health care reform for contributing to the rise. In fact, the reforms accounted for only 1.5 percentage points of the increase this year. The value to millions of Americans who are already getting expanded coverage and benefits is undeniable.
So what is driving up insurance premiums? The main factors, analysts say, were increased medical care costs and higher profits for insurance companies, which charged a lot more in premiums than they paid out for medical services. Both problems are being addressed by the health care reforms. But, clearly, they will require even more vigorous attention.

This latest survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust found that the average total family premium climbed above $15,000 in 2011, with the worker paying roughly $4,100 and the employer about $10,900. Since the survey started in 1999, worker contributions to premiums have increased 168 percent, while wages have gone up 50 percent. ...

For the longer term, the reform law will create a slew of pilot projects in Medicare to find ways to reduce the cost of delivering care. Any effective strategy should be pushed quickly into the private sector. Until the underlying health care costs are reduced, it will be hard to hold premiums down.
Consumer Reports: New rankings make choosing health insurance easier. When it comes to health insurance, a familiar name and lots of members don’t guarantee quality or customer satisfaction, according to new rankings of health-insurance plans from the National Committee for Quality Assurance that we published today. NCQA is an independent health-care quality-measurement group.
The rankings cover 830 private, Medicare, and Medicaid health insurance plans that enroll an estimated 127 million people. Private plans are those that people join through their jobs or buy on their own.

Our analysis of the NCQA rankings found that the five largest national insurers—Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, and United Healthcare, plus the mostly state-based Blue Cross Blue Shield plans—account for about 75 percent of the 390 ranked private plans, but only 36 percent of the top 50.

Here are other highlights:
- Biggest isn’t best...
- Small can be good...
- Kaiser Permanente makes the grade...
- New England plans excel...

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

"It is a restatement of laissez-faire-let things take their natural course without government interference. If people manage to become prosperous, good. If they starve, or have no place to live, or no money to pay medical bills, they have only themselves to blame; it is not the responsibility of society. We mustn't make people dependent on government- it is bad for them, the argument goes. Better hunger than dependency, better sickness than dependency."

"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.

AlterNet: Why Aren't Ayn Rand's Wealthy "Job Creators" ... Creating Jobs? Excerpt: The myth of the wealthy "job creator" has been used for years to underscore a harmful vision of capitalism. By John Paul Rollert. Excerpts: With the announcement last Monday of President Obama’s plan to pay for his jobs bill with, among other things, the so-called “Buffett Rule,” we’re going to be hearing a lot more about the “job creators.” Over the last year, Congressional Republicans have consistently invoked them as a hex of sorts against any proposal to raise new tax revenue. “I am not for raising taxes in a recession,” Eric Cantor declared last November, when the Bush tax cuts were a bargaining chip in the protracted budget debate, “especially when it comes to the job creators that we need so desperately to start creating jobs again.” ...
Shoq Value: George Carlin on the American Dream (with transcript). Excerpts: But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.
Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That's against their interests.

That's right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! Its a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.
truthOut: Five Facts You Should Know About the Wealthiest One Percent of Americans. By Zaid Jilani. Excerpts: As the ongoing occupation of Wall Street by hundreds of protesters enters its third week — and as protests spread to other cities such as Boston and Los Angeles — demonstrators have endorsed a new slogan: “We are the 99 percent.” This slogan refers an economic struggle between 99 percent of Americans and the richest one percent of Americans, who are increasingly accumulating a greater share of the national wealth to the detriment of the middle class.
It may shock you exactly how wealthy this top 1 percent of Americans is. ThinkProgress has assembled five facts about this class of super-rich Americans:

The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Owns 40 Percent Of The Nation’s Wealth...

The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Take Home 24 Percent Of National Income...

The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half Of The Country’s Stocks, Bonds, And Mutual Funds...

The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Have Only 5 Percent Of The Nation’s Personal Debt...

The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The Nation’s Income Than At Any Other Time Since The 1920s.
San Francisco Chronicle: Tax rich more, Patriotic Millionaires urge. By Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer. Excerpts: Los Altos resident Doug Edwards asked President Obama something that many Americans would consider unthinkable: "Would you please raise my taxes?" Edwards, 53, can afford it. Retired after being amply compensated for being employee No. 59 at Google, he's part of a Bay Area-birthed organization called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength.
The Patriotic Millionaires contend that Americans with incomes over $1 million should shoulder a larger share of the tax burden to pay for Pell Grants, road improvements and training programs "that made it possible for me to get to where I am," as Edwards told Obama during the president's appearance last week at the Mountain View social networking company LinkedIn. .../p>
But conservatives, particularly Republicans who control the House, prefer to refer to wealthy individuals as "job creators" who will be less likely to invest in the economy should their taxes rise. Besides, if wealthy people like Edwards really want to pay more to the federal government, House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said "he can send it in to the Treasury." "The reason we tax cigarettes in this country is to get people to stop smoking," Ryan said. "If you tax capital more, you get less capital. If you tax job creators more, you get fewer jobs. "That's the seed corn for the economy, which gets invested in entrepreneurs and startups and small businesses," Ryan said. Raising taxes would cut that supply off at a critical time when banks aren't loaning to small businesses as freely.

But Ask.com founder and Oakland venture capitalist Garrett Gruener said that changes in the marginal tax rates make "zero difference" about where he is going to invest. "The kind of investing I've done for the last 25 years isn't based on how a few points of the income tax rates change," said Gruener, a Democrat and member of the Patriotic Millionaires. But "somehow, the Republicans have managed to convince 98 percent of the people that they are affected by how 2 percent of the population is taxed." ...

While at least half of the Patriotic Millionaires would identify themselves as progressive Democrats - including several from the Bay Area - many of the rest are independents. Some are like David Watson, a 34-year-old former Google engineer, who was employee No. 83 at the search-engine behemoth. The Oakland resident is registered as a decline-to-state voter and has cast ballots for Republicans and Democrats. Raising taxes on wealthier individuals "seems like it's a common-sense thing." "I don't even see the point of why this discussion is going on," said Watson, who is now a music producer. "There should be some adults in this conversation."
Orion Magazine: The Reign of the One Percenters. Income inequality and the death of culture in New York City. By Christopher Ketcham. Excerpts: New York, the FPI informs us, is now at the forefront of the maldistribution of wealth into the hands of the few that has been ongoing in America since 1980, which marked the beginning of a new Gilded Age. Out of the twenty-five largest cities, it is the most unequal city in the United States for income distribution. If it were a nation, it would come in as the fifteenth worst among 134 countries ranked by extremes of wealth and poverty—a banana republic without the death squads. It is the showcase for the top 1 percent of households, which in New York have an average annual income of $3.7 million. These top wealth recipients—let’s call them the One Percenters—took for themselves close to 44 percent of all income in New York during 2007 (the last year for which data is available). That’s a high bar for wealth concentration; it’s almost twice the record-high levels among the top 1 percent nationwide, who claimed 23.5 percent of all national income in 2007, a number not seen since the eve of the Great Depression. During the vaunted 2002–07 economic expansion—the housing-boom bubble that ended in our current calamity, this Great Recession—average income for the One Percenters in New York went up 119 percent. Meanwhile, the number of homeless in the city rose to an all-time high last year—higher even than during the Great Depression—with a record 113,000 men, women, and children, many of them comprising whole families, retreating night after night to municipal shelters.
But here’s the most astonishing fact: the One Percenters consist of just 34,000 households, about 90,000 people. Relative to the great mass of New Yorkers—9 million of us—they’re nobody. We could snow them under in a New York minute. ...

According to the FPI, the wealth of the One Percenters derives almost entirely from the operations of the sector known as “financial services,” whose preoccupation is something they call “financial innovation.” The One Percenters draw the top salaries at commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, credit card companies, insurance companies, stock brokerages. They are the suit people at Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan and AIG and Deutsche Bank. To get a sense for how their fortunes have blossomed, consider the fact that the largest twenty financial institutions in the U.S., almost all of them headquartered in New York, now control upward of 70 percent of the country’s financial assets, roughly double what they controlled in the 1990s.

And what do the suit people do to earn such heaping returns? At one time, the financial sector could be relied upon to allocate capital for the building of things that society needed—projects that also invariably created jobs. But productivity is no longer its purview. Lord Adair Turner, a financial watchdog and former banker in the city of London—the other world capital of finance—recently denounced his class as practitioners and beneficiaries of a “socially useless activity.” Paul Woolley, who runs a think tank in London called the Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, observed that the “presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable” was a kind of metaphysics. “It wasn’t backed by any empirical evidence,” Woolley told John Cassidy, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, futures exchanges, hedge funds, complex securitization and derivative pools, the tranching of mortgages—these were shown to have “little or no long-term value,” according to Cassidy. The purpose was to “merely shift money around” without designing, building, or selling “a single tangible thing.” The One Percenter seeks only exchange value, as opposed to real value. Thus foreign exchange currency gambling has skyrocketed to seventy-three times the actual goods and services of the planet, up from eleven times in 1980. Thus the “value” of oil futures has risen from 20 percent of actual physical production in 1980 to 1,000 percent today. Thus interest rate derivatives have gone from nil in 1980 to $390 trillion in 2009. The trading schemes float disembodied above the real economy, related to it only because without the real economy there would be nothing to exploit.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.): A Level Playing Field for American Workers. Excerpts: The Senate on Monday began debating legislation on Chinese currency manipulation. Beijing undervalues its currency, the yuan, to make its exports to the United States cheaper and U.S. goods more expensive to buy in China. Sen. Bernie Sanders is a cosponsor of the bill to put higher duties on Chinese products. The measure is part of an effort to rewrite U.S. trade policies that have had these disastrous results for American workers:
- From 2001-2009, American multi-national corporations have laid-off 2.9 million workers in this country, while they have added 2.4 million jobs overseas.
- Since the passage of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China in 2000, the U.S. trade deficit with China has more than tripled. In 2000, the U.S. trade deficit with China was $83 billion. Last year, the U.S. trade deficit with China was a record-breaking $273 billion.
- Since 2000, 2.8 million American jobs have been eliminated or displaced as a result of our increased trade deficit with China.
- Over the last decade, more than 50,000 factories in America have been shut down. 5.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. We had more factory jobs in March of 1941, eight months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, than we do today.
truthOut: US Tax Policies Benefit Rich. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: It seems as if a number of people in the media have decided that President Obama was fibbing when he said that some millionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries — because, as the usual suspects triumphantly declare, on average millionaires pay higher average taxes than middle-income Americans.
This is, of course, stupid: the operative word is “some.”

And we’re not talking about one or two exceptional guys, either. Look at the I.R.S. data on returns for the 400 highest incomes in America, available at irs.gov. If you look at the numbers since 2004, you’ll see that in a typical year between 30 and 40 percent of those super-high-income players paid an average tax rate of less than 15 percent; most of them paid less than 20 percent. Bear in mind that for the very wealthy, the payroll tax — the main burden on working-class Americans — is trivial because of the cap on Social Security taxes and the fact that it only applies to earned income. And what becomes clear is that Mr. Obama’s claim that Warren Buffett’s secretary pays a higher tax rate than Mr. Buffett does is absolutely, totally true.

With taxes on the wealthy on the political radar, we’re going to be drowning in a vast wave of double-talk and smothered by the fuzzy math. Still, one has to try. So, a couple of notes. One is that you have to beware of the old trick of saying “taxes,” then slipping into “income taxes.” Most Americans pay more payroll taxes (for things like Medicare and Social Security) than income taxes, but the reverse is true at high incomes. So focusing only on income taxes makes it seem as if the rich bear much more of the burden than they really do.
The Raw Story: Communications Workers of America backs ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest. By Eric W. Dolan. Excerpt: The Communications Workers of America (CWA) has become the latest union to endorsed the “Occupy Wall Street” protest that started in lower Manhattan and spread across the country. “The 700,000 members of the Communications Workers of America strongly support the Occupy Wall Street Movement,” the CWA Executive Board said Tuesday in a statement. “It is an appropriate expression of anger for all Americans, but especially for those who have been left behind by Wall Street. We support the activists’ non-violent efforts to seek a more equitable and democratic society based on citizenship, not corporate greed.”
Washington Post: Bernanke tells Congress to cut out the brinkmanship over budget. By Neil Irwin and Lori Montgomery. Excerpts: With his strong words, Bernanke reinserted himself into the roiling political debate over the nation’s fiscal policy — at a time when he is already under fire from some Republican presidential candidates, among others, who say he has overplayed his hand as Fed chairman. Some critics have faulted Bernanke and the Fed for taking steps to stimulate the sagging recovery on the grounds that these steps could instead hurt the economy.
Amid a gloomy outlook for economic growth, Bernanke warned that the recovery is “close to faltering,” and he said the central bank has adjusted its forecasts downward since they were last released publicly in June.
The Smirking Chimp: Ah, To Be Young And In Hate: America's New Radicals Attack a System That Ignores Them. By Ted Rall. Excerpts: Who can blame young adults for rejecting the system? The political issue people care most about-jobs and the economy-prompts no real action from the political elite. Even their lip service is half-assed. Liberals know "green jobs" can't replace 14 million lost jobs; conservatives aren't stupid enough to think tax cuts for the rich will help them pay this month's bills.
The politicians' only real action is counterproductive; austerity and bank bailouts that hurt the economy. Is the government evil or incompetent? Does it matter?

Here in the United States, no one should be surprised that young adults are among the nation's angriest and most alienated citizens. No other group has been as systematically ignored by the mainstream political class as the young. What's shocking is that it took so long for them to take to the streets.

Every other age groups get government benefits. The elderly get a prescription drug plan. Even Republicans who want to slash Medicaid and Medicare take pains to promise seniors that their benefits will be grandfathered in. Kids get taken care of too. They get free public education. ObamaCare's first step was to facilitate coverage for children under 18.

Young adults get debt.

The troubles of young adults get no play in Washington. Pundits don't bother to debate issues that concerns people in their 20s and 30s. Recent college graduates, staggering under soaring student loan debt, are getting crushed by 80 percent unemployment-and no one even pretends to care. Young Americans tell pollsters that their top concerns are divorce, which leaves kids impoverished, and global warming. Like jobs, these issues aren't on anyone's agenda.
AlterNet: If Top 1% Hadn't Ripped Off Trillions, You'd Likely Be Making Thousands of Dollars More Right Now. The Occupy Wall Street movement is out to focus the nation's attention on decades of increasing inequality. By Joshua Holland. Excerpts: Economists Thomas Picketty and Emanuel Saez sliced and diced America's income going all the way back to 1913, and their results tell us exactly what the Occupy Wall Street movement is about, at least in broad terms.
Choose a year from some fondly remembered past when the American economy generated broadly shared prosperity. How about 1947? That year, the top 1 percent of U.S. households grabbed a bit less than 12 percent of the nation's pre-tax income, and the other 99 percent shared around 88 percent of the take. It wasn't a perfect time, but it was an era when a large middle-class was emerging.

Or maybe you think 1967 was a great time to be an American worker. That year, the top 1 percent grabbed 10.7 percent of the pile, and the other 99 percent divvied up around 89 percent of our income.

Between 1949 and 1979, those at the top never took in more than 12.8 percent of the total. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, they grabbed 10 percent of our economic output, and the rest of us shared 90 percent. And that's when things started to shift, relatively rapidly. In Reagan's final year in office, the top 1 percent of American households grabbed 15.5 percent of the nation's income.

By the time George W. Bush was elected, they were taking in 21.5 percent. And in 2007, the year before the crash, they were pulling in 23.5 percent of our pre-tax income, leaving the other 99 percent to share just 76.5 percent of the fruits of our output.

According to Paul Buchheit, a professor with City Colleges of Chicago and founder of fightingpoverty.org, “if middle- and upper-middle-class families had maintained the same share of American productivity that they held in 1980, they would be making an average of $12,500 more per year.” The size of our economy, he wrote, “has quintupled since 1980, and we all contributed to that success. But our contributions have earned us nothing. While total income has also quintupled, percentage-wise almost all the gains went to the richest 1 percent.” This upward redistribution of wealth “translates into a trillion extra dollars of income every year for the richest 1 percent.”
New York Times: Democrats Seek Tax on ‘Richest,’ Aiming Gauntlet at G.O.P. By Robert Pear. Excerpts: In proposing a 5 percent surtax on incomes of more than $1 million a year to pay for job-creation measures sought by President Obama, Senate Democratic leaders on Wednesday escalated efforts to strike a more populist tone and to draw Republicans into a confrontation over how much affluent Americans should pay to help others cope with a struggling economy. ...
Mr. Reid said the surtax would raise $445 billion over 10 years, just about the amount needed to pay for the jobs bill, though it appears unlikely it could make it through Congress. The proposal, he said, would “have the richest of the rich pay a little bit more” — specifically, “5 percent more to fund job creation and ensure this country’s economic success.” ...

Many economists predict that the economy will still face serious problems, including high unemployment, in 2012, an election year. Mr. Reid made clear that he thought his party would gain a political advantage from the proposal. “It’s interesting to note that independents, Democrats and Republicans and even the Tea Party agree it’s time for millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share of taxes,” Mr. Reid said Wednesday. ...

Congressional aides said it would probably work this way: The government would collect an additional tax equal to 5.6 percent of the amount of income exceeding $1 million. So for a person with income of $1.1 million, the extra tax would be $5,600, which is 5.6 percent of $100,000. Estimates from the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation indicate that 330,000 households have more than $1 million of income, broadly defined. ...

Tax rates on the wealthy have declined in recent decades. The total federal tax rate for the top one-thousandth of all earners — a group that now starts at about $1.5 million in annual income — was 53.7 percent in 1980, according to research by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. By 2004, the latest year for which the economists have data, the total federal rate had fallen to 33.7 percent. ...

“Drawing the line at a million dollars is the right thing to do,” Mr. Schumer said. “In the eyes of many, it is hard to ask more of households that make $250,000 or $300,000 a year. Many of them are not rich. In large parts of the country, that kind of income does not get you a big home or lots of vacations or anything else that’s associated with wealth.”
New York Times op-ed: Confronting the Malefactors. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.
It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts.

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis. ...

Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say, CNBC mock the protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us that there was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budget deficits would send interest rates soaring.
New York Times op-ed: Occupied Wall Street, Seen From Abroad. The American mainstream media is gradually beginning to pay attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement and its spinoffs springing up in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and Seattle. But from the very beginning the movement has attracted extensive coverage from Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern news outlets and Twitter users — probably because they recognize the forces that are reshaping politics across their region.
Indeed, the twin drivers of America’s nascent protest movement against the financial sector are injustice and invisibility, the very grievances that drove the Arab Spring.

Go on the Web site “We are the 99 percent” and you will see the Mohamed Bouazizis of the United States, page after page of testimonials from members of the middle class who took out loans to pay for education, took out mortgages to buy their houses and a piece of the American dream, worked hard at the jobs they could find, and ended up unemployed or radically underemployed and on the precipice of financial and social ruin. ...

Our political system is skewed to extremes by party primaries and beholden to donors at every subsequent stage. Neither Democratic nor Republican candidates can win without the support of the wealthiest 1 percent. And even if they could finance their campaigns more broadly, moderate candidates on both sides of the aisle who are willing to compromise and make the dramatic economic, environmental and energy policy changes our country needs cannot survive partisan primaries. The result is a government that does not actually represent the majority of the American people.

If you hire good people and treat them well, they will try to do a good job. They will stimulate one another by their vigor and example. They will set a fast pace for themselves. Then if they are well led and occasionally inspired, if they understand what the company is trying to do and know they will share in its sucess, they will contribute in a major way. The customer will get the superior service he is looking for. The result is profit to customers, employees, and to stcckholders. —Thomas J. Watson, Jr., from A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM.

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