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| 5/23 |
| 2008/7/16-23 [Politics/Domestic/President/Bush, Finance/Investment] UID:50595 Activity:nil |
7/16 Yes let's start making interest rate super low and make it super easy
to get loans so that every American can own a home! Go for it
Greenspan, and keep it up Bernanke. "We're creating...an ownership
society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able
to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house,
welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/klein
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/what_ownership_society.php
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E6DE153FF933A15751C1A9659C8B63
Please don't f***ing paste your f***ing CATO links here, thank you.
\_ All of that started in 1996.
\_ It is all Bill Clinton's fault.
\_ related to the carbon emission thread above. This is the perfect
time for US to curb consumer behaviors. we can now impose
heavy taxes on housing that has sq.feet per person larger than a
a preset limit, *AND* we can impose rules on developers that mediem
house size to a fixed sq feet. China has similiar regulation
already in place to curb large houses. Time for US to do something
similiar. |
| 5/23 |
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| www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/klein Subscribe Now Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker. Nicholas von Hoffman: America is shaken by images of panicked customers lined up to withdraw money from the failed IndyMac Bank. But the government's remedies aren't tough enough to calm their fears. Radio Nation : The Nation's Ari Melber and Jon Pincus tackle FISA, Elizabeth Holtzman talks impeachment--plus more on war resisters in Canada and the subprime mortgage crisis. Naomi Klein: As the planet is rocked by multiple shocks, here's a look at how disaster capitalists are reaping the benefits--leveraging the Iraq War, the push for arctic drilling and the global food crisis. Naomi Klein: Ten years after the massacre of indigenous people in Chiapas, Zapatistas are reading signs that the Mexican government is poised for another wave of repression. Naomi Klein: If you're looking for a sure bet in the new growth market, sell solar and buy surveillance. Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market--a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension--they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down. The effort centered on Britain's public housing, or council estates, which were filled with die-hard Labour Party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting subprime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness. As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. Across the Atlantic, Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988 only 26 percent of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into "haves" and "have-nots"--71 percent rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the "democratization" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning stock. Stock watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street. Stock ownership made up a relatively minor part of the average American's earnings, but in the era of frenetic downsizing and offshoring, this new class of amateur investor had a distinct shift in consciousness. Whenever a new round of layoffs was announced, sending another stock price soaring, many responded not by identifying with those who had lost their jobs, or by protesting the policies that had led to the layoffs, but by calling their brokers with instructions to buy. Bush came to office determined to take these trends even further, to deliver Social Security accounts to Wall Street and target minority communities--traditionally out of the Republican Party's reach--for easy homeownership. "Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home," Bush observed in 2002. He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home"--an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top. Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401s--their piece of the stock market--to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday's ownership society has morphed into today's members-only society. The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots--nearly twice the number of 1988. In other words, we are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. The free-market ideologues have lost an extremely potent psychological tool--and progressives have gained one. Now that John Edwards is out of the presidential race, the question is, will anyone dare to use it? If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation. About Naomi Klein Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). The Web Will Not Kill Traditional Organizing | The internet is not the end of local community organizing, just a new tool that allows citizens to more efficiently build their social capital. |
| www.tompaine.com/articles/what_ownership_society.php Robert B Reich September 02, 2004 The idea of an ownership society--where everyone has private retirement and investment accounts, rather than Social Security--is great, if you've got extra money to invest for your future. Robert Reich shares ideas on what a real ownership society would require. Robert B Reich is the Maurice B Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University, and was the secretary of labor under former President Bill Clinton. You won't be hearing much at the Republican Convention about jobs and wages, because job growth has stalled and wages are stagnant. But you will hear about something Republicans are now calling the "Ownership Society." The notion is to expand private ownership through more tax cuts on capital investments, tax credits for saving and privatized Social Security. Sounds nice, but here's the problem: The Republican rhetoric assumes most Americans can save and invest. Before they can join the "Ownership Society" they've got to pay their credit card bills, their rising variable-rate mortgages and their auto loans. After that, there's no money left because jobs are in short supply and wages are stuck in the mud. The Commerce Department reported this week that personal incomes rose a measly one-tenth of one percent in July, the lowest rise in almost two years. And--given rising prices for food, fuel and health insurance--consumers spent more than they earned. It's true that more than half of American households now own stocks in corporations. And the total value of their current portfolio is less than they invested. They got lured into the stock market during the late '90s when stock prices were pumped up with accounting steroids. The fact is, an Ownership Society based on the stock market would be a casino. The Bush administration would like you to put your Social Security payments into the stock market, but beware. If your timing is bad, you could find yourself retiring in a bear market. That's one of the reasons Social Security--as social insurance--was invented. Ownership of America is now more concentrated than since the days of the Robber Barons of the 19th century. The richest 1 percent of America owns more than the the bottom 90 percent put together. There are only two ways to reverse this trend, neither of which the Bush administration will support. The first is to enact a progressive tax on wealth--say, one-tenth of 1 percent per year, on those who own the most. Right now, the only wealth that's taxed is real property. The property tax is often regressive because poor and working-class families tend to cluster in their own communities, which means they pay through their noses for schools and local services. A fairer system would tax total wealth, and it would be administered nationally. Revenues could be distributed to communities on the basis of population--enabling poor communities to have good schools and better services. If George Bush suggests this Thursday night, I'll eat my spinach. The second way to reverse the concentration of wealth in America is with an educational system that assures that every American can make the most of his or her God-given talents and abilities, and become rich one day if that's what she wants. The administration has left the "No Child Left Behind Act" woefully underfunded, so states don't have enough money to respond to children who are left behind in lousy schools. And the administration has cut funds for job training, making it even harder for today's workers to get the skills they need to get ahead. Marketplace is produced by Minnesota Public Radio and is heard on 322 public radio stations nationwide. |
| query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E6DE153FF933A15751C1A9659C8B63 Save By DAVID BROOKS Published: December 20, 2003 Not long ago, a man who runs a construction company came to the White House to meet with a senior Bush administration official. He talked economic policy, then was asked how his business was going. He'd revamped his IT system, and he'd re-engineered his production process so he'd been able to reduce his work force to 7,200 from 9,800. You can imagine the reaction as he dribbled out this final bit of good news. The economy is doing well, but because of enormous productivity gains, it is not yet producing enough jobs to sharply reduce unemployment and ensure President Bush's re-election. This situation means that the name Arthur Okun is once again reverberating off White House walls. Okun, an economist, is the author of Okun's Law, which predicts how fast the economy has to grow to reduce unemployment. Back in the early 1990's, economists expected that the economy had to grow faster than 26 percent to create jobs. Today, because of productivity gains, growth rates have to be much higher. The first is the pure free-market answer, which says the market will take care of itself. Productivity gains will eventually lead to job creation, and workers will learn to adapt. The second is the unions' answer, which is that the job picture is stagnant because of unfair global competition. The third response has been championed most ardently by centrist organizations like the Democratic Leadership Council: embrace the more productive and fluid economy, but make sure government aggressively moves to give workers the tools they need to cope. Over the past three years, the Democratic Party has shifted behind the unions' approach. When Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean are asked about manufacturing job losses, they talk first about unfair trade. The Bush administration, meanwhile, is embracing its own version of the centrist Democratic approach, occupying the ground abandoned by the leftward-veering Democrats. In his State of the Union address, the president will announce measures to foster job creation. In the meantime, he is talking about what he calls the Ownership Society. This is a bundle of proposals that treat workers as self-reliant pioneers who rise through several employers and careers. They need to own their own capital reserves, their own retraining programs, their own pensions and their own health insurance. Administration officials are talking about giving unemployed workers personal re-employment accounts, which they could spend on training, child care, a car, a move to a place with more jobs, or whatever else they think would benefit them. President Bush has a proposal to combine and simplify the confusing morass of government savings programs and give individuals greater control over how they want to spend their tax-sheltered savings. Administration officials hope, in a second term, to let individuals control part of their Social Security pensions and perhaps even their medical savings accounts. The Ownership Society idea allows Bush to be centrist and conservative at the same time. It is centrist because it means actively using government to solve problems. In 2000, Bush declared: ''I do not believe government is the enemy. At its best, it can help people find the tools they need to build for themselves. |