The Deep State has a "Giant Vacume Cleaner" and boy do they clean up good!

The quote doesn't say "realize", it says "accept".

It also doesn't say "one decade from now". "In the next decade" means "at some time between now and a decade from now".

If the U.S. currency gets revalued, I'd like to simultaneously increase the factor between dollars and cents to, say, 10,000. (Obviously, the term "cent" would no longer make sense, so I'll use "penny".)

When grocery shopping, or even furniture shopping, prices would just be in pennies. Only when you get into the level where you take out a loan would you use dollars. Even so, we could add another level at another factor of 10,000, which would be useful for expressing amounts in the federal budget and national debt. So let's use "shilling" for 10,000 pennies, and "dollar" for 10,000 shillings, while revaluing the penny by a factor of ten. (The funny thing here is that the abbreviations, D-S-P, are the reverse of those for the British pounds-shillings-pence, where the abbreviation for pence was "d" from the Roman correlate "denarius".)

My last shopping trip: 939 pennies

Ford Focus MSRP: 16.81 shillings

Median household income: 51.371 shillings

New house: about 300 shillings

New NFL stadium: about 40 dollars

Annual federal spending on education: 7,148 dollars

Annual federal budget deficit: approximately 49,180 dollars

National debt: approximately 1,965,800 dollars

over taxing doesn't work. Just look at Detroit and New York. People with money will just leave.

Thom Hartmann consistently fails to realize that the income gains of the 1 percent, that far out distant the earnings of the labor workers, is due to the fact that they are the wealthy owners of our nation's wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital assets, held legally by the shareholders (them) of corporations. In other words, they are rich not because of their labor input but because of their ownership interests in the non-human factor of production that is largely and increasingly responsible for how products and services are made and delivered.

Until the Hartmann's of the world and other media and economic and social justice advocates wake up to this reality and begin to advocate for broadened ownership of private sector capital assets among the 99 percent who are now propertyless or under-capitalized, economic inequality will persist and worsen. What is needed are policies that will un-rig the system and provide equal opportunity for EVERY child, woman and man to acquire ownership stakes in FUTURE wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets with the earnings of capital. So that they do not have to deny themselves consumption or accumulate past savings and pledge personal equities (none of which the 99 percent possess) as security, we need to provide insured, zero-interest capital credit loans to finance the FUTURE productive sector repayable in the FUTURE earnings of the new capital assets to be formed.

OWNERSHIP is the key, yet Hartmann and others ignore this reality, even though they should be intelligent enough to understand that the rich are rich not because of their labor contributions but because of their productive contributions of tools and machines and other physical capital assets that they own.

Hartmann needs to study and support the Agenda of The JUST Third Way at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice, and the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm. See the full Act at http://cesj.org/homestead/strategies/national/cha-full.pdf.

But Kend, who did the wealthy "just take it from"? They took it from the masses of worker's labor. It's time the workers took some of it back...in fact, it's time they took it all back and throw some of those conniving capitalist-pig criminals in jail. Everyone takes risk...bank robbers take risk...carjackers take risks...gamblers take risks...and sometimes they pay off..sometimes they get away with it. That doesn't make it right! There's nothing holy or sacrosanct about taking risk...especially if that risk is about leveraging someone else's well being in order to make yourself shamelessly wealthy. People don't get rich by playing fair or being nice. They get rich by taking unfair advantage of other people.

Palin they didn't take it from anyone. They earned it. Poeple worked for them and got payed. Of course there are a few crooks out there in all business including government and unions but the majority of business owners pay and treat employees well that is why union membership is Declining

You are dead wrong. Most wealth is created by playing fair.

Palin you have a progressive tax already. If everything I read is correct the to 30 % pay 70% of the taxes. I am just saying don't get too tax greedy the wealthy will take all there money out of the country and invest it else where.

Dont blame people for taking there money else where blame the government for not changing the tax law. I am totally with you on this you should pay your taxes.

Okay Kend, Marc, Palin- here's my take on all this. Kend, the hell rich folks "earned" it! From my perspective it makes no difference if someone started the business from scratch and is the owner. If he (or she) has employees, in all likelihood that's who is doing most of the work producing or providing whatever it is said owner is in the business of selling. Like Thom has pointed out over & over, nobody gets rich or "makes it" by themselves. And if business owners are not willing or able to pay employees a living wage for full-time work, wealthy or not, they've no business hiring in the first place. And if they are wealthy, well shame on them.

Don't tell me the CEO of United Health "earns" the millions he rakes in every year, to cite just one example. Sorry Kend, that's BS. You're not selling me on the idea that anyone "earns" thousands of bucks per hour. Where health "insurance" piracy is concerned, that's government-sanctioned extortion pure and simple. Put more bluntly: THEFT.

This next point I'm about to make is one I've made before, but it's been awhile and I think it bears repeating. I'll begin by acknowledging that I don't know about any language outside of English (I'm almost embarrassed to say). However I've long observed that the English language in itself is not neutral; there's a semantical slant to it. I suspect this is true of all languages to varying degrees. When it comes to words or phrases used by most of us to express our thoughts, there is nothing neutral about it. I'm talking about these little biases woven through everyday dialogue. Want an example? Look at how folks refer to that which is earned through labor, rather than simply taken (with or without coercion or force) or stolen, or received as a gift. Because nobody - and I mean NOBODY - "earns" $9000 bucks an hour, or millions of bucks in annual "compensation". Virtually everyone uses the "e" word it seems, regardless of political persuasion… Even progressives do! And it grates on me big-time, whenever I hear it. When it comes to these grossly overcompensated toadies at the top of the ole dung heap, I prefer to use words like "given" or "paid" (or less polite terms than that!) rather than referring to such ill-gotten gains as something they've "earned".

This of course goes without saying, I've neither the ability nor the right to change everybody's behavior or way of speaking. I'm simply sharing an observation, along with my problem with this, because of how it relates to the topic at hand. There is nothing morally sound about any society with such extremes of poverty and wealth. Why dignify CEO piracy by referring to such ridiculous compensation as something they've "earned"? The hell they "earned" it! They stole it from us. - Aliceinwonderland

Thanks, Marc. I concur.

Baloney, Kend. Without strong unions to back them up, workers are denied a seat at the negotiating table and thus, forced to accept whatever crumbs are offered. (Remember "collective bargaining"?) With the balance of power tilted completely towards the business owners' side of that table, no actual "agreement" is even possible. Employers hold all the cards. It's non-negotiable; comply or else, suckers. You call this "freedom", living paycheck-to-paycheck with no benefits, no safety net and just a heartbeat away from homelessness?! Let's get real my friend. Against this kind of backdrop I say, to hell with the shareholders! - Aliceinwonderland

Kend, read Thom's report "Lawmakers Intimidate VW Workers", dated February 17th. (Talk about willful ignorance… tsk-tsk) Tennessee Governor Haslam threatened to eliminate VW's state tax incentives if workers unionized. Meanwhile you've got these Republican fascist bullies pushing their weight around, scaring people with consequences if they try to unionize. Corporate anti-union gestapo bullies, doing what they always do. (YAWN)

I'll not spend my Saturday morning paraphrasing something Thom wrote that you apparently never bothered to read. - AIW

Here's the thing. I just had a long argument on the member blogs about this.

There's this thing called the "Theory of the Surplus Value of Labor" (by Karl Marx) and it goes thus (First let me say that Marx studied the evolution of oppression and enslavement that he expected to result in ultimate liberation. He initially welcomed capitalism thinking that it would liberate people from the enslavement of the feudal social order redistributively giving economic power to the common individual but then he saw that the relationship between capitalist factory owner and worker is really the same as that of the aristocrat or nobility and peasant or serf of feudalism or master and slave of the slave societies of ancient Greece or Rome only in different clothing.) the surplus value of labor is the amount of value produced by the labor of the "direct producers" (factory workers, agrarian feudal peasants, slaves, etc.) that is in excess of the value that is necessary to maintain the subsistence of the direct producer and the direct producer's family so that they can survive to work some more tomorrow and to enable them to reproduce themselves and ensure a continuous supply of labor. That value, the surplus value, the amount produced in excess of that that is needed for the subsistence of the direct producers and their families, is the income of the ruling class.
Thus the value produced by our labor is stolen from us as it has been for millenia since the domestication of plants and animals when that principle of domestication came to be applied no longer just to plants and animals but also to other people, i.e., when soon after the domestication of plants and animals by people commenced the domestication of people by people and different forms of slavery, patriarchy, etc. began.
So then, the degree to which you do that, i.e., the degree to which you take the "surplus value" of your employees' labor (perhaps, in excess of any necessary cost of administering or coordinating their work) is the degree to which you are enslaving, exploiting and robbing them.

Contemporary mainstream economists like to validate this process by euphamizing all the terms of the matter simply calling the surplus value of labor, for example, "profits" or "production less labor costs" that presuppose its legitimacy. But we know what they really mean.

Indeed, Craig! Great list. Got my vote! - AIW

Look no one put a gun to anyones head. The VW employees had a vote. One vote one person. Get over it. Geez you guys act like there was no union intimidation.

Craig I want a new jet but no one is prepared to by me one either. There are plenty of jobs that you can work four days a week. Obama care took care of that.

Kend, try shakin' dat sawdust out'cho haid!

The Bureau of Labor Stastics:

Union Membership in 2013: Public sector Had a union membership of 35.8%. Private sector had a membership of 6.7%. Total Union membership as a percentage of the total workforce. 11.3%. This is the lowest percentage of Union membership ever since data was first collected in 1983, when it was 20.1%.

This trends raises several questions in my mind. Why do workers in the Private sector not feel the need for a union? Most of the losses have been in the Private sector. My second question is why do so many government workers feel the need to Unionize? Are our governments treating workers so unfairly the feel they need to unionize? or is it more for political access.

HUD's federally funded Housing Choice Voucher Program, otherwise known as Section 8, is failing many of the people it is suppose to help. In case you are not familar with some of the specifics, the amount of rent that a person has to be from one year to the next can fluctuate rather wildly as the funding for the program does not appear to be stable. The rent has gone up in some cases so much that HUD's own guideline that a person pay 30% of one's income toward the rent is violated, because the tenant all of a sudden has to pay more than 30% toward rent due to federal funding and budget cuts affecting the program. If a person's apartment cannot pass inspection, even if this is because the landlord refuses to provide any maintenance as most leases spell out will be provided, the Section 8 program penalizes the tenant, instead of taking the landlord to court. A woman in Ohio on the program had her apartment flunk the required inspection. She took the case to a hearing officier who agreed with the housing inspector. Her rental subsidy had been stopped. Then, the woman felt it necessary to take the housing authority to court, probably a federal court. She told the judge that she had paid for some repairs herself and that the landlord would not provide maintenance and should have been responsible for fixing the problems that caused the apartment to fail the inspection. The judge sided with the tenant and reversed the decision. I also read that the director of a small public housing authority in Southern Indiana told a landlord that a prospective tenant who would have been assisted through the Section 8 program and who happened to be African American was "not the kind of person you want to be renting to." The applicant sued the housing authority for discrimination and the housing authority lost the case. HUD is on the side of well-off property management companies and landlords, not low-income citizens. The government does not provide funding to decrease the national waiting lists for housing vouchers. During Bill Clinton's administration, according to Adloph Reed Jr. writing in the March issue of Harper's, the government got out of the business of helping to finance apartments through public housing. People in Section 8 live in privately owned apartments. Public housing has been associated with mismanagement, crime, poor building maintenance, and in some cases, old, obselete buildings. This whole issue is among the most important. Unfortunately, both on your show on on this Web site, there is little detailed discussion including those with knowledge and expertise in this area on housing, and how to address the increased financial squeeze on renters.

Ou812, don't imagine for a second that those figures represent working peoples' desire to join a union. The choice of union membership or not is a no brainer and survey research bears this out (http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp182.html). I mean, the stereotype of a union protected job that most people, including and, perhaps especially, working people have is like the one that Kend has of the Canadian postal workers. Who wouldn't want that?

There is, however, a tremendous amount of threatening, intimidation and illegal firing of workers by employers during workplace organizing campaigns and discrimination against workers who engage in organizing campaigns by employers. The VW campaign is fairly typical. Union organizing is legally protected activity, but in 2007 study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that 31% oworkplace organizingcampaigns result in an illegal firing of one or more of the workers engaging in the campaign. In 2000 Human Rights Watch announced a quadrupling of the instances of discrimination practiced by employers of employees who bengaged in workplace organizing campaigns since the '60s. Employers involved in workplace organizing campaigns use many methods to undermine it, including:

•

Threatening employees with loss of jobs or benefits if they join or vote for a union orengage in protected activity.• Threatening to close the plant if employees select a union to represent them.• Questioning employees about their union sympathiesor activities in circumstances that tendto interfere with, restrain, or coerce employeesin the exercise of their rights under theNLRA.• Promising benefits to employees to discourage their union support.• Transferring, laying off, terminating, or assigning more difficult work tasks to employeesbecause they engaged in union or protected activity.

In 80% of workplace organizing campaigns employers use outside consultants who have union busting down to a science. Here are a couple of excerpts from report of an extensive study conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2000-2005 (one of whose authors I know from my organizing days - as I participated in the study as a subject). I recommend reading the report http://web.wm.edu/so/tlsc/orgmaterials/Busting.pdf it's a great read, real enlightening and engrossing.

Organizers and workers reported that consultants are effective in helping employers erode theunion’s majority position within voting units because of the considerable time and expertise theydedicate to an anti-union campaign. Consultants provide employers with experience using the mosteffective anti-union tactics. They know how bestto sequence the use of these tactics during theelection process and how to avoid violating thelaw while achieving maximum impact. ArthurMendelson, a leading consultant in the field, explained, “Management can do so much within theconfines of the law to combat unionism that they need not and should not break the law.” (Logan2002: 208) The following example illustrates howquickly support for unionization can erode whena management consultant is involved: As soon as the employer found out the union was involved, they flew in their consultants. They hadthe consultant working in the nursing home for five straight weeks. We had 35 workers out of 43who signed cards when we filed foran election. In the last week before the election, we had only 28workers. Then, on the Monday night before the election, we had a meeting and no one showed up.We lost the election two days later by alandslide, 29 to 12. [Interview Russow 2004] Consultants help their clients overcome a range ofobstacles encountered in the weeks leading up toan election. One worker explained the role of a consultant at his workplace: [The employer’s] biggest problem was communication with the workforce. About 80 percent didn’tspeak English. So he hired a guy out of California to come in at $500 per hour to run his campaign.He was slamming these guys. Just for this election alone, [the employer] took out a $100,000 loanjust to make sure workersdidn’t vote with the union. [Interview Worker #1 2005]

And one more,

Employer Interference Undermines Majority Support Employers have become adept at using concerted and comprehensive anti-union campaigns tosystematically undermine workers’ right to organize. The impact of comprehensive anti-unioncampaigns on the rate of unionization in the Chicagometropolitan area has been substantial. In2002, labor unions filed 179 petitions with the NLRB to represent previously unorganized workersat private-sector workplaces in the Chicago metropolitan area. (NLRB 2004b) Unions werevictorious in only 31 percent of those campaigns. That unions were not more successful in theirefforts to represent workers using the NLRB election process (see Appendix B) is remarkableconsidering that, in most cases, the majorityof workers indicated they supported unionizationbefore the election process began. At some pointbetween when unions petitioned for an electionand when the election was actually held, unions lost their majority status. In many cases, an election was never even held.The NLRB held an election in only 69 percent ofthe 179 petitions filed (124 campaigns). In allbut one of the cases where an election was not held,unions withdrew their petitions because support for the union eroded to a point where they believedthey could not win the election. Of the 124 campaigns where an election was held, the union wassuccessful in only 45 percent. Even more soberingare the statistics on total workers organized. Ofthe approximate 8,000 workers petitioned for, unions eventually represented just 2,250 (28 percent)of them (authors’ calculations based on NLRB 2004b).1 Unions were unable to maintain worker support throughout the course of representation campaignsbecause employer interference undermined that support. Nearly all of the unions had achievedmajority support at the time they petitioned the NLRBfor an election. In 91 percent of the cases inthe CRC Survey, unions filed with at least 50 percent of workers signing cards or a petition in favorof unionization. In several cases, unions demonstrated more than 80 percent support. Nevertheless,unions lost elections in nearly half of the campaigns where the majority of workers indicated theysupported the union at the time the un

ion filed its petition with the NLRB

<p>Peddle your BS somewhere else Saulys. The figures speak for themselves. I was a Union member until I found out the truth. Unions are out of touch, out of date and out of luck. Until unions update their offerings, membership will continue to dwindle. Check back here in 12 months to see how much more membership diminishes in 2014.</p>

Ou812, you do better without a union? I suppose you can negotiate a good contract all by yourself, huh? I find it hard to believe you ever worked for anybody other than maybe your mom or dad. Or, I Imagine you're a middle or upper class college kid who hadn't had a job other than in your chosen profession upon getting your degree and after spending a rather merry youth at school.

And this is not to attack you, many people are born lucky like that and just don't know this stuff. It was once quite common in the U.S. to be a middle class brat and have your "happy days" like Richie Cunningham. I'm just telling you all this stuff because I know it's true, I can tell you, I've lived it. When I was a labor organizer I was a volunteer organizing outsourced temporaries like myself in my own work place and others like it in something similar to the Our Walmart model of organizing.

I am also aware of the problems with unions, I got my start in organizing in the Teamster reform movement as a UPS dock worker in the1970s. The historic corruption of the Teamsters probably did more to lower the general esteem of labor unions in the United States than anything else. But even as we fought the thugs and crooks in the union and fought to get them to earn the dues having their representation was still a lot better than having none and none of us would've ever thought we'd be better off without any union at all. The predations of UPS were always there, like a hungry beast snarling and baring its fangs, and the union, even our union, was like a thin screen just strong enough to separate us from it. We knew what'd happen if the screen were to disappear - and the corrupt thugs would make sure you didn't forget it using their selective representation of us as a weapon.

We eventually won our fight against Teamster corruption - long after I had quit working for UPS - thanks, in no small part to the Clinton Administration. Working people need to take their unions back but not having them is not an alternative. I mean, that's what the employers really would like and what they were really after when they corrupted unions in the first place with their payola.

Wait a minute! Ou812, you mean you really are so pliable as to think low union membership is because people just don't want a union, don't want any power in the work place, no protection or security or any chance of gettig a good deal?

Alice, I think you're right, it's Michelle. Look at that picture, swallowing the big one! Fraudster joke, "Oh, you ate one too!".

You're always welcome, Mark.

It would not surprise me a bit if that Bachmann clone was a liar-for-hire. That shit ain't gonna fly here; not on our watch!

By the way, I clicked on your link to that University of Illinois article, "Undermining The Right To Organize", and read a good part of it. I intend to finish reading it when I have time. It disgusts me no end how toothless the National Labor Relations Board has been in enforcing laws meant to protect workers' right to organize. It has undermined the financial security of families all over this country. The ones who need to "update their offerings" are the employers themselves!

Employers' methods of sabotaging union membership are so predictable. Laws are only as good as the enforcement backing them, without which they are worthless. I think the NLRB needs a major overhaul, to say the least. Without democracy in the workplace, we're screwed. - Aliceinwonderland

So then, ou812 is, no doubt, a man, that's a man's ribaldry. For sure, he's a white, male, misogynist, racist, homophobic suck ass to the 1% and their wannabes.

;-)