For the record - I NEVER used an obscenity. 

does that mean you'll make nice and no longer name call when addressing the few of us who post on here that don't agree with you?

Yes, "Walt K's" comment was deleted. It was obscene and personally abusive. Commenters cannot make personal assaults on the blog host and/or other commenters. These are the rules from now on. People can make substantive comments from the right or center (or from wherever) but obscenity and abuse and baiting will not be permitted. People who persist in using obscenity and making personal assaults can just be banned altogether.

Please restrict comments to substantive commentary related to subject matter presented in blog posts - the more informed and throughtful the commentary, the better.  

Refrain from personal baiting.  Focus on the intellectual, political and policy issues addressed, not the blog host or other commenters. 

Those on the right and center (and my notion of the center covers a lot of what passes for the left in the narrow-spectrum U.S.) who become obsessed with how "wrong" they think I am may be setting themselves up for a fair amount of discomfort by constantly reading me and then taking the time to comment on every single one of my posts (it gets a little tiresome even for them, it would seem).  I myself don't have time to respond to every criticism; some responses would call practically for an entire essay and there's just no time for that.

If this blog makes you angry and otherwise uncomfortable, then perhaps you are doing yourself a measure of mental harm by reading it --- perhaps not but it's worth considering. It is unlikely that I am going to find any reason to take any but a few right and center comments  seriously --- there  are occasional exceptions (especially around matters of empirical fact) but not many (I am fairly  unimpressed with what people have to say on the center and the right and this is not about to change) ---  and your time would probably be better spent trying to produce your own blog and/or publications (try doing your own weekly report, like the one I've been doing lately ...or even write a book perhaps) on current events. 

What's the problem? There's a huge market and outlet for right and center ideas in the U.S. today and therefore no reason that you can't find a more functional outlet than the comments section of my openly left  blog. In any event, people who insist on criticizing here - somewhat deluded in some cases (I suspect) by the notion that this blog is relevantly shaping opinion in the U.S. (please, I have zero delusions of grandeur) --- can do so as long as they refrain from being personally abusive and/or obscene in their comments. 

This policy applies to people of shared moral and intellectual sympathies and the blog host himself - a noted hothead.

Street

Victor yes in Chicago (as elsewhere) we are seeing a European-style clearing/bourgeoisification of the central city for global professionals and the pushing of deeply poor and predominantly black "underclass" people to the margins of the city and into segretated black suburbs where there are ghettos that extend from the city. I present data on this in my next book: Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (out in June). tiz that is important information and a somewhat hidden (in the U.S.) dimension of U.S. imperialism (though I seem to recall reading Chalmers Johnson write about some of this in his reflections the the "Empire of Bases"). Something else: some time ago the New York Times ran a chilling piece showing that people had started eating fast food (McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken and the like)in Okinawa, where chain restaurants grew up like a cancer in the wake of U.S. base expansion. The new "food" has led to increased obesity in Okinawa, which happened to be one of the healthiest places on the planet, with some of the longest (or perhaps the actual longest; don't recall) life spans on earth. You know right after WWII the U.S. had full contingency plans for a military intervention in Italy if your country had the audacity to vote Communist Party members into power. Of course we helped reconstruct fascist structures in occupied Italy. This history is totally deleted from the collective memory over here - along with much else. The U.S. is an evil empire on numerous levels.

February 1, 2007 VICENZA,ITALY: ‘YANKEE GO HOME'  By uli schmetzer http://www.uli-schmetzer.com/vicenza.html Every now and then someone asks the question why, with the Cold War over, the United States continues to expand its ring of eight hundred military bases around the world and camouflages these extensions with the threadbare excuse: ‘For security and protection.'                            Cynics (and the number is growing) might then ask: Since the U.S. seems to have trouble protecting its own country who or what is it protecting abroad?                             People tend to come up with different answers: The bases are launching pads or observation and missile guidance posts for U.S. military operations against those nations perceived to be the enemies of the United States. They are a reminder to host countries the U.S. is on their territory to protect them against enemies inside and outside their national borders, enemies U.S. intelligence will inevitably identify for them. They are a psychological asset to remind host governments and their citizen it is in their interest to maintain ‘friendly relations and cooperation' with Washington and preferably vote for those politicos who favor such friendly ties.                            The truth is these bases are a modern form of colonization, a new version of the military garrisons the ancient Romans left behind after conquering or intimidating other nations. Today the Israeli settlements scattered all over the West Bank are examples of the same strategy: They serve Jewish colonization of Arab territory.                            Every now and then somewhere in the world an indignant part of the population rises in protest against this American pseudo-occupation.                            Such is the case in Italy at the moment where a new base (disguised as an ‘extension' to an already existing base) in northern Vicenza has become a national rally cry against the 13 U.S. bases scattered across Italy, a country with the dubious distinction of being the principal launching pad for U.S. military action in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.                            The Italian protests have re-ignited anti-base movements in other European countries. Delegations from nations hosting U.S. bases have joined the Vicenza demonstrations. Pacifists, environmentalists and socialists are working on a joint European-wide anti-base protest movement.                           In May last year the citizen of Vicenza literally woke up one morning to be told a large chunk of the northern part of their stately city had been secretly signed away to the Pentagon three years earlier by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and their complacent city fathers. The deal was kept under wraps.                           Vicenza is no bastion of dissent, quite the contrary. One of Italy's most affluent cities it is in the clutches of jewelers, clothing boutiques and goldsmiths all solidly rightwing and super-conservative. Many of these already affluent business people saw the extended U.S. base as an additional source of revenue, a consideration far more attractive then the prospect of environmental damage, an increased crime rate and the noise factor of a new military airport near the city center, an airport that was part of the deal for the new base.                            Yet the bulk of the population, less interested in revenue and more in a better environment, rose up in anger. And low and behold the most unlikely political allies, from neo-fascists to northern separatists, joined their campaign. Within months populations at other U.S. bases in Italy became active on their own or sent delegations to protest marches, not just in Vicenza but also to Rome.                            In spite of this popular reaction Italy's center-left Prime Minister Romano Prodi, a former Christian Democrat and a shrewd political juggler, decided he was more interested in U.S. goodwill then popularity around U.S. military bases. Last month he sanctioned the base extension offering the lame excuse he had no choice since his predecessor, the pro-American Berlusconi, had signed the extension agreement under a still existing 1951 base accord with Washington.                           Prodi's nine-party coalition government, already hanging on a wafer-thin majority, now risks falling apart as environmentalist and leftwing parties support the ‘stop-the-base' clamor and call for an end to base agreements still valid although most were signed with Washington at the end of World War II.                            In the wake of the anti-base campaign some startling facts were presented to Italians: The U.S. 31st  Munition Squadron based at camp Darby (between Livorno and Pisa) has in custody 21,000 tons of conventional weapons for air war, the biggest U.S. bomb and missile arsenal in Europe. Camp Darby, so the Italian media reported, also supplied the ‘special weapons' Israel used against Lebanon last year.                           At Maddalena Navy base in Sardinia radioactive waters from U.S. nuclear submarines contaminated the international marine park ‘Bocche di Bonifacio' in 2005. The Berlusconi government staunchly denied nuclear weapons were stored at Maddalena but the U.S. Congress confirmed it. Nuclear warheads are also stored at Signorella in Sicily, now another focus of protests. Then medical records surfaced pointing to an unnaturally high rate of cancer and malformation in newly-born babies around U.S. bases where, so it was alleged, weapons of depleted uranium had been stored.                           What galvanized the protesters even more was the statistic that each year an average 14,000 cases of sexual violence are blamed on U.S. troops stationed abroad. But under a world-wide agreement that Washington imposes on all its ‘allies' American soldiers committing an offense abroad can not be tried by foreign courts, only U.S. military courts. The example often cited is the shocking case of a 12-year old girl raped by three soldiers on Okinawa Island in 1994. Japanese police identified the culprits but could not arrest or try them. The three offenders went free.                           Okinawa, the main U.S. military concentration in the Pacific, has 38 bases and Japanese statistics found between 1972 and 1995 alone U.S. soldiers stationed on the island committed 4716 acts of sexual violence. This, so police claim, is only the tip of the iceberg since the majority of molested or assaulted Japanese women do not report attacks, too ashamed and too worried about disgracing the honor of their family.                           One recent survey by a school teacher on Okinawa found a third of  his female high school students had been sexually molested by U.S. soldiers, a violation U.S. base officers have often dismissed as ‘flirting, because boys will be boys.'                            The people of Vicenza (a city already home to 2,500 U.S. servicemen at Camp Ederle) may be fighting a losing battle against the new base (which is labeled an extension to Camp Ederle). The new base would bring another 1,600 GIs, mainly paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, a rapid reaction force, to their city.                            The government in Italy apparently figures the protest is not worth risking bad blood with Washington and hides now behind antiquated and anachronistic bilateral pacts whose duration has never been quite clear.                              Perhaps the campaigners can take courage from the Philippines where street protests and a courageous Senate a decade ago refused to renew a bases treaty with the U.S. that left the Pentagon suddenly without its major air base at Clarke and its major deep-sea port at Subic Bay in the Pacific.                              Needless to say a peeved Washington turned off loan taps and aid to the Philippine elite which had benefited from U.S. handouts for generations while on the other end of the social scale impoverished Filipino families sent daughters to work as hostesses, bar girls and masseuses for American servicemen who often referred to these ‘good-time girls' as ‘our little brown f….machines.'                            Fortunately Europe may be in a better economic position if popular indignation ever raises enough courage to close down U.S. bases on ‘the old continent.'                             For the moment however the protesters may have to be content with neutralizing Pentagon plans to extend American bases in Italy, part of a major Pentagon stratagem to station more U.S troops in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia, India and Australia.                          What for, you may well ask: To fight the elusive specter of terrorism, of course, a new type of Cold War (this time ‘permanent' according to Donald Rumsfeld) which requires a U.S. military presence in all conceivable corners of the world.                          Good luck, Vicenza.                        ends

Good info, Paul. And I agree with Cyrano, there is more than simply statistics here. When one considers the costs to the quality of life of people in this tremendous shift of wealth, the picture is staggering. The innermost areas of the cities have become hellholes. And recently it has been demonstrated that the inner city is now moving out to the suburbs as middle class folks are increasingly caught up in the wealth transfer vacuum.

Well, see "'We've Done More than Talk'" for some of the more graphic mention of the human cost to iraqis, related to american oily plans.

applaud paul street... walt k ? In Paul's scripts, there is no mention of the human cost of iraqis, afhganis , and other arabs victims of american oily plans of world economic dominations.. and military profiteers... simply put, the US has become the source of hell and is the great evil for the most defenseless and the poorest people..

"Walt K" if you want to see "warped" take a look at the regressive (and ecocidal) nature of U.S. state-capitalist ("free market") economic "growth" (including some interesting references to that great pre-9/11 economy) as discussed at length in the opening sections of the report from which this blog is pasted.

The United States' warped attachment to "growth" as such is a big part of what's destroying community and (of special interest for the the above blog post) livable ecology at home and abroad. What is required "Walt K," is for some of us to transcend false (and warped) either-or (and neo-Cold War) dichotomies between the supposed "free market" (actually a heavily state-protected corporate-command economy) and Soviet totalitarianism (falsely identified with all left critiques of capitalism and incidentally defeated more than 15 years ago).  it would be useful for more of your sort to stop setting up all-or-nothing either-dichotomies between (i) the pursuit of equity and justice (including liveable ecology - a social justice issue in my opinion) and (ii) economic development. 

Here are some relevant additonal sections from the report ("Walt K" will naturally criticize the self-citation but the point is that you can fund an abundant of relevant sources in the previous publications I mention):   

 

REASONS FOR RICH REJOICE AS THE WORLD UNRAVELS: THE HIGHEST PROFITS MARGINS IN HALF A CENTURY

Even before George the Second was installed through the Baker-Scalia judicial coup of 12-12-2000 (as dark a day in its own way as 9/11/2001), the U.S. was already by far and away the most unequal and wealth-top-heavy society in the industrialized world.  Thanks in no small part to Bush and under the cover of his state-terrorist “war on terror,” the democracy-disabling U.S. wealth gap (see Paul Street, “Capitalism and Democracy ‘Don't Mix Very Well': Reflections on Globalization,” Z Magazine [February 2000], pp. 20-24) has reached terrible new levels.

As Jack Rasmus reports in the most recent Z Magazine, “for the first time since the U.S. government began to collect the data in 1947, wages and salaries no longer constitute more than half of total national income. Corporate profits,” Rasmus observes, “are at their highest levels since WWII, having risen double digits every quarter in the last three and a half years alone and 21.3 percent in the most recent year, 2005, according to the Dow-Jones 'Market Watch.' Corporate profit margins are higher than they have been in more than half a century, according to Merril Lynch economist David Rosenburg.  After tax profits are now equal to 8.5 percent of the GDP - that's more than a trillion dollars - and the highest percent since the end of World War II in 1945. A June 2006 report by the leading investment bank Goldman Sachs aptly summed it up: 'The most important contribution to the higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in Labor's share of national income.'" 

We are returning to the highly regressive income wealth distribution of the late 1920s, with the top 1 percent “earning” (taking) nearly 22 percent of the national income. The United States' wealthiest 1 percent now “receives between 19 and 21.5 percent of the [nation's] annual gross domestic product (GDP)...up from 8 percent in 1980.”  This  “represents a nearly full recovery of the roughly 22 percent share of the national income the top 1 percent received just prior to the stock market crash of 1929, the depression of the 1930s and the great leveling of class incomes that followed. 

That same 1 percent today also holds more than 35 percent of all assets and wealth of the country - about $ 417 trillion.  They own 51 percent of all stocks and 70 percent of all bonds, own homes worth more than $3 million and have a net worth of $6 million.  The bottom 50 percent of households, nearly 60 million families - all working class - in comparison own only 2.5 percent of the country's total assets and wealth" (Jack Rasmus, "The Trillion Dollar Income Shift, Part 1," Z Magazine [February 2007]: 44-49).  

The top 1 percent – comprising roughly 1.4 million “tax units” (see Peter Singer, “What Should a Billionaire Give?” New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 17, 2006, p.80) owns more than a third of all U.S. wealth.  The bottom HALF possesses a FORTIETH of “the world's richest nation's” net worth.  

During the last three years, Rasmus notes, the “earnings” of the top hundredth have resumed their long-term expansion since the late 1970s, which was briefly interrupted by the dot.com bust and economic downturn of 2001.  By “stark contrast,” the nation's 90 million working class families “never recovered from the 2001 recession” and have “fallen steadily behind.  This dark fact,” Rasmus notes, “is the defining economic characteristic and legacy of the George W. Bush presidency.”

By Rasmus' calculations, United States capitalism – recently hailed by Barack Obama as “our greatest asset” and “a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources” (B.O., The Audacity of Hope [New York, 2006], pp. 149-50) – transfers “well over $1 in income” annually from the nation's working class to “corporations and the wealthiest non-working class households” Rasmus, “Trillion Dollar Income Shift”).   

 Other sections are titled "HOW RICH IS OUR BOURGEOISIE?" and  "DEEP HOMELAND POVERTY." 

In the latter section I point out the following:   The standard federal data tells us that 37 million Americans were officially poor in 2005, giving the U.S. a poverty rate of 12.6.  It tells us that that rate has consistently grown through most of the Bush administration and that the number of officially poor Americans rose by more than five million between 2000 and 2005 (consistent with Rasmus' notion of an ongoing upward transferal of income). It tells us that the 2005 black poverty rate was 24.9, three times the measure for non-Hispanic whites (8.3).   

 But this understates matters. The official U.S. poverty measure is an open travesty in the eyes of serious poverty and policy researchers. Based on an archaic (1950s) formula that multiplies a minimal food budget times three (see John E. Schwarz, Illusions of Opportunity: the American Dream in Question [New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, pp. 61-62), it drastically underestimates health, housing, transportation and other expenses. It fails to differentiate basic family expenditures by region and metropolitan area.  It does not come close to capturing the real cost of being poor in the U.S.  According to 2006 federal (Department of Health and Human Services) guidelines, a family of three was officially poor last year only if it received $16,600 or less.  As the Economic Policy Institute EPI) shows in a detailed cost-of-living analysis applied to every major metropolitan area in the U.S.,  the real no-frills cost of a minimally decent “basic family budget” (BFB) for a family of three in Chicago in 2005 was $38,628, more than 230 percent of the poverty measure. For New York City, the equivalent cost was $52,776, more than three times the official poverty level.  Even in relatively low-cost Casper, Wyoming, where the BFB for a family of three was $24, 948, the official measure comes up woefully short (EPI's “Basic Family Budget Calculator” [can be accessed online at] www.epinet.org/content.cfm/datazone_fambud_budget; Sylvia Alegretto, “Basic Family Budgets, http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp165).

Another thing that is rarely noted in “mainstream” (dominant and corporate) reporting on domestic misery is the depth of deprivation within the nation's under-measured poverty population.  As the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops reported last year, 15.6 million or 42 percent of the nation's officially poor people lived in what researchers now call “deep poverty” in 2005 – at half or less than half the nation's notoriously inadequate poverty level. The number of Americans living at or below that terrible measure is currently the highest recorded  since the federal government began making available the data required to calculate deep poverty (USCB, “Poverty USA,” available at www.usccb.org/cchd/povertyusa/povfacts.shtml).   

In a research project I conducted for the Chicago Urban League in 2004, for what it's worth, I found 14 Chicago neighborhoods where a quarter or more of the children were living in deep poverty.  I discovered six neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of the kids were growing up in such extreme deprivation in the United States – once described by U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) as “the beacon to the world of the way life should be” (Street, Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago [2005], pp. 48-51).   This data comes from the end of the long Clinton economic boom, of the 1990s, when the “poverty gap” – “the amount of money needed to bring all poor people exactly up to the official poverty line” – increased even as overall U.S. poverty fell somewhat (see Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity [London: Verso, 2003], p. 45)..... 

 

Admit it "Walt K" et al, "capitalism" (or whatever we want to call the corporate-imperial American System) has failed.   And please spare me the by now much-discredited (even in the paages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal) upward mobility ("Horatio Alger") narrative.

 

Special credit is due to Jack Rasmus for the work he's doing on economic equality in Bush's America.

 

So you're upset that unemployment is down below 5% and the economy is growing at pre 9/11 rates?  That is warped.  Would it be better to have high unemployment and low economic growth as would occur in a command economy, or better yet parecon?