Pacific Progressive

OC Needs More Good Paying Jobs, Not Fewer - OC Register Continues $100K Obsession

Like a 3rd grader, the OC Register has an obsession with 100,000. For some reason, the Register believes that getting to  $100,000 in salary and benefits  (including health care) in Orange County makes you wealthy and is outrageous compensation.  This morning there was another installment, this time talking about the city of Orange - 39% of Orange Workers Crack $100K Club.

What's missing from this continuing obsession is any discussion of the costs of living in Orange County.  Is $100K really a luxurious amount of money?  

Let's use reliable information to make an objective assessment of the $100K obsession.  Each year, the County of Orange teams with the Orange County Business Council (OCBC) and the Children and Families Commission to publish the Community Indicators Report which summarizes the economic condition of the county as it relates to families, the workplace, health care and public safety.   Download 2011 Community Indicators 

Once you read the report, you realize that $100K doesn't go very far in the OC.  If you want to rent a one-bedroom apartment, you need to make $25.52/hr ($53,082 a year.)  If you need more space for the family, you'll need to make $63,357 for a 2 bedroom or $89,648 for a 3 bedroom.  If you want to buy the median priced home, you need to make at least $84,700.  (See page 23 in report.)  $100K doesn't look so big next to those numbers.

The numbers thrown around by the Register include benefits like health care.  In Orange County, 1 in 6 residents is uninsured (pg 47.)  City jobs come with health care benefits for full time and some part time employees. Families need reliable paychecks and health care to thrive and grow.  Paying poverty wages without benefits doesn't help families.

The industry that employees the most people now is tourism, where the average annual salary is $20,252 (pg 21.)  On that salary, people need to get 2 roommates to afford a one bedroom apartment.   And we wonder why there is over crowding is some parts of the County.

 We need more $100K jobs, not fewer. The $20K jobs that are becoming very common now need to be entry level jobs which eventually lead to $100K jobs and not the high end of the wage scale.   We need to spend more time creating good paying jobs for families and stop wasting time picking apart the decent jobs left.  

NPR Tells Us How Much Deficit Reduction We Need

From Beat the Press at the Center for Economic and Policy Research

NPR told listeners that the $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction being sought by the congressional super committee, that in fact we need $4 trillion. It's great that they got the word from God on this one.

Those of us who look at numbers might think otherwise. The financial markets are saying loudly that there is no problem with current deficits, otherwise they would not be lending money to the United States for 10 years at interest rates of just 2.0 percent. The numbers also offer many examples of countries with (including the United States) which have had much larger debt to GDP ratios and have had no problem borrowing in financial markets.

The piece concluded by telling listeners that we may end up going 14 months until the next election without getting much done. Actually, for people who pay attention to the economy, the main way in which we are not getting much done is in reducing the unemployment rate. This is far and away the most important problem facing the economy in the minds of the vast majority of the public, even if not at NPR.

It is also worth noting that the failure to reduce the unemployment rate will reduce capacity and employment in the long-term. This was pointed out by Paul Krugman in a column today and by David Rosnick in a blogpost last week.

 

Targeting Dissent

by: Nancy Murray and Kade Crockford, Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts | Special Feature

Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the "Homeland" is a collaborative project with Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts.

How little - yet how much - has changed in the last 40 years. The COINTELPRO papers sound distinctly 21st century as they detail the monitoring of perceived threats to "national security" by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), Secret Service, and the military, as well as the intelligence bureaucracy's war on First Amendment protest activity.  

The Church Committee investigation concluded in 1976 that the "unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order."

In addition to massive surveillance, assassinations and dirty tricks "by any means necessary" included the creation of NSA "watch lists" of Americans ranging "from members of radical political groups, to celebrities, to ordinary citizens involved in protests against their government," with names submitted by the FBI, Secret Service, military, CIA, and Defense Intelligence Agency. The secret lists, which included people whose activities "may result in civil disturbances or otherwise subvert the national security of the US," were used by the NSA to extract information of "intelligence value" from its stream of intercepted communications.

Air-Conditioned Poverty: A Right-Wing Diversion

By Isaiah J. Poole for the Campaign for America's Future

The Census Bureau reports that the percentage of people living in poverty in the U.S. is at its highest level in almost two decades. But not to worry, says the conservative Heritage Foundation: Poor people are doing just fine:

Few of the 46.2 million people identified by the Census Bureau as being “in poverty” are what most Americans would consider poor—lacking nutritious food, adequate warm housing, or clothing. The typical “poor” American lives in an air-conditioned house or apartment and has cable TV, a car, multiple color TVs, a DVD player, and a VCR among other conveniences.

Heritage has trotted out this line before to give right-wing lawmakers in Congress ammunition to support cuts in programs that help struggling families cope and eventually become financially self-supporting.

Heritage's formula for fighting poverty, by the way: Poor people should get a job and get married. More on that, and the conservative war in Congress against jobs and marriage, in a moment. But first, let's look at the poverty numbers, and the reality of poverty today in America.

Economists Heidi Shierholz and Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute have highlighted key numbers from the poverty report. They include:

• 15.1%: The share of the population in poverty in 2010
• 22.0%: The percent of children under 18 in poverty
• 46.2 million: The number of people in poverty in 2010
• 11.3%, 6.6%, 4.5%: The decline in family income between 2007 and 2010 for the bottom 20 percent, middle 20 percent, and the top 20 percent, respectively
• $6,298: The decline in median working-age household income from 2000 to 2010
• 49.1 million: The number of people under 65 without any health insurance

Five Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Solyndra

By Dave Johnson for Campaign for America's Future

Oil-backed conservatives have been absolutely ecstatic over the collapse of American solar-power company Solyndra and the rise of China as the dominant country in green energy, because they think they can turn this into a story that makes President Obama and government look bad. It also gives them a bonus opportunity to attack alternatives to coal and oil.

So is there really a "scandal" behind what happened to Solyndra? Or is this just one more conservative smear, made up from whole cloth and spread around conservative outlets, talk radio and FOX News, hoping the "mainstream media" will be tricked into propelling the propaganda out to the public?

The Smear Machine

When Bill Clinton was president, conservatives developed and refined a "smear machine" technique of making up accusation after accusation after accusation (after accusation after accusation), repeating them endlessly and hysterically in conservative-funded outlets, and working to get major media outlets to pick up and repeat them. Unfortunately they were often successful at driving phony smears into the public arena. Even though the stories were invariably refuted after investigation, by the time each smear was refuted many, many more were circulating. After a while people began to believe "where there's smoke there's fire."

Why I'm Not Surprised by Heritage's "Surprising" Poverty Facts

From Beat the Press at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Written by Shawn Fremstad   

At the Inequalities blog, Brendan Saloner, citing a perennial report from the Heritage Foundation, notes: "… many of the so-called poor appear to be living at a more middle-class standard. Most of them have fridges, microwaves, televisions, and even air conditioning and game systems. There are data that support this point, and it needs to be addressed. I have not heard a clear response from leftwing commentators."

There's actually no dearth of responses, including ones from Stephen Colbert and the Center for American Progress. Here's Colbert: 

And you would not believe some of the stuff poor people have in their homes! Luxuries like ceiling fans, DVD players, answering machines, and coffee makers. I don't have those things. I have central air, a Blu-Ray player, voicemail, and I go to Starbucks every day. Must be nice. Must be pretty nice.

I also recently had the chance to respond to Heritage's Robert Rector in a public radio debate with him. Rector's message is that we shouldn't be too concerned about economic insecurity and declining real incomes among the working class and middle class. In support of this message, he points to data showing that among households with income below the federal poverty line in 2005—an austere $19,806 for a family of two parents and two children that year, less than half of the income most Americans say such a family needs to "get along" at a basic level—most have refrigerators and cars, and some have computers and even own homes.

Think Again: CNN: America’s Easiest 'Ref?'

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman 

Has there ever been a group of “refs” that has been as successfully (and easily) “worked” as the folks at CNN?

CNN likes to advertise itself as playing the news straight down the middle. But for decades now, right-wingers have been calling CNN either the “Clinton News Network,” or the “Communist News Network,” and insisting that its anchors and guests make a greater and greater effort to report the news according to their prejudices. Their success has been astounding.

When former Time editor Walter Isaacson was made president of CNN in 2001, among his first actions was to fly to Washington to meet with a group of congressional Republicans to try to convince them that he and his network weren’t so evil after all. (There had been talk of a boycott of the network by Republicans.)

His successors have been traveling the same road over and over, if only metaphorically. Over the years, CNN has tried to kowtow to conservatives by hiring a neverending parade of right-wing pundits and professional agitators: Robert Novak, William Bennett, Jonah Goldberg, Dana Loesch, and perhaps most egregiously, though this is not an easy call, Erik Supreme Court Justice David Souter is a "goat fucking child molester” and Michelle Obama is a “Marxist harpie” Erikson.

The Phony Solyndra Solar Scandal

By Dave Johnson for Campaign for America's Future

Well here's a surprise: conservatives and oil interests are pushing deceptive and destructive stories about President Obama and clean energy. Imagine that! Their intent (as always) is to turn people against President Obama, clean energy, national energy policy, stimulus to help the economy, and government in general.It's what they do. Here is some information to help you push back on the latest whipped-up, anti-green, anti-government, anti-Obama "scandal."

Solyndra

Solyndra was a startup solar-power equipment manufacturer based in Fremont, California that went bankrupt at the end of August. The company's solar collectors used a special tubular internal design that let it collect light from all directions, and were made with a copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS) thin film that avoided using then-expensive silicon. It was one of several companies that received assistance from the government, in an attempt to push back on China's strategic targeting of green-energy manufacturing.

The company, partly backed by the conservative Walton family had received a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. The loan, which was originally pushed by the Bush administration, was 1.3% of the DOE portfolio.

The NYT Lumps Together Social Security and Medicare Again

The NYT did the old "entitlements" bashing in a budget piece today. In the Congressional Budget Office's Alternative Fiscal Scenario, which most analysts are using as the basis for budget debates, Social Security outlays are projected to increase by 25 percent as a share of GDP over the next two decades, from 4.8 percent to 6.0 percent. And all of this increase in spending will be covered by the bonds held in the Social Security trust fund.

By contrast, Medicare outlays are projected to increase by almost 70 percent, measured as a share of GDP, from 3.6 to 6.0 percent, in the Alternative Fiscal Scenario. The Medicare trust fund could only cover a small fraction of this projected rise.

These are qualitatively different situations and it is misleading to lump the two programs together as this article does.

 

Just a Couple More Things About NPR

by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Like Jake LaMotta and his brother Joey in the bloody boxing classic "Raging Bull," we are gluttons for punishment. So, here we are again, third week in a row, defending NPR against the bare-knuckled assault of its critics.

Our earlier pieces on the funding threat to NPR have generated plenty of punches, both pro and con. And although most of the comments were welcome, and encouraged further thinking about the value of public media in a democratic society, a few reminded us of the words of the poet and scholar James Merrick: "So high at last the contest rose/From words they almost came to blows!"

Nonetheless, reading those comments and criticisms made us realize there are a couple of points that these two wizened veterans of public broadcasting - with the multiple tote bags and coffee mugs to prove it - would like to clarify.

For one, when we described the right-wing media machine as NPR's "long-time nemesis," it was not to suggest that somehow public radio is its left-wing opposite. When it comes to covering and analyzing the news, the reverse of right isn't left; it's independent reporting that toes neither party nor ideological line. We've heard no NPR reporter - not a one - advocating on the air for more government spending (or less), for the right of abortion (or against it), for or against gay marriage, or for or against either political party, especially compared to what we hear from Fox News and talk radio on all of these issues and more.

How the So-Called Guardians of Free Speech Are Silencing the Messenger

by: John Pilger, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gaddafi is "delusional" and "blood-drenched" while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of "stability."

But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that "people must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other." Paine's "The Rights of Man" was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with "a dangerous and treasonable conspiracy." Wisely, he sought refuge in France.

The ordeal and courage of Paine is cited by the Sydney Peace Foundation in its award of Australia's human rights gold medal to Julian Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in England, but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' alleged whistleblower, of a capital crime.

Study: Majority of Consumers Obtain News From Online Sources

by: Nadia Prupis, t r u t h o u t | Report

 

For the first time, 21st century consumers are reading the news online more than in print, according to the "State of the News Media 2011" report by the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism. Only television remains the most-used resource for news among American adults, but the gap is closing.

In fact, most sectors of the American news industry began to recover in 2010 after two difficult years - but technological advances present old and new media alike with increasingly complex challenges.

For the online news media, the question is economic sustainability. While advertising profits on the Internet surpassed spending on print ads, especially since the emergence of the iPad and other tablets, the report shows that "by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly aggregators" such as Google or AOL.

"The biggest issue ahead may not be the lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments. It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own destiny," wrote the report's co-authors Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell.

NPR: The Saga Continues

by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

There’s no more scrupulous or versatile broadcast journalist than NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling. He is one of those reporters who keeps his eye on the sparrow – that is, on small details from individual lives that add up to significant issues of public policy. As he described in a special report this week how the United States Army is clarifying guidelines "that should make it easier for soldiers with traumatic brain injuries from explosions to receive the Purple Heart," it was mind-boggling to think that right wingers in Congress were at that very moment voting to eliminate the modest federal funds that make such essential and authoritative reporting available to anyone in America who cares to tune in.

 
Zwerdling’s collaborator on this report was ProPublica (the non-profit and equally independent newsroom that won the Pulitzer Prize last year for a harrowing account of deadly choices made by a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina). As a result of their reporting, the Army now intends to give special priority to reexamining the cases of soldiers who suffered battlefield concussions but who mistakenly may have been turned down for the Purple Heart, which historically has been awarded to soldiers injured by enemy action.
 
You may not think this such a big deal, but the symbolism of the announcement is potent. And it’s part of a larger, ongoing investigation conducted by Zwerdling and ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller into the military’s widespread failure to diagnose and treat traumatic brain injuries, the "signature injury" among troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as they fall to roadside bombs and other explosives.

In Defense of NPR

by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Come on now: let's take a breath and put this National Public Radio (NPR) fracas into perspective.

Just as public radio struggles against yet another assault from its longtime nemesis - the right-wing machine that would thrill if our sole sources of information were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and ads paid for by the Koch Brothers - it walks into a trap perpetrated by one of the sleaziest operatives ever to climb out of a sewer.

First, in the interest of full disclosure: While not presently committing journalism on public television, the two of us have been colleagues on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) for almost 40 years (although never for NPR). We've lived through every one of the fierce and often unscrupulous efforts by the right to shut down both public television and radio. Our work has sometimes been the explicit bull's eye on the dartboard as conservative ideologues sought to extinguish the independent reporting and analysis they find so threatening to their phobic worldview.

We have come to believe, as so many others have, that only the creation of a substantial trust fund for public media will free it from the whims and biases of the politicians, including Democratic politicians (yes, after one of our documentaries tracking President Clinton's scandalous fundraising in the mid-1990's, the knives were sharpened on the other side of the aisle).

AT&T to Limit Internet Access and Charge Overage Fees

by: Nadia Prupis, t r u t h o u t | Report

Starting May 2, AT&T will begin implementing monthly usage limits for its U-Verse and DSL users and charge $10 fees every time a customer exceeds the cap.

According to Broadband Reports, DSL customers will have a 150GB monthly usage limit, while U-Verse subscribers will get 250GB. AT&T will impose the $10 fee for every 50GB over the limit a customer uses.

The telecommunications giant says that their average DSL user consumes approximately 18GB a month, so the new fees are only likely to effect about 2 percent of their customers. The first three overage fees will be waived.

"Just one of these high-traffic users can utilize the same amount of data capacity as 19 typical households," an AT&T statement read. "Lopsided usage patterns can cause congestion at certain points in the network, which can slow Internet speeds and interfere with other customers' access to and use of the network. Our new plan addresses another concern: customers strongly believe that only those who use the most bandwidth should pay more than those who don't use as much."

AT&T also told Broadband Reports that it will give customers a tracking device to monitor usage over time and tools that will help identify services that use up the most bandwidth, such as the OnLive HD game streaming platform AT&T made an investment in, in September 2009.