Salon.com > The 1%

Obama opens doors to progress, Romney slams them shut

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:45:00 +0000

Progressives who found ourselves inconveniently placed when Sandy collided with two other storms and overwhelmed us are probably in a mood to view with particular seriousness that the Romney-Ryan budget would slash FEMA to ribbons while Obama's doesn't; and that not so long ago Mitt Romney was denouncing federal disaster relief as "immoral" (“Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better”).

Still, we are at that point in the election cycle when some progressives have been busily listing what they despise about Democrats, going on to remind us how tired they are of lesser evils and how weary their hands grow from holding their noses. In 2000 we were told how bad a campaign Al Gore ran, how soft he was on corporations, how little he did about climate change when he had the chance, and how pure of heart Ralph Nader was. This year we are reminded that Barack Obama failed to close Guantánamo, kept the stimulus too small, hired Tim Geithner, dispatched drones, made up a kill list, and, like Mitt Romney, supports oil drilling and collects corporate dollars.

GOP Congress really does make the rich richer

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Are you rich and want to get richer? Vote Republican! The stronger the GOP is in Congress, the larger the share of wealth the top 1 percent controls, according to a new study in the October issue of American Sociological Review, which confirms what we figured all along -- there's a direct connection between the rightward shift of Congress and the upward advance of the richest Americans’ net worths.

From 1949 through 2008, the impact of a 1 percentage point increase in the share of seats held by Republicans in the House (a little over five seats) raised the top 1 percent’s income share by about .08 percentage points. “At first glance, this might seem negligible," said Thomas Volscho, a sociologist at CUNY-College of Staten Island who co-authored the study. But it's not. "Given that the estimated national income in 2008 was more than $7.8 trillion, an increase of only 1 percent in Republican seat share would raise the income of the top 1 percent by nearly $6.6 billion. That equates to about $6,600 per family in the top 1 percent."

Robots are coming (for your job)

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 11:00:00 +0000

During this year’s political campaigns, politicians of both parties have neglected one increasingly important constituency of American workers. I refer, of course, to robots.

The complaint “It’s the twenty-first century, so where are the robots?” is receiving an answer. Robots are being used in advanced manufacturing. Support is building for allowing drones, developed in warfare, to be used for commercial purposes inside the U.S. Google’s robocars have logged more than 300,000 miles on American roads and Las Vegas has legalized self-driving vehicles. Robot vacuum cleaners chase dust bunnies across the floors of many homes.

Oh, and phones can now talk back.

Why I sought to modify Dodd-Frank

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:00:00 +0000

I know that writers, even good ones, sometimes address questions like, "Why do liberals aid the 1 percent?" to the general blogosphere rather than to the subject about whom they are about to theorize. That way they can imagine the answer that best feeds their postulate. However, as one of the liberals referenced in Gary Weiss' Salon article but never asked, I'd like to to respond to the question after the supposed "fact."

My opposition to the Senate-added swaps “push-out” provision, Section 716, was based solely on the fact that it was wholly at odds with two central tenets of the Dodd-Frank Act, reducing systemic risk and increasing derivative market-transparency, and not, as Weiss inaccurately states, on some conjured out of whole cloth allegiance to the so-called “1 percent.” Of course, if Salon had bothered to ask me why I opposed Section 716, then the story would not have been necessary at all. But, of course, that was the point.