POLITICS
I'm not one of those conspiratorial Freemen nutjobs who think the U.S. Government has been keeping the mummified remains of some wide-eyed Alpha Centauri interloper under lock and key at Roswell for the past 50 years. I don't suspect the CIA of selling drugs to inner-city black kids, nor a history of covert assassination attempts on antagonistic world leaders (do I ...?)
But I have come to believe we as an American people are being systematically lied to, both through deliberate distortion and misrepresentation from an exploding army of Spin Doctors, as well as through a media too lazy and profit-driven to investigate another hack's press release, or to report on any story too complex to gracefully fit into a 45-second spot on tonight's newscast.
The headlines proclaim 1999 celebrates historically low unemployment and an almost embarrassing prosperity. Good for any politician who lusts for reelection, right? But is it true?
In my recent job hunting experience, I've encountered as many as 200 applicants for a single secretarial position. From conversations with my HR interviewers, even the humblest part-time $7/hour gopher gig garners nearly 30 applications.
What's going on? Are the headlines wrong?
Well, I know I'm not being counted in the unemployment statistics, since my meager income from a moonlighting newspaper delivery route puts me over the limit for eligibility. I know my friend Pete isn't counted; he's been homeless for more than a year. I know my friend Evie isn't being counted; she never signed up.
When I look at just those people I know personally who aren't being included in these statistics, I realize something's seriously wrong with the way this country handles the truth. But don't take my word for it � read the following articles from various journalists and Potomac pundits around the nation, confirm their facts if you wish, and then decide for yourself.
America's in trouble. And the enemy is us.
� Kelli M, May 1999
TRUTH 101
"Dow's success has been great � but not for everyone"
The Dow broke 10,000 recently to great fanfare, but most households have less wealth now, adjusting for inflation, than they did in 1983, when the Dow was stuck at 1,000. The stock market boom has sent the fortunes of some Americans soaring while leaving many others in the dust.
Four out of 10 households now own stock directly and indirectly, but most still don't own much. Almost 90 percent of the value of all stocks and mutual funds owned by households is in the hands of the top 19 percent. According to economist Edward Wolff of New York University, an estimated 42 percent of the benefits of the increase in the stock market between 1989 and 1997 went to the richest 1 percent alone.
The booming economy has been a bust for millions of Americans. The inflation-adjusted net worth of the median household fell from $54,600 in 1989 to $49,000 in 1997. The typical household's net worth just about matches the projected sticker price of Ford's new supersize sports utility vehicle, the Excursion.
Nine years into the longest peacetime expansion in history, average workers are still earning less, adjusting for inflation, than they did when Richard Nixon was president. Between 1973 and 1998, productivity rose 33 percent, but weekly wages in 1998 were 12 percent less than in 1973. The many thousands of dollars in cumulative wages lost since 1973 will never be recovered � much less their lost investment potential
The Dow has broken 10,000 but a lot of Americans are just plain broke. Nearly one out of five households has zero or negative net worth (greater debts than assets), an increase from the 1980s. Household debt as a percentage of personal income rose from 58 percent in 1973 to 85 percent in 1997.
Since the mid-1970s, the top 1 percent of households has doubled its share of the national wealth to 40 percent; the top 5 percent have more than 60 percent. The top 1 percent of households has more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent combined.
Where are we headed? "The Atlanta-based Affluent Market Institute predicts that by 2005, America's millionaires will control 60 percent of the nation's purchasing dollars," notes Jeff Gates, author of "The Ownership Solution." Does that sound like a recipe for long-term prosperity and democracy to you?
Government policy should promote broader ownership and equity. Higher state and federal minimum wages and local living-wage ordinances would help people make ends meet today and build assets for the future.
Because of the 1997 "Taxpayer Relief Act," which reduced the tax rate on long-term capital gains from 28 percent to 20 percent, many workers now pay a higher tax rate on income from wages than wealthy investors pay on realized capital gains. Capital gains should be taxed like wages. Progressive tax policies such as a higher no-tax threshold and an expanded earned-income credit would help low-income families.
Here's another good idea. Sen. Robert Kerrey, D-Neb., has proposed an investment program for this country's children. The "KidSave Accounts" program would guarantee every American child $1,000 at birth, plus $500 a year for children ages one to five, to be invested until retirement. Through compound returns over time, the accounts would grow substantially. The program would supplement Social Security and strengthen opportunities and asset-building across generations. At an 8.5 percent return, for example, $1000 set aside at birth would be worth $250,000 at age 65; the additional $2,500 set aside in the child's first five years would be worth $470,000.
Let's look forward to an 11,000 Dow with widely shared prosperity. That would truly be something to celebrate.
� Holly Sklar is co-author of the new book "Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing American Wealth Gap," published by the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy, and author of "Chaos or Community? Seeking Solutions, Not Scapegoats for Bad Economics" (South End Press, 1995). Her e-mail address is [email protected].
"Signs are clear: We're in need of something to help the soul"
If you had put $10,000 in the stock market in 1983, you could have more than $110,000 today. Unfortunately, most Americans didn't have the $10,000 to invest then, and they don't have it today.
Dear Pfizer: This is a tall order, but the need is great. Could your biotech engineers start working on Viagra for the psyche? You've pumped pizzazz back into thousands of men with erectile dysfunction, how about giving millions of us something to cure impotence of the soul?
Desperate times call for desperate measures. And these are desperate times.
We came of age in the late '60s. Protested racism, sexism, the Vietnam War and the Cambodian incursion. We talked about peace and brotherhood and could keep it up all night against the military industrial complex.
Now we have mortgages that will take until 2025 to pay off � if our companies don't downsize us off first. If we don't suffer a cataclysmic illness that our thrice-merged HMOs refuse to cover.
It's widespread, Pfizer. Millions of us suffer from some degree of soul dysfunction. We look around at one horror after another � at home and abroad � and our blood and passion rise. We want to act, to cry out, to make something happen. But we do nothing with our desire.
We're limp, flaccid, impotent.
Impotent against the truly insane bombing of Yugoslavia. We had to destroy the village in order to save it. Against the draft-dodging boomer-in-chief who is driving our runaway truck of foreign policy.
This is not Nixon, not LBJ. I have seen the enemy, and he is us. This is our 52-year-old contemporary, dropping bombs to "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow."
So many cruise missiles, so little time. Four massive attacks on four countries in 18 months.
Every day, as refugee camps swell by thousands of ethnic Albanians (and countless others disappear back into Kosovo), the rhetoric grows increasingly grotesque. Rhetoric from the once-noble William Cohen. From the first-ever woman secretary of state.
Even liberal Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., fumes like a schoolyard bully from the Senate that if "Mr. Milosevic" knows what's good for him, he'll get back to the peace table. Or else.
Hasn't anyone noticed? "Or else" is costing a bloody fortune � in lives and dollars. Not American lives, of course, which is all that seems to matter these days. That wasn't the way it was before we were impotent. All the world over it's so easy to see: People everywhere just want to be free.
What is the rate of exchange now, anyway? About 100 ethnic Albanians to one (non-immigrant) U.S. citizen? Or is it 1,000 to one? The boomer-in-chief has made it clear that, if we're weighing Rwandans, East Timorese or anybody else who doesn't look like us, the scales are especially tilted: About a million of them equals one of us.
In a middle-class Denver suburb, on a day when NATO conducts some of its heaviest bombing, two fantastically screwed-up young U.S. citizens turn their high school into a teen-age killing field. I know we've come a long way: we're changing day to day.
Again. An entire nation keens: It's the guns. It's the media. It's the video games. It's the music. It's the liberals. It's the conservatives. How did this happen? What shall we do? Who can we blame?
Moses, the head of the National Rifle Association, says the massacre is a good advertisement for armed guards in public schools.
With a straight face, the boomer-in-chief says: "We must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons."
Sensitively, Moses says the annual convention of the NRA � in Denver of all places � will also be shorter and less festive. But the show goes on.
Please, Pfizer, get cracking. We atrophy by the minute. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
� Stephanie Salter is a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. Her e-mail address is [email protected].
"Political silence that's truly staggering"
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When the rear-view mirror of history records the presidency of Bill Clinton, it will probably ignore his foibles and simply call him the consumate politician. He has an uncanny way of casting consistency aside to seize the moment, to outwit friend and foe alike.
Among politicians, his intelligence is almost without equal, and his ego is without restraint. He has cowed the rebellious liberals of his own party and demoralized the fractious Republicans who, in a fit of madness, shut down the government at the end of 1995.
Clinton has totally dismembered the Republican agenda. He has taken, as if they were his own, what should have been Republican proposals for crime prevention, improved health care, higher quality education and increased defense spending.
The Republicans are left with just one distinctive position, their proposal for a 10 percent tax cut. And, unfortunately for the Republicans, most Americans aren't willing to trade improvements in education, or reduction in crime, for a tax cut.
Thus our two major parties have come together in the middle.
Does this mean that we have reached a new high in the sophistication of American politics, or does it mean that the whole system needs help?
Even though the complexities of finance and the intricacies of international trade that have produced our present sense of euphoria are not to be credited to politicians, both parties are bathed in self-congratulation for what they call the herculean feat of balancing the budget.
Instead of the honest two-party debate that a healthy democracy needs for its success, our politicians have come together in a spending frenzy that has lost touch with reason. The temptation to spend themselves into re-election has become too powerful a means for most politician to resist.
Truth of the matter is that we are being fed a lie. Except for the most tortured twists of accounting, our federal budget is not in balance.
The deception occurs when our politicians and their bureaucrats include excess money from the Social Security trust fund within the revenue side of the budget. They do this knowing full well that by law, Social Security revenues are prohibited from inclusion in budget totals.
If properly and honestly calculated, without Social Security revenue, the government's operating budget for this fiscal year shows a loss, not a surplus as announced by the president and applauded by Congress.
But the sham doesn't end there. The so-called "surplus" has already been committed to politically popular projects. The "surplus" is simply money that has been taken from the Social Security trust fund to be used, contrary to law, for other purposes.
Aside from the shame that politicians should bear for trying to fool the public into believing that our government is running in the black, and therefore there are additional monies to be allocated to pet projects, there is an even bigger piece of deceit.
This one is a silent lie; silent because it should be regularly addressed by every politician. Instead it is dealt with in silence. The silent lie is the staggering size of our national debt. At this moment, the public debt is in excess of $5.5 trillion, and is growing at the rate of over $400 million per day.
We need two changes in law.
First, it should be made a felony for any elected official to spend money from the Social Security trust, the Postal Service fund, or any other "off budget" program except for the specific purpose stated in the act that empowered them.
Next, each president should be mandated to begin his State of the Union address with a reminder to each citizen as to what their share of the national debt has become.
If President Clinton had been under such a rule, he would have said: Greetings. It is my pleasure to announce that if the national debt were divided up among you, each of you would owe $20,829.84.
� George Sjostrom is a Simi Valley resident. His column appears biweekly in the Ventura County Star, website staronline.com.
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"Bill of NO Rights"
BILL OF "NO" RIGHTS:
ARTICLE I: You do not have the right to a new car, big screen TV or any
other form of wealth. More power to you if you can legally acquire them,
but no one is guaranteeing anything.
ARTICLE II: You do not have the right to never be offended. This country
is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone - not just you!
You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion,
etc., but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.
ARTICLE III: You do not have the right to be free from harm. If you
stick a screwdriver in your eye, learn to be more careful, do not expect
the tool manufacturer to make you and all your relatives independently
wealthy.
ARTICLE IV: You do not have the right to free food and housing.
Americans are the most charitable people to be found, and will gladly
help anyone in need, but we are quickly growing weary of subsidizing
generation after generation of professional couch potatoes who achieve
nothing more than the creation of another generation of professional
couch potatoes.
ARTICLE V: You do not have the right to free health care. That would be
nice, but from the looks of public housing, we're just not interested in
public health care.
ARTICLE VI: You do not have the right to physically harm other people.
If you kidnap, rape, intentionally maim, or kill someone, don't be
surprised if the rest of us want to see you fry in the electric chair.
ARTICLE VII: You do not have the right to the possessions of others. If
you rob, cheat or coerce away the goods or services of other citizens,
don't be surprised if the rest of us get together and lock you away in a
place where you still won't have the right to a big screen color TV or a
life of leisure.
ARTICLE VIII: You don't have the right to demand that our children risk
their lives in foreign wars to soothe your aching conscience. We hate
oppressive governments and won't lift a finger to stop you from going to
fight if you'd like. However, we do not enjoy parenting the entire world
and do not want to spend so much of our time battling each and every
little tyrant with a military uniform and a funny hat.
ARTICLE IX: You don't have the right to a job. All of us sure want all
of you to have one, and will gladly help you along in hard times, but we
expect you to take advantage of the opportunities of education and
vocational training aid before you to make yourself useful.
ARTICLE X: You do not have the right to happiness. Being an American
means that you have the right to pursue happiness - which by the way, is
a lot easier if you are unencumbered by an overabundance of idiotic laws
created by those of you who were confused by the Bill of Rights."
The preceding has been attributed to State Representative
Mitchell Kaye from GA.
"We, the sensible people of the United States, in an attempt to help
everyone get along, restore some semblance of justice, avoid any more
riots, keep our nation safe, promote positive behavior, and secure the
blessings of debt free liberty to ourselves and our
great-great-great-grandchildren, hereby try one more time to ordain and
establish some common sense guidelines for the terminally whiny, guilt
ridden, delusional, and other liberal, bedwetters. We hold these
truths to be self-evident: that a whole lot of people are confused by
the Bill of Rights and are so dim that they require a
