What
‘s Wrong Today:

Welcome
to 2014. Will 2014 be a time when America progresses, stagnates or retreats?
The village pundits say that we are a divided people that can’t see the
problems we face in the same way, and who believe in completely different
solutions.

Will
the political stagnation continue?

A 2014 prediction that will certainly be correct:

Congress thinks it will be Same Ol’ Same Ol’ in 2014:

Republicans plan to recycle an old strategy:

A New Year’s reboot has strings attached:

The
Wrongologist Blog reached 60,000+ reads in 2013, up from 25,000 in 2012 and
3,000 in 2011. Thanks to you, we will crack 120,000 reads in 2014. Here are the top 5 most
read Wrongologist posts of 2013:

   1.    Banks:
Burglars or Bunglers?

2.    Erdogan
Misreads the Turkish People

3.    Register
Pressure Cookers

4.    The
Growth Market in Student Loans

5.    Income
Levels Drive 2012 Election Results

Enjoy them again, or for some of you, hate
‘em again…

Happy New Year!

On Christmas, people say: “Peace
on earth, good will towards men”. While it isn’t Sunday, you might use the
quote below by Mose Allison to talk with your loved ones about the state of the
world today:

“Everybody’s
Crying for Peace on Earth just as soon as we
win this war”  – Mose Allison (“Everybody’s
Crying Mercy”)

In this season of faux deficit
outrage, few jobs (and no policy) for the long-term unemployed, let’s remember
that in America, we also face the twin epidemics of homelessness AND abandoned
properties. And we can’t figure out what to do about either of them.

Here are the Wrongologist’s favorite Christmas videos:

 #1.  Alec Baldwin, Molly Shannon and Ana
Gasteyer, “Schweddy Balls” (“Saturday Night Live”);http://www.hulu.com/watch/4156

 #2. Darlene Love, “Christmas Time for the Jews” (“Saturday Night Live”);http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/christmastime-for-the-jews-song/n12006/

#3. Tom Lehrer, “A Christmas Carol” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffO8nZThwmM

Finally, an Xmas pic of the Wrongologist’s dog:

Here’s
hoping that you are able to be with your loved ones today. 

What’s
Wrong Today:

On Dec.
17, the Turkish public and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan were shocked by
the news of a major corruption case.

Here is a
brief outline of the scandal: Sons of three government ministers were detained by police
on the morning of Dec. 17 on charges of bribery and influence peddling. On
Dec. 19, while the sons were being questioned, the Istanbul
police launched three separate anti-corruption operations and detained 52 more
people.

At the
center of the investigation is an Iranian named Reza Zarrab, a gold dealer
apparently working for Iran. Iran has been banned from using the international
money-transfer system SWIFT since March 2012
as a part of the US-EU economic sanctions regime, but apparently Turkey and Tehran
have been
using Turkey’s Halkbank to evade the embargo.

According
to al-Monitor, here is how the
plan worked: Front companies were set up in China. Then, money was
transferred from Iran with falsified documents to bank accounts opened in the
names of those companies supposedly as reimbursements for imports from China.
The money was then transferred to the accounts of real (or other front
companies) in Turkey as payment for exports. That cash was then used to
purchase gold. The gold was then sent via courier to Iran, or to
Dubai to be forwarded to Iran.

As a
result, Turkey’s gold imports and exports rose steadily. According to
al-Monitor, $8 billion worth of gold was sent to Iran over the past 3 years, in
contravention of the sanctions regime.

This complicated system was designed to
solve Turkey’s inability to pay Iran directly for the Iranian oil and natural
gas it was buying, due to the embargo.

To
counter this scheme, the United States banned gold exports to
Iran in July 2013. This has resulted in the accumulation of
nearly $13 billion in imported gold in Turkey.

Although many
media outlets have framed the scandal as a power
struggle between the Fethullah Gulen movement and Erdogan’s government, the US seems
focused on the Turkey-Iran-Halkbank-gold triangle, since David Cohen, the US Treasury undersecretary
of terrorism and financial intelligence, arrived at the end of the week in
Turkey. That can’t be a coincidence. The scandal has the potential to cause major
damage to Turkey’s relations with the US, which has already been
shaken by policy differences over Turkey’s efforts in Egypt and Syria.

The New York Times reported that
Erdogan wasted no time in moving to seal off the emerging scandal:

Mr.
Erdogan is trying to contain the scandal by blaming domestic conspirators and
foreign meddlers, just as he did during last summer’s Gezi Park
demonstrations,
which began over plans to raze Gezi Park in central Istanbul and convert it
into a shopping mall.

These moves
are hard to accept from the leader of an established democracy. Importantly,
there is a Presidential
election
looming in 2015, and Mr. Erdogan wants to move from prime minister to president
when his PM term ends next year. The current President, Abdullah
Gul,
is expected to make way for Erdogan’s ascension to the presidency next summer. Gul
would like to return to being prime minister, which represents something of a
challenge to Erdogan, since executive power resides mostly with the prime
minister and Erdogan would rather have someone who is pliable in the office.

Since the
scandal became public, those media allied against the government are leaking
information on the investigations, while pro-government media are not
reporting on the evidence. These outlets are instead making the claim that the
operation is a conspiracy
to topple the government, carried out by foreigners.  

Yahoo News reports that Mr.
Erdogan described the bribery probe as “smear campaign” with
international ramifications, taking it out on foreign ambassadors. From Mr.
Erdogan:

Yahoo said
that Erdogan’s remarks were considered to be directed at US Ambassador Francis
Ricciardone, who denied the claims. Separately, The Times reported that 29 police chiefs were reassigned from their
positions in Ankara and Istanbul: 

Regarding
the Gulen movement, the Economist reported on Erdogan’s relationship with Turkey’s most influential Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in
Pennsylvania but commands a global network of schools, charities and media
outlets:

The
asymmetric struggle between Mr. Erdogan’s AKP party and the Gulen movement is devolving
into a back and forth of recrimination. It appears that there will be no winners
of this fight, so it becomes important who loses less. At the moment, the most
serious damage has been inflicted upon Erdogan and his government.

Since 2010, Mr. Erdogan has become
quite authoritarian. He has a questionable record with the press in the past
couple of years. The Turkish economy is also experiencing some trouble, with the
Turkish lira being devalued by 16% in the past 6 months. It is common knowledge
that the Turkish economy is kept at its high rate of growth by foreign cash attracted with
high interest rates, and a buoyant stock market. When there is a defacto devaluation,
foreign cash leaves first. The fact that 3.5 million people get food aid from
AKP local governments, while 6 million people receive free coal from the same
sources is well-known, and likely to help Erdogan at election time.

Yet, this
scandal doesn’t look like it will go away as easily as did Gezi Park. Whether
that causes difficulty for Erdogan and the AKP at the ballot box next year
remains to be seen.

In the meantime, Mr. Erdogan has some explaining to do
with his European allies and the US regarding why Turkey failed to comply with the Iran sanctions using the now-public gold scheme.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Can raising the minimum wage be a defining political battle of the 2014 Congressional
elections? Dave Johnson at Campaign
for America’s Future writes:

As the Wrongologist reported,
when
the public can vote on minimum wage increases, they pass handily:

Even in
New Jersey, where voters re-elected Republican Chris Christie as governor, the
minimum wage was increased to $8.25, and indexed it to inflation, by 61% to 39%
of the voters.

Polls show
public pressure is building: A December
11 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 63% supported a rise to
$10.10:

Here are a
few more polls:

• A November
  Gallup poll showed that 76% of Americans want the minimum wage raised to at
  least $9 from the current $7.25. This is up 5 percentage points just since
  March.
  

• An August
  poll by the National Employment Law Project (NELP)
  found that 80% support raising
  the minimum wage to $10.10, including 62% of Republicans and 75% of
  southern whites.
  

• A March
  poll by the USA Today/Pew Research Center found that 71% favor increasing
  the minimum wage to $9.

How many
hours does it take to make rent at the minmum wage? The National Low Income
Housing Coalition looked
at the number of hours minimum-wage employees have to work per week in each state just to
rent an apartment and still be able to survive. (See their
chart here).

West
Virginia is lowest at 63 hours. Hawaii was 175 hours. California, Maryland, New
Jersey, New York and Washington, DC were all over 130 hours. A standard work
week is 40 hours. So, today, there is
no state where a minimum wage worker can earn enough to make the fair market rent
for a two-bedroom place on 40 hours a week.

In the New
Year, the Fair
Minimum Wage Act, that would raise the wage to $10.10 and index it to
inflation, was introduced in the 113th Congress by Sen. Tom Harkin
(D-IA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA). President Obama has endorsed the
proposal.

So, the
push to make it a national issue begins. Republicans will have to decide: Will they allow this increase to pass the Congress, or will they try to obstruct it and run as opponents of fair pay
for working people in 2014? Many Republicans are likely to oppose the bill, but many local and state measures may be brought to the ballot in order to increase
turnout, which could hurt Republicans in some districts.

Republicans
will continue to push the nonsense that joblessness will result from a higher
minimum wage, when in fact more consumer demand via a higher minimum wage means
more jobs. As the Wrongologist said on Tuesday:

David
Johnson also makes a good point about businesses reducing employment if the minimum
wage goes up:

Businesses can
decide how to cover their added costs. Some might raise prices, others might
pay top executives a bit less, and others would dip into some of their excess
cash. Companies that raise prices so top executives can retain their pay will
be at a disadvantage if their competitors don’t raise prices.

According to the BLS, 3.6
million workers in the US make the minimum wage or less. These 3.6 million
workers make up 4.7% of the working population.

Raising
their take home pay will not hurt our (now) growing economy, it will help it move
ahead. Let’s force corporate America to take their employees off of federal
aid.

Let’s
force Congressional Republicans to tell their voters why a higher
minimum wage is a bad idea.

 

What’s Wrong Today:

We
have become a low-growth economy. Republicans have to answer why
“growth policies” (that have directly increased inequality), did not
also provide the promised payback of increased growth for all. Particularly in
the minimum wage.

As Mr.
Obama and others have
noted, a parent who works full-time, year round at the federal minimum wage
does not earn an income above the federal poverty line.

This wasn’t always
the case. Up until the early 1980s, an annual minimum-wage income—after
adjusting for inflation—was enough to keep a family of two above the poverty
line. At its high point in 1968, the minimum wage was high enough for a family
of three to be above the poverty line with the earnings of a full-time worker,
although it still fell short for a family of four. Today, at the federal
minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, working 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year
yields an annual income of only $15,080. As shown in this chart from EPI,
this is below the federal poverty line for families of two or more.

For some
context, median individual earnings are $40,404 a year, according to the BLS, while the US
poverty level is $23,656, according to HHS.
Full-time minimum wage earners make 62.7% less than median income and are 36%
below the poverty level.
According to Barry
Ritholtz:

As Bloomberg
Businessweek reported earlier this year, net total public assistance to the fast-food industry is about $7
billion dollars. (This does not include future medical costs associated
with diabetes or heart disease). If the minimum wage were suddenly raised
to $15, it would drive fast-food prices 25% higher, adding $1 to the cost of a Big Mac.

And employees
of the fast food industry receive more taxpayer aid than any other sector. How
much? More than half (52%) of the families of fast-food workers receive some
form of public assistance. That’s more than double the rate of the workforce as
a whole. Most of it is through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance
Program ($4 billion), while the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program are the rest ($3 billion).

So, let’s
consider the options: we can continue to provide SNAP
(food stamp) assistance, SCHIP, and the
Earned Income Tax Credit
(EITC), subsidizing large and profitable companies with a significant slice of
our tax revenues, or we can raise the minimum wage, effectively shifting the
cost of poverty among the working poor from taxpayers to the corporations and
fast food consumers, where they belong. Why should taxpayers subsidize anyone’s Big Mac?

Do the
math: $7 billion in entitlements for two million fast-food workers (ignoring other minimum wage
earners for simplicity) would be the equivalent of $3.50 an hour. 7B/2M = $3,500,
$3,500/50 weeks (assuming that most of these jobs, if not all of them, are part
time) would be $70. $70/20 hour work week is $3.50. Adding $3.50 to the current
$7.25 would make the minimum wage $10.75.

Raising
the minimum wage to $10.75 should offset that $7 billion in federal expenditures.
If that was done, and the federal assistance programs were cut by a
corresponding $7B would make for a pretty good tradeoff.

And to Republicans: If the price of beef doubled, would we see the same hue and cry
about that cost versus increased wage cost? No one would care, the cost would be passed along. But if we were
to double wages, Republicans, CEOs and pundits would tell us the sky is falling.

A Pew
Research Center survey
found that 71% of people favored an increase in the federal minimum to
$9.00/hour from $7.25. But while large majorities of Democrats (87%) and
independents (68%) said they favored such an increase, there are clear partisan
differences; Republicans were split, with 50% favoring an increase to 47%
opposed. (see chart below)

Nineteen
states (plus DC) have set their own, higher minimums, ranging from $7.35 in Missouri to $9.19 in
Washington State. Some cities and counties have gone even higher — San
Francisco’s minimum wage, for example, is set to rise 19 cents to $10.74 next
month. Those states collectively include 45%
of the nation’s working-age (16 and over.

Here is a view of
the minimum wage by state from The
Economist:

Source: The Economist

The proliferation of different state and
municipal minimum wages means that the federal rate covers fewer workers than
it once did. In 1979, 7.9% of workers were paid at or below the minimum wage,
while in 2012, 2.8% earned below minimum wage. Starting on January 1st
2014, 21 states will have a minimum
wage that is higher than the current federal minimum, but few will be
near the $15/hour that voters approved in SeaTac,
Washington. Nor will many be above the
federal minimum of $10.10 as Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep.
George Miller (D-CA) have proposed.

Jobs are the answer to better GDP
growth and reduced income inequality, but ONLY if the jobs produce enough income so that
the person doing the work can afford the other necessities that go along with a
sustaining lifestyle, with minimal contribution from the social safety net by
federal or state programs.  

This all
adds up to why the minimum wage must be increased.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Enjoy
today’s ride on the Bandwagon of Wrong™.

From
Politico: House Budget Committee Chairman
Paul Ryan (R-WI) said on “Fox News Sunday” that Senate and House Republicans
will meet up at their party’s retreats in the New Year to figure out what Republicans can extract from Democrats in return for raising
the debt ceiling next year:

Jared Bernstein on Ryan’s hope:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

This
goes beyond normal Republican politics. Ryan is trying to bring the US
government to its knees in an early preview of his 2016 presidential campaign. We
get it; he wants something out of the deal so he will look good to the extreme right
wing of the right-wing Republican Party. And right there is what’s wrong with Republicans
today: They passed a 2-year budget that authorized this spending. Now they will
try to extract concessions in order to fund the spending that they just authorized.

That’s
insanity.

From
Digby: Senate Budget Committee chair Sen.
Patty Murray, (D- WA), and her House counterpart, Rep. Paul Ryan, (R- WI),
spoke on Meet the Press on Sunday
about the budget agreement which they announced last week. They said the accord
showed that serious legislating is still possible even when the two parties
appear to be deeply divided on matters of principle. Murray:

Ryan:

Ryan
said that in the first quarter of 2014, the House Ways and Means Committee
would:

So,
could tax reform be what Ryan is angling for if he plans to hold the Debt
Ceiling increase hostage? He spent some time on Meet the Press kissing up to
the groups that were against his budget deal, the Club for Growth, Heritage
Action and Americans for Prosperity, saying: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

And the budget deal couldn’t have worked out better from Ryan’s perspective. The discretionary
budget that the Democrats agreed with was far less than what Ryan had originally
proposed: 

Ryan had wanted a budget of $1.095
billion, and he “settled “ for a budget of $967 billion. Republicans should
support a budget that was $128 billion
LESS than they wanted originally.

Now,
Patty Murray hopes to move on to tax reform and increasing entitlements. Is she
trying single-handedly to make Mr. Ryan the Republican nominee in 2016?

Wait!
Come to think of it, that may be a brilliant move…Ryan will be the new and improved Romney model for Republicans. More
conservative! More truthy!

Be
assured, there will be no tax increases under Paul Ryan’s watch between here
and 2016. And since the new budget reduces the deficit only by 1/3 of one percent over the next two years, we will revisit
the fight over the debt ceiling a few more times before the next presidential
election.

So the new budget bi-partisanship is only a photo-op for Paul Ryan. He plans to hold the Debt Ceiling hostage to yet another Republican effort to extract tax reductions and/or spending cuts from the Democrats.

It shouldn’t take any more “getting to know you” meetings by Ms. Murray to understand that Mr. Ryan’s passion is politics, and he has no plan to be a bi-partisan partner in solving low economic growth, stagnating wages for the middle class, or a balanced deficit reduction plan.

Plutarch, (in Coriolanus) wrote about Rome and the abuses of
great wealth:

Use his words to write your Sunday homily.

The
House passed a budget. The 2-year budget promises to do something in ten
years, while being only a two year deal. And it doesn’t even actually do what
it proclaims; actually reduce
the deficit in a meaningful way. It replaces a $6.3 billion deficit reduction
with a $2.3 billion reduction, which looks like a $4.0 billion increase.
Since the CBO estimates the deficit to be $6.3 trillion over the next ten
years, that $2.3 billion amounts to a reduction
of one third of one percent.

Mr. Boehner made a turn to help get the budget
passed:

But not without grumbles within his own party:

Congress channeled Mandela:

Francis won Time’s Person of the Year, but haters were out there:

Mr. Obama’s critics followed him to South Africa:

And the media misinterpreted Obama’s selfie:

The
Wrongologist wrote this week about the breakdown of Trust
in America. Democracy works when there is a rough national consensus and
starts breaking down when there isn’t any consensus. Consensus? Bueller?

We used to
have consensus when the economy was growing and everyone had a shot at living a
better life than their parents. Today, the economy is growing, but fewer
are getting that shot. Kids are told to get smarter, to work smarter (more) and
settle for what will eventually be called ‘smart wages’ (less).

There is no
point in debating each other when there are zero points of agreement. Sitting
on the sidelines and demanding nothing but more tax cuts and less regulation
has been an altogether too comfortable lounge chair for the rich.

Or, as Chesterton said:

“The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly;
the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

What’s
Wrong Today:

Americans
are becoming a mistrustful bunch. Nearly 2/3 of us say you can’t be too careful
in dealing with people, according to the Chicago-based General
Social Survey, (GSS), a massive survey of Americans conducted regularly
since 1972, with funding from the National Science Foundation. The GSS has been
asking whether most people can be trusted, or whether “you can’t be too
careful” in daily life. Four decades ago, Americans were evenly split on the
question. But, here are the current findings:

• 78% have little faith in people
  they meet while traveling, saying they trust them “just
  somewhat,” “not too much” or “not at all”, while 19%
  don’t worry, they have “quite a bit” or “a great deal”
  of trust in people away from home
• 75% mistrust people driving
  cars while they’re driving, biking or walking
• 67% have little confidence in
  people who swipe their credit card when they buy something
• 59% don’t have much faith in
  people with whom they have shared photos, videos or information on social
  media
• 55% don’t trust the people they
  hire to come into their homes to do work
• 50% have little trust in the
  people who prepare their food when they eat out

Yet, 100% of them continue to eat
out? Asked
by the GSS how much of the time they trust the government in Washington to do
what is right, people say:

• 81%: only some of the time
• 15%: most of the time
• 2%: just about always

The GSS poll
was conducted Oct. 3-7, 2013. It involved online interviews with 1,227 adults.
The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage
points for all respondents.

Pew
Research Center show similar results, with just 19% trusting the government
most of the time. Pew has a slick, interactive longitudinal
survey that has tracked the public’s trust in government since 1958. Check
it out at the link above.  

A 107-country
poll by Transparency
International, a corruption monitor, this past summer found Americans more
likely than Italians to say that they feel that their police, business and media
are all “corrupt or extremely corrupt”. But, according to the Economist,
that is an ill-informed conclusion:

In
genuinely low-trust countries, tax evasion comes naturally: when those at the
top cheat, only dupes follow the rules. But, according to the Economist, America
shows few signs of surging tax evasion:

Yet Americans
are increasingly distrustful and angry. But even though the Transparency
International survey shows we distrust authority at Italian levels, they do not
completely describe reality. Most surveys show that “half of all Americans” think
this or that, but behind the headlines, the data show partisan or demographic
divides.

Behind the
GSS numbers about overall trust between Americans, there are some large gaps: The
bulk of the recent decline involves whites becoming less trusting. And we know
that over the same period, (since the early 1970’s), society has become more
impersonal and more economically unequal.

Robert Putnam of
Harvard University, a pioneer in the study of “social capital”, argues
that Americans’ trust in one another has been declining steadily since the  end of the WWII, when civic activity and a
sense of community among neighbors were at a peak.

Putnam makes a
distinction between two kinds of social capital: bonding capital and bridging
capital. Bonding occurs when you are
socializing with people who are like you. But in order to create
peaceful societies in a diverse multi-ethnic country, you also need to have bridging
capital: Bridging is what you do when
you make friends with people who are not like you. Putnam argues that
those two kinds of social capital, bonding and bridging, strengthen each other.
Consequently, with the decline of the bonding capital, inevitably comes the decline
of bridging capital, and thus, lower societal trust.

And
thus, the growth in anti-government cynicism that is America’s real product of
distrust. Also, our capitalism-based society relies on risk, individuals,
competition, and pitting people (and groups) against one another for a limited
number of dollars and other resources. That also contributes to reduced trust
in a society. We see one another as competitors, rather than allies for
resources.With low GDP growth, America is becoming a zero-sum game economy.

Sharply-delineated
voter blocs are alarmingly willing to believe that rival groups are up to no
good or are taking more than their fair share. That tallies with one of the
biggest changes over the past 15 years: a
collapse in support among conservatives for government safety nets.

Here is a
good example that proves the point:

Who said
that? George
W. Bush, in his weekly radio address on December 15, 2002. Can you imagine a conservative delivering that message in 2013?

To succeed, a pluralist democracy must find
compromises between a wide range of views. In DC today, compromise is often
portrayed as giving up your principles and therefore a form of corruption,
instead of a necessity that allows society to function.

It comes down to respecting another’s
point of view even if you don’t trust them.

What’s
Wrong Today:

The
widening gap between rich and poor is eroding faith in the American dream.

By almost
two to one ― 64% to 33% ― Americans say the US no longer offers everyone an
equal chance to get ahead, according to a poll by Bloomberg. The survey of
1,004 adults was conducted by Selzer & Co., an Iowa-based
pollster from December 6-9. The poll was taken just after the statements by President
Obama and Pope Francis, who both expressed alarm about growing income
inequality.

By way of
background, the richest 10% of Americans earned more than half of all US
income last year, the largest share since 1917, according to Emmanuel
Saez,
economist at the University of California at Berkeley. From Bloomberg:

In the poll,
68% of Americans say the income gap is growing, while 18% say it is unchanged
and 10% say it’s shrinking. It is amazing that FACTS just don’t seem to matter to the 28% who say that
inequality isn’t growing! More from Bloomberg: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

So, if you
are doing ok, you think “the market” is the answer, and if you make less than
$50k, you are looking for some help. Is inequality simply another way to talk
about class warfare and income redistribution as Republicans complain?

The Market
is not going to re-animate our middle class. It is six years since the start of the Great Recession, and it hasn’t happened yet. An unfettered business environment
will not produce wage growth. Nor will trickle-down. Even Adam Smith realized
the limitations of just letting businessmen do what they pleased. While he is
often quoted by conservatives, who wrongly assign a God-like virtue to the
“invisible hand” of the market, he also had this to say:

From Tomdispatch.com:

In 2011,
when Mr. Obama proposed a “millionaire’s tax”, he
was accused by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) of heading down the “class
warfare path.” 
In 2012, Mitt Romney blasted the president for encouraging “class warfare” by attacking entrepreneurial
success.

Tomdispatch
goes on to describe how usage of class warfare was co-opted recently by the 1%,
saying that for
at least a century, it was a commonplace in the American lexicon that:

MSNBC’s Tim Noah:

But focus
on the epithet class warfare
distracts us from the true issues of inequality: Equality should be about equal
opportunities in education, employment, housing, health care, safe living
environment, secure pensions – these are the basic principles of equality.

However, the
greatest transfer of wealth in history continues, and no one in Washington can,
or will, do anything about it. We have been living under an oligarchy since
St. Ronnie introduced the country to “Reaganomics”.
Since financial wealth is what counts as far as the control of income-producing
assets, we can say that just 10% of the people own the United States of
America.

The poor have
just three ways to band together and act to protect their interests:

#1. Government
#2. Unions
#3. Civil Disobedience

In the
early 21st Century, the first two options have been taken out of the
equation. That leaves #3. That’s the one the oligarchs want the poor to try, since
they expect the police will save their skins when the time comes. That is why the police have been
militarized, because that’s the option the plutocrats think they can
simply slap down. (Think about Occupy)

We have
all seen the hardware the police are stockpiling. It must be the real reason
for militarizing our police departments.

As long as
the 10% who sit on most of the assets don’t give a damn about their fellow
Americans dying of hunger, disease, destroyed living environments and crumbling
infrastructure, America does not have a chance of becoming a nation worthy of “All
men are created equal” in our Declaration of
Independence.

And as long as those
in Congress stay busy managing their careers instead
of shouldering their part of the responsibility to secure a humanely just society, we will never achieve the American dream.

“The
American Dream: You have to be asleep to believe it.” -George Carlin

Time Magazine announced that it will name its Person of the Year (POY) tomorrow. It
offered 10 finalists who had the most influence on the news in 2013.
Their list includes: Bashar Assad, Jeff Bezos, Ted Cruz, Miley Cyrus, Pope
Francis, Barack Obama, Hassan Rouhani, Kathleen Sebelius, Edward Snowden, and Edith
Windsor, a gay rights activist.

Of course,
Time has also named Hitler and Stalin
(twice) as POY in the distant past, while, in 2002, it named
Whistleblowers,
including Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent who revealed mishandling of information about
the 9/11 attacks by the FBI.

The Wrongologist salutes another
whistleblower, Edward Snowden as Person of the Year. Snowden leaked an
estimated 200,000 files that exposed the extensive and intrusive phone and Internet
surveillance and intelligence gathering by the US, principally by the National
Security Agency (NSA). In his nomination, the Wrongologist joins The Guardian, who yesterday named Snowden their POY for
2013. They had named Chelsea Manning as POY in 2012, making it a 2-year run for
whistleblowers by The Guardian. From
their article:

We should
note that the Snowden affair was also a bonanza for The Guardian, since Snowden gave the data that he copied from US
government computers to their reporter, Glenn Greenwald. Last week, Alan
Rusbridger, the Guardian’s
editor, said that his paper has published only 1% of the
files that it received from Snowden.

By Snowden
downloading thousands of files from the NSA’s computers and handing them over
to journalists, we have seen a torrent of news stories about the NSA’s
surveillance activities. The Guardian and the WaPo published a
series of articles beginning last May, and the flow of documents continues.
Just last week, we learned that the agency is tracking hundreds of
millions of cell phones, gathering nearly five billion records a day. (See an
interactive timeline of the Snowden revelations here.)

Snowden has
opened the eyes of people around the world to how easy it is for governments to
monitor digital communications, and how complicit major technology companies
have been in these surveillance programs.

He has sparked a debate about how to
preserve privacy in the information age—and whether such a thing is even
possible. If Snowden hadn’t come forward, the steady encroachment of the
surveillance state would have continued, and most people might never have known
about the effort. Since Snowden shined a light on Big Brother and his enablers,
some of them may be forced to be more circumspect in their actions. On Monday, the
CEOs of AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and
Yahoo—published an
open letter
in which they said:

OK, but without
Snowden’s intervention, would the likes of Google’s Larry Page and Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg have signed a letter asking that the government rein in its stealth
data gathering? Previously, these companies had been helping the NSA, but since
Snowden blew the lid off the whole enterprise, they now have decided to try to do
something about it.

It was the same story for the Obama
Administration,
which before Snowden’s disclosures, had been issuing false statements about
what the NSA wasn’t doing. James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National
Intelligence (DNI), said that it wasn’t
true that
the NSA collected data on hundreds of millions of Americans, while General
Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, denied at least fourteen
times
that the Agency intercepted any American’s e-mails, texts, and other electronic
communications. Both claims were false.

Disclosing
this secret information transformed Snowden’s life. He now lives in Moscow,
unable to leave Russia for fear of arrest. Without political asylum, he faces extradition
to the US and a prosecution that threatens a long jail sentence, if Chelsea Manning’s
term of 35 years is any yardstick. Snowden seems to have anticipated this. In an
interview
with Greenwald, he said: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

He has
forsaken his future and his liberty for the sake of democratic values,
transparency, and freedom.

The
official argument against Snowden is that his disclosures actually make it more
likely that the next terrorist attack succeeds. Responsible members of our
intelligence establishment have testified that terrorists are more able to
evade detection because they have learned, via Snowden, some of our “sources
and methods”. Most of their testimony is vague. And few specific
instances are cited in which Snowden’s information was harmful.

And
it all begs the central question of whether heroic efforts to minimize the risk of terrorist attack at home,
which comes with the steady erosion of individual rights, is worth the cost to
the American people. 

Our
government, probably with good intentions, has directed an unprecedented
expansion of the surveillance state, bending America’s laws and violating some
of our most deeply held values. Even after all of Snowden’s revelations, there is no assurance that anything
meaningful will be done by the Obama Administration to protect the zone
of privacy in which all (or most) of us believe we have the right to live. Here
is a brief reminder of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Please reread it and tell us who deserves to be in prison:

That
most Americans sit silently by and allow this to continue at the cost of their personal
liberty and ultimately, of that of their children as well, is a disgrace.

Naming
Snowden as POY won’t, by itself, change what happens in Washington and other
capitals. Particularly if it is only the Wrongologist and The Guardian that give him the honor.

Being
named Time’s POY would send a
message that the main stream American media recognize the contribution he has
made, and the importance of the issues he has raised.