Wealth Distribution in the USA:Worse than we Imagine... Much Worse!

A revealing video with only the fault that its dismissal of socialism as equality of income is propagandist and not true. Socialism means "from each according to their ability to each according to their work", but with a much more equitable distribution of wealth than under capitalism, and so approximating more to what the film depicts as the average US citizen's idea of an ideal distribution.

Middle Class Support for Welfare Goes Up When They Feel at Risk Themselves!

Three researchers from Yale and Ohio State University, Philipp Rehm (Ohio State), Jacob S Hacker and Mark Schlesinger (Yale) examined attitudes to welfare policies within the US and across 13 other countries. The researchers surveyed people’s support for unemployment insurance across 13 nations (Portugal, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Germany, Australia, United Kingdom, United States). They then surveyed US residents alone on their support for specific social policies within the United States and asked people to assess major economic risks—both their level of worry about them and their level of expectation that they themselves would experience them. Rehm said:

We also probed their attitudes about spending on existing programs, the role of government relative to the private sector in providing economic security, and hypothetical social programs that could be created to deal with major economic risks. Our research all produced highly consistent results across nations and within the US.

They found that support for welfare policies goes up when economic difficulties strike higher up the social scale. Popular support gets broader and opinion less polarized. Where the risk of unemployment or other misfortune threatens mainly people already on low incomes and at the bottom of the social scale, opposition to the welfare state among the generally better off is strongest. When, in times of widespread recession, that threat begins to climb the social ladder, support for welfare policies tends also to migrate up the ladder and to widen out among a larger proportion of the population.

Economic events that make better off people feel insecure are likely to reduce their traditional opposition to welfare. This has the effect of raising a nation’s average support for welfare intervention as those who normally perceive themselves as self sufficient feel at greater risk of losing jobs, homes and other major fundamentals of life.

Conversely, when economic hardships strike only those who are generally on low incomes most of the time, opposition to the welfare state remains strong higher up the social scale. It takes a more widespread misfortune, such as national or global recession, to shift attitudes. The paper says:

To create cross class coalitions—that is, a wider proportion of the population supporting the welfare state—risks have to broaden in reach, not just deepen in impact on the already disadvantaged.

The conclusion is that a broad coalition of support across the social divide is necessary for welfare states to survive:

There seems little question that welfare states cannot long swim in a sea of public hostility, that widespread support is a necessary condition for their sustenance.

It seems a patently obvious conclusion, but says nothing about why people should be so opposed to welfare when the research shows they turn to supporting it when they themselves feel insecure. Welfare is a security net! Remove the net and it is missing when you need it. In other words, it is common sense to want to have a security net, and there is no time better than the present to prove it.

The middle classes, for the first time in several generations, are beginning to realize that they too can feel the need for security when the ruling class starts to pull the snug rug of middle class complacency from beneath them, for the smug rug includes the safety net. For that reason the agents of the ruling class, supposedly democratically elected governments of get rich quick opportunists, will squeeze the blood from the underclasses before they will squeeze anything from the middle class.

The point of Rawls's “Veil of Ignorance” is to put everyone in the situation of not knowing where in society you will end up. If you know you are wealthy and are complacent about your position in society, then you will not care a hoot what happens to your neighbours. If you consider that you might end up poor or disabled, whether by misfortune or bad judgment, then you will insist upon society providing the welfare safety net that you will need to keep you alive and perhaps sane. Quit apart from that, though, which is still an argument from self interest, people in putatively Christian societies ought to have sufficient compassion for the poor and disadvantaged to want to have them protected.

There is a final reason for welfare, another selfish reason for the middle classes, and that is the need for everyone to have some money to spend. In a hierarchical society like western societies, money has to be injected at the base. It is then inevitably spent by the poor on their necessities, and someone has to supply those needs—small shopkeepers and services, or people employed at the lowest level of supermarkets and service industries. That money therefore moves up. The “trickle down” idea is manifestly nonsense, because the rich spend their money wherever in the world they like, and mostly not in western supermarkets!

It is therefore in the best interests of everyone to support the welfare state. Any of us not at the top of the heap might need it, and all of us do need it for society to work properly. It also ensures that we are doing the most honorable thing, and that is caring for the welfare of the least in our society. That alone ought to be sufficient when people like to claim to be Christian.

Impose a Supertax to Recoup the Money Robbed from our National Treasuries

After the UK bank bailouts in 2007-8, which the National Audit Office said emptied the British exchequer by almost a trillion pounds, UK Labour Chancellor, Alistair Darling, said the banks were henceforth to show restraint, and boasted of the 50 percent supertax he had imposed on bankers’ bonuses. Actually, it was a one-off payroll tax that would only raise £550 million—about 0.06 percent of the money the robbers had received. The bleating professional defenders of the City called it a fresh attack on that sacred institution, but nothing is being said about it now that banks are rewarding their executives, like Stephen Hester of RBS, for that staggering robbery of the treasuries of all the leading capitalist countries, leaving everyone except the ruling junker class tantamount to being bankrupt.

The measure, feeble and ineffective as it was, would prompt defections from the City, the publicity lobbyists claimed. All of these bankers can, apparently, get immensely rewarding jobs anywhere else in the world, and now they shall! It is their own propaganda, though doubtless, like all greedy opportunists, they believe it. And Darling said the banks would actually pay the bonuses tax, so the burden again falls on us, guileless slaves of the rich, whether it is through the exchequer or through the banks that we are robbed. John Whiting, tax policy director of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, immediately warned that the banks would find ways around the tax!

Bonuses are only part of the problem. Income tax is not merely unfair, it is regressive—the richer you are, the less you pay. One of the very richest men in the USA, Warren Buffett, has openly admitted that his tax rate (18 percent) is lower than that of his lower class secretary (30 percent). Can anyone deny that it is grossly unfair that the rich should pay less national tax than those who are much poorer? How is it possible? When income tax was introduced temporarily in 1842, even Queen Victoria paid it. The monarchy later, when it became a normal feature of government funding, was excused it. But in 1992, the British Queen volunteered to pay it again—no doubt with some persuasion—but hoping to gain popularity at a time when monarchy was under criticism.

In 1909, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, set income tax at 9d (9 pence) in the pound (3.75 cents in the dollar), for incomes less than £2,000, which amounts to about £160,000 at 2012 values. He set a higher rate of 12d (one shilling, or 5 percent) for incomes above £2,000, and an additional “surtax” or “supertax” of 6d (another 2.5 percent) on the amount by which incomes of £5,000 (£400,000 today) or more exceeded £3,000 (£240,000 today). This scheme, applied today, would mean rich people simply pay tax, not supertax, on earnings up to £240,000, but would owe the exchequer £4,000 as soon as they earned £400,000. Effectively, the rich would experience a hike in tax of just 1 percent of their income when they went through the £400,000 barrier, hardly a backbreaking jump. As things stand, the megarich would simply hire top accountants, lawyers and lobbyists to ensure the nation never gets the money they owe it, if everyone else does! But, if this sudden hike were sufficiently large, and avoidance and evasion of it were treated strictly as criminal, banks and corporations would not be inclined to overpay directors, and they would not want to recieve more than the limit and suffer the penalty of the tax barrier.

Republicans brag that, when they took Congress in 1994, they lowered taxes creating an improvement in the economy, and higher tax revenues. Since then they have perpetually called for the same strategem, even though the improvement they boasted of was short lived. What they want is lower taxes for the rich, but it is cutting taxation of the poor and middle classes that improves spending, business transactions, and ultimately the economy as a whole. Money rises like a gas through the classes of any capitalist society like ours, it does not trickle down like water, at least, if it does, it does not trickle down at home where it is needed!

Time series suggest that governments resist raising tax from the rich except in crises. Then they have sometimes lifted taxation into the supertax category of over 90 percent. When this is done, the revenue is fed in at the base of the economy in public projects and better benefits, lifting spending power at the base and thereby stimulating the economy throughout by the multiplier effect—the way each dollar or pound is spent over and over again, once someone poor gets it to spend in the first place, and the way an initial expenditure triggers further ones, like a tin of paint for the front door stimulating the decoration of the rest of the house, which now looks shabby, then new furniture, and with fresh aspirations, a new car, a new home, and so on. It is Keynesianism. It works! So, taxing the richest boosts the economy. Reducing taxes on the rich induces them to accumulate more capital which they regretably are too often ready to invest overseas for even better profits. Meanwhile, our own economy is deprived of liquidity and unemployment and poverty rise. Tax rates for the richest were being cut until 1928, but they failed to stop, and arguably exacerbated the Great Crash of 1929 and the following long depression, ended only by WWII. Our situation today is frighteningly similar.

Curiously, considering that the upper classes in the USA—not to mention many of the middle classes too, albeit perhaps influenced too much by patriotic propaganda—constantly demand foreign wars, the top rates of income tax go up while wars are being fought and afterwards when their costs have to be met. In WWI, the top US rate of income tax reached 77 percent, but in the aftermath of WWII it went as high as 94 percent. The US Right Wing, who bleat their propaganda line that Obama is a “commie” when he is not being a Moslem or a Satanist, would be certain that supertax equates to communism. Yet it has inevitably preceded the US economy picking up, so that the supertax was soon lifted. Perhaps too soon. UK supertax was lifted in 1973, but replaced by rates of income tax progressiing from zero for the very poorest to much higher levels for the rich, albeit falling short of a supertax. Maybe now, it should be a permanent feature of the modern capitalist state.

HM Revenue and Customs (UK) claims that twice in the post-war years, special tax rates have pushed income tax above 100 percent. Sad parasites of other people’s work received unearned income from stocks and shares, and apparently paid the taxman more than they earned. They must have been Warren Buffets living in cardboard boxes under railway arches. It is a highly dubious calculation which must assume that the different rates are applied additively. They were not. Some rates were either/or, not both in succession. No wonder the tax men leave the calculations to each of us ourselves to submit via self assessment. The people who do pay rates of over 100 percent are the poorest—those on benefits who lose all of certain benefits when they earn above certain levels of income. Unless the increase in income exceeds that lost by loss of benefits, income declines, so the effective tax rate of such poor people is over 100 percent. This is very common indeed, and explains why many people give up looking for work.

When a nation is divided into two contending classes, both cannot have their own way. Democracy is meant to ensure the majority rules, subject to its laws not oppressing the minority, but, for that, it has to be fair. It is not fair when one section owns all the media, and the rich can do that through their wealth. The American paranoia about socialism leads ordinary Americans to accept the rich man’s propaganda, and support the rich man’s interests contrary to their own. So that when sensible policies are proposed the people are confused by those who want a less practicable and more greedy policy, so that what emerges is precisely the wrong kind—acquiescence in wasteful policies, such as militarism and imperialism, rather than taking steps in the right direction.

The British Labour Party has exactly the same problem. Beguiled by Blairism and topped up in the Blair years with careerists and opportunists, it is quite incapabale of taking the right decisions. Even though the Con Dem coalition is on shaky ground, and the people are sick of the succession of Thatcherite policies over the last thirty years by successive governments, the Labour leadership is tied to its outdated mode of thinking—deregulated neo-liberalism—when something new, and actually left wing is needed in the face of the bankers and the junkers.

The 30 Year War Against The American Dream: Henry Schoenberger

Henry Schoenberger, the author of How We Got Swindled By Wall Street Godfathers, Greed and Financial Darwinism, subtitled The 30 Year War Against The American Dream, points out that the OWS protests simply display the plethora of anger around in the USA. The level of poverty is now at its highest level ever—the poor are angry. The successful elderly planning on retirement after a lifetime of hard work are being hit—elderly retirers are angry. Young entrepreneurs, the foundation of our future economy, and those in their prime, whose enterprise should be creating new jobs to give a living to ordinary folk and a first step to the young—even many of those are angry.

Capitalism, as an economic philosophy, is only 200 years old, based as it is on the book by Adam Smith (1723-1790), the title of which is always given now as The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. The United States declared its independence that same year.

Since then, the abuse and misuse of Capitalism has paralleled the use and abuse of Democracy.

Henry Schoenberger

Smith is often presented by right wing libertarians, Republicans, neoliberals, and assorted conservatives as the model entrepreneurial hero. Yet, he first held the chair of logic at Glasgow University, and then in 1752 became its chair of moral philosophy. So he was really one of those timeserving wasters lolling around a university with students and living off someone else's hard earned income! That, at least is how the right wing regard university teachers and research workers.

In 1759, he wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments about the standards of conduct that hold society together, explaining how benevolent human motives and activities lead to a society beneficial for all, and thereafter a virtuous circle. Adam Smith had a lifelong interest in the value of morality for the public good. In his book, The Wealth of Nations, he expressed a belief that allowing the entrepreneur to pursue his own interest essentially unfettered would lead to the betterment of all because it would lead to the better use of resources, including time. He never imagined that his theories could be so distorted by the ultra rich cornering one particular resource to the detriment of most of the rest of us—money!

Darwin published his book on the Origin of Species 85 years after The Wealth of Nations, and, although most Protestant pastors in the USA and their theologians who run the Republican Party cannot now abide the thought of evolution, for the first century of so they loved it. The survival of the fittest was a perfect expression of capitalism. So Darwin's theory applied even within human society. It was not restricted only to the wild.

This extension of Darwinism into society was dubbed “Social Darwinism”. It even made it respectable for the protestant churches to abandon Christianity—Christ blessed the poor and damned the rich—but now Social Darwinism made it clear, they thought, that God meant the rich were blessed and the poor were damned! It was a creed that was soon attacked by social scientists, and began to fall into disrepute. Reaganomics and deregulation revived it.

We all need to know a little about economic theories to understand the fallacious arguments advanced today for unfettered greed. For thirty years after WWII, the rate of growth of the incomes of rich and poor were broadly the same. John Maynard Keynes, before the War had shown how economies can be controlled by regulation, such as using taxation to slow down growth when the economy was overheating, and feeding back into feeble economies some of the tax take to boost spending during recessions. It worked wonderfully well.

Controlling self interest worked for decades in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The top tax bracket went up to 90% and still the ultra rich survived, but so did our middle class and our society was not demoralized. There was enough concern on both sides of the aisle to pass Civil Rights legislation and CEOs did not earn more than 40 times the average wage in their industry.

Henry Schoenberger

Interestingly, it was a closer match to Adam Smith's teaching than libertarian capitalists like to admit. Smith knew that regulation was sometimes necessary, and did not pretend otherwise. He believed that once the boundaries were suitably set, and the operators accepted them, then they would work to better themselves and society as a whole through the so called “invisible hand”. The trouble is, when things work well, smug, greedy people always want to try their luck at extending the conditions to their advantage.

That is what Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK tried in the 1980s. In what was imagined as an economic “Big Bang”, a bonfire of the regulations was arranged on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberalism became the watchword, and Social Darwinism was born again. Survival of the fittest became survival of the richest. In the last thirty years, the workers and even some middle class have lost income, the better off middle classes have maintained theirs, and the rich have multiplied their riches several fold!

In 1776, Adam Smith could not have seen that unregulated Wall Street financiers enjoying tariff free transfer of money anywhere in the world could manipulate markets and the rewards they had from them to the advantage of themselves as a new Brahman class in the supposedly classless western societies. Greed became endemic. Like the living dead they sucked the economic life blood—money—from the middle and working classes. The insatiable greed and selfishness of the rich has killed millions and millions of jobs, people's savings, their livelihoods and increasingly their lives, quite contrary to the ideas of the capitalists' holy book, The Wealth of Nations, by their innocent prophet, Adam Smith. Henry Schoenberger sums up:

Wall Street is a problem because for 30 years it has practiced innovative financial investment at the expense of our economy. Wall Street has turned away from real investment based on innovation for capital formation to create jobs to benefit our economy. Wall Street Trojan megabanks are a major part of the problem.

Government ought not to be the problem because it is the role of government to regulate, to ensure that the balance of society and its economy are right. Our governments neither guard the public good nor the public. The politicians lack all morality themselves, themselves infected with the zombie infection endemic among the rich and aspirants to riches, with the taste for more and more blood, salivating at the thought of more victims, us, and more dollars, ours.

Schoenberger points out that Goldman has inveigled the government at the highest level for three decades. The OWS movement should demand the removal of any Wall Street executive from any important government post, and equally that government servants should be banned from transferring their allegiance to Wall Street until 10 years after leaving government. Consulting and “Atlantic Bridge” style “charities” and think tanks should be illegal as soon as they get near to government in any direct way, or even indirectly, if the influence can amount to bribery, or any similar illegal approach. That applies too to lobbying, nothing more than approved bribery.

High Street deposit banks must be severed from the high risk investment banks. Bonuses should be illegal. As compensation they must be treated as pay and seriously taxed. Taxes must reflect the reality that 1 percent has 40 percent, so that taxation is at least fair by percentage, and preferably progressive, so that richer people should pay a higher percentage. If a rich man faced with a 60% tax rate gets a rise of $1 million, are we seriously to believe he would refuse to work rather than receive $400,000 after tax.

Schoenberger concludes it “is the time for a movement to kick out all members of congress who vote against jobs! And stop wall street godfathers from taking advantage of the 99% who do not practice unbridled greed!”

The News Media Help Us Understand the Wall Street Demonstrations

Posted originally by COMIC

Americans Get More Antisocial as the Meanness of Capitalism Registers

Sociality is essential to humanity. It is the feeling of care and concern that people have towards each other, and is a deep instinct within us from the time when we lived for several hundred thousand years in small groups which gave us the advantage over fiercer animals that eventually made us king of the jungle and of the world. The instinct to work in small groups is still with us, but is getting weaker:

There is a lot of evidence that our democracy is based on having citizens connected with one another. When we connect with one another in associations we learn that our self interest is actually connected to the interests of others. That gives us a conception of the public good, common identity, and sense of common responsibility as a nation and as citizens. Any decline in that scholars see as potentially detrimental to democracy.

Pamela Paxton

Pamela Paxton is a sociology professor and Population Research Center affiliate from The University of Texas at Austin. She and Matthew A Painter II, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wyoming, used the Iowa Community Survey and the General Social Survey to explore the changing nature of voluntary association membership between 1994 and 2004, using responses from approximately 10,000 citizens in 99 small towns in Iowa, as well as a national sample of the United States population. They compared active members, who regularly attend local meetings, to checkbook members who do not attend any meetings and whose only requirement for membership was likely just to write a check.

Small town Iowans on average actively participated in about a quarter fewer associations in 2004 than they did in 1994. Active participation in recreational groups declined the most at 6 percent. The smallest declines in participation occurred for church and political/civic associations. Church participation declined by 3.5 percent, and active memberships in political and job related groups declined by 2 percent, the latter decline being less because 2004 was a presidential election year.

Overall, the evidence from Iowa suggests not only declining membership in general, but also a shift in how members participate in voluntary organizations. All categories show small but significant checkbook membership of all categories, except one which remained level, increased 1 to 1.6 percent. Paxton said:

Even if we thought these checkbook memberships were equivalent to being actively involved in an organization, the decline in the active associations is greater than any increase we are getting in checkbook memberships.

Paxton said scholars are still trying to understand the decline, but if it is happening in small towns in Iowa, the heartland of America, she expects the declines may be even more drastic elsewhere in country. Potential explanations for the shift from active to passive participation include:

• communities have less neighborhood interaction
• commutes are longer
• television and computer gaming inhibit interaction
• generational differences.

Academics have to think of the sources of their funding and therefore are often timid in expressing conclusions that funding bodies do not like. The fact is that capitalism is based on the ruthless exploitation of your neighbor, everyone wants to join the rich man’s club, and capitalism is supposed to be the way to the American dream, trust disappears, neighborliness and sociality seem old fashioned in the increasingly harsh America. People withdraw to their tellies and computers. Turn to any political forum and you find the defenders of the system, people who are doing all right out of it, and many, like these, who are plainly exasperated by unemployment, hardship, uncertainty, unfriendliness:

1. interactions between people now always have the motive of profit
2. the reality of commercial competition is that anything goes, to win
3. a monetarist system always breeds distrust
4. employers always have some angle or con going even against their own employees—I’m sick of it
5. the system of government and economics is designed for people to screw one another
6. I don’t trush anybody any more—I haven’t found one person worth trusting
7. poor people are disposable, there are so many of them they don’t individually matter
8. societies with large impoverished classes soon acquire repressive means of state control of those populations—the USofA used terrorist threats to set up more repressive mechanisms
9. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who isn’t some sort of con artist or predator or something—to hell with them
10. our country became great is because we wanted it to help the poor and the elderly
11. it is unfairness that is ruining the country—how does a corporation making billions in profits not pay taxes and get government disbursements every year?
12. tax dollars should help our communities not fund foreign wars and corporation bribes—decent government gives us back the tax we pay in better community services, benefits for our people out of work, community projects that create jobs, and community education, then interaction will grow
13. it is a sick society that keeps a huge prison population and pays most people peanuts for doing menial jobs like flipping burgers, but an immensely rich minority who takes everything to spend abroad—what’s fair?
14. society needs a social contract—without it, a society has no stake in its people, and is ripe for revolution.

Americans have been conditioned for decades to hate socialism, yet it simply means building a society that everyone wants to live in. It does not mean collecting tax dollars from the poor and middle classes to give to the megarich.

The six broad categories of organizations in the study were service and fraternal organizations, recreational groups, political and civic groups, job-related organizations, church-related groups, and all other groups and organizations.

LA Dodgers a Microcosm of American Society

The LA Dodgers are bankrupt. They do not have the cash to pay their employees’ wages. We are talking about a community here. The Dodgers are a baseball team much loved by its many patrons, as sports teams usually are, whether big or small. And the Dodgers are bankrupt despite recent success—they made the play offs as recently as 2008 and 2009. Why then has this catastrophe engulfed the team? Andrew Gumbel of the UK Observer has explained it.

The fact is that the owner of the team has sucked them dry for his own aggrandisement. It should be a lesson for Americans, especially those who persistently defend the mega rich, people whom they do not know and never will, and people who are richer than they can ever imagine—America’s plutocrats, the corrupt and greedy rich.

Frank McCourt, not the deceased Irish novelist but a car lot magnate, bought the team and bled it dry to support a life of luxury for himself and his family. McCourt bought the Dodgers from News Corp, who had used it to build up a regional sports network. To do it, McCourt borrowed $150m from Bank of America, $75m from Major League Baseball and $196m from Fox, so he had not spent a penny of his own money.

McCourt then sliced off what was most profitable, the stadium car park and the ticket office as his own operations, which charged the Dodgers rent, and, in turn, giving McCourt security to borrow more dollars. He paid himself $5m a year, his wife, Jamie, $2m pa as chief executive, and their two children $600,000 each—one was a student at Stanford University and Goldman Sachs employed the other. McCourt also enjoyed a private jet and four luxurious houses in Hollywood and Malibu. In typical robbing financier style, the money and debt were spread among, and constantly moved between McCourt’s shell companies and subsidiaries to hide what was going on.

And what was going on was that the assets of the team were being stripped and moved into the personal accounts of a single family and a few hangers on.

Yes, it ought to be a lesson for the average American, whether poor and unemployed or middle class and imagining that they are well off. You just do not have a clue, especially you Tea Partiers taken in by rich men’s stunts to keep you on side. The invisible über rich of the USA are taking you all for the same sort of ride as McCourt took the community that supported the LA Dodgers. They are robbing you silly, and too many of you are defending them!

You cheer because they are sending your boys to distant lands to get maimed and killed, and they make money out of armaments and the vast support industry of the military-industrial complex that supports it. Often you don’t even get a badly paid job out of it. They manufacture more and more abroad in low cost countries. You lose your jobs, or the threat is used to keep wages down or to get concessions from the city and the state treasury, and all of it goes into pockets just as McCourt’s did. You don’t know what is going on because they are like McCourt experts in hiding it, and have a gigantic publicity service called the media to feed you anything to keep you confused and divided.

Get real! You Yankees are like the Dodgers fans—being conned!

Prejudice Adversely Affects How Americans Judge their President

A University of Delaware psychology post graduate student, Eric Hehman, who specializes in intergroup relations focuses on prejudice and discrimination, and recently received a national research award for his work on it. The national award was won for his work on what characteristics of a person caused others to remember or forget having seen their face before. He found that people tend to recognize members of their own racial group better than those of different races, though they are better still at recognizing people of any race when they are considered similar to them in some other way, like being students of the same alma mater.

Following from this, Hehman noticed that the criticisms of Obama seemed to go beyond the kinds of criticisms that are commonly heard about presidents’ policies. He particularly noticed that rumors of doubts about Obama’s birth certificate, his religion and allegations that he was corrupting children with a socialist agenda and seemed not strictly based in reality. Hehman said:

I found these controversies fairly strange and wondered if the impetus behind them was rooted in racism, manifesting and rationalizing itself in accusations of Obama’s “un-Americanism”. Some of professor Gaertner’s previous work had dealt with similar issues of unintentional racial biases influencing behavior, often without the person even being aware of their biases. So investigating this with regard to Obama was a natural step.

Hehman’s hypothesis was that whites’ racial prejudices influenced how American they thought Obama was, and affected how they judged his presidential performance. Hehman predicted that whites would be the only group in which such racial prejudice would affect their judgements of performance, and that it would affect only their judgements of the president because he was black. He hypothesized that when whites judged Vice President, Joseph R Biden Jr, or when African Americans judged either Obama or Biden, racial prejudices would have no affect.

The paper describing the study, “Evaluations of Presidential Performance: Race, Prejudice, and Perceptions of Americanism”, appeared in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. UD professor of psychology Samuel Gaertner was Hehman’s adviser and co-author.

Hehman asked about 300 white and black members of the UD community to judge the success in office of either Obama or Biden. He said:

Our predictions were supported. Whites who were racially prejudiced against blacks saw Obama as “less American” and subsequently rated him as performing more poorly as president. Non-prejudiced whites, and both prejudiced and non-prejudiced blacks, did not do so. Additionally and importantly, this relationship was only found with Obama, and not in evaluations of Biden.

Racial prejudice among some white Americans—even though unintentional—influences their views of President Barack Obama’s “Americanism” and how well he is performing in office. Hehman hoped his paper would cause readers to see that:

…even among people who think themselves unprejudiced, unconscious racial prejudices could manifest themselves with important outcomes, such as evaluations of the leader of our country. I hope they examine their opinions and behaviors, both political and otherwise, to ensure they are based on a steady foundation of fact, rather than racial uncomfortability or prejudice.

Houston, a Glimpse into America’s More Caring Future?

The 2011 Kinder Houston Area Survey took in a representative sample of 750 Harris County residents—including 240 respondents contacted by cell phone. The University of Houston administered the survey. Survey author, Stephen Klineberg, co-director of the Kinder Institute and professor of sociology, said:

Houston is where America’s four major ethnic communities—Anglos, Asians, blacks and Latinos—meet in more equal numbers than almost anywhere else in the country. The challenges and opportunities of creating a more unified and inclusive multiethnic society will be seen here first.

As a city at the forefront of the country’s demographic revolution, Klineberg thought that Houston offers a glimpse into America’s future, and the survey’s assessment of the city may offer important lessons for strengthening the rest of the country:

• create policies that moderate the inequalities
• nurture a far more educated workforce
• develop cities into environmentally and aesthetically appealing destinations
• empower all members of a multiethnic society.

Though Texas is a red state traditionally wanting less government, a majority of Houstonians today (52 percent) said that government has a responsibility to help reduce the inequalities between rich and poor in America (up from 45 percent in 2009). This year 48 percent said that “government should do more to solve our country’s problems” (up from 36 percent in 1996). 72 percent of respondents thought most poor people in the US today are poor because of circumstances they can’t control (up from 68 percent in 2007, and 52 percent in 1999). Although 86 percent agreed “if you work hard in this city, eventually you will succeed”, 67 percent also think “people who work hard and live by the rules are not getting a fair break these days”.

Respondents are a bit more upbeat in their personal economic outlooks—26 percent (up from 20 percent in 2010) report improving personal financial conditions—but remain pessimistic about the long term national prospects—only 31 percent (down from 43 percent in 2007) believe that young people will eventually have a higher standard of living than adult Americans today:

Houstonians feel that the bleeding has stopped, but a robust recovery is not yet on the horizon.

Stephen Klineberg

78 percent disagreed with the statement “A high school education is enough to get a good job”. The percent of people who spontaneously mentioned education when asked to name the biggest problem facing people in Houston jumped to 7.6 percent this year from just 1.7 percent in 2009 and 2 percent in 2010:

There’s a new awareness that this is now a high tech, knowledge based economy and there aren’t many good jobs for people without a college education. Education is more important than ever. Long gone are the days when you could get a job out of high school, work hard and make enough money until you retire. The resources of the knowledge economy are not found in factories, they are situated between the ears of the best and brightest, who can live anywhere.

Klineberg

Public support for new initiatives to improve the quality of life in Houston has remained firm or grown stronger across the 30 years of the survey. Area residents support measures to enhance the city’s green spaces and bayous, revitalize and preserve urban centers and improve air and water quality.

Though most respondents (52 percent) said they would prefer to live in a single family residential area, a large minority (45 percent) would choose an area with a mix of homes, shops and restaurants. In 2010, 41 percent said they’d prefer a smaller home within walking distance of shops and workplaces, rather than a single family home with a big yard “where you would need to drive almost everywhere you want to go”.

Asked how they would feel if a close relative of theirs wanted to marry a non-Anglo, 8 percent of the Anglo respondents this year said they would disapprove, down from 13 percent in 2002 and 23 percent in 1995. Among the Anglo respondents under the age of 30, 93 percent said they would approve of such intermarriage, compared with 69 percent of those 60 or older. Seventy percent of Anglos under 30, but only 35 percent in the older group, said that the increasing immigration into this country today mostly strengthens American culture. 73 percent of the younger respondents, compared with 52 percent of those 60 or older, said they are in favor of granting illegal immigrants a path to legal citizenship if they speak English and have no criminal record.

So, older Houstonians’ attitudes toward diversity, which will continue growing rapidly, are in conflict with younger Anglos more comfortable with the demographic trends.

Bonuses and Distribution of Wealth in the UK

UK society, like the US, is skewed horribly in favour of the rich and against the poor. Some 53 of the UK’s richest 1,000 are billionaires. The wealth of these 1000 people has increased from £98.99 billion in 1997 to £335.5 billion today. Over the past 12 months, they got richer by an incredible 29 per cent. Despite the worsening economic situation, this is the largest annual increase in the wealth of this rich minority. What these figures show is an increasingly unequal society that has enriched the already megarich at our expense. The amount of gross domestic product (GDP, annual national production) dedicated to wages and salaries has declined over the past three decades. There is no way that such a distribution of wealth can be said to favour the common good.

The injustice of wealth distribution is in need of urgent debate. Why is the argument for higher taxation on the highest earners continually rejected out of hand? If the country wants better services then they have to be paid for. It is not possible to have something for nothing. And those who earn the most—and usually have got most out of the system—should pay more tax. Justice should be applied to the economic system by restoring higher levels of tax on those most able to pay. If they want to leave the country, then the country can put an even higher tax on any wealth they propose to take with them? Then we can say good riddance to bad rubbish, and let our youth have the chances they are now being denied.

In 1976, wages and salaries accounted for 65.1 per cent of GDP, this had reduced to 52.6 per cent by 1996, a time when the wealth of the richest 1,000 increased threefold. But society took a fairer proportion of that wealth increase. Levels of taxation were far higher on the rich. Tax rates above 80 per cent on those earning the most were not uncommon. Society was more equal and cohesive as a result. Reagan’s pandering to the megarich demands for tax cutting spread to his lapbitch, Margaret Thatcher, then to Bush’s lapbitch, Tony Blair, leading to today’s gross inequality and unfairness, in imitation of the USA.

Top FTSE 100 chief executives earned 47 times median earnings in 2000 and 88 times in 2010. In the public sector the ratio is far lower, more like 12 to one. Even so, the top 1% of public officials earned an average of £120,000. Why does a senior executive need a financial incentive, when every other worker does not get them and makes do with an agree wage? Would executives refuse to work? Would a hospital director let people die if not awarded a bonus?

The Big Society is an austerity program. The coalition government cynically chants its slogan “we’re all in it together” in reducing the deficit. Yet the policy implemented cuts public services, freezes public sector workers pay, cuts jobs and reduces pension rights, while inviting billionaires from everywhere to live here untaxed! When we discover that 1,000 people in Britain now have over £300 million each, we should be seriously complaining that the entire cost of deficit reduction is falling on the poor 65 million of us. At present it is the poorest who continue to pay for the deficit while the megarich grow ever wealthier. This cannot be right.

It has been suggested that there would be no deficit at all, if the treasury recooped some of the wealth the rich have robbed us of in the last thirty of forty years. MP Austin Mitchell thinks this 1,000 people with the most wealth could yield 25 per cent of it for the sake of the economy upon which the rich depend for future wealth. It would clear £84 billion from the deficit. Another suggestion was that the top 1 percent of the richest people, about 650,000 in the UK, could give up 20 percent of their accumulated wealth, clearing the deficit all together. Note that these megarich people would still be megarich under either scheme. They would still have 75 to 80 percent of their amassed riches.

The proposals are all the more attractive because of the neglible tax that most of these people pay and have ever paid, through their use of corporate lawyers to exploit taxation loopholes, and simply defraud the exchequer. Strict taxation on the rich is a basic justice that should be implemented now. The complaint of ordinary middle class people in the late Roman empire was that their megarich paid no taxes, or simply increased rents to cover any they had to pay. Soon after, the western empire collapsed. The people preferred barbarians to their own rulers.

A recent government inquiry considered that there should be a maximum pay ratio of 20:1 between top and bottom. It was meant to be only in the public sector, but, if it was considered just, why not overall? It was a hostage to fortune even to suggest it, so it disappeared in the final report. Instead, it recommended bonuses as being fair! CEOs should have a marginal element of their pay “at risk”, subject to meeting agreed objectives. Then public services would not be offering rewards for failure.

No research has shown that bonuses improve performance, nor do firms paying them do better. Paying students to get better passes did not work. The ones who did well, did it because they enjoyed what they were doing. The same should be applied to bankers and CEOs. If they don’t like it, then let them quit and join the oridnary Joes who have to like it or survive in frugality on benefits. In any case, who would judge the CEO’s performance? A team of bureaucrats?

Schemes like this are bogus, even where performance can be measured. Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS was awarded a discretionary £16m pension pot, while he wrecked the biggest bank in the world. The package was approved by the bank’s remunerators and non-executives, his friends and associates. Directors rip off shareholders with the collusion of institutions, so they get bonuses whether good or useless. Bankers’ bonuses are the biggest because the City is a massive gang of monkeys scratching each others’ backs furiously.

Bonuses are not incentives. They are measures of greed and selfishness, and are possible because corporate leadership is no longer properly accountable. Such schemes were thought up in the 1980s to let top earners take ever larger sums of money from their companies. It was unfair, dishonest, and, for the banks, disastrous. Top executives are paid above the average to work harder and more successfully than the rest of us. If they fail, they should be fired, with no golden handshakes.

Pay should be fixed and pay scales fairly flat. The bonus anyone should get is acclaim by peers and the public for doing a good job.

Reporting from the UK Morning Star and the UK Guardian.

What Makes Working People Happier? Labor Unions!

In the UK the latest fraudster to head the government is keen to find out what makes us happy, while doing his utmost to make us unhappy by destroying the services we treasure like the National Health Service, free schooling, and a fairly neutral but certainly professional civil service. Maybe David Cameron wants to know what makes people happy so that he can all the more effectively make them miserable.

An associated project which he laughingly calls the “Big Society” while dramatically making society considerably smaller, for many of us at least, would be more appropriated called “Yet Another Big Lie” (YABL), Cameron doing his utmost, it seems, to out-Blair the Great Liar Himself, Tony Blair.

Social Psychologists know a lot about social happiness, but Cameron pretends no one knows anything about it, in an attempt to give himself kudos. One thing is certain, and that is that happiness is a relative emotion. It is popularly said that “money cannot bring you happiness, but it helps”, and that is about the gist of it.

People can be unhappy because they yearn for something, and may feel ecstatic to get it, but the pleasure quite quickly wears off, and lack of some new object or experience kicks in to make people again feel unhappy. Being wealthy removes a lot of the fears that the poor have to endure through lack of sufficient cash, but having it just leaves people open to a new desire and new unhappiness. The greedy rich simply set themselves new targets of wealth. If a media mogul owns two newspapers, he will not be happy till he has three and a TV station. Then he wants Three TV stations, and so on.

These very rich people will unquestionably be very unhappy that the ordinary Joe and Jane often want to organize into trades unions to try to safeguard the pay and conditions that they have. Good pay and conditions cost money to the corporation boss, so they are much happier, for a while, when the unions are weak, or in their pocket, or when their lackeys in Washington and London are bringing in anti-union laws. That has been the situiation recently in Wisconsin where Governor Walker suddenly realized he meant to campaign over union power, but conveniently forgot while he conned the voters, so he has just reminded himself and the electorate that he aims to trash the unions as much as he can.

University of Notre Dame political scientist, Benjamin Radcliff, calls it “a perennial ideological debate in American politics—whether labor unions are good or bad for society”. You don’t need to be a professor of poliutics to know that effective unions are good for the members and bad for the members’ employers.

Are they good for society, though? Well, if, ultimately, the unions disappeared and bargaining was entirely at the whim of the boss, most people would be far worse off, and bosses would be therefore better off, at least initially. Unfortunately for the bosses, and this is something that oddly doesn’t make many of them unhappy, when the people do not have much cash to spend, they cannot buy things and industry collapses. That ought to make the bosses very unhappy one would imagine, but too few of them are intelligent enough to realize. Only the intelligent bosses do realize this, and they are very unpopular in their own circles for being wishy washy liberals or even hard nosed socialists.

Anyway, the general upper crust view is that Joe and Jane get too much, and should have less, so that is the message of the right wing media and the right wing puppets called politicians. Most academics too go along with the popular orthodoxy, however insane it is, but not all. Some academics warned against the 2008 crash, not many, but a few, but the rest, the bosses and the politicos, ignored them as Weary Willys.

Now, according to a study co-authored by Radcliff, people who live in countries with strong labor unions were happier, regardless of whether or not they belonged to a labor union themselves. Data from several European countries as well as Japan, Australia and the US, showed that happiness in life meant happiness at work. And the dominating factor that made people happier at work was the security they felt through having a strong union to help them. Happiness relates to the density of unions in a given country. Denmark ranks near the top in both categories, but the US ranks near the bottom for happiness in all the countries studied.

Radcliff found there was a direct effect and an indirect effect of strong labor unions. Members have obvious benefits—job security, fair wages, benefits and decent hours. But for those who are not members, there is the “indirect effect”.

People who have unionized jobs like their jobs better. And that puts pressure on other employers to extend the same benefits and wages to compete with the union shops.

Not surprisngly, lower paid labor union members found more contentment through organized labor than union members on the highest salaries. It’s no coincidence that American workers have never been more dissatisfied with their jobs.

Clever employers, those interested in long term stability rather than short term greed, would encourage trades union membership. They might have to lose some excessive short term profits, but would enjoy the benefits of stability over the long term. As it is, they should look on the Middle East in fear, and wonder what they might be stirring up at home by their unshackled greed, unjust treatment of the ordinary person, and bogus democracy. That goes in the UK for Cameron’s Conservative and Liberal democratic (or ConDem) coalition. People will only put up with so much, notably when they can see that the system is blatantly unfair.

Radcliff specializes in comparative and American politics. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on the study of politics and happiness, having published articles on it in scholarly journals including the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Social Forces, and the Journal of Politics. He is author of the book Happiness, Economics and Politics.

A Better Presidential Electoral System than the US Electoral College

Americans do not elect a president. They elect representatives of their state to an electoral college totalling 538 of them distributed to each state according to the size of states’ congressional delegation, reflecting the population of each state. California has 54, New York has 33, the seven least populated states have 3 each. The District of Columbia also has 3. It is a uniquely American institution which then elects the vice president and president.

Isn’t this undemocratic? Why not have a direct election? The political controversy surrounding the Electoral College is as old as the republic. In 1969, Congress started to think so. Nixon had defeated Hubert Humphrey with a popular margin of less than 1 percent. Unlike the crookery of the hanging chads of 2000, the House of Representatives was so shocked that a successful candidate could actually be denied the Presidency that it moved a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. The Senate also inclined to support the amendment, and lawyers of the American Bar Association said the US electoral system was…

…archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous.

Electing the president by direct popular vote would be simpler and fairer. But the issue lost momentum. In 1976, Jimmy Carter’s narrow victory over Gerald Ford resurrected it. The League of Women Voters and a majority of Americans, according to pollsters, thought the electoral college should be abolished. In the Senate, although the bill had majority support, it died for lack of the two thirds majority needed to pass it.

In spite of recent contentious elections that raised the controversy to new heights, the debate is unlikely to reach a resolution given the compelling political considerations on both sides. But rarely if ever does the public debate on this subject take into account objective, mathematical considerations. Nevertheless, statisticians can make an important contribution to the debate, for mathematicians have made statistical calculations on voting issues since the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet, a French philosopher and mathematician, applied probability theory to voting. In the 1990s, Will Hively, reported that a physicist, Alan Natapoff, had proved the electoral college is better than a simple, direct election, and indeed the success of US democracy depends on it:

Everybody gets this wrong. Everybody. Because we were taught incorrectly.

Alan Napatoff

But more recently, UC Berkeley’s Elchanan Mossel, an associate professor in the departments of Statistics and Computer Science and an expert in probability theory, begs to differ. He believes this system of electing the president is more likely to result in an erroneous election outcome compared to the simple majority voting system. Mossel’s analysis compares the Electoral College system with the simple majority voting system to test how prone to error the electoral system and whether it can change the outcome.

Originally the electoral college did not have to choose the winner of the popular vote. In 1888, Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent of the popular vote and Benjamin Harrison 47.9 percent. Cleveland won by 100,456 votes. The college chose Harrison by 233 to 168. The representatives to the electoral college did not have to vote for Cleveland. They chose Harrison, so he was the winner. In 1824, Andrew Jackson beat his rival, John Quincy Adams, by more popular and more electoral votes—99 to 84. But 78 went to other candidates, so the House of Representatives picked the winner. They did not select Jackson.

In 1876, Samuel J Tilden lost to Rutherford B Hayes by one electoral vote, though he received 50.9 percent of the popular vote to Hayes’s 47.9 percent. An extraordinary commission awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes. In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the popular voting, 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent, but Nixon won 26 more states to 24 for Kennedy and others. But Kennedy had won big states, and won the electoral ballot, 303 to 219. A close popular majority had turned into a big electoral college majority.

James Madison, chief architect of the US’s electoral college, wanted to protect the people against the tyranny of the majority—a built in majority for some bloc destroying tolerance so that minorities were no longer free. Madison explained in The Federalist Papers X that a well constructed union must break and control the violence of factionalism especially the force of an overbearing majority. J S Mill explicitly warned of the same thing in his later essay On Liberty.

In any democracy, a majority’s power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives. Madison and his colleagues, having won the war of independence, wanted an electoral college to avoid internal revolutions, so built a system which made representatives of each state intermediary voters. The representatives, they expected, would be responsible middle class people, like themselves, who would vote for a president like themselves, and so stability would be guaranteed. They were aiming to stifle the “popular will”—they distrusted the mob.

Nowadays, whoever wins the popular vote in any state (except in Maine) wins all the electoral votes in that state automatically, so whole states become blue or red ones, and the large states carry more weight. The representatives to the electoral college have no independence. They must vote according to their state’s popular vote. It means that the popular vote in a few states can overwhelm many others who might dissent. Actual representatives are superfluous. Each state gets a weighted vote for the presidency based on its weighting and the popular vote in it. If the Madisonian system had any original merit by requiring candidates to win states on the way to winning the nation, it has now been neutralized into a series of popular votes, many of which matter only when the large states balance themselves out. So, the votes in small states and states which go against the trend can only matter on the odd occasions when by chance the large states neutralize each other’s votes.

Natapoff looked into the math, and convinced himself, the US electoral system increases voters’ power. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports—which Americans intuitively understand. In baseball’s World Series, the team that scores the most runs overall does not get to be champion. To do that, a team has to win the most games. In 1960, the New York Yankees scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. The Yankees won three massively (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but lost four close games. Napatoff says:

Nobody walked away saying it was unfair.

Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.

Napatoff argued that under a tyranny, everyone’s voting power is equal to zero. Equality of the vote is not enough. Mossel agrees:

Statistically, the most robust system in the world is a dictatorship. Under such a system, the results never depend on how people vote.

But since most people would prefer an alternative to dictatorship, the question is which democratic voting system will produce accurate results. To that end, Mossel compared different voting systems, including simple majority voting and the Electoral College system, both of which offer voters two alternatives to pick from.

A well designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. In a democracy, as a nation gets larger, everyone’s voting power shrinks. So, the immense size of the US electorate means everyone’s individual vote is of negligible weight, and only counts a little more when the voting in the big states turns out to be tight. In large democracies, with massive electorates, each person’s voting power in direct elections is virtually zero!

Napatoff says people are less vulnerable to tyranny when their voting power increases, and individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts—such as states—than when pooled in one large, national, direct election. Anyone's vote has more chance to determine the outcome locally, in one's state, and thereby anyone has more chance to change the outcome of the electoral college, than when one's your vote is among the many more of a direct federal election. He concludes a voter has more power under the current US electoral system.

Under raw voting in a divided society, a candidate wants to woo a bloc large enough to be the majority. In a two person or two party situation, where each party represents blocs on the right and left respectively, given that neither can expect an overall majority only from its core supporters, then both have to woo the floating voter caught between the two, usually those in the center. Some think this makes for constancy and stability, but it makes for a lot of frustration on both wings., and that is being felt today as the US polarises.

The probability that anyone’s vote will turn the election is the probability that all the other votes balance out. In a small town with 135 citizens, the probability any vote will be decisive because the others are in balance can be calculated as 6.9 percent. The 1960 presidential race between Kennedy and Nixon was one of the closest ever. A deadlock would have been 34,167,371 votes for Kennedy and for Nixon. Kennedy got 34,227,096 to Nixon’s 34,107,646. The chance of one vote being decisive is minuscule.

Unfortunately, in such a case, the electoral college system has little or no advantage. Districting never boosts voting power in close elections, the time when you hope it might. It does not help any electorate of any size when the contest is perfectly even. Doing the math shows it slightly reduces individual power. Abolition of the electoral college as it now operates would improve democracy when the votes are close.

When one party or candidate has a landslide, the electoral college, Natapoff says, strengthens the individual vote a little. For a town of 135, the notional crossover point for voting power is about a 55-45 percent split in voter preference between two candidates. In any contest closer than this, voters would have more power in a simple, direct election. In any contest more lopsided than this, district voting will give individual voters more power—but it matters less, because the result is so lopsided it cannot be affected by one vote anyway! In that town of 135 citizens, when voter preference for one candidate is 55 percent, the probability of deadlock, and of anyone's vote turning the election, falls below 0.4 percent. The probability that one vote will matter keeps on falling, as a candidate pulls further ahead. For all that math, there is less chance of changing the outcome. Natapoff says:

If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote, in 100,000 votes he’s almost sure to win. And that’s bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn’t make any difference in the outcome.

One can imagine an extreme case of district voting where every voter is in a district of their own. Plainly the district voting model becomes the same as a direct election. So extreme districting is no different from direct election, whether the voting is lopsided or close—districting cannot help when the election is heavily skewed, and, as we saw, it is no advantage when the election is close.

So, when one candidate gains an edge over another, a 1 or 2 percent change in the electoral college system hugely reduces anyone’s chance of changing an election with their solitary vote, and candidates have less incentive to keep the losers happy. We have what Madison wanted to avoid. The larger the electorate, the more telling a candidate’s lead becomes, so the best idea is not to allow large elections. That is an advantage of dividing the national election into smaller, state contests, but today the states themselves are mainly far too big for this to matter.

The United States is not a perfectly districted nation. States vary enormously in size. The more lopsided the contest, the smaller each district, or state, needs to be to give individual voters the best chance of a local deadlock. So in close elections, voters in larger states would have more power, in lopsided elections, voters in smaller states would.

Either the national electorate has to be divided into smaller sizes, preferably all nearer the same size, meaning large and intermediate states themselves have to be split into national voting districts about as big or smaller than the smallest states today, or the electorate must have a greater choice of responses. With a lot of small voting districts, the candidates have a lot more chance of losing and the voting pattern comes more into balance, and, of course, the votes count for more.

But a similar effect can be had in a single national vote by allowing voters to vote for more people, the list of candidates being opened up from just two, to several. By having an alternative vote or, better still, a single transferable vote, everyone can still vote for their preferred candidate, but they can also vote for the others in order of preference, their second and third choices, all the way down the list…or not, just as they wish. When no one has an absolute majority, the least popular candidate drops out and his second choices are redistributed, successively until there is an overall winner. The modern automatic telling machines now used in the USA makes transferable voting (STV) practicable, when once it would not have been.

Natapoff says, the point of districting is to reduce the death grip of blocs on the outcome. But small districts which the math says give a notionally better chance of a tie, so that the individual vote counts, also make it easier for a bloc of big enough size to form and dominate the election.

Mossel’s assumption is that any voting model is subject to error, meaning that the vote cast by a small number of voters in each election will end up being recorded differently from what those voters intended. This may be due to human error, hanging chads, or voting machines that flip some vote randomly.

In 1899, W F Sheppard found that majority voting has an error on a given vote of its square root. So, if the error—say a faulty voting machine—is 1 in 10,000, the chance that the result of the election will be changed is roughly the square root, or 1 in 100. In a landslide election such unfortunate occurrences make no statistical difference. But in a close election, such errors may wreak havoc, even without our knowledge. Mossel uses advanced mehtods like Gaussian analysis, and isoperimetric theory, but he finds that the answer is unequivocal:

We don’t have the best system. Isoperimetric theory tells us majority voting method is optimal. It is the most robust.

Put simply:

With Electoral College voting, in essence you’re doing majority twice. First you do majority in each state and then you do the majority of the majority, so you take the square root of the square root. So you take square root of 1/10,000 once and get 1/100, and then you take square root again and get 1/10.

The Electoral College appears to fail miserably based on the robustness to error criteria, and in comparison with direct elections. If the democratic ideal is for the outcome to reflect the intent of the voter as much as humanly possible, then the analysis suggests a change is needed. If Americans want the best electoral system, they should change the electoral college method to a direct election for president, and to try to achieve Madison's aims, should have multi candidate elections by alternative vote or preferably single transferable vote.

Civilians in War Zones and International Law

In a discussion on Civilians in War Zones, eminent Judge, Richard Goldstone, formerly of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, characterized the last century as “very bloody”. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was one civilian killed for every eight or nine soldiers. In World War II, the ratio became 1 to 1. Now, for every soldier killed, nine civilians die. The cause is the use of indiscriminate air power which pays propaganda value lip service to supposed minimization of collateral damage, a euphemism for civilian injuries, but also because of “deliberate attacks against civilians” to terrorize them.

Though we already have some excellent international court facilities, like The Hague in Holland, not all countries co-operate in making them effective, including the US, and so to deter this trend, Goldstone wants better international courts and more international co-operation to bring criminals to justice:

Our only hope is in an efficient, international system of justice&hellip [and] …an effective, coherent international system of law.

The widespread availability of pictorial evidence, from digital cameras, mobile phones and hand held movie cameras, easily transmitted from country to country by the internet offers new ways of bringing criminals to justice. He said:

There should be true equality. People’s human dignity and their right to that dignity needs to be recognized, [through] a concerted effort to implement international law.

Helen Stacy, a Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, pointed to the admirable role of the US in bringing about the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in pressing on with the Nuremberg Trials. Yet the US has fallen short of its once impressive standards in refusing to sign, for example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 194 nations have ratified this convention including all of the nations in the UN except Somalia and the US! Equally, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has only not been signed by the US.

The US has, of course, liberal forms of expression, and so notionally it is possible for citizens to raise these issues and press for them, but It is pretty plain to outsiders, if not to many people within the US system, that the fault in the system is the press and broadcast media which are overwhelmingly owned by one small section of society with a view of the world that does not favor many of these conventions, for all the past reputation of the US. The media either fail to highlight important international issues, or make light of them. Professor James Campbell, who headed Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, said:

Conversations like this are enormously important. The future of international humanitarian law is being determined.

International humanitarian law is “a constant struggle, an inescapably political struggle assailed by powerful enemies, and curiously mocked by a public that regards it as naïve, feckless, or who regard the idea of international law as an oxymoron”. Nevertheless, “the rapid expansion of international law is ongoing… Just as freedom is a constant struggle, so is international humanitarian law. It is being waged in our country, in dialogues like the one we’re having today”.

Ultimately, the skepticism about international law, will remain valid as long as the most powerful country in the deliberately stands in the way of effective implementation because it prefers to be its own law. That would be fine, if that country operated internationally by the legal and democratic principles which it is fond of citing. Instead it uses the double talk of John Foster Dulles—it always agrees in principle, while in practice putting every obstacle in the way.

Massacre of the Innocents? Flaws in US Justice

In the USA, which boasts itself the model of all justice and fairness, Cornelius Dupree, 51, had spent 30 years in jail for rape and robbery when Texas District Judge, Don Adams, said he was “free to go”—cleared of his conviction by DNA evidence. Yet just 266 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989, according to the Innocence Project, which aims to reform the use of science in the criminal justice system. That most of them are black shows the continuing racial injustice of US justice!

Black men accused of raping white women are falsely convicted than than others accused of rape, and young suspects under 18 are at greater risk of false confession than others. Capital exonerations are less common among those convicted of murdering more than two victims and those convicted of murdering children. When defendants would not confess, and vigorously asserted their innocence at trial, yet were found guilty, the rate of later exoneration is higher.

Attorney Barry Scheck, who heads the Innocence Project, said:

Cornelius Dupree spent the prime of his life behind bars because of mistaken identification that probably would have been avoided if the best practices now used in Dallas had been employed.

Critics say the US criminal justice system is riddled with injustice through bad practices and outdated science, even though modern science and technology can prevent it. The police identification lineup is grossly flawed, and has been known to be for a long time. 75 percent of all convictions proved wrong by DNA evidence start with mistaken identity by eyewitnesses. In 1979, Cornelius Dupree was himself picked out of a photo display by a rape victim. She picked the wrong man!

Brandon Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, points out that people are not as certain of details as they think, and are subject to all sorts of subtle suggestions by police, even subconscious and inadvertant ones, but also, when they want to nail a victim, deliberate ones. Garrett added:

There have now been thousands of studies with incredibly consistent results all showing that suggestion has this outsized powerful effect on eyewitness memory… Even if police are trying their best not to signal anything, the eyewitness—who may be a victim of a crime and hesitant about participating—may be looking to the police officer for reassurance and for cues and may perceive things that weren’t even intended.

The big question, in a country where tens of thousands of cases each year rely on eyewitness testimony for convictions, is “do the administrators of this ‘justice’ want to change their bad but often convenient practices?”. Some, but only a few, do. Some police departments, perhaps a few hundred, have begun to change the way they conduct lineups. One way is to have an officer not involved in the case supervising the parade. Another is to tell the witness that the suspect may not be in the lineup at all.

The same criticisms hold true for other old fashioned police methods that remain in practice even though modern day science has disproved their reliability. Michael Saks, law professor at Arizona State University, calls the pseudo science still used by the police departments “wannabe science”. It includes handwriting, fingerprints, fire and arson investigation, and even forensic dentistry.

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 for setting the house blaze that killed his three small daughters. Attorney Scheck and other legal experts engaged several fire science experts to review the evidence that convicted Willingham. They concluded the fire was not arson. University of Michigan professor Samuel Gross, said:

The problem with arson cases is that if the defendant wasn’t guilty it is not because someone else did it, it is because there was no crime!

Much US justice, especially in emotion loaded cases, is concerned with having a victim, not catching the real criminal. People want to feel exonerated that someone, anyone, has been punished for what they think is a heinous crime. A conviction will convince them the punishment is just, though they have no idea of the strength of the evidence presented.

That is so in the Lockerbie case, the destruction of an airliner for which Abdul Baset Almagrahi was convicted. The case against him is extremely thin, and looks to have been bought because it suited the US authorities to pin the outrage on to Libya. The conviction does not look just, and unless justice is seen to be done, no one should pretend it is just. Gail Jaspen, chief deputy director of Virginia Department of Forensics, says:

Evidence by itself doesn’t prove somebody’s innocence, because the (forensic science) department doesn’t have the ability to exonerate anybody. Only the court or the governor does.

So however strong the evidence, scientific or otherwise, it may not be enough, when the legal authorities, police, judges, governors, and even presidents, in international cases, already have made up their mind which outcome they favor.

The irreversibility of a death sentence, when evidence is found that undermines a death penalty, is a big argument for its abolition in civilized societies. To keep a man imprisoned wrongfully for thirty years is bad, but the man still has his life, and the state can offer some compensation for wrongful imprisonment. Bringing a dead man back to life remains impossible. Yet, the senior authorities of most states in the Union will not consider abolishing the death penalty, confident as they are it will never be used against them.

Congressmen Bail Out Firms to Protect their Own Investments

Equity ownership, stocks and shares owned by politicians, influenced their legislative and financial monitoring activities. The financial interests of politicians increased the probability that banks received bailout money, how much support these institutions received and how quickly.

Representatives’ stock ownership influenced members of the US House of Representatives to bailout the financial sector by voting for the bills HR 3997 on 29 September and HR 1424 on 3 October, 2008. In the initial vote, the likelihood of voting for the bailout was 41 percent for non-investors and 58 percent for equity owners. In the final vote, the likelihood was 55 and 69 percent respectively.

Congressional equity ownership in a given firm was also shown to affect the probability of receiving a bailout, the bailout amount and the timing of government support to that firm. Congressional committees with jurisdiction over the finance sector can affect regulatory outcomes. Equity ownership of members of these congressional committees affects bailout decisions, largely due to the powerful members in each committee, the chairs and ranking members.

Lobbying is indubitably an important means of exerting influence in politics. In the United States, campaign donations also matter. What has gone virtually unnoticed thus far though is that politicians also are investors. Part of their wealth rests with firms whose wellbeing falls under their legislative and regulatory influence.

Professor of Business Laurence van Lent of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Ahmed Tahoun of Manchester Business School (UK) drew these conclusions on the basis of an analysis of 555 publicly listed financial sector firms, 295 of which received government support under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Where is All the Money? Ask Credit Suisse Bank!

Sam Pizzigati, editor of Too Much, an online newsletter on excess and inequality, reports that the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse has issued for the first time a Global Wealth Report based on financial data from over 200 countries. It shows that total global net worth, despite the 2008 global economic meltdown, has rocketed up 72 percent since 2000. Credit Suisse sums up:

The past decade has been especially conducive to the establishment and preservation of large fortunes.

The world has more than enough wealth to ensure no one on the planet need be potless. The study shows the world has 4.4 billion adults and the total wealth they own is $194.5 trillion. Shared out, every adult in the world could have $43,800. The fact is, though, that three billion people, almost 70 percent, have less than $10,000, and 1.1 billion, a quarter of all adults, have less than $1,000. These figures are net worth, meaning their assets less their liabilities. Half the people on earth who are 20 and older have less than 2 percent of global wealth—each less than $4,000.

The world’s richest 1 percent—adults who have at least $588,000—hold 43 percent of the world’s wealth. They constitute the ruling class, the wealthiest class, and they break down as:

• just over 1,000 billionaires, with over $1000 million each
• 80,000 more super rich people worth between $50 million and $1 billion each
• 24 million more people who are millionaires worth between $1 million and $50 million.

Those wealth differences are exacerbated by the local conditions. In uncivilized societies with poor public health care, poor quality public education, and no state pensions, then the poor are hit by ill health, a miserable old age, and ignorance because they cannot afford to pay for the absent public services. Moreover, epidemics like swine flu, natural disasters, like Katrina, and unemploment are additional shocks for which the poor do not have the reserves to survive easily. In a society with the opposite conditions, a history of civilized caring governments which have provided public services and benefits then poverty does not have the stigma and practical horrors it has in poor societies.

No other nation has as much total wealth as the United States, with only 5.2 percent of the world’s population. It has 23 percent of the world’s adults worth at least $100,000 and an even greater proportion, 41 percent, of the world’s millionaires. Yet, it is a society with inadequate social services, so its people need more personal wealth to survive than people in countries like France, Sweden and Germany which have good social services.

Canada has a national public health insurance. Credit Suisse calculates the wealth of the typical Canadian family is $94,700, double the $47,771 US average. It shows that good public services add to a nation’s wealth. Public services provide jobs, and need private business suppliers, and health and pension security means people are less risk averse, and will be more inclined to start up new businesses.

Why then have we given trillions of dollars to the banks, depleting our treasuries so much that we are told we have been living too extravagantly? It is a big lie, and we ought to be taking direct action to change it. But we can do without Tea Party economics. We do not need tax cuts for the rich, we need services for the poor, paid for by taxing the rich. They can afford it, we cannot!

God or Liberty? A Fair Society, Please!

Not Freedom from Taxation, Nor Mystical Faith, but a Fair Distribution of Wealth and a Functioning Society

US religious and social history has been characterized by a periodical pulsation of religious fervor. Since the 1980s, the pulsation has been upbeat, evangelical movements and their leaders grabbing a lot of publicity and political power. These periods of religious fervency rarely last over half a century, so the latest one is probably on the wane, and the religious enthusiasts are riding the Tea Parties as if it were a religious revival. But Pulitzer Prize winner, Jon Meacham, a journalist and a historian, sees the Tea Party as “nationalistic, not moralistic”.

Tea Partyers are less concerned about the moral issues and more concerned about economic ones. It is conservative Christians who still say, “We need government to protect our morality, to protect us from ourselves”.

The myth stems from the original event in 1773, the Boston Tea Party, which was an act of rebellion against taxation without representation. The colonies were ruled by the King Georges of England and had no say in their own affairs. Three years later, the American colonies rebelled, and won independence. For Meacham:

It is liberty, less than religion, that holds us together.

S Augustine, in City of God, defined a people as “the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” The “City of God” he meant was the Christian Church, in those days, the Catholic Church, and the objects of their love were their fellow human beings, and, of course, God, in the form of Jesus Christ, who had identified himself with the meek and the downtrodden in the world. When the new Christian religion began to spread from the original Jews to gentiles in the Roman empire, it was indeed the poor and the downtrodden who responded, and a much smaller number of mainly rich women, glad to give up their legacies for salvation.

For modern American Christians none of that applies. According to Meacham, “the attack culture has subsumed everything else”. American conservative Christians, like those who supported Bush, and who are now supporting “Tea Parties” to get rid of Obama think, and like to say, that the United States is a “Christian nation”. Even many liberal Americans agree. They think the country’s founding principles are based on Christianity, through the settlement of New England by the Pilgrim fathers in 1620.

It was not the Christian ideas of the Pilgrim Fathers who initially settled in America, but the Enlightenment values of the Founding Fathers of the new republic who set out the documents that proclaimed the nature of the new political entity, and set out its founding principles, principles that still apply. Since the country’s founding, Americans have confused its defining features.

Mark McGarvie, a history professor at the University of Richmond, points out that the stress on man’s duties and responsibilities towards his fellow man, according to the teaching of Christ, was an element in the motivation of the founding of some of the early US colonies, but Christianity had nothing to say about anyone’s individual freedom. Christ had nothing to say specifically about slavery. Plainly, though, slaves fell into the category of the poor, the meek and the downtrodden, people whom Christ said were blessed, would enter the kingdom of heaven and ought to be treated like God. The man Christians treat as their God, Paul, the one they prefer to cite rather than God—Christ whom they largely ignore—told slaves to settle for their lot. Paul marginalized Christ’s emphasis on being loving and kind to each other—on works, as the New Testament calls it—by substituting for Christ’s practical teaching his own mystification, faith in God and the body of Christ!

The Declaration of Independence was based on the ideas of the Enlightenment, the teachings of Locke and Rousseau, as expressed by Jefferson and Madison. These men were also concerned with the poor and downtrodden, with the centuries of oppression people had suffered while Europe was ruled by the Church, and its hereditary nobility, who wanted the people to believe that kings were divinely appointed and had to be obeyed, even when they were wicked. It is what S—Paul taught, but not Christ.

With the rise of the merchant class of capitalists, the Feudal System of government by the nobility and royalty was doomed, but struggles were needed to put it firmly in its grave, and the American Declaration of Independence was one of the acts that established that kings were not divinely right! Instead of the divine right of kings, the Enlightenment idea was that God had nothing to do with individual rights, except that free will meant everyone was personally free in God’s own view! The Enlightenment was about protecting individual rights, in contradiction of divine rights.

Now the point of individual rights is not that everyone should do as they like, for that would be intolerable, and indeed would be quite alien to anything that Christ taught or any Christian should believe. The Founding Fathers thought that humans were primarily good to each other, and that society should allow them to prosper according to their good nature. They inscribed on the country’s Great Seal the motto “Out of many, one”. Americans were to pursue their own interests and desires with the ultimate aim of doing good not just for themselves but for a whole united society.

The other side of the US Great Seal has two mottoes, one of which announces that the birth of the USA begins a “New Order of the Centuries”, while the other is simply “It Has Favored Our Efforts”, “It” meaning Fortune or Providence, according to your religious inclination. So, although Christians will read this as being God’s Providence, and therefore God, the deists who drew up the documents could be more neutral and read it as Fortune. Even here, then, a Christian interpretation is not the only one. Deists believed in a God, but not one that twiddled with the world he made.

The conflict between the mystified Christianity of Paul and Luther, and the practical Christianity of Christ himself, filtered through the Enlightenment, existed from the outset of the USA, and there seems little to be gained in denying it. Christians nevertheless do, or they do not recognize it at all.

In modern practical terms, freedom is the freedom of the hyper rich one or two percent of the people to take the enormity of the country’s wealth that leaves the poor and even the middle classes struggling, either to stay alive or to maintain their standards. It is not social schemes like health and education, schemes that no civilized country can do without but which are being starved of sufficient cash to offer a proper service, both in the US and abroad. Christ went about curing people gratis and blessing the poor like Lazarus, the beggar, while approving the damnation of the rich, like Dives, the rich man. The greed of the minority is the real moral problem of all societies. That is what Christ taught.

It is all very simply set out in the Christian gospels but none of the evangelical crowd, who think Tea Parties are sent by God, have read or comprehend the teachings of Christ. They believe what their Republican pastors and politicians tell them, and, as Limbaugh and Beck prove, being idiotic is what the conservative Christian loves—“That’s just how I feel. Boy aren’t these guys just great!” They are too easily conned to see they are being conned! These guys are not idiots. They are! They are being taken for a ride, and the only benefactors are the Republican grandees, the mega rich, whom they think will help them by reducing taxation when all it does is leave those with the income worth taxing, better off.