March 29, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE INCOME CHASM

Newly released tax data shows income disparities in the United States at their highest levels since 1928. The Bush administration tries to claim these disparities aren't due to their tax cuts--oh no--but to changes in technology. The top 300,000 income earners collectively made as much as the bottom 150 million of us. There's something very wrong with this picture. And it's not as though the living standards for most of us are rising. To the contrary, most of us are losing ground. This article by David Cay Johnston is at www.nytimes.com:

The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.

Prof. Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley, economist who analyzed the Internal Revenue Service data with Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, said such growing disparities were significant in terms of social and political stability.

“If the economy is growing but only a few are enjoying the benefits, it goes to our sense of fairness,” Professor Saez said. “It can have important political consequences.”

Last year, according to data from other sources, incomes for average Americans increased for the first time in several years. But because those at the top rely heavily on the stock market and business profits for their income, both of which were strong last year, it is likely that the disparities in 2005 are the same or larger now, Professor Saez said.

REPUBLICANS EFFORT TO SUPPRESS VOTE

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Then an amendment to the Constitution prohibited discriminating against anyone in the United States on the basis of race. But segregation continued until the 1960's. Dr. Martin Luther King and others led the way toward desegregation. But Republicans liked it better in the good old days when the votes of African-Americans and the poor could be suppressed. Some groups just don't like Republicans for some reason. The scandal that is exploding over the firing of U. S. Attorneys is very much tied to Republican efforts to suppress the votes of poor and minority voters. This article by Joseph D. Rich is at www.latimes.com:

Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.

It has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.

At least two of the recently fired U.S. attorneys, John McKay in Seattle and David C. Iglesias in New Mexico, were targeted largely because they refused to prosecute voting fraud cases that implicated Democrats or voters likely to vote for Democrats.

This pattern also extended to hiring. In March 2006, Bradley Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo. Two weeks earlier, the administration was granted the authority to make such indefinite appointments without Senate confirmation. That was too bad: A Senate hearing might have uncovered Schlozman's central role in politicizing the civil rights division during his three-year tenure.