Sunday, January 7, 2018
Why There Are No Viable Political Alternatives to Unbridled Capitalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7JgfB8PaAk
USA Student Loan Debt in 2017: A $1.3 Trillion Crisis
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2017/02/21/student-loan-debt-statistics-2017/#20258a415dab
Student loan debt is now the
second highest consumer debt category -- behind only mortgage debt -- and
higher than both credit cards and auto loans.
According to Make Lemonade, there are more than 44 million borrowers
with $1.3 trillion in student loan debt in the U.S. alone. The average student
in the Class of 2016 has $37,172 in student loan debt.
The latest student loan debt
statistics for 2017 show how serious the student loan debt crisis has become -
for borrowers across all demographics and age groups.
If you are a student loan
borrower, the following student loan debt statistics can help you make more
informed decisions regarding student loan refinance, student loan consolidation, student
loan repayment and student forgiveness.
Student Loan Statistics:
Overview
(As of 4Q 2016, New York
Federal Reserve)
Total Student Loan Debt: $1.31
trillion
Total U.S. Borrowers With
Student Loan Debt: 44.2 million
Student Loan Delinquency Or
Default Rate: 11.2%
Total Increase In Student Loan
Debt In 4Q2016: $31 billion
New Delinquent Balances (30+
days): $32.6 billion
New Delinquent Balances -
Seriously Delinquent (90+ days): $31 billion
High Student Loan Debt States
& Low Student Loan Debt States
New Hampshire has the highest
average student loan debt per student ($36,101) from the Class of 2015.
Utah has the lowest average
student loan debt per student ($18,873) from the Class of 2015.
In the U.S., the average student
loan debt per capita is $4,920. Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan have among
the highest student loan debt per capita in the nation.
Arizona: $4,760
California: $4,160
Florida: $4,480
Michigan: $5,330
New York: $5,570
Ohio: $5,700
Pennsylvania: $5,690
Texas: $4,510
As of 2015, more than 42
million student loan borrowers have student loan debt of $100,000 or less. More
than 2 million student loan borrowers have student loan debt greater than
$100,000, with 415,000 of that total holding student loan debt greater than $200,000.
The largest concentration of student loan debt is $10,000 - $25,000, which
accounts for 12.4 million student loan borrowers.
[…]
The 2017 ‘Are You Serious?’ Awards
Conn Hallinan
Under-reported stories from
around the world on the military industrial complex, the global class war, and
doomsday.
The Reverse WEBBY Award goes
to the Colsa Corporation — a
Huntsville, Alabama-based company that runs the multi-million dollar WebOps
program for the U.S. Defense Department. WebOps, according to Associated
Press, employs “specialists” who “employ fictitious identities and try to
sway targets from joining the Islamic State.”
But it turns out the
“specialists” aren’t fluent — they used the Arabic word for “salad” in place of
“authority.” Thus the Palestinian governing body set up by the 1993 Oslo
Accords became the “Palestinian salad” (tasty with a light vinaigrette).
Runner up is the military’s
Special Operations Forces that botched a raid in Yemen last February that got a
Navy SEAL killed and destroyed a $75 million MV-22 Osprey aircraft.
Desperate to show that the
raid gathered valuable intelligence, U.S. commanders published a video on how to make explosives that they
say was captured during the raid. Except the video was 10 years old and already
all over the Internet.
The raid also killed several
children, but the Trump administration called it “a success by all standards.”
The Little Bo Peep Award goes
to the DOD’s “Iraq Train and Equip” program that lost track of $1.6 billion worth of
weapons and military equipment — some of which might have fallen into the hands
of the Islamic State. “Sending millions of dollars’ worth of arms into a black
hole and hoping for the best is not a viable counter-terrorism strategy,”
Amnesty International researcher Patrick Wilcken modestly suggested to
the Financial Times.
The Rudyard Kipling Award also
goes to the Pentagon, for spending $28 million on new camouflage uniforms for
the Afghan Army that depict a lush forest background. The country is almost 98
percent desert.
Runner up is the British New Century Consulting contractor
hired by the U.S. for $536 million to train intelligence officers for the
Afghan Army. There is no evidence that the company did so, but New Century did
buy Alfa Romeos and Bentleys for its executives and paid six figure salaries to
employees’ relatives without any record of their doing work.
The U.S. has spent $120
billion in Afghanistan since 2002. Most of it goes to train the Afghan armed
forces, whose desertion rate is close to 35 percent, in part because the
Taliban are inflicting heavy casualties on police and soldiers.
How many casualties? Not
clear, because the Pentagon has classified those figures. “The
Afghans know what’s going on; the Taliban knows what’s going on; the U.S.
military knows what’s going on,” says John F. Sopko, the special inspector for
Afghanistan. “The only people who don’t know what’s going on are the people
paying for it.”
I suggest that readers read a
short poem by Kipling entitled “Arithmetic on the
Frontier.” Nothing’s changed.
The Marie Antoinette Award goes
to Brazilian President Michel Temer, who’s instituted a draconian austerity
regime in one of the most unequal countries in the world, while ordering more
than $400,000 in food for his
official trips. That would include 500 cartons of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, almost
a ton and half of chocolate cake, provolone, Brie and buffalo mozzarella for
sandwiches, and 120 jars of Nutella spread.
Public uproar was so great
that the order was cancelled. However, Temer did host a taxpayer-funded steak
and shrimp feed for 300 legislators in an effort to get their support for
budget cuts.
Meanwhile, Temer ally Pedro Fernandez suggested that
one way to save money on a program that feeds the poor for 65 cents a meal is
to have them eat “every other day.”
The Grinch Award had
three winners this year:
The U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) for demanding that Cambodia repay a $506 million
debt to Washington for a Vietnam War era program called Food For Peace. While
USAID was handing out rice, wheat, oil, and cotton to refugees, the U.S.
military was secretly — and illegally — dropping more than 500,000 tons of explosives
on Cambodia. Those bombings killed upwards of half a million people,
destabilized the Phnom Penh government, and led to the genocidal regime of the
Khmer Rouge that killed more than 2 million people. Bombs still litter Cambodia
and kill scores of people every year.
The U.S. Defense Department
for discharging soldiers with
post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, thus denying some of
them health care, disability pensions, and education funds. Of the 92,000
troops discharged from 2011 to 2015, some 57,000 were diagnosed with PTSD, TBI,
or both. The military is supposed to screen discharges before tagging them with
the “misconduct” label, but in almost half the cases there was no screening. Of
that 57,000, some 13,000 received a “less than honorable” discharge that denies
them health care, pensions, and benefits.
Stephen Miller, President
Trump’s hardline policy adviser and frequent speech writer, for intervening in
the Group of Seven summit meeting in Sicily and sabotaging an Italian initiative to
resettle millions of refugees from wars in the Middle East and Africa. The G-7
includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, and the U.S.
The Golden Lemon Award goes
to Lockheed-Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive weapons
system in history. In the long run the program is estimated to cost $1.5 trillion. The plane was
withdrawn from an air show in Amberley, Australia
because there was a possibility of lightning (the plane’s name is “Lightning
II”), and this past June five pilots’ experienced “hypoxia-like” symptoms — no
air — and the plane was grounded. So far, no one has figured out the problem.
The F-35 can’t open its weapons bay at high speed, because it causes the plane
to “flutter,” and while it’s supposed to be able to take off from an aircraft carrier, it can’t.
According to a study by the Director of Operational Test Evaluation, “The
aircraft will have little, if any real combat capability for years
to come.”
A better buy for the money?
Higher education students in the U.S. are currently $1.3 trillion in debt.
The Torquemada Award goes
to Alpaslan Durmas, education minister
in Turkey’s conservative Islamic government, for removing all references to
“evolution” in biology textbooks because it is “too complicated for students.”
Instead they will be instructed that God created people 10,000 years ago.
Mustafa Akyol of Al Monitor points out the irony in
Durmas’ order. Medieval Muslim scholars wrote about a common origin of the
species: He explains, “That is why John William Draper, a Darwin contemporary,
referred to Darwin’s views as the ‘Mohammadan theory of evolution.’”
Turkey has also blocked Wikipedia in case some of the kiddies
want to read about evolution on line.
The Frankenstein Award goes
to the U.S. Navy for building small “killer” boats called
Autonomous Surface Craft that use artificial intelligence to locate and destroy
their targets.
I mean, what could go wrong,
this is the U.S. Navy, right? The same one that rammed two high-tech guided
missile destroyers into a huge oil tanker and
a giant container ship this past summer, killing a score of sailors. A guided
missile cruiser collided with a South Korean fishing boat, and the guided
missile cruiser Antietam ran aground in Yokosuka Harbor in Japan. The Navy also
kind of lost track of an aircraft carrier battle group
in the Indian Ocean.
So, not to worry.
The Ostrich Award goes to
the Trump administration for first disbanding a federal climate advisory
group and then sending speakers representing Peabody Energy, a coal company; NuScale
Power, a nuclear engineering firm; and Tellurian, a liquid natural gas group,
to represent the U.S. at the international climate talks in Germany. Barry K. Worthington,
executive director of the U.S. Energy Association, said he was going to
challenge the idea fossil fuel should be phased out. “If I can throw myself on
the hand grenade to help people realize that, I’m willing to do it.”
It was a puzzling analogy.
In the meantime, 2016 was
the hottest year on record, breaking
records set in 2014 and 2015. Temperatures were particularly high in Asia and
the Arctic, and drought was widespread in southern Africa. Wildfires burned 8.9
million acres in western Canada and the U.S. And a patch of warm water off the
coast of Alaska facilitated the growth of toxic algae that killed thousands of
seabirds and shut down fishing industries.
The Doomsday Award goes
to what the Financial Times calls the
“uber-rich” who are “hedging against the collapse of the capitalist system” by
buying up land in New Zealand. “About 40 percent of our clients are Americans,”
says Matt Finnigan of Sotheby’s International Realty New Zealand. The buyers
want land that comes “with their own water supply, power sources, and ability
to grow food.”
But you don’t have to go down
under to bunker down. Vivos Group will sell you a hardened concrete bunker in
South Dakota for $25,000 and a yearly fee of $1,000. Or you can buy a cabin on
the World, a huge cruise liner that will take you far from trouble. If you are
Larry Ellison, you can buy 98 percent of Lanai, one of the Hawaiian Islands.
In Memory of Edward
Herman, co-author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent: The
Political Economy of the Mass Media, who died Nov. 11 at age 92. The book was
what author and journalist Matt Taibbi called “a kind of bible of media
criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers.” Herman wrote almost 20 books
on political economy and corporate power, including his 1997 The Global
Media with Robert McChesney.
FPIF columnist Conn Hallinan
can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com.
The Economics Driving Iran’s Protests: Why Trump and Bibi Are Not In Charge
JANUARY 4, 2018
All eyes are on Iran. On
December 28, as if from nowhere, protests broke out in Iran’s second most
populous city, Mashhad – out in the far east, near the Turkmenistan and
Afghanistan border. The protests moved with deliberate speed across the
country, to Kermanshah in the west and Bandar Abbas in the south. Tehran was
not spared, although it is not the epicenter of the protests. This is unlike
the Green Movement of 2009, when Tehran’s reform-minded citizens came onto the
streets angry with what they saw as a stolen election. It is unlike the student
uprisings of 1999, again centered in Tehran, when students protested over the
closure of the reform newspaper Salam.
Those were protests of a
rising middle-class, throttled by social sanctions and by political
limitations. Their protests culminated in the election of President Hassan
Rouhani, who is the current standard bearer of their hopes. Social sanctions
have been eased in Tehran – women openly sit in public without the veil (the
police in Tehran had said earlier last year that they would not arrest women
who did not wear the hijab). Even political rights are now somewhat available
to the reformers. Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the National Security Council,
said that restrictions on imprisoned reformist leaders would be lifted.
The current wave of protests
is characterized not so much by a desire for an expanded political system, the
terms of previous ‘reform’ protests. This is an upsurge against the privations
in Iran – unemployment, deprivation and hopelessness. The sharpness of the
slogans – even against the Supreme Leader of the country – indicates the level
of anger at the failure of the Islamic Republic to deliver the basic needs of a
growing and youthful population. The protests were no surprise to those who had
watched almost weekly working-class actions in factories and oil facilities as
well as protests by retirees and those who had lost money in the banking
crisis. These actions raised the confidence of the working-class and the lower
middle class, both of whom had seen their standard of living plummet.
Oil Revolts
What is taking place in Iran
is not unlike what is taking place across the oil-producing states from
Venezuela to Saudi Arabia. Oil prices began to drop sharply in the second half
of 2014 as a result of high output from Saudi Arabia and their Gulf allies.
Iraqi and Libyan oil production had fallen, so it appeared on the surface that
the Saudis and their Gulf allies were merely covering that shortfall. But as
supply far outpaced demand the volume of oil that the Gulf countries produced
seemed to have a political motive. It hurt Iran, already wracked by the UN,
European Union and US sanctions, but it also hit Russia and Venezuela. The West
and the Saudis saw these three countries – Iran, Russia and Venezuela – as
adversaries. It was quite clear that this was a political move.
Unrest in Venezuela mirrors
that in Iran. Both countries – since the 1940s – have been reliant upon oil
exports for their own development agenda, both countries failed to diversify
their economies beyond oil and both countries relied upon depleted national
budgets to provide social welfare to their populations. It was this narrowed
economic and political landscape that produced the Iranian Revolution of
1978-79 and the Venezuelan Revolution of 1989-1999. The political outcomes in
both were different, with the former dynamic being led and seized by the
Islamic clerics and the latter dynamic being led and seized by the Bolivarian
socialists.
Both Iran and Venezuela – from
different sides of the political spectrum – found themselves in the gun-sights
of the United States and its Western allies. It was this that led to the sanctions
regimes against both – pushed by the United States government. The sanctions
against Iran and Venezuela have been at different intensities, with Iran being
hit harder over the past decade. Neither Iran nor Venezuela was able to
effectively find an exit from the sanctions regimes or to create regional or
alternative trade networks that would earn them foreign exchange and investment
as well as enhance their ability to be less dependent on Western networks of
finance and investment.
Raised Expectations
Iran’s government – led by
Hasan Rouhani – had raised the expectations of the population when it
negotiated the nuclear deal with the West and the United Nations in 2015. The
sanctions cost Iran more than $160 billion in oil revenues since 2012. This penalty
was borne by ordinary Iranians, who saw their standard of living fall and their
aspirations for the future narrow. Rouhani had said that the nuclear deal would
attract investment into the country and free up Iran from the murderous
sanctions regime.
But, since the nuclear deal,
the handcuffs on Iran remain. The US – under Trump – tightened non-nuclear
sanctions. Trump’s belligerence towards Iran has stayed the hand of many
transnational firms that had earlier expressed interest in making investments
inside Iran. Rouhani’s bet has not really paid off. The 2015 nuclear deal, an
achievement in its own right, did not fully provide the kind of relief needed
for the Iranian population. Expectations were raised, but little has been
delivered.
As part of his pledge to
openness, Rouhani’s government released details of its budget to the public in
early December 2017. Rouhani pledged to spend about $100 billion – less than a
third of his draft budget – on public service programmes for job creation and
for a new social security programme. Inflation remains a problem, as do the
840,000 young Iranians who will enter the workforce next year.
Confidence in Rouhani’s budget
was dampened when the public got to see how much money goes towards the
clergy-dominated institutions. For example, in the city of Mashhad, where the
protests began, the Astan-e Quds Razavi, Iran’s largest endowment, a foundation
that controls a shrine in the city, owns 43% of the land in the city and has an
income near $150 million per year. In the 2017 presidential election, Ibrahim
Raisi, the candidate of the Supreme Leader Khamenei and head of Astan-e Quds
Razavi, openly said that Khamenei had allowed the endowment not to pay taxes.
This rattled a population that saw these institutions as sponges on a state
that had turned its back on ordinary Iranians. All of this produced a deep
sense of disquiet amongst those who don’t see themselves being the
beneficiaries of the nuclear deal.
Over 2016, Iran’s growth rate
did rise as oil left the country and pent-up demand inside Iran was allowed to
be fulfilled. The growth rate rose to a respectable 7.4%. But the danger signal
here is that the non-oil growth rate was a mere 0.9%. This was an oil-driven
recovery and it was dependent on oil prices. Before he came to power in 1979,
Ayatollah Khomeini had said, ‘Economics is for donkeys.’ The Islamic Republic –
unlike the Bolivarian government in Venezuela – made little attempt to
diversify the economy and prepare for a post-oil future. Rather it relied upon
its oil revenues for both its domestic policy and its foreign policy (including
the support to the Lebanese political force – Hezbollah – and the Syrian
government). Iran remained vulnerable as long as its economic power was
dependent on oil. Its vulnerabilities are now on display.
Official unemployment sits at
12.7%, but this is a very inaccurate figure. Sources in Iran say that the youth
unemployment rate might even be as high as 50%. To bring down inflation the
government has steadily eliminated subsidies on energy and bread. Prices of
these goods have gone up – a decisive factor in the protests. It is important
to point out that in anticipation of the end of these subsidies, the government
began a universal cash transfer scheme in 2010, which has been attributed to a
decline in poverty from 13.1% (2009) to 8.1% (2013). But the fact of a decline
in poverty did nothing to the anger at the subsidy cuts that came when prices
of basic goods (energy and bread) rose, despite the fact that overall inflation
declined. In fact, by 2014, the poverty rate began to rise again – a sign that
Rouhani’s policy of inflation control has been a direct attack on the Iranian
working-class and lower middle-class.
There is something vulgar
about the way Trump and Netanyahu and their ilk are fanning on the protests in
Iran. After all, it is the US-Israeli policy to strangle Iran that has created
the conditions for these protests. But the end of the sanctions has condensed
frustration in the government of Rouhani and in the Islamic Republic itself –
not on the West’s continued policies.
Politically Trump and
Netanyahu benefit from Obama’s nuclear deal; it has made it appear as if the
West is no longer responsible for the crisis in Iran.
Tens of thousands of people
have taken to the streets. But tens of thousands more followed to defend the
Islamic Republic. These are tense times for Iran. It is clear that the
government is going to have to accede to the pressure from this working-class uprising.
It is not enough to describe the protestors as foreign agents. Even if Trump
and Netanyahu, the monarchists and the Mujahideen Khalq try to take credit for
the uprising, they are not in charge. The well of Iranian patriotism is deep.
The Iranians will not take their orders from the White House. But neither will
they sit quietly as their lives fall apart before their eyes.
How Much Democracy Is Too Much?
Published by Slavoj Žižek on May 19, 2003
Democracy is not merely the
“power of, by, and for the people.” It is not enough just to claim that, in
democracy, the will and the interests (the two in no way automatically
coincide) of the large majority determine state decisions. Democracy—in the way
the term is used today—concerns, above all, formal legalism. Its minimal
definition is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules
which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the “rules of the
game.”
“Democracy” means that,
whatever electoral manipulation actually takes place, every political agent
will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the U.S. presidential
elections of 2000 were effectively “democratic.” Despite obvious and patent
electoral manipulations in Florida, the Democratic candidate accepted his
defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after the elections, Bill Clinton made an
appropriately acerbic comment: “The American people have spoken. We just don’t
know what they said.” This comment should have been taken more seriously than
it was meant, for it revealed how the present machinery of democracy can be
problematic, to say the least. Why should the left always and unconditionally
respect the formal “rules of the game”? Why should it not, in some
circumstances, put in question the legitimacy of the outcome of a formal
democratic procedure?
Alternatively, there is at
least one case in which formal democrats themselves (or, at least, a
substantial portion of them) would tolerate the suspension of democracy: What
if formally free elections are won by an anti-democratic party whose platform
promises the abolition of formal democracy? (This did happen, among other
places, in Algeria a few years ago.) In such a case, many a democrat would
concede that the people were not yet “mature” enough to be allowed democracy,
and that some kind of enlightened despotism whose aim is to educate the
majority to become proper democrats is preferable.
[…]
United States federal judge
[…]
Tenure and salary[edit]
"Article III federal
judges" (as opposed to judges of some courts with special jurisdictions)
serve "during good behavior" (often paraphrased as appointed
"for life"). Judges hold their seats until they resign, die, or are removed
from office. Although the legal orthodoxy is that judges cannot be removed from
office except by impeachment by the House of
Representatives followed by conviction by the Senate, several legal scholars,
including William Rehnquist, Saikrishna Prakash, and Steven
D. Smith, have argued that the Good Behaviour Clause may, in theory, permit
removal by way of a writ of scire
facias filed before a federal court, without resort to impeachment.[1]
Since the impeachment process
requires a trial by the United States Senate, and since the
constitutional provision concerning federal judges' tenure cannot be changed
without the ratifications of three-fourths of the states, federal judges have
perhaps the best job security available in the United States. Moreover, the Constitution
forbids Congress to diminish a federal judge's salary. Twentieth-century
experience suggests that Congress is generally unwilling to take time out of
its busy schedule to impeach and try a federal judge until, after criminal
conviction, he or she is already in prison and still drawing a salary, which
cannot otherwise be taken away (see Nixon v. United States, a key Supreme Court
case about Congress's discretion in impeaching and trying federal judges).
As of 2015, federal district
judges are paid $201,100 a year, circuit judges $213,300, Associate
Justices of the Supreme Court $246,800 and the Chief Justice of the United States$258,100.
All were permitted to earn a maximum of an additional $21,000 a year for
teaching.[2]
Chief Justice John
Roberts has repeatedly pleaded for an increase in judicial pay,
calling the situation "a constitutional crisis that threatens to undermine
the strength and independence of the federal judiciary".[3] The
problem is that the most talented associates at the largest U.S. law firms with
judicial clerkship experience (in other words, the attorneys most qualified to
become the next generation of federal judges) already earn as much as a federal
judge in their first year as full-time associates.[4] Thus,
when those attorneys eventually become experienced partners and reach the stage
in life where one would normally consider switching to public service, their
interest in joining the judiciary is tempered by the prospect of a giant pay
cut back to what they were making 10 to 20 years earlier (adjusted for
inflation). One way for attorneys to soften the financial blow is to spend only
a few years on the bench and then return to private practice or go into private
arbitration, but such turnover creates a risk of a revolving door judiciary subject
to regulatory capture.
Thus, Chief Justice Roberts
has warned that "judges are no longer drawn primarily from among the best
lawyers in the practicing bar" and "If judicial appointment ceases to
be the capstone of a distinguished career and instead becomes a stepping stone
to a lucrative position in private practice, the Framers' goal of a truly
independent judiciary will be placed in serious jeopardy."[3]
[…]
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