Driving in my car I was listening to Bloomberg news. Their guys explained the problem. The Fed/government has flooded the banks with liquidity, meaning letting them borrow money for free. The idea is to get the economy going again. But even though the banks get the money for free the banks are not happy. They want to “invest” that money in paper, but CD’s and such are not making that much money. They only give a single digit return. And the bankers want more. So that’s why they’re taking increasing risks.

Now you are me would probably be happy with a middle or high single digit. After all a single digit return can go up to 9%. (I just looked up the return on CD’s The best I could find was Doral bank giving a whopping 1.15%.) But banksters, to use Jesse Jackson’s happy phrase, expect lots more and so they gamble.

Oh, the liberals say we need more regulation. But didn’t they say that the Dodd-Frank law was going to take care of all that? Not a single commentator says that the JP Morgan gambles violated Dodd-Frank.

Years of “reform” amount to little more than a shampoo job for the rugs of the capitalist casino. They had get the stink out of the Great Recession. A little (hot) air freshner and they’re back in business.

This morning the labor department published the numbers. Job growth in the country was only 115,000. 7.9 million are working part time who’d want to work full time. Still the “unemployment rate” went down to 8.1%.

A much more revealing percent is the “employment-population ratio”. As I said last month “It’s basically the number of adults working divided by the number of adults in the country.” The higher that percent is, the better. It fell a tenth of a percent last month to 58.4%. It’s actually the same percent it was a year ago.

What’s going on? For sensible reasons people are “discouraged”. 342,000 people “left the labor force” last month about three times the number of new jobs. The percent now in the labor force as compared to all possible US workers is the lowest since 1981.

One place they’re going to is “on disability”. The number of workers on social security disability jumped from 7.1 million in 2007 to 8.7 million last month. The reason for the big jump isn’t really known. Perhaps after losing extended unemployment hundreds of thousands are throwing in the towel and admitting to their lifetime of work and lifestyle injuries and going to live on small social security benefits. More than 99% of workers who go on disability stay on those benefits until retirement age. The program grants them an average $1,111 a month, a measly $13,000 a year. Still it’s better than nothing in the “Slowly Improving Economy”

Hilarious.

The top ten US labor leaders took home an average salary and other compensation averaging $394,925. The Department of Labor says the an income higher than $343,927 puts you in the top 1%.

So I took a quick look at my own union, the American Federation of Teachers via the Labor Department website.

There you can see the LM-2 reports that unions have to file each year. It shows that AFT President Randy Weingarten takes in salary and other compensation equal to $493,859 Vice-President Loretta Johnson gets $369,408 Secretary-Treasurer Cortese: $365,014.

Dennis Van Roekel, President of the NEA took in $460,000. (James Hoffa, President of the Teamsters Unions, took in $368,000.)

So tell me, do these 1% union officials really understand what it’s like in the classroom? Do they understand what it’s like seeing miserable pay increases all going down the whole to pay for medical benefits? Do they understand the stress of teaching to the test and giving practice test after practice test in hopes the kids will do well on the high stakes test? They know, but only abstractly.

Oh yeah, some of them used to be in the classroom, but that was years and years ago.

Top union officials who have rich peoples salaries, private offices and staff who work for them, who go on to work for foundations, NGO’s or the Democratic Party inevitably “get the bigger view”. They “understand” the problems of administration and the appreciate the views of billionaires have made their boodle and now are gracious enough to share their immense wisdom and a bit of their loot. It’s not a matter of personal corruption of union officials, but the near inevitable change when people change working conditions and class.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Unions could be run so that officers would be paid no more than one and a half or twice what an average worker made. They would be expected to go back into the ranks every few years.

Hopefully there will be a radical challenge to Weingarten and company this year and if they’re interested in making a real change the insurgents will pledge to reduce top salaries 50 or 75%.

Though the raise was more than generous it wasn’t as good as the rise from 2010 when pay rose 22.8%

It wasn’t’ always like this. Back in 1980 CEO pay was only 42 times that of the average worker.

The standard line on why CEO’s have to make such money is that otherwise the big companies won’t attract top talent. Yet, other capitalist countries don’t have the outrageous inequality enjoyed by the US 1%. According to Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post, “the ratio is 25-1 (Britain), 13-1 (Sweden), 11-1 (Germany) and 10-1 (Japan). “

Oh yes, we need that American talent, the wonderful expertise that almost brought the world system to collapse in 2008.

To me the most revealing number concerning jobs is the “employment-population ratio”. It’s basically the number of adults working divided by the number of adults in the country. This number doesn’t get affected by “discouraged” workers, people “leaving the labor force” and the other ways of hiding the unemployed.

For all the talk of the improving economy the number, 58.5%, is the same now as it was a year ago. It actually went down a tenth of a percent last month.

Will say it till I’m blue in the face. We need millions of new public enterprise jobs, now.

Trade unions won’t say it, though. They’re betting everything on Obama’s reelection. He’s such a friend. (though he forgot to have the Democratic Convention in a city with a union hotel… Hey, you have to vote for the better of two weevils)

I went to a Labor Council meeting with local Congresswoman DeLauro. Someone asked, “What’s Plan B if the Surpeme Court knocks down the Obama health care law”. She said, “There’s no Plan B”. I asked “What about Single-Payer”? She replied “You know I’m for it, but there’s no votes for it. There needs to be more education.” I replied “From a president who won’t say one word about single-payer”?

WAIT.

Didn’t we have enough “de-regulation” in the ’90′s and the first half of the last decade. Isn’t that a big reason things crashed in 2008?

Bloomberg news has an article about this and quotes a fraudster who served 41/2 years in prison for scamming. He looks at the law in disbelief. He says it’s an open invitation for fraud.

The Bloomberg writer, Susan Antilla, says the law is 22 pages of “cool opportunities to avoid rules that force companies to supply audited financial statements”.

Anyone for 5,000 share of “Son of Enron”?

He explained that the income gains are more and more going to the top. “In the Clinton era expansion, 45 percent of the total income gains went to the top 1 percent; in the Bush recovery, the figure was 65 percent; now it is 93 percent.”

One of the ways the rich suck up the money is by hypnosis, For 30 years these Rasputins have convinced the 99% that tax cuts are always necessary and that high tax rates make the economy collapse.

Over the weekend I heard economist Richard Wolff talk about tax rates in the 1940’s and he said the highest bracket was charged over 90%. That seemed unbelievable so I looked it up. Lo and behold he was right. The Tax Foundation has the figures for almost 100 years.

Back in 1944 anything you made over $200,000 was taxed at 94%. (Now a buck went further in those days, more than 10 times are far. The Tax Foundation estimates that $200,000 in those days is like $2.4 million today.) High tax rates on the top bracket lasted until the 1980’s. In 1981 the top bracket was 70%. The next year it went down to 50% and kept on dropping under Reagan.

Did those high tax rates cripple the U.S? Well, we paid for World War II and came out of it with no return to the Great Depression. The 50’s through the start of the ‘70’s were the golden age for U.S. workers in terms of money.

Today the highest rate is 35% though the rich don’t really pay that. They make most of their dough from stocks and bonds and that gets a special “capital gains rate” and dividends rate of 15%. That’s how Warren Buffet pays a smaller share of his income than does his secretary.

In his late ’80′s he’s still at it, taking part in the resistance against the picking clean of Greece by European capital and its Greek assistants. He issued an amazing “Letter to International Public Opinion” and here is video of Greek-American Ioanna Gutas reading major parts of it.

Then there’s an interview I did with her about how Greece got into this pitiful situation. We start with the unknown (in the US) monstrous invasion of Greece by Germany in WWII coming up to the madness and betrayal of the last few years.