News & Articles

The rich truly are different from you and me – they tend to become congress critters.
You don’t find many plumbers, mine workers, dirt farmers, Walmart associates, beauty parlor operators, taxi drivers, or other “get-the-job-done” Americans among the 535 members of the US House and Senate. What you do find is an over-supply of lawmakers drawn from a very thin strata of America’s population: Millionaires. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that last year – for the first time in history – more than half of our senators and House members are in the Millionaires Club. Indeed, the average net worth (the value of what they own minus what they owe) for all lawmakers now totals more than $7 million.
The world in which our “representatives” live is light years from where the majority of people live, and the divide between the governors and the governees is especially stark for the 40 percent of people whose net worth is zero (or, technically, less than zero, since their income and other assets are far exceeded by their debts). This widening chasm is not just a matter of wealth, but most significantly a literal separation of the privileged few from the experiences, needs, and aspirations of the many who’re struggling to make ends meet and worried that opportunities for their children to get ahead are no longer available to them.
The harsh reality is that most Americans are no longer represented in Washington. Chances are that their own members of Congress don’t know any struggling and worried people, share nothing in common with them, and can’t relate to their real-life needs, Thus, Congress is content to play ideological games with such basics as health care, minimum wage, joblessness, food stamps, and Social Security. America’s wealth divide has become a chasm, creating a looming social and political crisis for America that undermines any pretense that ours is a democratic society.
“Millionaires’ Club: For The First Time, Most Lawmakers are Worth $1 Million-Plus,” www.opensecrets.org, January 9, 2014.
“For first time, more than half in Congress are millionaires,” The New York Times, January 10, 2014.

Pulling the curtain on an anti-minimum wage front group

In Frank Baum’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the “wizard’ turns out to be a phony – just an old guy sitting behind a curtain, using his booming voice to spew nonsense in a vain effort to fool people.
But now, a century after Baum’s fictional Oz, a real-life incarnation of the phony wizard has been discovered, hiding behind not one, but two curtains. He’s recently been booming out his nonsense in full-page newspaper ads that are hyperbolic screeds against economists who favor raising the minimum wage, denouncing them as “radical researchers.”
The ad directs readers to a website named MinimumWage.com, implying that it’s the site of independent, unbiased, non-radical economists. But, no – it’s not a group at all, just a curtain. Who’s behind it? Something that goes by the name of The Employment Policies Institute, which sounds rock solid, but it, too, is just a curtain.
Go to 1090 Vermont Avenue in Washington, the address of this “institute,” and you won’t find any economists or any other employees, for the institute has none. But you will find the old wizard sitting there – manipulating statistics, twisting logic, and spewing out economic nonsense.
The wiz turns out to be nothing but a 71-year-old PR and advertising hatchet man named Richard Berman. Various corporations pay him to set up official-sounding front groups that advance their political agenda. The Employment Policy Institute, for example, is a front for the big restaurant chains. They want to keep profiting by paying poverty wages to their workers, so they’ve hired Berman to trash any and all who support raising America’s wage floor.
The “Institute” provides a varnish of academic legitimacy for unvarnished corporate greed. As the watchdog group, PRWatch, says of Berman’s flim flam, “They are little more than phony experts on retainer.”