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Joseph Stiglitz

October 3, 2012
Roberts Court Tilts for Big Business, Harms Individuals, Film Says
by Jeremy Leaming

The Roberts Court is a tool of corporate America. At least that’s the gist of a new film from Alliance for Justice, called “Unequal Justice: The Relentless Rise of the 1% Court.”

This of course is not news to those who pay attention to what the Supreme Court does, nor is it agreed upon. For instance the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Chamber of Commerce likely see the Roberts Court as a protector of American capitalism – the place where almost anyone can lift themselves up by their bootstraps to become superrich.

“The Roberts Court is basically a pro-business court,” Stanford Law School Professor and ACS Board member Pamela Karlan, says in the AFJ film. “They don’t have a desire to really open the federal courts up to suits by average Americans, either workers or consumers, or people who are injured by various products; it’s a pro-business court.” (Watch the film here or view below.)

The film reminds us of the Court’s opinions that shut down a class action gender discrimination lawsuit against the retail giant Wal-Mart, overturned a woman’s lower court verdict against a company for years of gender discrimination, and found that corporate America has even more power to spend boatloads of money to sway elections.

“The Citizens United’s impact has been dramatic,” says former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold and founder of Progressives United. “And since then our system is in the worst free-fall it’s been in since the Gilded Age, probably worse.”

Even former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a rightwing policymaker, weighed in on blasting Citizens United as one of the most “misguided, naïve, uniformed, egregious decisions of the United States Supreme Court, I think in the 21st Century.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation and narrator of the 20-minute film, said individuals have been shut out of the justice system by today’s Supreme Court, which “has decided that when everyday people run up against powerful corporate interests, the big corporations almost always win.”

Some of the women behind the class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart explain their efforts to advance equality and deal with a stinging defeat.

“The women of Wal-Mart brought the case to stand up for their right to be treated equally, but they never got that far,” Heuvel said. “The decision turned on whether their claims had enough in common. The conservative majority raised the hurdle for class actions, and made it harder to prove discrimination.”

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Access to Justice, Class actions, Corporate governance, Economic inequality, Supreme Court, Democracy and Voting, Alliance for Justice, campaign finance regulation, Citizens United v. FEC, corporate interests, Gender discrimination, Joseph Stiglitz, Roberts Court, Russ Feingold, Unequal Justice: The Relentless Rise of the 1% Court, Wall-Mart
August 3, 2012
Letting Go of Economic Policy that Entrenches Poverty, Coddles the Wealthy
by Jeremy Leaming

As much as they claim to loathe government, right-wing policy makers adore government assistance to the nation’s superrich.

The economic policies, including weakened regulation of the financial industry, pushed by a party that has become behold to the superrich ushered in the Great Recession and the gaping economic inequality that the nation seems to be slowly awakening. Yet likely not fast enough. The number in poverty is on track, The Associated Press reported in July, to reach “levels unseen in nearly half a century,” and wiping out gains to lessen poverty that were seen in the 1960s. These economic policies center on tax cuts for the wealthiest, dwindling social services, along with weak regulation of the financial industry.

“The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year,” Columbia Business School Professor Joseph Stiglitz wrote last year. “In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent.”

Stiglitz noted in the same article how woefully out touch the wealthiest are – they can take care of themselves just fine and are numb to the plight of a family of three that must somehow survive on an annual income of less than $38,000.

So what can be done to reverse the situation? It appears rather hopeless, since the superrich are also the most powerful and have been able to keep alive the economic policies that have benefited them at a great cost to everyone else. During this year’s ACS National Convention Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law school professor and longtime advocate for the nation’s most vulnerable said the shrinking middle class must become far more vocal in calling for an end to disastrous economic policies.

In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, Edelman (pictured), also chair of the ACS Board, said we know “what we need to do – make the rich pay their fair share of running the country, raise the minimum wage, provide health care and a decent safety net, and the like”

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Economic inequality, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Edelman, poverty, So Rich, So Poor, wealth gap
July 25, 2012
Poverty Grows, Right-Wing Policy Makers and Pundits Shrug
by Jeremy Leaming

Right-wing activists and pundits are quick to bemoan discussion of the nation’s growing poverty, blasting discussion of economic inequality and poverty as an effort to stoke class warfare. It’s a refrain we’ve heard for decades.

But studies, by the Census Bureau and others, show that not only is economic inequality real and festering, but poverty is growing, while the middle class shrinks.

The Associated Press reported earlier this week that the “ranks of America’s poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and a fraying government safety net.”

The nation’s social safety net has been diminished by a Republican Party that has grown beholden to the superrich, and is devoted to the proposition as Tim Dickinson wrote for Rolling Stone that “the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.”

Of course moderate Democrats have also played a significant role in shredding the social safety net. The 1996 so-called welfare reform act took a major swipe at the social safety net.

The AP surveying “more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics,” found a “broad consensus that the “official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. That level of poverty, the AP continued, will represent the highest level since 1965.

In his new book So Rich, So Poor, Peter Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, laments the nation’s worn social safety net, writing that “the bottom has dropped out” of it. He said repairing the tattered social safety net is one of the most urgent challenges facing the country.

Talking to the AP, Edelman (pictured), also chair of the ACS Board, said the challenges go beyond the weakened social safety net, noting the “deep problems in the economy.”

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Economic inequality, Supreme Court, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, CBO, Joseph Stiglitz, Medicaid, Peter Edelman, poverty, So Rich, So Poor,, superrich, wealth gap
July 18, 2012
Conservatives Rail Against Administration’s Action on Helping the Unemployed
by Jeremy Leaming

To help states more effectively provide support to individuals while they seek employment, the Obama administration is allowing state officials to seek waivers of some requirements of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

But The New York Times reports the administration’s move has stirred consternation among some conservative lawmakers. In a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), complained that Congress did not intend for states to be provided “waivers of TANF work requirements.”

In a July 12 statement, HHS Acting Assistant Secretary George Sheldon says the Social Security Act provides the department the “authority to grant states waivers of certain TANF provisions for the purpose of testing new approaches to meeting the goals of the TANF statute. The Secretary is interested in using her authority to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.”

The Times, however, notes that conservative lobbying groups, which have fought to eliminate a social safety net, primarily by supporting economic policy that starves government of revenue by slashing taxes on the nation’s wealthiest, are decrying the administration’s move as detrimental to a program that has allegedly “lifted millions out of poverty.”

Such a claim is as bizarre as it is laughable.

The number of people now in poverty is larger than at any time since the Great Depression. As many economists have noted the nation’s middle class is shrinking, poverty is growing, and the only people who are faring better are the superrich.

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Economic inequality, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, Department of Health and Human Services, George Sheldon, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Edelman, So Rich, So Poor, TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
July 10, 2012
Economic, Social Inequalities Creating a Wobbly Democracy
by Jeremy Leaming

While liberals continue to ponderously ponder how to refute the right’s method of constitutional interpretation called originalism, the right continues to advance a simplistic and destructive story that the Constitution is all about severely limiting the federal government’s reach.

For far too long liberals have obsessed over methods of constitutional interpretation, leaving rightists to advance the constitutional storyline, which says the nation’s governing document only promotes individualism, limited government, and of course Christianity.

As law professor and historian William E. Forbath recently noted in an op-ed for The New York Times liberals have far too often shrugged their shoulders at this narrative, claiming that “rights and wrongs of economic life” are not addressed by the Constitution, but instead through politics.

“That’s a major failing,” Forbath (pictured) writes, “because there is a venerable rival to constitutional laissez-faire: a rich distributive tradition of constitutional law and politics, rooted in the framers’ generation. None other than James Madison was among its prominent expounders – in his draft of the Virginia Constitution, he included rights to free education and public land.”

In a more expansive piece for the book, The Constitution in 2020, Forbath explores the “historical heft” of a century-long effort “to make good on the constitutional justice of livelihoods and social and economic rights ….”

For example, Abraham Lincoln and other founders of the Republican Party argued that equal rights also included “a fair distribution of initial endowments,” and FDR in his State of the Union proposing a Second Bill of Rights, said the government “owes to everyone an avenue to possess himself of a portion of [the nation’s wealth] sufficient for his needs, through his own work.”

Moreover, Forbath noted, African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement strived to “craft a broader social rights agenda,” including the right to a decent income. During the Civil Rights movement, the federal courts took note of the efforts in “undoing the exclusion of black women from welfare rolls,” he continued.

The Supreme Court in its 1970 Goldberg v. Kelly opinion, said, “From its founding the Nation’s basic commitment has been to foster the dignity and well-being of all persons within its borders. We have come to recognize that forces not within the control of the poor contribute to their poverty.”

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Tags:
Methods of interpretation, Economic inequality, Originalism, Commerce clause, Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Civil Rights Movement, FDR, Goldberb v. Kelly, Joseph Stiglitz, Pamela Karlan, social and economic inequalities, The Constitution In 2020, William E. Forbath

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