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• Job Cut Reports
  • Comment 11/08/12: Boulder Colorado, I was let go, layoff. All contractors in department told to take 8 furlough days over coming weeks. -anonymous-
  • Comment 11/09/12: IBM just announced that Canada's first and only Global Delivery Facility will open in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Wonder how soon before the present IBM employees spread across country are asked to move or lose jobs? -cdn ibmer-
  • Comment 11/10/12: Something to support the rumor of an RA around 11/30... my manager told his team to have their PBC input in no later than 11/16. Per history for PBCs, I expect ratings have already been decided, but our input is needed to finalize the PBC process. Then the PBC results can be used to support the RA. What is interesting about this other than the early timing (before this I was never asked for my PBC input before January), my manager made a point of telling his team we will be evaluated mainly on our attainment of our annual sales targets... with the last seven weeks of the year still to go, and those are typically the biggest of the year, revenue-wise. I expect many people being evaluated will be far short of their revenue targets at this point in the year--as I am--easier to justify a low rating. Will be interesting to see if my big November-December pipeline of business enters into the discussion. -Anonymous-
  • Comment 11/10/12: Nova Scotia outsourcing to IBM. IBM pays their SAP workers $30,000 a year in Dubuque, Iowa. I bet the that's much less than than Nova Scotia's govt was paying. The support will be horrible. IBM Dubuque basically hires people off the street with little to no experience in anything and expects the subject matter experts to get them up to speed. Customer suffers, but they signed the contract with IBM so now they are stuck for now. -lowballed-
  • Comment 11/10/12: Avantor also called IBM's consultants "incompetent and inexperienced". What did Avantor think? That you could find experienced SAP programmers for $30k a year? I get paid weakly, very weakly. -toldyaso-
  • Comment 11/13/12: I work for a big contract US based. My team was also asked, and then a "friendly reminder" to complete our PBC by the 16th. I do not recall ever being asked this early prior to y/e. Bring it on Big Blew. Let me go already...sick of this chit every time around the holidays. We are supposed to be enjoying this time with our family as year-end closes and we look back and enjoy all of the benefits of the hard work all year. I guess this is a thing of the past, huh? The dismal roadmap to 2015 will never be achieved. They need to bring in some new TOP management to fix this mess created by greed. Can't last too much longer. The bottom will fall out. Who will the first lines manage if they continue cutting US folks. I personally don't need a manager. He does nothing for me. I manage myself. Do they exist just to ask us to complete PBC's and all of the CYA garbage we are asked to "sign"...? -RottenInDenmark-
  • Comment 11/13/12: Lots of 'emergency' firings due to fraudulent expense reports. If you get an invitation to a one-one meeting with your Director...be afraid!! You'll have no recourse either, no 'here's my side' to the story. You're out the door that day. Join the Union and get a voice. -Ibmblows-
  • Comment 11/14/12: ibmblows: Sounds like another way IBM management does a "drive by" firing or pruning without an RA. IBM management basically tells everyone to lie on their ILC or TOTALS labor reporting. So now they are getting petty on expense accounts? Do you get severance or are fired with cause? -anonymous-
  • Comment 11/15/12: Checking in with former IBM colleagues and received confirmation re: Thanksgiving RAs. Hitting consultant-level (80%), mid-management (10%); upper management RRA (Resource reassignment Action) remaining 10%. Guestimated number for US locations - 10 - 15,000, depending on the RRA acceptance rate. Was RAd back in March and couldn't be happier - sold stock while it was high, fortunate to have more robust RA package. For those who plan to stay with Ginny's Blue Machine - unionize, or get your resumes updated. Best of luck to everyone. -NoLongerBlue- Alliance reply: If these job cuts do happen, we need everyone to send us information and RA packs to ibmunionalliance@gmail.com. IBM doesn't inform the media or our communities, the Alliance does.
  • Comment 11/15/12: NoLongerBlue, wouldn't be at all surprised if there are RA's at EOM. I figured they were holding off until after the election. I just anticipated that they would restart them in January, 2013 to avoid the obvious. Sadly, they'll do all they can to accomplish Roadkill 2015. -Former IBM-
  • Comment 11/15/12: No severance, a check mark in the 'not eligible to be rehired' box and immediate revoking of your system access. I've seen consistent 1 performers get fired this way. Somewhere in IBM there must be a very aggressive team researching this; 3 employees just recently were ousted. -ibmblows-
  • Comment 11/16/12: In IBM if you don't grow an extra set of b***s then grow another set of eyes behind you head. You gotta watch your back constantly in this Big Blew. IBM are out to take out as many resources they can for whatever reason, petty or not. Hopefully you are not made a turkey roadkill this holiday season. Please unionize soon. -gobbled-
  • Comment 11/17/12: Profit before patient care, IBM again layoff workers at Kaiser Health care for profit, thinking the India sources can pick up the slack when the customer has ask for America works to perform major health care changes not the India staff. Orders to not work overtime and furlough the staff. -Anonymous-
  • Comment 11/18/12: In an area on the East Coast, Sub-Ks are being asked to furlough one day a week. Managers are also being asked (forced) to PBC full-timers with a 3 to justify RA. Not all full-timers, but upper management wants to see a couple of PBC 3s. -GinniRomettyLooksLikeNurseRatched-

News and Opinion Concerning Health Savings Accounts, Medical Costs and Health Care Reform

• Ventura County Star: A five-year slide has pushed employers, long the dominant health insurance provider in California, into minority status. Less than half of employers offer coverage. By Tom Kisken. Excerpts: A five-year slide has pushed employers, long the dominant health insurance provider in California, into minority status. For the first time since at least 2001, and likely much longer, less than half of Californians younger than 65 received coverage through their own or a family member's employer in 2011.

  The news comes from a UCLA study released in late October, just before employers begin to unveil their 2013 coverage offerings to workers with the now routine trends of rising costs or reduced benefits.

  "The job-based system has reached its limit," said Shana Alex Lavarreda, director of health insurance studies at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. ...

  At a Ventura County job and career center where people searched online for job leads, conversations settled on the cost of health insurance. A woman with a job said she went on extended disability and ended up on Medi-Cal because she couldn't afford the premiums.

• Washington Post: Michelle Andrews weighs the benefits of high-deductible health plans. Excerpts: Alison Mitisek was at a Denver pediatrician’s office with her 15-month-old son last August when she passed out. The doctor’s office staff called an ambulance, which rushed her to a nearby emergency department.

  Doctors were not able to determine why Mitisek, a 30-year-old schoolteacher, lost consciousness. Still, the bills for the ambulance and the diagnostic testing and other care came to $5,800. Mitisek’s group health plan had a $5,600 annual deductible, on which she and her husband, Mark, had already paid $800. Their share of the $5,800 bill before their insurance kicked in was $4,800.

  In general, the higher a health plan’s deductible, the lower the premium. “Taking that gamble is appealing,” Mark Mitisek says of the choice to pay lower premiums and hope to avoid needing pricey medical care. “But when you lose the gamble and you’re stuck with that expense, it makes you think twice.”

  “People get caught all the time,” says Martin Rosen, co-founder of Health Advocate, a company that helps consumers resolve medical billing problems and provides support for health-care decisions. “If you come from a traditional health plan and you paid a flat $100 co-pay for a visit to the emergency room, the assumption is that you’re going to pay the same in a high-deductible plan.” ...

  “When people are considering a high-deductible plan, I always say, ‘Could you come up with the whole deductible all at one time?’” says Amelia Haviland, an associate professor of statistics and health policy at Carnegie Mellon University who has published studies on the effect of high-deductible health plans on health-care spending. “If it’s going to keep you from going to the emergency department when you really need to go, don’t choose that plan.” ...

  Proponents of high-deductible health plans say that requiring consumers to pay a larger share of their own health-care costs helps reduce spending on unnecessary care. But the Rand study and others have found that when people have to pay more out of pocket for their care, they also skimp on care they need, such as preventive cancer screenings.

• Physicians for a National Health Program: Real Danger of “Obamacare”: Insurance Company Takeover of Health Care. By Nomi Prins. Excerpts: Election rhetoric shuns the big picture in favor of the bigger platitude. Now that The Show is over, we are left with the equivalent of a Sunday morning hangover following a binge of promises and lies. We leave the theatre of political spectacle on steroids for the real world of unstable economy, a globally and publicly subsidized financial sector, and increased costs of living on everything from food to education to health-care; outpacing declining median incomes. The average cost for health insurance for a family is $15,745 per year vs. a median income of $50,502, or about half post-tax take-home pay. ...

  The Tea-Party Conservative types get it embarrassingly wrong when they call it a “government takeover of health care.” Likewise, Progressive Obama-supporters are deluded in accepting it as the most sweeping healthcare reform since Medicare. (Side note: I wish the word ‘sweeping’ could be retired from politics until it actually means -sweeping.)

  Here’s why. The PPACA does nothing to restructure the health insurance industry, anymore than the Dodd-Frank Act restructures the banking industry. This means everything else it attempts to do, positive or negative, will be vastly overshadowed by an industry accelerating to morph itself into a acquisition machine in order to circumvent anything that even smells like a restriction, including laws that exist and ones to come.

  How? By doing the same thing energy and telecom companies did after they were deregulated in 1996, and that banks did after they were summarily deregulated (after moving that way for decades) in 1999. They are merging, consolidating, eliminating competitors, and controlling their domain. They are manufacturing power.

  Investment bankers are roaming the world to exploit this hot new opportunity. That’s one reason insurance companies don’t even call themselves that anymore. Now, they are ‘managed health care’ companies. Call yourself a managed health care company, and you can buy everything from other insurance companies to hospitals to clinics to doctors. The more consolidation, the more fees bankers rake in, and the more premiums and medical reimbursements and health care procedures, each company can control. ...

  You know who else is similarly too big to fail? The insurance industry. UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer covers 50% of the insurable population in over 30 states. Blue Cross-Blue Shield, covers 100 million people through a constellation of 38 sub-companies. They, and other insurance companies are growing in breadth. When companies consolidate, the result is less transparency, less competition, and more possibility for fraud and shady behavior. Every. Single. Time.

• Huffington Post: Get Ready to Get Spun -- Again -- By Masters of Spin. By Wendell Potter. Excerpts: Health insurers invested a lot of what you paid them in premiums in an effort to get more of their friends elected to Congress. As the Center for Public Integrity reported last month, the political action committees of the 11 largest health insurers and their biggest trade group -- America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) -- gave $10.2 million to federal politicians between January 2007 and August 2012. Most of that money went to Republicans who pledged to repeal or gut the Affordable Care Act.

  The return on that investment was not so good. But that doesn't mean insurers have come to accept that Obamacare must be implemented as Congress intended. On the contrary, even more of your premium dollars are about to be spent on a propaganda campaign to get the law changed to protect profits.

  Even as insurers were helping to bankroll their friends' campaigns they were publicly expressing support for the reform law. AHIP president Karen Ignagni said in April 2010, a month after the president signed the Affordable Care Act, that her group was "strongly committed" to its "successful implementation."

  What she really meant is that insurers were committed to the parts of the law they like -- such as one that requires us to buy coverage from them -- but not so much to the ones that might negatively impact their bottom lines. Like those that will end the abusive practices that have enabled them to pad those bottom lines.

  When Ignagni and insurance company executives speak, it is important to parse their words to understand what they are really saying. That's just as true now as it was in 2010. ...

  One of the most important consumer protections in Obamacare prohibits insurers from charging older people more than three times as much as younger people. Insurance company lobbyists have persuaded many state lawmakers to allow them to charge older folks five times as much as younger folks, and some states have no restrictions at all. As a result, many Americans in their 40s, 50s and early 60s can't possibly afford coverage.

  Insurers have no problem with that. As we age, we have greater need for medical care, and insurers would rather not have to pay for it. They much prefer to sell skimpy policies with relatively low premiums to young people who are less likely to get sick.

• Huffington Post: Papa John's Obamacare Costs Are Far Less Than Price Of Free Pizza Giveaway. By Jillian Berman. Excerpts: News flash to Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter: Obamacare isn’t the only thing costing your business money.

  The pizza chain head has made his views on the Affordable Care Act clear in recent months, claiming the new health care law will cost his business about $5 to $8 million per year. To compensate Schnatter's said he will likely raise pizza prices and cut back some workers’ hours so he doesn’t have to insure them.

  Caleb Melby of Forbes has graciously done the math on Obamacare’s cost to Papa John’s and according to his analysis, to cover the cost of Obamacare, the pizza chain would have to raise prices by 3.4 to 4.6 cents per pie -- way less than the 11 to 14 cents Schnatter claims he needs. ...

  We're guessing Obamacare won't impact life at Schnatter's lavish home, a 40,000 square-foot mansion in a tony suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, that features several swimming pools, a private golf course and a 22-car garage among other amenities, according to CelebrityNetworth.com.

• New York Times: Rising Out-of-Pocket Health Costs. By Ann Carrns. Excerpts: I looked over some medical statements recently and realized that even though my family had spent roughly $3,000 out of pocket for health care this year, we would still fail to meet our annual deductible.

  We’re not alone. Workers who get health insurance through their employers have seen the average deductible nearly double over the last six years, a new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds.

• Los Angeles Times, courtesy of Physicians for a National Health Program: Patient trapped in health insurance rate hike. A patient's move from one Southern California community to another nearby triggers a 25% rate hike by Anthem Blue Cross despite no change in her care. By David Lazarus. Excerpts: It's understandable that car insurance rates can change when you move. One neighborhood might have more accidents or burglaries than another.

  But health insurance?

  Joan Swope, 62, moved recently from Cathedral City, just down the road from Palm Springs, to nearby Palm Desert.

  She informed her insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, of the change of address. A few weeks later, Anthem responded with a notice stating that, because of the move, Swope's monthly premium on her individual policy will increase to $524 from $418.

  That's a more than 25% rate hike. For a move of less than 10 miles.

  "It's ridiculous," Swope told me. "I'm going to the same doctor. I'm going to the same facilities and the same drugstore. Nothing has changed."

  Nothing except her ZIP Code. And in the actuarial world of insurance, that's a sufficiently life-altering event to justify an extra $1,272 in annual payments — on top of a $5,000 deductible.

• Employee Benefits News: Survey: Health care inflation hits 15-year low. Excerpts: Expansion of consumer-directed health plans and investment in health management programs produced the lowest average annual employer cost increase since 1997, according to the National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans, conducted annually by Mercer.

  Growth in the average total health benefit cost per employee slowed from 6.1% last year to just 4.1% in 2012. Cost averaged $10,558 per employee in 2012. Large employers – those with 500 or more employees – experienced both a higher increase (5.4%) and higher average cost.

• Washington Post: AARP uses its power to oppose Social Security, Medicare benefit cuts for retirees. By Michael A. Fletcher and Zachary A. Goldfarb. Excerpts: AARP, the lobbying powerhouse for older Americans, last year made a dramatic concession. Amid a national debate over whether to overhaul Social Security, the group said for the first time it was open to cuts in benefits.

  The backlash from AARP members and liberal groups that oppose changes in the program was enormous — and this time around, as Washington debates how to tame the ballooning federal debt, AARP is flatly opposed to any benefit reductions for the nation’s retirees. ...

  Republicans say scaling back Social Security and Medicare, the largest drivers of future government deficits, is necessary. President Obama has previously been open to benefit cuts.

  But for lawmakers who would have to vote for such changes, AARP’s 37 million members and $1.3 billion budget are a force to be reckoned with. In the past eight months, AARP has sponsored a series of candidate debates, run television ads, circulated questionnaires and held more than 4,000 meetings around the country to mobilize its legion of supporters to oppose any cuts.

  Under the slogan “You’ve earned a say,” the group has been building opposition to entitlement changes. A recent poll by the organization found that 70 percent of Americans 50 and older think Medicare and Social Security shouldn’t be part of the upcoming fiscal debate. ...

  AARP opposes raising the age for Medicare eligibility on the grounds that it would increase costs for younger seniors while driving up premium costs for older ones. The group opposes efforts to shrink Social Security cost-of-living increases, which it says would cost older seniors thousands of dollars in benefits. ...

  “You have people in their 40s and 50s who are cascading toward a terrible retirement,” said Eric Kingson, a Syracuse University professor who co-chairs Strengthen Social Security, a coalition that has joined AARP, organized labor and others in opposing any benefit cuts in the program. ...

  LeaMond, AARP’s top lobbyist now, said that Medicare savings can be found by slowing the growth in health-care costs and that Social Security can be strengthened without cutting benefits, though she did not say how. She said AARP members care deeply about the long-term solvency of the programs even if they don’t want to bear the brunt of the cost of fixing them.

  “If the critics spend anytime with our members, you cannot help but be struck by their powerful sense of legacy,” she said. “They want to leave Medicare and Social Security as strong for their kids and grandkids as for them.”

News and Opinion Concerning the "War on the Middle Class"

"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.

• New York Times op-ed: Let’s Not Make a Deal. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: Even though preliminary estimates suggest that Democrats received somewhat more votes than Republicans in Congressional elections, the G.O.P. retains solid control of the House thanks to extreme gerrymandering by courts and Republican-controlled state governments. And Representative John Boehner, the speaker of the House, wasted no time in declaring that his party remains as intransigent as ever, utterly opposed to any rise in tax rates even as it whines about the size of the deficit.

  So President Obama has to make a decision, almost immediately, about how to deal with continuing Republican obstruction. How far should he go in accommodating the G.O.P.’s demands? ...

  Because Republicans are trying, for the third time since he took office, to use economic blackmail to achieve a goal they lack the votes to achieve through the normal legislative process. In particular, they want to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, even though the nation can’t afford to make those tax cuts permanent and the public believes that taxes on the rich should go up — and they’re threatening to block any deal on anything else unless they get their way. So they are, in effect, threatening to tank the economy unless their demands are met.

  Mr. Obama essentially surrendered in the face of similar tactics at the end of 2010, extending low taxes on the rich for two more years. He made significant concessions again in 2011, when Republicans threatened to create financial chaos by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And the current potential crisis is the legacy of those past concessions.

  Well, this has to stop — unless we want hostage-taking, the threat of making the nation ungovernable, to become a standard part of our political process. ...

  Meanwhile, the president is in a far stronger position than in previous confrontations. I don’t place much stock in talk of “mandates,” but Mr. Obama did win re-election with a populist campaign, so he can plausibly claim that Republicans are defying the will of the American people. And he just won his big election and is, therefore, far better placed than before to weather any political blowback from economic troubles — especially when it would be so obvious that these troubles were being deliberately inflicted by the G.O.P. in a last-ditch attempt to defend the privileges of the 1 percent.

• The Smirking Chimp: Congrats Mr. President, Now Please Protect Our Social Security. By Cliff Schecter. Excerpts: President Obama won on Tuesday with a coalition of the future. Not only did he have the support of younger voters, Asians, African Americans, women, Latinos, moderates, union members and city dwellers and suburbanites alike, he got the support of those who think we should be expanding, not contracting our social compact.

  So let's begin with this so-called "Grand" Bargain, and when I say "begin," take that as "keep the government's hands off of our Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid," if you get my drift. There is no crisis. Let's try it again together: there is no crisis. No fiscal cliff or whatever the buzzwords are in the Beltway today.

  The rather slight budgetary issues can be fixed in the blink of an eye, by addressing real problems such as our lack of revenue and propensity for wasting money on things to go BOOM that the military doesn't even want.

• Washington Post: House Democrats got more votes than House Republicans. Yet Boehner says he’s got a mandate? By Ezra Klein. Excerpts: The political-science evidence is clear on this: There’s no such thing as an election mandate. There’s only what a president is able to get done with the Congress the American people gave him.

  But few politicians agree. And so the days and weeks after elections are heavy with arguments about who has a mandate, and for what. The latest debate is about whether President Obama, who ran a campaign explicitly promising to raise taxes on high earners and who beat a candidate explicitly promising to refuse any and all tax increases, has a mandate to raise taxes.

  Speaker John Boehner says he doesn’t. “Listen, our majority is going to get reelected,” he said the day before the election. “We’ll have as much of a mandate as he [President Obama] will … to not raise taxes.”

  Boehner’s logic is, on its face, sound. House Republicans have been as clear in their opposition to new taxes on the rich as Obama has been in his support for them. And House Republicans were reelected. They have as much right to claim a popular mandate as the president does.

  Or they would if they’d actually won more votes. But they didn’t. House Republicans did the equivalent of winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote. ...

  What saved Boehner’s majority wasn’t the will of the people but the power of redistricting. As my colleague Dylan Matthews showed, Republicans used their control over the redistricting process to great effect, packing Democrats into tighter and tighter districts and managing to restructure races so even a slight loss for Republicans in the popular vote still meant a healthy majority in the House.

  That’s a neat trick, but it’s not a popular mandate, or anything near to it — and Boehner knows it. That’s why his first move after the election was to announce, in a vague-but-important statement, that he was open to some kind of compromise on taxes.

• Washington Post opinion: Obama shouldn’t back down. By E.J. Dionne Jr. Excerpts: It is said after every election that the victors should put politics aside and work for the good of the country. If President Obama believed this pious nonsense, he would put his second term in jeopardy. Asking politicians to ignore politics is like insisting that professional hockey players switch to basketball. In a system with national elections every two years — and in which the two parties are in relatively close balance — politics never disappears.

  Fortunately, the president knows foolishness when he sees it. He has been toughened by four years of unremitting Republican opposition and has behind him both a large electoral college victory and an advantage of about 3 million popular votes. The word “mandate” is overused — just ask George W. Bush. But Obama was absolutely clear during the campaign about his insistence that taxes on better-off Americans need to rise as part of any deal on the budget deficit and “fiscal cliff.” ...

  The voters clearly heard what Obama was saying during the campaign. According to the media exit poll, only 35 percent of voters said taxes should not be increased. Fully 47 percent of all voters supported raising taxes on Americans earning $250,000 or more, including 66 percent of Obama’s voters. An additional 13 percent, of all voters and Obama’s, said taxes should go up for everyone.

  If Republican leaders in Congress want to pretend that Obama’s reelection means absolutely nothing, the president seems willing to let all the Bush tax cuts expire. This is the only way to deal with recalcitrance, reflected in the fact that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t even let the president make his case on Friday before issuing a flat statement rejecting any tax increases. Obama can only hope that he can break more reasonable Senate Republicans away from their hard-line leadership. ...

  Boehner made clear that preserving low tax rates for the rich remains the GOP’s single highest priority. The speaker said he might support new revenue but only through some vague “tax reform.” But that’s what Mitt Romney offered during the campaign. Boehner is saying he will make a deal with the victorious candidate only on the basis of the program of the defeated candidate. Here’s hoping this is just a bargaining position.

• Washington Post: Liberal groups mobilize for ‘fiscal cliff’ fight over Social Security, Medicare. By Zachary A. Goldfarb. Excerpts: Leaders of the nation’s labor unions and other liberal groups are planning Tuesday to press Obama at the White House to reject the kind of cuts in Medicare and Social Security that he has previously offered to make. On Thursday, left-leaning lawmakers and seniors groups plan to rally on Capitol Hill against any changes to entitlements. ...

  “We will make it very clear we will not be supportive of cuts to Medicare and Social Security,” said Sen. Bernard Sanders (Vt.), an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. “It would be a huge shock and disappointment if the president forgot the reality that he just won a major victory.” ...

  “We will give the president and his allies in Congress all the support and cover in the world in the fight for no more tax cuts for the rich. That includes, in particular, supporting the president’s position that it’s better to negotiate past December 31st than do a deal that’s bad for the country,” said a top labor official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment ahead of Tuesday’s meeting. “On the other hand, the answer for those who want to cut social insurance benefits in an economic crisis and increase economic insecurity is, ‘Hell, no.’ ”

• AlterNet: Danger Ahead: The Oligarchs Don't Understand That Economic Collapse Happens When They Get All the Money. The corporate masters seem to have forgotten they depend on working people for their own survival. By Thom Hartmann, Sam Sacks. Excerpts: Let’s face it, if your opponent in Monopoly scoops up Boardwalk, Park Place, North Carolina Avenue, Pacific Avenue, both utilities, and the four railroads – that’s game over. The other players, all of whom have been relegated to mere consumers instead of property owners, will slowly go bankrupt having to pay higher and higher costs for rent and services, utilities, and transportation. Eventually, one player has all the money and the losers have to clean up the board game and put it away.

  But let’s assume the Monopoly game doesn’t end there. Let’s assume the broke players keep rolling the dice and keep going around the board. They essentially keep living their lives desperate and broke, using their credit cards and home lines of credit to stay in the game. Maybe they end up in jail. If they’re lucky, they land on Baltic Avenue and can afford to stay a night in the slums.

  Meanwhile, the oligarch who owns everything can no longer collect any income. The other players can’t afford to pay rent, they can’t pay utilities, and they can’t ride on the railroads. Eventually, without consumers spending money, the Monopoly oligarch goes broke, too. His properties and businesses disappear and suddenly everyone is broke!

  That’s what Monopoly’s version of economic collapse looks like. And it’s very similar to what global economic collapse in the real world looks like, too.

  Now put the Monopoly game board away and consider this: Researchers in Zurich, Switzerland have found that there are roughly 43,000 transnational corporations that dominate the global economy. Of those, there are about 1,300 companies that control 80% of all the global revenues for all the transnational corporations on the planet. Now let’s take it a step further. Of those 1,300 core companies, only 147 companies, which all happen to own each other in some way, control 40% - or nearly half – of all the wealth in the entire transnational corporate network. That means 1% of transnationals own 40% of all the world’s business wealth.

  In other words, the global 1% has its own 1%. ...

  Right now, you can count the number of banks that own half of all the wealth in the U.S. economy on just one hand. There are just five of them and they are the usual suspects: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. Their total assets equal 8.5 trillion, which is 56% of our entire economy.

• New York Times op-ed: Life Expectancy of the Living Dead. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: Regular readers know that a lot of this blog’s time is spent on intellectual zombies — beliefs and concepts that have been killed by evidence but that keep shambling forward nonetheless, trying to eat our brains. And now that talk has turned once again to Grand Bargains and all that, I see that we’re once again seeing the Social Security/life expectancy zombie: we live longer, so shouldn’t retirement wait?

  What you need to know:

  1. The relevant life expectancy is life expectancy at or near retirement age. Falling infant mortality doesn’t make a case for delaying Social Security — and that’s important, because gains have been much less striking at age 65 than at birth.
  2. Gains in life expectancy have been very strongly correlated with income and class; those with lower incomes and lower status — the very people who depend most on Social Security — have seen very small gains in life expectancy: ...
  3. The retirement age has already been increased: the Greenspan Commission of the early 80s set it in motion, so that it’s now 66 and scheduled to rise to 67, essentially consuming all of the life expectancy gains of the bottom 50 percent.
  4. The alleged wise men of DC don’t know any of this. When Ryan Grim tried to ask Alan Simpson about it, Simpson replied by denying the facts, attacking the interviewer, and insulting the AARP.
• New York Times editorial: A New Chance for the Senate. Excerpts: In May, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, was furious at yet another obstructionist filibuster by Senate Republicans. He admitted then that he was wrong in 2011 not to change the Senate’s rules when he had a chance.

  “These two young, fine senators said it was time to change the rules of the Senate, and we didn’t,” he said, referring to Tom Udall of New Mexico and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who came up with a plan to reduce filibuster abuse that he rejected. “They were right. The rest of us were wrong, or most of us, anyway. What a shame.”

  It was a shame, a missed opportunity that helped give Republicans a big cudgel over the last two years. But now Mr. Reid has a chance to rectify that mistake. In January, at the beginning of the next session of the United States Senate, Democrats can vastly improve the efficiency of Congress and reduce filibuster abuse with a simple-majority vote. This time they need to seize the moment.

  The filibuster’s importance is as a last-ditch ploy to prevent a minority party from being steamrolled on the most pressing national issues. It was never intended to routinely require a 60-vote supermajority on virtually every issue the Senate takes up. Yet that’s how Republicans have used it in the last six years, to a far greater extent than Democrats ever did when they were in the minority.

• Washington Post: The Confederacy of Takers. By Dana Milbank. Excerpts: President Obama’s opponents have unwittingly come up with a brilliant plan to avoid the “fiscal cliff.” They want to secede from the union.

  If Obama were serious about being a good steward of the nation’s finances, he’d let them. ...

  And so a large number of patriotic Americans, mostly from states won by Mitt Romney last week, have petitioned the White House to let them secede. They should be careful about what they wish for. It would be excellent financial news for those of us left behind if Obama were to grant a number of the rebel states their wish “to withdraw from the United States and create [their] own NEW government” (the petitions emphasize “new” by capitalizing it).

  Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes. The balance is the opposite in blue states. The secession petitions, therefore, give the opportunity to create what would be, in a fiscal sense, a far more perfect union.

  Among those states with large numbers of petitioners asking out: Louisiana (more than 28,000 signatures at midday Tuesday), which gets about $1.45 in federal largess for every $1 it pays in taxes; Alabama (more than 20,000 signatures), which takes $1.71 for every $1 it puts in; South Carolina (26,000), which takes $1.38 for its dollar; and Missouri (22,000), which takes $1.29 for its dollar.

  Since the effort gained attention this week, copycats in all but a few states have joined the petition drive. To be fair, White House officials could refuse the secession petitions of states Obama won, such as New York (which gets only 79 cents on its tax dollar), Michigan (85 cents) and Colorado (79 cents). ...

  Of course, secession isn’t as easy or as painless as an electronic petition, and Obama couldn’t offer a redress of these petitioners’ grievances even if he wanted to. Nor should he want to: The Union of the Makers would be fiscally healthy but spiritually poor without the Confederacy of the Takers.

  Yet would-be rebels from the red states should keep in mind during the coming budget battle that those who are most ardent about cutting government spending tend to come from parts of the country that most rely on it.

• The Smirking Chimp: Why the Grand Bargain Is One-Sided and Totally Unfair. By Cenk Uygur. Excerpts: First of all, let's establish that no one in Washington actually cares about balancing the budget. If they did, they would love this so-called Fiscal Cliff. It raises taxes and cuts spending, so it would massively reduce the deficit. Isn't that what all of Washington has been pretending to care about all of this time?

  Second, understand that this so-called compromise they are talking about in order to avoid this supposed calamity is a trick. In fact, it'll be the greatest robbery in American history. Think about it -- they say they are worried about all those tax increases and spending cuts. But that's not true. The Grand Bargain would dramatically increase spending cuts, not alleviate them. So, in fact, the only thing they care about is paying less taxes, as always.

  Right now, according to the sequester $1.2 trillion in spending cuts are set to take place if nothing happens. Half of that would come from defense. Of course, this is the real problem because there's no way the defense contractors are going to allow that. Whenever people in Washington complain about spending cuts they mean spending cuts that would affect defense contractors. They want to massively increase spending cuts everywhere else in the budget.

• New York Times opinion: The Moocher Majority. By Paul Kruger. Excerpts: Lots of people having fun with Mitt Romney’s post-election diagnosis, which is that President Obama played dirty: he won peoples’ votes by — horrors — actually making their lives better:

  “With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” Mr. Romney said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

  The president’s health care plan, he said, was also a useful tool in mobilizing black and Hispanic voters. Though Mr. Romney won the white vote with 59 percent, according to exit polls, minorities coalesced around the president in overwhelming numbers: 93 percent of blacks and 71 percent of Hispanics.

  “You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge,” Mr. Romney said. “Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

  Gosh. People who will have health insurance under Obama but would have lost it under Romney voted for Obama. What’s wrong with those people?

  But as many commentators have pointed out, Romney was just encapsulating the prevalent worldview on the right. Some of us see an increasingly, radically unequal America, with rising inequality actually reinforced by public policy, with tax rates on the rich lower than they have been in many decades and the overall redistributive effect of government down substantially since the 1970s. But the right sees an entitlement epidemic, in which the big problem is that too many people are getting free stuff.

• New York Times opinion: Romney Blames Loss on Obama ‘Gifts’. By Andrew Rosenthal. Excerpts: Now we know that Mitt Romney did not “misspeak” when he whined to a big-money crowd that 47 percent of Americans mooch off government and “believe they are victims.” He meant precisely what he said.

  In a post-mortem call with his biggest donors on Wednesday, Mr. Romney said his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama” (well, yes, it was a pretty dull campaign) and that he lost because President Obama showered voters with “gifts.” By voters he meant black, Hispanic, female and young voters. And by “gifts,” he meant government money that is not spent on tax breaks and other incentives for big companies and rich people.

  He said Mr. Obama motivated young voters by keeping student-loan interest rates low and by extending dependent health insurance coverage to age 26. According to the Times account of the call, Mr. Romney said Mr. Obama’s health care plan also mobilized African-American and Hispanic voters. “You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family in perpetuity, I mean this is huge,” Mr. Romney said.

  He is right. It is huge. A hugely overdue and hugely necessary reform of a system that has left Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder with emergency rooms as their source of medical care. How crafty of Mr. Obama to pretend that he was governing when what he was really doing was handing out “gifts” in exchange for votes. ...

  Mr. Romney is so irrelevant now that’s it tempting to let his comments gather dust on the remainder table of history. But I thought a few points were worth making. First, none of these examples qualify as actual gifts. Some, like keeping interest rates low on student debt, are smart investments to help young people succeed and become – yes, taxpayers. Others, like health care reform, require Americans to spend money (on insurance, or pay a penalty).

  I guess Mr. Romney would not consider oil subsidies a gift. Or a tax system that allows him to pay a 14 percent tax rate. Or his proposal to build warships and warplanes and other fancy hardware that the military doesn’t want or need.

• The Smirking Chimp: The "Fiscal Cliff" Is a Hoax ... and a Mel Brooks Routine. By Richard Eskow. Excerpts: Viewers of MSNBC know that progressives like Chris Hayes and Lawrence O'Donnell are dutifully trying to remove the word "cliff" from the nomenclature, since the effects of this law would be gradual -- more like a "slope," as they said the other night. They're right about the "slope" part.

  But it's a tactical mistake to even engage in this kind of discussion, because there's really no "slope" either. There's just a law.

  John Boehner's law.

  Sure, the President agreed to that law as part of a deal to settle deficit talks last year. At the time the Republicans were about to shut down the entire government. The GOP forced this law into existence.

  That means the "fiscal cliff" is theirs. They own it

  Anyone who opposes disastrous, European-style austerity measures needs to stop talking about this in urgent terms. And nobody should characterize it as anything but what it really is: A deed performed by Republicans in Congress, which the same Congress can easily reverse.

  That's not just more accurate. It also places the responsibility for this pseudo-crisis exactly where it belongs.

  A Gun to the Head. The motives for the hoax are easy to understand. As a Campaign for America's Future/Democracy Corps poll reaffirmed after the election, the public overwhelmingly opposes any of the fiscal measures being negotiated as the result of this fictitious "crisis." A majority of voters, cutting across party lines, opposes virtually all of the ideas being discussed - including cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits, and reductions in anti-poverty programs.

  Voters strongly support some steps that aren't being debated because of this phony "crisis," like increased investment in jobs and economic growth. These negotiations are likely have the opposite effect instead, leading to more cuts in these programs. In fact, of the many "debt deal" provisions being debated today, only tax increases for the wealthiest Americans have the majority's approval. ...

  Here's more proof that both the "fiscal cliff" and the "emergency" deficit talks surrounding it are a fraud: They include two issues that don't belong in a deficit discussion at all. One's Social Security, which is forbidden by law from contributing to the national deficit.

  The other is the scam known as tax "reform" and "tax code simplification" - which, in plain English, means a lowering of top tax rates for millionaires and billionaires - supposedly in return for reduced "tax expenditures" and increased "tax revenues" to be named at a later date.

  Why would deficit talks include two ideas that won't reduce the national debt, especially when "tax simplification" will undoubtedly increase that debt substantially? That's an easy one: Because this phony "crisis" has nothing to do with deficits.

  It's all part of a long-range plan to scam the public into transferring even more of its wealth to the wealthiest among us: first by giving them lower tax rates, and then by cutting a program the public has already paid into. That way there'll be less pressure to increases taxes on the wealthy later on. (They may also want to raid Social Security's trust fund to pay for the deficits caused by their tax breaks.)

  These "deficit" moves would transfer even more of our national treasure to the extremely rich - including those on Wall Street who created our economic crisis in the first place. That, and not a "fiscal cliff," is what's "looming."

• Huffington Post: Tax What They Burn Before Tax What We Earn... By Ralph Nader. Excerpts: President Obama, as of now at least, supports letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire. But even if President Obama stands firm on this position in negotiations with Congressional Republicans, there's more work to be done to achieve more fundamental tax reform. As the president and Congress debate raising the income tax rate from 35 percent back up to where it was under President Clinton -- 39.5 percent -- keep in mind that under President Eisenhower, the largest earners paid roughly 90 percent after deductions. It was 70 percent at the start of Ronald Reagan's first term (which he then lowered drastically to 28 percent). In 2012, the line in the sand has been drawn on a relatively meager 4.9 percent difference.

  To many Americans, the very word "tax" strikes a sense of resentment -- few like to give up a percentage of their hard-earned wages. But let's recall the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, "taxes are what we pay for civilization." The basic purpose of taxation is to raise revenue needed for the public services we presumably all benefit from, and a purpose of government is to ensure that everyone is paying their fair share. Rarely is the fairness yardstick applied to the biggest culprits of tax avoidance and/or tax evasion -- the corporations. And, given grossly inadequate government tax enforcement budgets on global corporations, "tax evasion" is the proper term to add to the words "tax avoidance" (as the corporate attorneys would prefer, likely adding that it's "perfectly legal".)

  Did you know that many large U.S. chartered corporations -- Bank of America, Verizon, GE, to name a few -- did not pay a single dollar in taxes to the United States government in 2010? These are companies that report massive, billion dollar annual profits, but don't contribute a dime of federal income tax to the country that provides them with resources, public services and infrastructure to conduct business. Some of these giant corporations even receive a hefty tax benefit from the federal government. In the years 2008-2010, for example, GE made over $7 billion in U.S. profit, paid zero federal tax, and reaped nearly $5 billion extra from the United States treasury. All they say is "perfectly legal" because of the bloated tax code, with its numerous loopholes, which have allowed crafty tax accountants and attorneys to devise an entire playbook of tactics to avoid paying their way.

  Tax avoidance at GE is seen as a systematic profit center with the smartest loophole experts getting bonuses. Consider this: One building in the Cayman Islands -- the Ugland House -- is the legal address of thousands of U.S companies' corporate subsidies. All to avoid taxes. All "perfectly legal".

• New York Times opinion: Life, Death and Deficits. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: America’s political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas — beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity. But there are others.

  And right now the most dangerous zombie is probably the claim that rising life expectancy justifies a rise in both the Social Security retirement age and the age of eligibility for Medicare. Even some Democrats — including, according to reports, the president — have seemed susceptible to this argument. But it’s a cruel, foolish idea — cruel in the case of Social Security, foolish in the case of Medicare — and we shouldn’t let it eat our brains.

  First of all, you need to understand that while life expectancy at birth has gone up a lot, that’s not relevant to this issue; what matters is life expectancy for those at or near retirement age. When, to take one example, Alan Simpson — the co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit commission — declared that Social Security was “never intended as a retirement program” because life expectancy when it was founded was only 63, he was displaying his ignorance. Even in 1940, Americans who made it to age 65 generally had many years left.

  Now, life expectancy at age 65 has risen, too. But the rise has been very uneven since the 1970s, with only the relatively affluent and well-educated seeing large gains. Bear in mind, too, that the full retirement age has already gone up to 66 and is scheduled to rise to 67 under current law.

  This means that any further rise in the retirement age would be a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution, who aren’t living much longer, and who, in many cases, have jobs requiring physical effort that’s difficult even for healthy seniors. And these are precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.

  So any rise in the Social Security retirement age would, as I said, be cruel, hurting the most vulnerable Americans. And this cruelty would be gratuitous: While the United States does have a long-run budget problem, Social Security is not a major factor in that problem.

  Medicare, on the other hand, is a big budget problem. But raising the eligibility age, which means forcing seniors to seek private insurance, is no way to deal with that problem.

  It’s true that thanks to Obamacare, seniors should actually be able to get insurance even without Medicare. (Although, what happens if a number of states block the expansion of Medicaid that’s a crucial piece of the program?) But let’s be clear: Government insurance via Medicare is better and more cost-effective than private insurance. ...

  What would happen if we raised the Medicare eligibility age? The federal government would save only a small amount of money, because younger seniors are relatively healthy and hence low-cost. Meanwhile, however, those seniors would face sharply higher out-of-pocket costs. How could this trade-off be considered good policy?

  The bottom line is that raising the age of eligibility for either Social Security benefits or Medicare would be destructive, making Americans’ lives worse without contributing in any significant way to deficit reduction. Democrats, in particular, who even consider either alternative need to ask themselves what on earth they think they’re doing.

  But what, ask the deficit scolds, do people like me propose doing about rising spending? The answer is to do what every other advanced country does, and make a serious effort to rein in health care costs. Give Medicare the ability to bargain over drug prices. Let the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created as part of Obamacare to help Medicare control costs, do its job instead of crying “death panels.” (And isn’t it odd that the same people who demagogue attempts to help Medicare save money are eager to throw millions of people out of the program altogether?) We know that we have a health care system with skewed incentives and bloated costs, so why don’t we try to fix it?

• YouTube: Republican Deficit Hawk Hypocrites (video, approx. 5 minutes). By Senator Bernie Sanders. Description: Senator Sanders lays out a brief history of Republic hypocrisy concerning the deficit. Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan - leader of the deficit hawks - voted for two wars, the Medicare Part D program, and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans during the Bush administration. Now he, and the other deficit hawks, want to reduce the deficit on the backs of children, the elderly and the poor while protecting the interests of millionaires and billionaires.