Between The Lines - Sam Pizzigati: America's Middle Class Declines as Counterparts in Europe and Canada Advances (Week Ending May 9, 2014)

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

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America's Poor and Middle Class Decline as Counterparts in Europe and Canada Advance

Posted April 30, 2014

Interview with Sam Pizzigati, veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies Associate fellow, conducted by Scott Harris

Since the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in September 2011, America has seen more discussion and debate about rising income inequality. While many politicians, including President Obama, talk about the need to address inequality, little of substance has been done to reverse policies that exacerbate the accelerating wealth gap. Now a new study published in the New York Times, titled, “The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest,” cites statistics from the Luxembourg Income Study Database, and concludes that the middle class in other industrialized nations around the world have seen considerably larger increases in income over the last three decades, than their American counterparts.

The study also found that poor Americans have fared even worse than the middle class in comparison to families with similar incomes living in Canada and Europe. Major factors in the different outcomes revolve around tax policies that favor the rich, lagging education attainment, the distribution of wealth upwards to the wealthiest sector and the weakening of labor unions.

Recent research on inequality and views on America’s dysfunctional political system have found a large audience among Americans looking for answers about declining living standards. French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” argues that unfettered capitalism inevitably leads to extreme income inequality. A new study by professors at Princeton and Northwestern University conclude that America is no longer a democracy, but an oligarchy where the rich call the shots. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Sam Pizzigati, a veteran labor journalist and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Here, he assesses the decline of the American middle class, rising income inequality and public policy initiatives that can help reverse falling living standards.

SAM PIZZIGATI: When you look at disposable income around the developed world, you see that it's been an incredibly lousy century so far for average Americans. Since the year 2000, disposable income in the United States has barely nudged at all. It's only up 0.3 percent.

In other countries, by comparison, the increase is much, much higher. So if you look at Spain, is much, much higher. Spain we now see as a basket case with all sorts of economic trouble. But yet, in Spain they've had a disposable income increase of 4.1 percent, well over 10 times the U.S. increase.

In Italy, another country that's doing very poorly economically, the (disposable income) increase has been 8 percent. In the Netherlands, 14 percent. In Canada, our neighbors to the north, they've seen a 20 percent increase in household disposable income since the year 2000. Again, we've seen 0.3 percent. Looking across the world, the developed, our peer nations, average people in the United States are doing much, much worse than people elsewhere.

BETWEEN THE LINES: You know, there ares a lot of people out there that probably don't understand the forces that contribute to inequality in this country. But by looking at the public policies of these other industrialized nations around the world and what they do different from the United States that contributes to less inequality than we have here, what can we learn?

SAM PIZZIGATI: I think the best comparison to make is the comparison within the United States, that is, the comparison between the United States today and where we were in the middle of the 20th century when we became the first nation in the world to create a mass middle-class. And at that time, that mass middle class was built on two factors: one, we had a strong labor movement in the United States, over one of every three workers carried a union card and because of that unions set the labor market pace and even non-union workers ended up getting union level wages because unions were so prevalent. Right now, less than seven percent of U.S. workers hold union cards over vast swatches of the country. The labor movement and collective bargaining have essentially disappeared. So what we have is that the treasure that the United States economy is generating every year is flowing into the pockets of people at the top and not average Americans, and that's a prime, prime source of inequality that we're facing.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, we also had a strong, progressive tax system that limited inequities from the operations of the market. Income over $400,000 in the 1950s faced a 91 percent top tax rate. Now it's 39.6 percent for that same income. So just by letting our progressive tax system atrophy just by tolerating the assault on unions that we've seen over the past 50 and 60 years – we've changed the dynamics of income and wealth distribution in the United States and other countries have not gone through that process anywhere near that extent that we have here in the United States.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Sam, I also wanted to ask you the million dollar here, trillion dollar question: What are some of the policy prescriptions that you would advise the country take a serious look at, debate, and vote on in terms of the capacity to reverse economic disparity in this country? What are the ones that you think are the most important?

SAM PIZZIGATI: There are a number of things. But I would say that the very first thing is that we need to stop subsidizing inequality with our tax dollars. And that's exactly what we're doing right now. Every major corporation in the United States depends on government contracts and government tax subsidies of various support, whether you're talking about Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor or General Motors, or Apple computer, every major corporation has its hand in the till in one way or another.

So one thing that we're talking about – the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington – is that we should tie government procurement and government tax breaks to corporate pay policies. And if corporations are paying its top executives hundreds of times more than its average workers are receiving, that corporation should not be able to receive a government contract. That corporation should not receive a government tax break.

There are a number of other things that we can do along those lines in the state of California right now. There's legislation pending that would tax corporations that have a high ratio between CEO and worker pay than those corporations that have a modest differential between CEO and worker pay. These are the sorts of steps I think that we need to start thinking about. At the same time, we need to do the things that we know work from the past. We need to enable unions to organize and change the labor rules that benefit management so overwhelmingly today and of course we need to reinstitute a strong progressive tax system where people of great wealth pay a higher share of their income and taxes than people of modest means.

Sam Pizzigati is author of the book, "The Rich Don't Always Win." Read Pizzigati’s online column “Too Much” at toomuchonline.org.