How rich hippies and developers went to war over Instagram’s favourite beach

Reviews of Uno Astrolodge, a boutique new age-style hotel on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, lean heavily on words such as “magic”, “paradise” and “peace”. When it opened in 2001, Uno Astrolodge was one of the first upscale hotels in the beach town of Tulum. Over the past decade, the once-sleepy town, 75 miles south of Cancún, has become the kind of spiritual oasis particularly favoured by the fashion industry and wealthy New Yorkers. Until recently, guests at Uno Astrolodge, set on an exclusive stretch of white sandy beach, paid up to $300 per night for a room in a candlelit bungalow with a view of the ocean. They showered under the trees in private outdoor bathrooms and ate fresh bread baked on site every morning. They could spend their time detoxing in Native American sweat lodge ceremonies or getting their Mayan astrology charts read. Wednesdays at the Astrolodge featured sound healing ceremonies; a “women’s circle” welcomed every full moon with ecstatic dancing.

The Republican Class War

One recent morning at the Jefferson Hotel, in Washington, D.C., Peter Wehner, a conservative writer who served as an adviser for the past three Republican Presidents, described his party’s problems over a bowl of oatmeal. He said, “We got clobbered in 2012”—the fifth Presidential election out of the past six in which the Republican candidate lost the popular vote. “There’s a demographic problem. White votes are going down two points every year. We’re out of touch with the middle class.” Mitt Romney—whose very hair embodies wealthy privilege—was nominated at a national convention, in Tampa, that became an Ayn Rand-style celebration of business executives, the heroic “makers.” During the campaign, Romney wrote off forty-seven per cent of the country—the “takers”—as government parasites. He went on to lose badly to President Barack Obama, whom Republicans had regarded as an obvious failure, a target as vulnerable as Jimmy Carter. In the shock of that defeat, Wehner said, some conservatives realized that “there was a need for a policy agenda that reaches the middle class.” He added, “This was not a blinding insight.”

Harper stokes resentments in discreet class war

The willingness of much of the Canadian media to go along with the Conservative narrative about Stephen Harper’s “moderation” has allowed the prime minister to wage a discreet class war against working people without attracting too much attention.

Canadians don’t like Harper’s anti-worker agenda — when they notice it. That’s why there’s been such a public outcry since the temporary foreign worker program was exposed as a mechanism by which the Harper government has flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of cheap foreign workers, thereby suppressing Canadian wages in the interests of helping corporations.

Scenes from the class struggle in Canada

We have all heard the story of how the Canadian banks weathered the storm of the post-2008 recession as a kind of Rock of Gibraltar, proving the soundness of Canada's financial sector and fiscal model. It has been pointed to, again-and-again, by the mindless financial pundits that the media trot out to tell us that the sky is not falling and the system works just fine.

In fact, when Occupy Toronto began, there was no end to the preening of the imbecilic peacocks of the business commentary community (a truly sad crowd, they are not actually rich... they just make a living kissing the asses of the rich) spouting off with a bunch of nonsense about how, to loosely paraphrase, "the people in New York may have a point but our banking sector is just fine. It is not like the USA."

In between moments of pontificating on the perils of doing anything other than what the Conservative government of Canada has done, our Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, told the world in no uncertain terms, that, "In Canada, we did not suffer a single bank or federally regulated insurance company bailout or failure. Our country's financial institutions stood solid and steadfast, based on sound risk management and supported by a very effective regulatory and supervisory framework."

Well, it turns out Jim may have been being more than a little disingenuous.

It seems that, in fact, Canada's big banks were dipping deeply into the proverbial gravy train that populist rich kids like Toronto's pseudo-mayor like to ramble on about. To the tune of $114 billion.

Paul Ryan's Class Warfare

"Class warfare may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics."

That's what House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) told Fox News Sunday last September.

I would argue it makes for both rotten politics and rotten economics. And there is no greater example of that than Chairman Ryan's own budget.

That's right...the Ryan budget...the one that ends Medicare but continues tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires...is back.

It's like a bad horror movie.

So what is different this time around? The answer is not much.

It still does nothing to create jobs. It still eviscerates the social safety net. It still fails to invest in education, infrastructure, and clean energy.

Don’t tell us it’s not a class war

The entire world seems to be one huge advertisement for The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein showed in her revelatory book how the corporate-political-military-media complex exploits crises to further impose their harsh right-wing agenda – even when they themselves created the crisis. In a sane world, the economic meltdown and deep recession of the past four years would have led at minimum to stringent regulation of financiers and speculators plus programs to assist their victims. But in this world, you have to be nuts to believe in a sane world.

In reality, everything that’s happened in the past several years has gone to further empower and enrich the 1 per cent (or maybe the 5 per cent) at the expense of the rest of us. Look anywhere you want. What else does the universal demand for austerity programs mean? What else does the sudden concerted attack on public sector workers mean? What else does the intransigent line taken by multinational corporations against their unions mean? What else does the demand for “right-to-work” laws mean? What else does the widespread attack on seniors’ pensions mean?

The Policy Backdrop of Inequality and Its Implications for "Class Warfare"

Hey, no fair fighting back!!

That's what I hear when conservatives go on about "class warfare" in response the President's call for balance in deficit reduction. It's particularly grating to hear Rep Paul Ryan use the CW talking point, when the loins' share of his deficit savings come from cuts to low-income programs and Medicare, with no offsetting revenue.

Lots of posts in recent days have explored the tax side of this equation, essentially emphasizing the Buffett point that many of those who have done the best are paying a smaller share of the income in federal taxes than the middle class. That's an important point that links directly to President Obama's call for shared sacrifice and balanced deficit reduction. Sorry, Rep. Ryan -- it can't all come out of the spending side.

But, as the figure below reveals, the increase in income inequality -- one reliable metric of how different income classes have fared -- is very much a pretax phenomenon. The figure shows the changes in income shares from a comprehensive income data set of the Congressional Budget Office, 1979-2007, pretax and aftertax (federal taxes only -- I've added a table below with the levels for the most recent data year so you can see the underlying shares).


Source: CBO

The fact that the growth in inequality is largely a function of the pretax income distribution doesn't mean we should make it worse with regressive, supply-side tax cuts -- (economist Alan Blinder calls this move "unnecessary roughness" -- amplifying pretax inequality with regressive tax cuts). To the contrary, we need balanced tax measures to generate the revenues to support programs that can help push back on this trend -- initiatives like Head Start, child nutrition, educational support.

But it also doesn't mean we can meaningfully correct the problem with tax policy alone. We have be mindful of all the policies that effect the pretax distribution--the distribution of labor and capital earnings before any taxes and transfers kick in...that's where the real inequality action is.

Now, most economists argue that much of the increase in inequality is due to factors like globalization and technological change -- factors that are less a matter of policy than of economic evolution. But of course their impact can be amplified or dampened by policy. For example, unfair trade practices like China currency management make give low-wage competitors an even stronger price advantage. (Trade agreements are less of a big deal as I see it--the advocates overdo how much they'll help and visa-versa re the opponents -- though the advocates are worse...).

Lack of a strong, long-term public-private strategy in terms of boosting our manufacturing sector, as is standard practice in advanced (Germany) and emerging (China) countries also hurts our manufacturers compete internationally. So policy does matter -- considerably -- in this space.

Technological change is also thought to be a significant factor behind the changes in the graph, though the evidence here is more ambiguous. (One strain of work, for example, argues that technology has increased labor demand for both high skill and low skill work, while leaving out the middle.) But to the extent that technology increases employers' skill demands such that a college education is increasingly necessary to compete, programs that help disadvantaged kids get that opportunity play a role here too. And cuts to those programs hurt.

And then there's a bunch of stuff that directly raises or lowers the bargaining clout of middle and working class families--policy changes or missed policy opportunities that have hurt or failed to help them.

- The long-term erosion of the minimum wage

- The absence of legislative protection to balance the organizing playing field for those who want to collectively bargain

- The inattention to labor standards such as wage and hour rules, overtime regulations, workplace safety, worker classification (this is where regular employees get misclassified as independent contractors and lose basic labor protections -- and guess what? Progressive reform of this problem is in the President's new budget plan -- very cool...)

- The attack on public sector employment

- The lack of universal health care

- The absence of comprehensive immigration reform

One more biggie: full employment. It's very much a policy variable and one, in fact, that used to be the law for the Federal Reserve -- so-called Humphrey Hawkins Act mandated full employment as a policy goal of the Fed. As I stress here, the fact that our job market has run with so much slack over the very period when inequality grew is no coincidence (and visa-versa: when inequality was flat or falling, we were more likely to be at full employment).

And of course, in recession, like now, by dithering on stimulus, we're disproportionately hurting the wage, incomes, and living standards of the folks who've been losing income share over the years shown in the figure above.

In other words, there are a lot of policy measures that have considerable impact on how the benefits of growth are distributed -- before taxes even show up on the scene. When representatives of the wealthy squeal about "class warfare," they're not just talking about shielding their treasure from the tax system. They're also protecting and endorsing a policy agenda that's helped tilt growth their way for a long time.


Origin
Source: Huffington 

Elizabeth Warren Blasts GOP 'Class Warfare' Charge, Tax Cuts For The Rich

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts and former White House financial reform adviser, blasted Republicans at an appearance In Andover last month for accusing Democrats of engaging in "class warfare."

"I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,'" Warren said. "No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own -- nobody."

Republican lawmakers have criticized President Barack Obama in recent weeks for engaging in "class warfare." House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) argued in an op-ed last month that the president was “anti-business, hyper-regulatory [and] pro-tax” and “fueled by efforts to incite class warfare."

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) had a similar criticism after Obama unveiled his new deficit reduction plan this month, which features a proposed tax on millionaires, saying “Class warfare isn’t leadership.”