Does Brazil Have the Answer?

What I saw was no illusion. Though its starting point was quite extreme, Brazil is a country that has seen income inequality drop over the last decade. Unemployment is at near record lows. And the growth of the middle class is quite stunning. By most estimates, upward of 40 million people have been pulled out of poverty in the last decade; extreme poverty, says the government, has been reduced by 89 percent. Per capita income has continued to grow even as G.D.P. growth has slowed.

Nevertheless, the economists I spoke to were uniformly bearish about the short-term future of the Brazilian economy. They pointed, for starters, to that slowdown in G.D.P., which they didn’t expect to pick up anytime soon. Despite the country’s enormous economic gains since the beginning of this century, there has been very little accompanying productivity gains. Indeed, several economists told me that the main reason unemployment was so low was that the economy was terribly inefficient. Too much of the economy was in the hands of the state, I was told, and, what’s more, it was a consumption-based economy that lacked necessary investment. And on and on. I got the sense that many economists believe that Brazil had been more lucky than good, and now its luck was running out. In a recent article about the Brazilian economy, The Economist put it starkly: “The Deterioration,” read its headline.

As I listened to the economists, though, I couldn’t help thinking about our own economy. Our G.D.P. growth was more than 4 percent in the third quarter of 2013, and, of course, our productivity has risen relentlessly. But, despite the growth, unemployment can’t seem to drop below 7 percent. And the middle class is slowly but surely being eviscerated — thanks, at least in part, to those productivity gains. Income inequality has become a fact of life in the United States, and while politicians decry that fact, they seem incapable of doing anything about it. Which made me wonder: Whose economy runs better, really?

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And most striking of all — at least from the point of view of an American — for the last 10 years, Brazil has had a program called Bolsa Família, which essentially hands money to mothers living in poverty. In return, they have to ensure that their children go to school and avail themselves of health care services. There is no question that Bolsa Família has been enormously effective in reducing poverty.

"I quit the company as 'Head of Finance for the Gulf of Mexico'," Stauffer told Truthout. "I had a sweet job, but I could no longer stand the injustice and lies at work."

Stauffer, who worked for BP in Houston, used these strong words to describe what he and at least 450 other BP America employees are outraged over - what they describe as their company reneging on their pension plans by up to 75 percent, lying about it, and actively working against them in order not to pay them retirement benefits that were promised.

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Fritz Guenther, a BP employee and United Steelworkers Union member working in Alaska, who has worked for BP for 35 years, said he and his colleagues are "currently fighting to get back the pension plans that BP promised us in writing in 1989."

"We were openly lied to by BP managers and HR people that when we were converted to the "new" plan that it would be as good or better than the existing and industry competitive plan," Guenther told Truthout. "Now that many of us are reaching retirement age, we are finding out that we have less than 50 percent of what we would have had if BP's promise was true or if we had remained in the old plan."

On average, 20 to 25 cents of every $1 spent on four government assistance programs is lost to fraud, Sen. Ron Johnson says

"Do you realize the average rate of fraud," Johnson asked, "whether it's in the Earned Income Tax Credit or Medicare or Medicaid, across the board, food stamps -- the average rate of fraud in those programs is 20 to 25 percent?"

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For a claim that is false and ridiculous, we give Johnson a Pants on Fire.

Rowen caught this interview with Scott Walker where he bragged about voting for Ronald Reagan!

I remember, I was a teenager, had just become a teenager and voted for Ronald Reagan — limited government, you know, smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense. You knew what you were getting. You knew how a Reagan administration, a Reagan presidency was going to be better for you.

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The funny thing is, scott walker was 13 and 17 during the Reagan election years.

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His birth date is not in dispute. Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as President on November 4th, 1980 - - just two days after Walker's 13th birthday - - and was re-elected on Nov. 6th, 1984 - - presidential election dates, here. On presidential election day November 6th, 1984, Scott Walker would have been 17 years and four days old.