2 parts moron
2 parts illiterate old man
4 parts clueless and confused
65 LBs KFC Extra Crunchy
2-50 gallon drums of ‘Vlad’s Extra Strength Spray Tan (Shit-hole Pumpkin #45)
1 gallon of “Russian Formula” Hair Dye – Urine Trouble Gold: “2 Girls, 1 Room”
Innumerable Diet Cokes
More ketchup and burnt to a cinder meat than anyone ever thought possible
More than a little bloviating dementia
Several large scoops of sexual assault, rape and potentially incestuous ‘shroom pounding
1 giant, orange, lying asshole
Mix well and spew
oh, but wait, the slurring, snorting, stumbling, stammering and stupidity is just ramping up …
take it away Dr. Dimwitzky …
Nice, dumb AND without any empathy …
Good thing this dude’s not in charge of the nucl … oh wait … fuck! …
We’re all gunna die aren’t we Mabel?
"Other people — Sean Hannity, RushBo — a lot of great people, a lot of great writers got it right" — who is "RushBo"? pic.twitter.com/rlGSnM2roz
And the gop/TP response will be: In 3, 2, 1 … That damned Obama !!! … Obama is Killing the economy with his leftist, liberal Socialism !!! OMG! What will ever become of the poor job creators ?!?! Obama’s destroying our country! We must take back America !!! Obama’s the worst president in history !!! Obama’s trying to destroy America !!!
There, now you don’t have to bother with the news today … Go watch the World Cup … Or, go help out yer’ neighbor or something … Enjoy yer’ long weekend … Peace, and safe journeys …
Some time back I posted a video by Nick Hanauer where he discussed inequality, and who the real ‘job creators’ are … and the lies told by those who wish to deny it … It was an amazing video and was (and remains to this day) one of the most responded to posts I have ever done in the past 12 or so years that I have been writing a blog … He has just released another great piece and I would hope that you would take the time to read it and then pass it along to anyone you think might be interested in reading it … especially that crazy uncle who loves to/insists on ranting on about the beauty of trickle down economics … NOTE: I have reposted the above mentioned video at the bottom of this post for those who haven’t seen it yet …
The Pitchforks Are Coming … For Us Plutocrats By NICK HANAUER
Memo: From Nick Hanauer To: My Fellow Zillionaires
You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about. In 1992, I was selling pillows made by my family’s business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then, that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed. I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough—and that time wasn’t far off—people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor. And Filene’s. And Borders. And on and on.
Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy, was the strategic part of my success. The lucky part was that I had two friends, both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. One was a guy you’ve probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the other was a fellow named Jeff Bezos. I was so excited by the potential of the web that I told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time. It just happened that the second Jeff—Bezos—called me back first to take up my investment offer. So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. The other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online idea; people just weren’t yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don’t vary in quality—Bezos’ great insight). Cybershop didn’t make it, just another dot-com bust. Amazon did somewhat better. Now I own a very large yacht. But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks. At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent. But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution. And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last. If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when. Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.
Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.
The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression—so that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks—that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too. It’s not just that we’ll escape with our lives; it’s that we’ll most certainly get even richer. The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts. What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too. It’s when I realized this that I decided I had to leave my insulated world of the super-rich and get involved in politics. Not directly, by running for office or becoming one of the big-money billionaires who back candidates in an election. Instead, I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas—by advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call “middle-out” economics. It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another. Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around. On June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called “The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.” Forbes labeled it “Nick Hanauer’s near insane” proposal. And yet, just weeks after it was published, my friend David Rolf, a Service Employees International Union organizer, roused fast-food workers to go on strike around the country for a $15 living wage. Nearly a year later, the city of Seattle passed a $15 minimum wage. And just 350 days after my article was published, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray signed that ordinance into law. How could this happen, you ask? It happened because we reminded the masses that they are the source of growth and prosperity, not us rich guys. We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees. We reminded them that if businesses paid workers a living wage rather than poverty wages, taxpayers wouldn’t have to make up the difference. And when we got done, 74 percent of likely Seattle voters in a recent poll agreed that a $15 minimum wage was a swell idea. The standard response in the minimum-wage debate, made by Republicans and their business backers and plenty of Democrats as well, is that raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Businesses will have to lay off workers. This argument reflects the orthodox economics that most people had in college. If you took Econ 101, then you literally were taught that if wages go up, employment must go down. The law of supply and demand and all that. That’s why you’ve got John Boehner and other Republicans in Congress insisting that if you price employment higher, you get less of it. Really? Because here’s an odd thing. During the past three decades, compensation for CEOs grew 127 times faster than it did for workers. Since 1950, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased 1,000 percent, and that is not a typo. CEOs used to earn 30 times the median wage; now they rake in 500 times. Yet no company I know of has eliminated its senior managers, or outsourced them to China or automated their jobs. Instead, we now have more CEOs and senior executives than ever before. So, too, for financial services workers and technology workers. These folks earn multiples of the median wage, yet we somehow have more and more of them. Pic by Victor Juhasz
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong. Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk. But in Seattle, our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet? Well, trickle-downers, look at the data here: The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage? San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America? Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us. It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass. It makes perfect sense if you think about it: If a worker earns $7.25 an hour, which is now the national minimum wage, what proportion of that person’s income do you think ends up in the cash registers of local small businesses? Hardly any. That person is paying rent, ideally going out to get subsistence groceries at Safeway, and, if really lucky, has a bus pass. But she’s not going out to eat at restaurants. Not browsing for new clothes. Not buying flowers on Mother’s Day. Is this issue more complicated than I’m making out? Of course. Are there many factors at play determining the dynamics of employment? Yup. But please, please stop insisting that if we pay low-wage workers more, unemployment will skyrocket and it will destroy the economy. It’s utter nonsense. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics isn’t believing that if the rich get richer, it’s good for the economy. It’s believing that if the poor get richer, it’s bad for the economy. I know that virtually all of you feel that compelling our businesses to pay workers more is somehow unfair, or is too much government interference. Most of you think that we should just let good examples like Costco or Gap lead the way. Or let the market set the price. But here’s the thing. When those who set bad examples, like the owners of Wal-Mart or McDonald’s, pay their workers close to the minimum wage, what they’re really saying is that they’d pay even less if it weren’t illegal. (Thankfully both companies have recently said they would not oppose a hike in the minimum wage.) In any large group, some people absolutely will not do the right thing. That’s why our economy can only be safe and effective if it is governed by the same kinds of rules as, say, the transportation system, with its speed limits and stop signs. Wal-Mart is our nation’s largest employer with some 1.4 million employees in the United States and more than $25 billion in pre-tax profit. So why are Wal-Mart employees the largest group of Medicaid recipients in many states? Wal-Mart could, say, pay each of its 1 million lowest-paid workers an extra $10,000 per year, raise them all out of poverty and enable them to, of all things, afford to shop at Wal-Mart. Not only would this also save us all the expense of the food stamps, Medicaid and rent assistance that they currently require, but Wal-Mart would still earn more than $15 billion pre-tax per year. Wal-Mart won’t (and shouldn’t) volunteer to pay its workers more than their competitors. In order for us to have an economy that works for everyone, we should compel all retailers to pay living wages—not just ask politely. We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It’s simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good. So forget all that rhetoric about how America is great because of people like you and me and Steve Jobs. You know the truth even if you won’t admit it: If any of us had been born in Somalia or the Congo, all we’d be is some guy standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. It’s not that Somalia and Congo don’t have good entrepreneurs. It’s just that the best ones are selling their wares off crates by the side of the road because that’s all their customers can afford. So why not talk about a different kind of New Deal for the American people, one that could appeal to the right as well as left—to libertarians as well as liberals? First, I’d ask my Republican friends to get real about reducing the size of government. Yes, yes and yes, you guys are all correct: The federal government is too big in some ways. But no way can you cut government substantially, not the way things are now. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush each had eight years to do it, and they failed miserably. Republicans and Democrats in Congress can’t shrink government with wishful thinking. The only way to slash government for real is to go back to basic economic principles: You have to reduce the demand for government. If people are getting $15 an hour or more, they don’t need food stamps. They don’t need rent assistance. They don’t need you and me to pay for their medical care. If the consumer middle class is back, buying and shopping, then it stands to reason you won’t need as large a welfare state. And at the same time, revenues from payroll and sales taxes would rise, reducing the deficit. This is, in other words, an economic approach that can unite left and right. Perhaps that’s one reason the right is beginning, inexorably, to wake up to this reality as well. Even Republicans as diverse as Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum recently came out in favor of raising the minimum wage, in defiance of the Republicans in Congress. One thing we can agree on—I’m sure of this—is that the change isn’t going to start in Washington. Thinking is stale, arguments even more so. On both sides. But the way I see it, that’s all right. Most major social movements have seen their earliest victories at the state and municipal levels. The fight over the eight-hour workday, which ended in Washington, D.C., in 1938, began in places like Illinois and Massachusetts in the late 1800s. The movement for social security began in California in the 1930s. Even the Affordable Health Care Act—Obamacare—would have been hard to imagine without Mitt Romney’s model in Massachusetts to lead the way. Sadly, no Republicans and few Democrats get this. President Obama doesn’t seem to either, though his heart is in the right place. In his State of the Union speech this year, he mentioned the need for a higher minimum wage but failed to make the case that less inequality and a renewed middle class would promote faster economic growth. Instead, the arguments we hear from most Democrats are the same old social-justice claims. The only reason to help workers is because we feel sorry for them. These fairness arguments feed right into every stereotype of Obama and the Democrats as bleeding hearts. Republicans say growth. Democrats say fairness—and lose every time. But just because the two parties in Washington haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean we rich folks can just keep going. The conversation is already changing, even if the billionaires aren’t onto it. I know what you think: You think that Occupy Wall Street and all the other capitalism-is-the-problem protesters disappeared without a trace. But that’s not true. Of course, it’s hard to get people to sleep in a park in the cause of social justice. But the protests we had in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis really did help to change the debate in this country from death panels and debt ceilings to inequality. It’s just that so many of you plutocrats didn’t get the message. Dear 1%ers, many of our fellow citizens are starting to believe that capitalism itself is the problem. I disagree, and I’m sure you do too. Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter. That is why investments in the middle class work. And tax breaks for rich people like us don’t. Balancing the power of workers and billionaires by raising the minimum wage isn’t bad for capitalism. It’s an indispensable tool smart capitalists use to make capitalism stable and sustainable. And no one has a bigger stake in that than zillionaires like us. The oldest and most important conflict in human societies is the battle over the concentration of wealth and power. The folks like us at the top have always told those at the bottom that our respective positions are righteous and good for all. Historically, we called that divine right. Today we have trickle-down economics. What nonsense this is. Am I really such a superior person? Do I belong at the center of the moral as well as economic universe? Do you? My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows. They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another pillow company. Three generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in Seattle named Bezos. I look at the average Joe on the street, and I say, “There but for the grace of Jeff go I.” Even the best of us, in the worst of circumstances, are barefoot, standing by a dirt road, selling fruit. We should never forget that, or forget that the United States of America and its middle class made us, rather than the other way around. Or we could sit back, do nothing, enjoy our yachts. And wait for the pitchforks. Nick Hanauer is a Seattle-based entrepreneur. reposted from politico …
or … “i’ve got mine, so fuck the rest of you” “the only two facts you need to know about the shutdown” 1. if the gop/bagger controlled house of representatives voted on a “clean” budget bill – one that opened up the closed government offices but did not attempt to defund the affordable care act – that bill would pass, and the shutdown would be over now … nearly all democrats would vote for it, as would enough rethugs to end the shutdown and its related damage immediately … and of course it would pass the senate, just as it has already passed, repeatedly …unless, of course, some bagger moron ideologue in the minority dared filibuster it, and then it would be signed by the president … 2. so far though, speaker of the souse john of orange boehner has refused to let this vote occur … his tea party contingent knows how the vote would go, and therefore does not want it to happen; and the tan man’s fear of them, and fear for his job as speaker is so strong that he will not let that vote take place …
and then, just for good measure, there’s this … snitch “making sure obama is only a one two term president” mcconnell and rand “civil rights are for suckers” paul discussing the gop talking points of the day …
so with these facts in mind, let’s continue …
Rand Paul: There’s no reason to raise the debt ceiling
Source: The Hill Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) argued Wednesday that there’s no need to raise the debt ceiling because the U.S. can pay the interest on its debt with existing revenue. “What’s going on is, interestingly, the Democrats are scaring people saying we might not pay because Republicans don’t want to raise the debt ceiling,” Paul said on CNN. “If you don’t raise the debt ceiling that means you won’t have a balanced budget, it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t pay your bills.” Paul argued that the House has passed a bill, the Full Faith and Credit law, that mandates payments on debt interest, Social Security, Medicare and soldier’s salaries go out first. He said that if the debt ceiling is breached, other government function wouldn’t get financed, but that no default would occur. “I’m for taking default completely off the table and for promising to the American people and the markets, to Wall Street, that we will always pay the interest on the debt as a priority,” he said. “You know how we do that? We bring in $250 billion in tax revenue every month. The debt payment is about $30 billion. We just promise that we’ll always pay it. “read more here … so there you have it … the gop/bagger plan for america … fuck the election results of 2012 … fuck the will of the people … fuck previous congressional and senate decisions … fuck the american economy … fuck the world economy … fuck the supreme court and their decisions … and most of all, we’ve got ours, so fuck everybody else … ”we want what we want, and we want it now” … They will keep things shut down until Oct 17 debt ceiling hits. Then they will pay what they think they must in order to keep their anarchist revolution going — debts, SS, Medicare, Military, and not pay what they don’t like — Depts of Education, EPA, HUD, Agriculture (food stamps), Affordable Care Act, etc. (“other government function wouldn’t get financed, but that no default would occur.”) They will have achieved the destruction of the government as they have always wished. Of course, they don’t care about other consequences – crashing the economy of not only this but other countries. Why should they care? They have theirs so fuck you. Make no mistake about it – this is not only a revolution but outright anarchy!! GOP lawmakers predict shutdown will last for weeks. When asked how long the current impasse would last, a number of lawmakers agreed that it could go on for weeks, at least until Oct. 17, when the nation is expected to hit the debt limit. “Two weeks,” a GOP lawmaker told The Hill. “At least a week,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) predicted. “Until the debt ceiling is hit,” Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (R-Calif.) said, noting that the administration could move the date up, instead of leaving it at the projected Oct. 17 marker. read more here …
america, meet bathtub … as chief rethug/bagger economic guru and wild eyed fanatic grover norquist so famously said, “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” yup, republicans are now openly talking about, and acknowledging, that they are ready to push the nation into default unless they get their way … of course, they could simply pass a CR and raise the debt limit, then start negotiating as democrats have repeatedly offered ( 18 separate times ) for the past six months, but I guess it is considered rude or unpatriotic to raise this fact … and this plan would give them exactly what they have wanted all along … stop the federal government dead in it’s tracks, then only restart the areas of it that they like and want (also explaining their desire to pass “mini-CR’s” to open up only the parts of government that are giving them the worst press – don’t worry kids, they’ll then kill any others they don’t like the next time they grab the american people and economy as hostages) … so much easier than winning pesky elections and then doing it legally and constitutionally as american constitutional law demands …
House Republicans To Defund ACORN Again, Even Though It Still Does Not Exist
Source: Huffington Post ”john of orange boehner arriving to save america”
WASHINGTON — House Republicans are scheduled to vote on two separate budget bills this week, each of which would reject funding for the poverty activism group ACORN, despite the fact that ACORN disbanded three years ago. ACORN, also known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, came under heavy fire in the fall of 2009 after conservative videographer James O’Keefe released a set of selectively edited videos that appeared to show its employees offering advice on tax avoidance related to prostitution and child smuggling. Independent investigations by the California attorney general, the Massachusetts attorney general and the Brooklyn, N.Y., district attorney would later clear ACORN of criminal wrongdoing, and an investigation by the Government Accountability Office would clear ACORN of charges that it mishandled federal funds. But in the fall of 2009, Congress banned federal funding for ACORN using broad language that applied to “any organization” that had been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws or campaign finance laws or with filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. The funding ban also extended to any employees, contractors or others affiliated with any group so charged. Struggling with the bad publicity and loss of federal funds, ACORN dissolved in early 2010. Just to be sure, however, Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) included this language in a government funding bill introduced on May 28 of this year: “None of the funds made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or successors.” Section 545 of a bill put forward the next day by Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) delves still deeper into faux certainty, extending the funding ban to “any prior appropriations Act.” “Is it too late to defund Saddam Hussein?” mocked Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), defended the passages as routine language that House Republicans always include. “These provisions are typically carried every year in appropriations bills,” Hing said read more here … hey boehner, you drunken, lying sack of shit … where’s those fucking jobs you promised??? just wonderin’ …
For approximately three years, our governments, the banking cabal, and the Corporate Media have assured us that they knew the appropriate approach for fixing the economies that they had previously crippled with their own mismanagement. We were told that the key was to stomp on the Little People with “austerity” in order to continue making full interest payments to the Bond Parasites — at any/all costs. Following three years of this continuous, uninterrupted failure, Greece has already defaulted on 75% of its debts, and its economy is totally destroyed. The UK, Spain and Italy are all plummeting downward in suicide-spirals, where the more austerity these sadistic governments inflict upon their own people the worse their debt/deficit problems get. Ireland and Portugal are nearly in the same position.
Now in what may be the greatest economic “mea culpa” in history, we have the media admitting that this government/banking/propaganda-machine troika has been wrong all along. They have been forced to acknowledge that Iceland’s approach to economic triage was the correct approach right from the beginning.
What was Iceland’s approach? To do the exact opposite of everything the bankers running our own economies told us to do. The bankers (naturally) told us that we needed to bail out the criminal Big Banks, at taxpayer expense (they were Too Big To Fail). Iceland gave the banksters nothing. The bankers told us that no amount of suffering (for the Little People) was too great in order to make sure that the Bond Parasites got paid at 100 cents on the dollar. Iceland told the Bond Parasites they would get what was left over, after the people had been taken care of (by their own government). The bankers told us that our governments could no longer afford the same education, health care and pension systems which our parents had taken for granted. Iceland told the bankers that what the country could no longer afford was to continue to be blood-sucked by the worst financial criminals in the history of our species. Now, after three-plus years of this absolute dichotomy in economic policymaking, a clear picture has emerged (despite the best efforts of the propaganda machine to hide the truth). In typical fashion, the moment that the Corporate Media is forced to admit that it has been serially misinforming us for the past several years; the Revisionists are immediately deployed to rewrite history, as shown in this Bloomberg BusinessWeek excerpt: …the island’s approach to its rescue led to a “surprisingly” strong recovery, the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief to the country said.
In fact, from the moment the Crash of ’08 was orchestrated and our morally bankrupt governments began executing the plans of the bankers, I have written that the only rational strategy was to put People before Parasites. While I wouldn’t expect national policymakers to take their cues from my writing, when I wrote out my economic prescriptions for our economies I didn’t base my views on compassion, or simply “doing the right thing.” Rather, I have consistently argued that it was a matter of simple arithmetic and the most-elementary principles of economics that “the Iceland approach” was the only strategy which could possibly succeed. When Plutarch wrote 2,000 years ago “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all Republics,” he was not parroting socialist dogma (1,500 years before the birth of Socialism). Plutarch was simply expressing the First Principle of economics; something on which all of the modern capitalist economists who followed in his footsteps have based their own theories. When modern economists produce their own jargon, such as the Marginal Propensity to Consume; it is squarely based on the wisdom of Plutarch: that an economy will always be healthier with its wealth in the hands of the poor and the Middle Class instead of being hoarded by rich misers (and gamblers). So when the Bloomberg Revisionists attempt to convince us that Iceland’s strong (and real)economic recovery was a “surprise”; this could only be true if none of our governments, none of the bankers and none of the media’s precious “experts” understood the most-elementary principles of arithmetic and economics. Is this the message the media wants to convey? What is even more disingenuous here is the congratulatory tone in this exercise in Revisionism, since nothing could be further from the truth. As I detailed in a four-part series one year ago, the campaign of “economic rape” perpetrated against the governments of Europe over the past two and half years (in particular) has been expressly designed to take away “the Iceland option” for Europe’s other governments. One of the reasons for Iceland being able to escape the choke-hold of the Western banking cabal is that its economy (and its people) still retained enough residual prosperity to tough it out — as the banking cabal tried to strangle Iceland’s economy as retribution for rejecting their Debt Slavery. Thus, austerity has been nothing less than a deliberate campaign to destroy these European economies so that the Slaves would be too economically weak to be able to sever their own choke-holds. Mission accomplished! One can only assume that neither the Corporate Media nor their Banker Masters would have allowed this clear acknowledgment that Iceland was right and we were wrong to appear within its own pages, unless it felt secure in the knowledge that all the remaining Debt Slaves had been crippled beyond their capacity to ever escape this economic oppression.
Indeed, for evidence of this we need only look to Greece: the one other European nation where there had been “rumblings” (i.e. riots) aimed at toppling the Traitor Government that served the banking cabal. After two elections, the combination of fear and propaganda bullied the long-suffering Greek people into choosing another Traitor Government — which had expressly pledged itself to reinforcing the bonds of economic slavery. When the Slaves vote for slavery, the Slave Masters can afford to gloat. Here, the purpose of this Bloomberg propaganda was not to praise Iceland’s government (when both the bankers and Corporate Media despise Iceland with all of their considerable malice). Rather, the goal of this disinformation was to manufacture a new Big Lie.
Instead of the Truth: that from Day 1 Iceland’s approach was the only possible strategy which could have succeeded, while our own governments chose a strategy intended to fail; we get the Big Lie. Our Traitor Governments were acting honestly and honourably; and Iceland’s success and our failure was yet another “surprise which no one could have predicted.” We saw precisely the same Revisionism following the Crash of ’08 itself, where the mainstream media trotted out all their expert-shills to tell us they had been “surprised” by this economic event; while those within the precious metals sector had been predicting precisely such a cataclysm, in ever more-assertive terms, for several years. The real message here for readers is that when an economic strategy of People before Parasites succeeds that there is nothing the least-bit “surprising” about this. As with all the remainder of the world around us, promoting the health of Parasites is only good for the Parasites themselves.
i’m reposting yet another phenomenal piece by Rmuse at politicususa …
The Republican Obsession With Obstructing Obama is Endangering the Country There are signs that some Republicans realize the election was a repudiation of Republicans and their persistent obstructionism and refusal to help all Americans, but the majority are still of the mindset that preventing economic progress will “make President Obama a one-term President.” The Republican hatred of President Obama transcends economic policy and permeates their entire reason for living. The recent statements by some Senate Republicans that they will not confirm anyone the President nominates to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has nothing to do with the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans and everything to do obstructing President Obama. Their opposition to any Administration proposal is not founded in sound economic or foreign policies, but their insane obsession with preventing the President from working for the American people. Last year’s S&P report was correct in its appraisal that Republicans have made governance less stable, less effective, and less predictable, and one may have thought the election signaled that their intransigence on balanced deficit reduction was not acceptable, but they learned nothing whatsoever. In fact, they immediately trotted out Willard Romney’s tax plan, made Paul Ryan point-man on fiscal cliff negotiations, and assailed the President for not putting the Affordable Care Act on the table as a means of deficit reduction; anything to prevent raising tax rates on the wealthiest 2% of income earners. Their obsession with protecting the rich is more than just a form of mental illness; it is hazardous to this country’s economic health the American people cannot survive as long as they continue making governance less stable and effective. President Obama gave Republicans a proposal that cuts the deficit, cuts spending, creates jobs through infrastructure improvements, and preserves tax cuts for 98% of the population and 97% of small businesses. Republicans countered with Romney’s austerity plan and greater tax cuts for the wealthy, and they show no signs of relenting despite the looming fiscal cliff. Americans cannot tolerate another four years of Republican obstructionism just to benefit 2% of the population, or Draconian cuts to social safety nets that tens-of-millions of Americans depend on for basic survival. It has come to the point that Republicans are not doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, because they are doing the same thing they have for the past four years and expect the same results of making governance impossible, and unfortunately for America, their insane obsession with obstructing the President is a danger to economic recovery and 98% of the population. -snip-
… Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner presented President Obama’s proposal for avoiding the fiscal cliff Republicans voted for last year, and Republicans dismissed it with extreme prejudice because it is not austerity with more tax cuts for the rich. The President’s proposal adheres to the kind of broad framework of the deal Boehner wants with an upfront deficit-reduction “down payment” that cancels automatic tax increases and spending cuts while still signaling seriousness on the deficit, and a second stage giving Congress the opportunity to work on overhauling the tax code and social programs to secure more deficit reduction next year. Still, it does not include reducing taxes on wealthy and corporations’ while drastically cutting social safety nets and spending on infrastructure. Boehner said, “The Democrats have yet to get serious about real spending cuts,” and that “no substantive progress has been made in the talks between the White House and the House over the last two weeks. Listen, this is not a game, jobs are on the line, the American economy is on the line. And this is a moment for adult leadership.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “They took a step backward, moving away from consensus and significantly closer to the cliff,” which is simple code for not proposing severe austerity to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy that, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), will not reduce the deficit. In the CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook for Fiscal Years 2012 – 2022, it says if Bush-era tax cuts are allowed to expire at the end of the year, then the projected deficit will shrink from $1.1 trillion to $196 billion; an 82% reduction over the next six years. As a result, an increase in tax revenues combined with spending cuts will nearly halve the deficit in 2013, reducing it to $585 billion. read entire article here …
this article has been going viral the last few days and for good reason … i have written about this bunch before and their plans to take over, once and for all, the government and the economy … the war on the 99% continues …
CEO Council Demands Cuts To Poor, Elderly While Reaping Billions In Government Contracts, Tax Breaks link to article WASHINGTON — The corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed. The companies represented by executives working with the Campaign To Fix The Debt have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as well as specialized tax breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies’ tax bills. The CEOs are part of a campaign run by the Peter Peterson-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to spend at least $30 million pushing for a deficit reduction deal in the lame-duck session and beyond. During the past few days, CEOs belonging to what the campaign calls its CEO Fiscal Leadership Council (see pdf pages below listing memebrs) — most visibly, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and Honeywell’s David Cote — have barnstormed the media, making the case that the only way to cut the deficit is to severely scale back social safety-net programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — which would disproportionately impact the poor and the elderly. As part of their push, they are advocating a "territorial tax system" that would exempt their companies’ foreign profits from taxation, netting them about $134 billion in tax savings, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled "The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks" — money that could help pay off the federal budget deficit. Yet the CEOs are not offering to forgo federal money or pay a higher tax rate, on their personal income or corporate profits. Instead, council recommendations include cutting "entitlement" programs, as well as what they call "low-priority spending." read more here …. from huffington post
here is the list of all of the ceo’s who will do anything to continue to steal from us …
a couple of articles appeared the last day or two that completely refute the whole gop “obama has done a lousy job with the economy” and “he’s hurting the oil business” nonsense that has been spewing forth from the right for the last few years … so how about all you low information pundits and idiots on the right just cut it with all the “drill baby, drill” shit and give up on the whole “job creators” fantasy? … that screeching and wailing really has been getting on everyone’s nerves for a long while guys … wake up and smell the coffee …
New Home Sales Jump to Near 2-1/2 Year High in September Source: Reuters New home sales jump to near 2-1/2 year high in September Wed Oct 24, 2012 10:02am EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New single-family home sales surged in September to their highest level in nearly 2-1/2 years, further evidence the housing market recovery is gaining steam. The Commerce Department said on Wednesday sales increased 5.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted 389,000-unit annual rate – the highest level since April 2010, when sales were boosted by a tax credit for first-time homebuyers. Though August’s sales pace was revised down to a 368,000-unit pace from the previously reported 373,000 units, the tenor of the report was relatively strong, with the median home price of a new home rising 11.7 percent from a year ago. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast sales rising to a 385,000-unit rate last month. read more here …
US may soon become world’s top oil producer Source: AP-Excite By JONATHAN FAHEY NEW YORK (AP) – U.S. oil output is surging so fast that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest producer. Driven by high prices and new drilling methods, U.S. production of crude and other liquid hydrocarbons is on track to rise 7 percent this year to an average of 10.9 million barrels per day. This will be the fourth straight year of crude increases and the biggest single-year gain since 1951. The boom has surprised even the experts. "Five years ago, if I or anyone had predicted today’s production growth, people would have thought we were crazy," says Jim Burkhard, head of oil markets research at IHS CERA, an energy consulting firm.
Mitt Romney Profited By At Least $15.3 Million From Auto Bailout: Report
Source: Huffington Post By Mollie Reilly Mitt Romney, who famously authored an op-ed in 2008 suggesting that the federal government should "let Detroit go bankrupt," has been on the defensive in the Midwest ever since President Barack Obama’s controversial auto bailout turned the struggling companies around. Political observers roundly agree that Romney’s opposition to federal intervention may very well cost him Ohio and therefore the White House. At Tuesday’s presidential debate on Long Island, Romney attempted to recast the story, with himself as the champion of the industry (see the video above), but his comments at the time, recorded for posterity, have made such a reinvention challenging. But while Romney’s political fortunes may have been shorted by the Obama’s auto rescue, the bailout was a boon for his personal fortune. A new report running Thursday in The Nation finds that Romney and his wife, Ann, made at least $15.3 million — and perhaps tens of millions more — as a result of bailout funds paid to General Motors. The story, an early copy of which was provided to The Huffington Post, is written by investigative reporter Greg Palast and was backed by the The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. read full story here … from huffington post
mitt romney and bain capital continue to move good, american jobs overseas for big profits … watch the video and share the story of sensata workers in freeport, ill., to see how selling out american workers and moving jobs to china continues to line romney’s pockets …
daily kos: Romney’s Bain Capital did what they do best. They bought out a company called Sensata Tech and are in the process of outsourcing it to China. They even brought in Chinese workers for the current employees to train. Yea, they were forced to train their own replacements. And Bain Capital forced the company to take down their American flag and put up a Chinese flag while they trained them. A Chinese flag was flying over a Bain-owned factory in Freeport, Illinois. This is our economy if Romney wins.
crooks and liars: Right now in Freeport, Illinois, some 170 workers at an auto sensor plant are sleeping in tents to protest Bain-owned Sensata Technology’s decision to ship their jobs to China. The company recently made factory officials take down the American flag when they were forced to train their Chinese replacement workers, according to Tom Gaulrapp, with the United Steelworkers Union. That’s un-American, my friends. This is taking place as Mitt Romney tries to convince people to believe that he doesn’t know about Bain’s shipping American jobs overseas. He is trying to distance himself from Bain Capital, a pioneer of outsourcing where Romney made a fortune as CEO. Another employee losing her job, Mary Jo Kerr, is a young mom of three. She’s heartbroken because she can’t afford dance lessons for her daughter. Another is Dot Turner, so close to retirement, but will not receive it. Instead Dot will get just 26 weeks’ severance for 43 years of work in the plant. Listen to their stories in the video below, and be sure to note the Chinese flag flying in front of the plant at about 1:10 into the video…in Illinois.
meanwhile … as mitt and his bain buds are sending sensata jobs to china for a big profit …
Ryan hits administration’s China policy in Ohio campaign stop
Source: nbcnews.com Ryan told the crowd in the heavily manufacturing Buckeye State that a Mitt Romney administration would not tolerate China stealing American jobs and property rights — a topic the VP nominee frequently talks about on the campaign trail. “We are going to stop this kind of cheating from occurring, if people are manipulating our currency, we are going to say that ‘they are manipulating our currency.’ If they are stealing our products, we are going to say ‘stop stealing our products or else you have consequences.’ That’s a big deal. That takes our jobs,” he said. read more here …
and let’s NOT forget that ryan voted against giving the president the authority to impose sanctions on china …
if you happen to be a friend of either donald trump or jack welch, then you best stand back, because their heads are about to explode …
after all the heaving, sighing,blathering and bloviating last week on the right because the unemployment number fell from 8.1 to 7.8% under (gasp) obama’s watch, this is sure to get certain liars pundits on the right quite excited and distracted … and like the 7.8% number, they’ll no doubt attack and discard, rather than, oh maybe be happy for their fellow americans that things ARE actually getting a little better …
well, here come the faux noise driven, right wingnut conspiracy theories in 3, 2, 1 … let the treasonous asshole douchebaggery commence …
BLOOMBERG: U.S. debt has shrunk to a six-year low
U.S. debt has shrunk to a six-year low relative to the size of the economy as homeowners, cities and companies cut borrowing, undermining rating companies’ downgrading of the nation’s credit rating. Total indebtedness including that of federal and state governments and consumers has fallen to 3.29 times gross domestic product, the least since 2006, from a peak of 3.59 four years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Private- sector borrowing is down by $4 trillion to $40.2 trillion. Downgrading the U.S. is premature when the two-thirds of American debt that is private is shrinking, according to Jim Vogel, head of government agency-debt research at FTN Financial in Memphis, Tennessee. “When one trend goes counter to the only one that they seem to be looking at, that throws up a flag,” Vogel said in a Sept. 27 interview in reference to the ratings firms. “If private debt is getting on a much firmer credit foundation, why do we have a 2013 deadline for one of the thorniest fiscal problems of an entire generation?”
are you paying attention mittens? … seeing as bill clinton called out and debunked all your lies last night, all you had left was to keep on hoping that your treasonous brethren in congress could continue to completely tank the economy in the hopes that that would help you out in november … then along comes more of those pesky facts and numbers … and there goes your last argument … so what’s next magic undies boy? …
maybe a dog whistle? … it’s really all you’ve got left …
The ADP National Employment Report August 2012
Source: ADP Payroll Services August 2012 Report Employment in the U.S. nonfarm private business sector increased by 201,000 from July to August, on a seasonally adjusted basis. The estimated gain from June to July was revised up from the initial estimate of 163,000 to 173,000. Employment in the private, service-providing sector expanded 185,000 in August, up from 156,000 in July. Employment in the private, goods-producing sector added 16,000 jobs in August. Manufacturing employment rose 3,000, following an increase of 6,000 in July. read more here …
Reports: Jobs, Unemployment Show Signs Of Improvement In August
Source: TPM The jobs market may be showing serious signs of improvement, in new statistics out Thursday morning. The Department of Labor said that unemployment applications fell last week by 12,000, down to a seasonally adjusted 365,000. According to the Associated Press, a consistent number below 375,000 is seen as the number that suggests hiring is strong enough to lower the unemployment rate. In addition, the ADP National Employment Report announced that employers added an estimated 201,000 private-sector jobs in August, according to Reuters, far surpassing the original expectation of 140,000. read more here …
this has been good enough news that the stock market is up this morning …
Pickup trucks drive US auto sales to 3-year high
Big pickups carried U.S. auto sales to their highest level in three years.
Demand for full-size pickups jumped 16 percent in August, helping to make it the strongest sales month since August 2009. Overall auto sales increased 20 percent from a year earlier to nearly 1.3 million, according to Autodata corp. The rising demand shows that businesses need to replace aging trucks and feel more confident about the recovery in U.S. housing—an industry where pickups are essential for hauling equipment and crews. "Businesses don’t usually go buy a fleet of trucks unless they have good reason to believe that business will be ramping up," said Jesse Toprak, vice president of market intelligence for the TrueCar.com auto pricing service. Ford, GM and Chrysler, the biggest makers of full-size trucks, notched double-digit gains in overall sales last month.
Reports Offer Latest Sign of a Healing Housing Market
Source: The New York Times In the latest sign that the worst might be over for the battered American housing market, the two government-controlled mortgage-finance giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, this week reported some of their best quarterly results since the real estate collapse. On Wednesday, Fannie Mae posted second-quarter net income of $5.1 billion. That is up from $2.7 billion in the first quarter of this year and an improvement from a net loss of $2.9 billion in the second quarter of last year. Fannie requested no additional money from the Treasury and said it would pay a $2.9 billion dividend to taxpayers. On Tuesday, its brother organization, Freddie Mac, announced second-quarter net income of $3 billion, up from $577 million in the first quarter and a net loss of $2.1 billion in the year-ago second quarter. It also requested no additional federal aid and said it would pay a $1.8 billion dividend to the federal government. read more here …
and so what does mittens do? …
well he tried this …
Romney: No ‘Bailouts’ for Threatened Homeowners
Source: national journal Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, pressed Wednesday for specifics on how he would help struggling homeowners, repeatedly brushed aside the suggestion that the federal government should take a more active role in helping people pay their mortgages and keep their homes. Romney told KLAS, a Las Vegas television station, that he planned to provide no “bailouts” for those facing the threat of foreclosure. Romney drew criticism last fall in Nevada for comments to a Las Vegas newspaper that the housing market needs to "hit the bottom." read more here …
yup, it’s dog whistle time again for the gop … count on it …
the romney speech … 1. drill, drill, drill, then drill some more … 2. get rid of obamacare but keep romneycare in massachusetts. 3. limit the size of government. (cut, cut, cut) 4. crack down on china … somehow. 5. obama is bad, america is great. 6. a woman went out of business because obama said something about vegas. 7. and um, marco rubio said something positive about something. 8. a guy opened a new factory and he’s rich now. 9. and he went to san diego on memorial day and met some great americans. 10. told a slew of lies about obama and his record.. 11. he knows how to lead cause he’s um, been in the private sector 12 said that he would “lay some pipe himself”, if he had to, when speaking about the keystone pipeline project. (he might want to clear that with anne first)
though billed by aides as a major address, romney largely stuck to his standard remarks, speaking to the small crowd of about 200 … oh yeah, and while obama was speaking, romney had his tour bus driving around the obama event honking it’s horn and taunting the president and his supporters … stay classy mittens, stay classy ….
the obama speech … in a speech that was nearly twice as long as romney’s, obama offered a crowd of over 1,500 cheering supporters an expansive explanation for how his economic vision differed from that of romney … during his speech, obama cast the election as a choice between two “fundamentally different” economic views, rattling off a long list of spending cuts that would affect americans if romney and his party succeed in implementing their ideas … at one point, he addressed undecided voters watching his remarks on television, telling them that romney advocates the policies of the past that he said brought prosperity to the nation’s wealthiest at the expense of middle-income americans …
“If you want to give the policies of the last decade another try, then you should vote for mr. romney,” obama said … and followed later with … "I’m not going to stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people they were elected to serve. Not when so much is at stake."
NOTE: i tried for more than half an hour to find a picture of romney’s ohio speech today, but i can’t find any pictures of it anywhere … not even his own website had one … so, hopefully this will suffice … i think it probably captures the spirit of the event anyways …
as wannabe president mittens, ”the lyin’ king” romney, that misrepresenting, misstating, misinforming, master of magical thinking and constantly conniving,conductor of dog whistle operas likes to tell it … “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”
the republican lie machine has almost everyone believing that president obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future as the “barber of bain” likes to spew … even some democrats seem to think it’s true … BULLSHIT!!! … if you allow yourself to look at the FACTS, then no amount of repug magical thinking, wishful thinking and outright fear mongering and lies would work … so people, listen up, it’s once again time for a little thing we like to call …
FACTS, DAMNIT! …
Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace, which is slower than at any time in nearly 60 years
But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s. Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has. Here are the facts, according to the official government statistics:
• In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.
• In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.
• In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.
The big surge in federal spending happened in fiscal 2009, before Obama took office. Since then, spending growth has been relatively flat. Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%. There has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear. Why do people think Obama has spent like a drunken sailor? It’s in part because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the federal budget.
Senate Republicans yesterday filibustered the Democrats’ legislation for extending the soon-to-expire payroll tax break, with the plan going down by a vote of 51-49 (shy of the 60 votes necessary to invoke cloture). The GOP leadership’s alternative plan for extending the tax break went down by an overwhelming vote of 20-78. The reason that the GOP voted down the Democrats’ plan is that it would have been paid for by a small surtax on income above $1 million. Just one Republican — Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) — broke with her colleagues, who have consistently protected tax breaks for the wealthy while showing little more than indifference about a tax increase on the middle class. The surtax proposed by Democrats would have affected just 0.6 percent of Massachusetts taxpayers, who have an average income of more than $2 million. Yet Scott Brown, who led the filibuster has somehow convinced himself that these few wealthy people should be shielded from a tax increase, even if it ultimately means that taxes go up on 113 million households. frombusinessweek.comandthinkprogress.org
it’s not that the gop are protecting the rich, it’s that they are protecting a couple of the rich people … they are so held hostage by the koch brothers, americans for tax reform’s founder and president grover norquist (a man the entire republican cabal has signed pledges with to never, ever raise taxes in any way, which sounds just a little treasonous to me), and a few others … they no longer are even protecting the majority of the uber rich, as is their usual pattern … simple fact: rich people and giant corporations without customers go bankrupt … no ifs, ands, or buts about it … no customers is ALWAYS followed by layoffs and bankruptcy … simple … business and economics 101 … and the gop’s course of action has been to destroy the middle class … to destroy the “customers” of the “capitalists”, or “job creators” as the teapublicans like to call them … do the math … it isn’t hard … the income disparity in the united states right now is approaching record highs, already as high as it’s been since before the great depression … and why are they doing this? … one reason, as mitch mcconnell, the republican senate minority leader stated (on numerous occasions), his “number one priority is to make sure Barrack Obama is a one term president” … but there is much more at play here than simply the lust for power and the white house … it is also about crashing the economy and particularly the middle class, so that the corporate elite can have their slaves back … if all the unions are gone, there are no child labour laws, the environment and safety are completely without regulation, the minimum wage has been struck down and the average person can’t get a decent education, then they are completely at the mercy of the corporations … you will either take the job that’s offered, or you and your kids will starve to death on the street … as michelle bachmann recently said, “if anyone will not work, neither should he eat’” … a third, and very important part of all this is what carl rove likes to call his permanent republican majority … killing unions also kills one of the strongest forces that the democratic party has for getting out the vote during elections … less unions, less people vote democrat … those damn union thugs … they forced a 40 hour work week, safety and health protections, overtime, vacation and family/medical leave and enforced those rights on the job … they gave workers the right to work and not be fired on a whim and ended child labor … who did they think they were anyway? … back to my original point here … the gop is so owned by their grover pledge that they aren’t even listening to what the rich want and desperately need … they are so ideologically driven that it is getting in the way of what would be right for both the middle class and the 1% … a recent piece by one of the 1% sums it up perfectly … nick hanauer, a very well off venture capitalist wrote the following in bloomberg businessweek …
Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators
Dec. 1 It is a tenet of American economic beliefs, and an article of faith for Republicans that is seldom contested by Democrats: If taxes are raised on the rich, job creation will stop. Trouble is, sometimes the things that we know to be true are dead wrong. For the larger part of human history, for example, people were sure that the sun circles the Earth and that we are at the center of the universe. It doesn’t, and we aren’t. The conventional wisdom that the rich and businesses are our nation’s “job creators” is every bit as false. I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc. Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate. That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be. Theory of Evolution When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around. It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do. That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer. And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years. Since 1980, the share of the nation’s income for fat cats like me in the top 0.1 percent has increased a shocking 400 percent, while the share for the bottom 50 percent of Americans has declined 33 percent. At the same time, effective tax rates on the super wealthy fell to 16.6 percent in 2007, from 42 percent at the peak of U.S. productivity in the early 1960s, and about 30 percent during the expansion of the 1990s. In my case, that means that this year, I paid an 11 percent rate on an eight-figure income. One reason this policy is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, I go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally. It’s true that we do spend a lot more than the average family. Yet the one truly expensive line item in our budget is our airplane (which, by the way, was manufactured in France by Dassault Aviation SA), and those annual costs are mostly for fuel (from the Middle East). It’s just crazy to believe that any of this is more beneficial to our economy than hiring more teachers or police officers or investing in our infrastructure. More Shoppers Needed I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the tens of millions of middle-class families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages. If the average American family still got the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would have an astounding $13,000 more in their pockets a year. It’s worth pausing to consider what our economy would be like today if middle-class consumers had that additional income to spend. It is mathematically impossible to invest enough in our economy and our country to sustain the middle class (our customers) without taxing the top 1 percent at reasonable levels again. Shifting the burden from the 99 percent to the 1 percent is the surest and best way to get our consumer-based economy rolling again. Significant tax increases on the about $1.5 trillion in collective income of those of us in the top 1 percent could create hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in our economy, rather than letting it pile up in a few bank accounts like a huge clot in our nation’s economic circulatory system. Consider, for example, that a puny 3 percent surtax on incomes above $1 million would be enough to maintain and expand the current payroll tax cut beyond December, preventing a $1,000 increase on the average worker’s taxes at the worst possible time for the economy. With a few more pennies on the dollar, we could invest in rebuilding schools and infrastructure. And even if we imposed a millionaires’ surtax and rolled back the Bush- era tax cuts for those at the top, the taxes on the richest Americans would still be historically low, and their incomes would still be astronomically high. We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich. So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business.
need proof that this agenda has been underway the past thirty years or so? …
this is why there are occupy movements and related groups springing up all over the planet …
WASHINGTON – Thousands of demonstrators, including movie stars and a Nobel laureate, surrounded the White House on Sunday to protest a proposed Canadian pipeline that’s serving as a flashpoint for the U.S. environmental movement while resonating with Americans fed up with corporate interests. The demonstration is the latest in a series of White House protests aimed at convincing U.S. President Barack Obama to thwart Calgary-based TransCanada’s attempts to build the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry Alberta oilsands crude through six American states to Gulf Coast refineries. Mark Ruffalo, nominated for an Academy Award last year, and Jody Williams, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on banning landmines, were among a sea of protesters who marched along several downtown blocks, including past the U.S. Treasury building, before surrounding the White House in a mammoth circle. Bill McKibben, a leading U.S. environmentalist and one of the protest’s organizers, described the scene as both "a big O-shaped hug" or "a symbolic house arrest." Obama, however, was golfing in northern Virginia for most of the afternoon. His motorcade arrived back at the White House just before 5 p.m. without any interference from the protesters. "I have heard he’s gone golfing but he has to drive through the wonderful circle to get back to his house, so that’s perfect," Canadian actress Margot Kidder, who was arrested at a similar White House protest in August, said earlier on Sunday. Ruffalo was on hand to address the protesters before they began their march, some of them carrying a giant fake pipeline emblazoned with the words Stop The XL Pipeline. "I’m here to get a message to President Obama to stop the tarsands Keystone XL pipeline," Ruffalo told The Canadian Press before he took to the stage in a park across Pennsylvania Avenue. "I voted for him because he promised us change and he promised us we were going to be the generation to end tyranny, and now is his chance to come through." Police on the scene estimated the crowd at about 5,000-strong while organizers claimed as many as 12,000 people were on hand at the peak of the protest. The Obama administration is currently weighing whether to give the green light to Keystone XL. The U.S. State Department is making the ruling because the pipeline crosses an international border, but the president has said the final decision will reflect his views and suggested he isn’t swayed by the argument that the pipeline will create thousands of jobs. "Folks in Nebraska, like all across the country, aren’t going to say to themselves, ‘We’ll take a few thousand jobs if it means our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health,"’ Obama said in a recent interview with an Omaha TV station. "We don’t want, for example, aquifers to be adversely affected. Folks in Nebraska obviously would be directly impacted." A decision on the pipeline was supposed to be made by the end of the year, but the State Department suggested last week that it might defer the decision as they continue to assess whether Keystone XL is in the national interest of the United States. Keystone XL has become a political hot potato for the Obama administration, especially since the release of emails that suggest a cosy relationship between State Department officials and TransCanada’s chief lobbyist, Paul Elliott. Elliott worked on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential bid in 2008. There have also been allegations that the State Department failed to do an impartial environmental assessment of Keystone XL by hiring an environmental consulting firm, Houston-based Cardno Entrix, recommended to it by TransCanada itself. With a presidential election less than a year away, key Obama advisers are reportedly growing increasingly nervous about losing supporters if they approve Keystone XL. The pipeline’s opponents point to spills along oil pipelines and argue the Keystone XL project is a disaster waiting to happen since it would carry millions of barrels a week of carbon-intensive oilsands crude through environmentally fragile areas of the U.S. Great Plains. Proponents, meantime, say the pipeline will create thousands of much-needed jobs and help end American reliance on oil from volatile and sometime hostile OPEC regimes. The project has not only become a symbol of the increasingly heated debate in the United States about the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and a perceived reluctance to embrace renewable sources of energy. It’s also tapping into growing American distaste for big corporations amid the continuing Occupy Wall Street protests. Pipeline opponents have said their anti-Keystone protests reflect widespread public anger at corporate greed, pointing to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. "You can’t occupy the White House, but you can surround it," McKibben told a news conference last week. Michael Brune, the executive director for the Sierra Club, urged Obama to block the pipeline as he addressed Sunday’s protesters. "President Obama can reignite the passion of Americans who care about clean air and clean water if he stands up for the health and livelihood of America’s heartland, takes a stand against this climate catastrophe, and rejects this pipeline," Brune said. "Denying the Keystone XL permit will send a clear signal that the U.S. government recognizes our true ‘national interest’ before oil company profits." TransCanada responded to the White House protest in a statement released Sunday afternoon. "What these millionaire actors and professional activists don’t seem to understand is that saying no to Keystone means saying yes to more conflict oil from the Middle East and Venezuela filling American gas tanks," company spokesman James Millar said. Millar added: "After the Washington protesters fly back home, they will forget about the millions of Americans who can’t find work." Keystone XL has galvanized the environmental movement in the U.S. following last year’s failed federal climate change legislation. More than 1,000 protesters were arrested this summer in two weeks of sit-ins outside the White House. The Nebraska legislature, meantime, is in special session considering legislation that could force TransCanada to reroute the pipeline away from the Ogallala aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the region.
OTTAWA – A generation of solid economic growth has meant little in the everyday lives of most Canadians, according to a new index of wellbeing. The finding is a yellow light for decision-makers that social unrest is just around the corner unless deep changes are made, warns Roy Romanow, the advisory board chairman of the University of Waterloo group that created the index. The index suggests the middle class, in particular, is eroding. "There are some very, very troubling signs," Romanow said in an interview. "I think if we continue on this trajectory we’re going to have bigger and bigger disparities. You can never build a solid political, social and economic community with wide disparities." The Canadian Index of Wellbeing is meant to be GDP’s alter ego, measuring the quality of life in society in ways gross domestic product does not. The index has been years in the making, pulling together 64 indicators to track progress in areas such as community spirit, education, health, environment, leisure and democratic engagement. While GDP measures what companies and government produce, the wellbeing index measures how Canada and its people are faring. It shows that between 1994 and 2008, wellbeing improved by just 11 per cent. The economy over that period grew by 31 per cent. So while investment and corporate activity were ticking along at a decent pace, Canadian households saw only minor improvements in their lifestyle. "The divergence in the (index of wellbeing) and GDP tells us emphatically that we have not been making the right investments in our people and in our communities. And we have not been doing it for a long time," the report on the index says. The index’s subcomponents show that quality of life actually deteriorated over that time frame in areas such as the environment, leisure and culture, and time use. Researchers noted that metal reserves are at rock-bottom, species abundance has declined, greenhouse-gas emissions have soared, and ground ozone has risen. When it comes to leisure, Canadians are working out more and taking longer vacations, but they spend less time engaged in arts and culture. Health care saw a slight gain — we’re smoking less and getting our flu shots, but diabetes and depression were on the rise. Wealthier people had better health status. Living standards rose 26.4 per cent, but at the expense of income inequality. The rich took the lion’s share. While parents are reading more to their young children and signing them up for all sorts of classes, kids are also spending more time in front of screens. And seniors are seeing less of their families. In other words, a typical household is now working harder and longer to keep on track financially, at the expense of having free time with family and friends, enjoying arts and culture, and volunteering. "Many Canadians are simply too caught up in a time crunch to enjoy leisure and culture activities in the company of friends and family. The question raised by the results of this domain: Is that progress?" the study asks. On the positive side, the index also revealed that Canadians feel safer than in the 1990s, and feel a stronger sense of belonging to their community. The "community vitality" index rose 20.7 per cent over the 15 years. Education has improved, especially with university graduation rates soaring. But our international rating has declined in literacy, math and science. While Romanow, the former NDP premier of Saskatchewan, is the face of the new index, he says the work put into the index is far from political or ideological. Rather, the data is taken from Statistics Canada and elsewhere, collected and crunched by a wide variety experts in their field. The work is recognized by the Organization for Economic Co-operation as leading edge. The policy prescriptions, however, point to failures at every level of government over the past couple of decades, Romanow says — adding that he, too, carries some of the blame. "We all wear some of this." Instead of focusing on redistributing wealth and building programs that improve quality of life for Canadians, governments are obsessed with juicing GDP, he said. The result has been to whittle away at the vibrancy of the middle class, and undermine core Canadian values that encourage individual effort, in part, through redistribution of wealth, Romanow said. "I think this is a yellow light. A cautionary light," he added. "We want to be able to make sure that … our societal values are not diminished here.
Rand Paul: There’s no reason to raise the debt ceiling
WTFville Chronicle 