How They Really Feel

This man's comments speaks volumes on the attitudes of the wealthy. His disdain for those with less money is palpable. He clearly is equating people's value with the size of their portfolio. Rich people are better.



And it is not just an arrogant attitude; he is also egregiously wrong,his intellectual honesty clearly compromised by his ideology. Notice that he claims to be subsidizing the 99% because he is making big bucks. It is especially ridiculous in light of the massive amounts of money our government has directed at the 1%, and especially the 0.1%, who operate under a self-serving delusion that everything they have is because of skill and hard work. Overlooked by this dickhead are the endless flows of government contracts and concessions to big Pharma, defense contractors and the like. Overlooked are the multi-million dollar giveaways by state and municipal governments as they compete to entice corporations to locate in their areas.

Richie Rich also ignores huge sums given to banks as part of their bailout, money bank executives then used to pay outsized bonuses. And just this week we read that those banks earned roughly $13 billion in interest directly the result of the sweetheart deal they received for tanking the US economy. Here is the gist of it, as related by AllGov:

Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s generous lending during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, banks that were teetering and at risk of collapsing wound up making billions of dollars in profits, according to Bloomberg Markets magazine.

After combing through 29,000 pages of Fed documents released to Bloomberg by court order, the publication determined that banks earned about $13 billion in income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates. These loans were made without informing the public or Congress of which institutions were borrowing heavily to stave off disaster.

Finally, have a look at the chart below. The corporations in these sectors are generally run by individuals who espouse rugged individualism, a can-do attitude, and the glories of a free market. They also almost always bitch about high taxes and government regulation. As you can see, they rarely pay their share of taxes, but they sure know how to pull in those tax subsidies- nearly $223 billion from 2008-2010.

Source: Citizens for Tax Justice

That's some serious corporate welfare. And from their government-subsidized profits, they pay outsized compensation to people like the guy in the video. If corporate boards claim that their executives deserve their often huge compensation, then those corporations don't need and don't deserve government support.  If you cannot live without taxpayers like me subsidizing your bottom line, then your insistence on fat bonuses is even more morally obscene than it already is.

Or is this a problem only when the recipients are the 99%?

The implicit message: It's just good business, complete with tax write-offs, when rich guys are in on it, and it's socialism only when the poor receive it.

Semi-Happy Thanksgiving

I would prefer to believe that everyone had a happy Thanksgiving, that they enjoyed a safe and sane feast with family and loved ones. The reality is that many did not.

I believe this is the official start of the holiday season, although every year it looks more like Halloween is. Either way we are now in the most frenzied period of consumption, the time of the year corporate America loves the best and depends upon the most.

In view of that it seems appropriate to recognize how unhappy many are. They've got good reasons. Here are just a few links, each with additional links and source material, that address the growing poverty in America. Read them and learn, but don't characterize the poor, sick, homeless, or unemployed as "unfortunate." Poverty in America is the direct result of reckless policies designed by and catering to ideologues and an avaricious oligarchy, not misfortune.

Extreme poverty is growing

The growth in the "near poor," just above poverty, startles US Census

Inequality is even worse than we thought

More than 1 in 5 of American children are poor

Moyers on Plutonomy

Here is Bill Moyers taking a page from the late Edward R. Murrow when he says having a bias is not a bad thing as long as you don't try to hide it.

Their bias is my bias: Plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Moyers explains how we have now arrived at plutonomy and why it matters.




For teabaggers inclined to obsess over what our founding fathers and past patriots had to say about wealth inequality, I offer some insights.

Social Security's Biggest Defender

Here is the guy voters have been told to shun, ridicule, and oppose at every opportunity. Why? Because Senator Bernie Sanders is un-American, he hates your values, and he wants to enslave you in government-run welfare camps.

Right? I mean these are the kind of tight, reasoned arguments that true patriots like Sarah Palin make about Sanders. They must be true. After all, Sanders is the only avowed socialist in Congress and we all know what they want. If you have any doubts, Sarah will tell you, for a fee, all you need to know about socialism (and everything else).

Those who value facts over diatribe know that Senator Sanders is one of the few who consistently works for the rest of us. Listen to Sanders on social security in the video below. His is one of the few voices in Congress that pushes back against the asinine and palpably wrong argument that social security doesn't work, it is killing the budget, and must be cut. Republicans are leading the assault, but more than a few Dems are willing to give in instead of defending your interests.

Aggressive, moneyed interests in the Republican party; Weak, hand-wringing facilitators in the Democratic party. No wonder Sanders is an independent.

It'll Ruin Us, I Tell You

Yep, it is the most contemptible, onerous regulation you could possibly impose upon commerce. Just ask the business organizations quoted in the video below.

What is this horror? An August 30 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that requires businesses to display a single poster reminding their employees of their rights.

We can't have employees knowing what their rights are. Better get that black man out of the White House. More analysis at Crooks and Liars.

We Are The Many

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, is in town. Security is tight and Waikiki is cordoned off.  Among the festivities was a performance by Makana, a popular local musician, for the numerous leaders from Asia, including China and Japan, along with the US. President Obama was there. You can read more about how the APEC forum turned out here.

As our local newspaper explains, Makana gave an unexpected and gutsy performance in which he sang his new song, We Are the Many, while he shows off an Occupy with Aloha shirt. The video below shows him singing. You will see why it was bold. In my view it was also highly appropriate.

Was anyone offended? Tough shit. If any world leader was offended, it serves to demonstrate why Occupy Wall Street is necessary in the first place.

The second video is a better-quality, professionally recorded version of the same song. Good job, Makana.

Pigs Fly

Jim Cramer gets a lot of things wrong, especially his stock picks, which are running roughly the same as a chimp and a dartboard. He has generally been a cheerleader for Republicans because Wall Street can buy them so easily. But even he has had enough of the small-minded buffoons at the last Republican debate.

Our problem, as Cramer says, is "unregulated, rapacious capitalism."

The Greatest Speech, the Greatest Creed

Here is the most profound single speech I believe I have ever heard. Unfotunately, no America politician will ever give a speech like this one.

More on How People Are Fighting Back

Here is more on how people are fighting back against an unsustainable and deeply damaging banking system; not the one most of us grew up with, to be sure, but the one it has become. It was a good weekend, what with my beloved mother's birthday, Guy Fawkes Day (for which the BBC dutifully broadcast V for Vendetta), all in addition to #OWS efforts to encourage the 99% to move their money. 

Growing anecdotal information suggests that quite a few of us pulled accounts from the likes of Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo, and took their business to credit unions and community banks. 

The Credit Union Times reported 40,000+ new accounts on Saturday. Other branches around the country reported hundreds to thousands of new accounts.

For their part, mega-banks say they are pleased with the action, because it is cleaning out the small accounts, the ones with high margins and low profitability. A Motley Fool apologist admits to much, but still defends Wall Street banks:

What’s important is realizing there are injustices with bailouts, cronyism and money in politics. People should really be upset about them. But they should realize at the same time that the economic system we have in the United States, compared to the rest of the globe, has created more wealth for everybody than almost any other country on Earth.

Bullshit, the banking system we had until a few years ago did indeed, play a crucial role in America's development, but not the one we currently have. Apparently it is too much trouble for him to show even the dimmest awareness of the massive changes that have taken place.

America's small regional banks are (mostly) not the problem. It is the global banking giants that are undermining the middle class. Read some details on this from a British banking perspective at George Monbiot's excellent column called The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen. 

Reinstate Glass-Steagall

Why Cain Connects With Republicans

This is another reason why #OWS is fighting back: The country's socio-economic standing in the world continues to deteriorate. One measure of that can be seen in a widely disseminated story that America's poorest of the poor now represent 1 in 15 citizens, those who's income is 50% or less than the official poverty level. 

Let that sink in a bit. That is about 21 million people. They are not just unemployed, or down on the luck, or facing lean times, or whatever other cliche' gets bandied about. These are America's very poorest, and the number--and proportion-- are now higher than ever. As the original AP article states:

The ranks of America's poorest poor have climbed to a record high — 1 in 15 people — spread widely across metropolitan areas as the housing bust pushed many inner-city poor into suburbs and other outlying places and shriveled jobs and income 

New census data paint a stark portrait of the nation's haves and have-nots at a time when unemployment remains persistently high. It comes a week before the government releases first-ever economic data that will show more Hispanics, elderly and working-age poor have fallen into poverty. 

In all, the numbers underscore the breadth and scope by which the downturn has reached further into mainstream America.

And yet, some presidential candidates seem to think there is no connection between unemployment and the high crimes on Wall Street, Herman Cain for one. Cain, whom I view as the intellectual equivalent of a freak show at a second-rate carnival, argues instead that significant tax cuts for America's wealthiest are what is needed. This is at the core of his asinine 9-9-9 plan. Never mind that we have been cutting taxes on the wealthy for a generation; they are apparently not rich enough. Another round of tax cuts on the top 1% will somehow induce them to create jobs.

In effect, Herman Cain is telling us that there really is no banking problem in this country. Those mobs at #OWS are just lazy and disaffected; they just want to blame others for their own problems. You just aren't working hard enough, that's all.

Holy freakin' shit. Cain, you cannot be serious. Are you saying the big banks have not created a crisis? Not only is this a miserable misreading of America's deep economic difficulties, you want us to think that simply getting a job, never mind their scarcity, somehow fixes an entrenched banking issue, just makes it all go away. Or maybe we just need to keep working because the banks have not really created a crisis anyway, so don't worry about it. Is that it?

Herman Cain's position on complex politico-economic issues is what we so often find in conservative ideologues; it comes down to simplistic moralizing about what he considers to be other people's personal shortcomings, their defective characters, their basic immorality. His economic policies make no sense, and his bravado intertwined with appalling ignorance may be galling for some of us, but that is beside the point for most Republican primary voters. Cain is demonstrating a punitive, stern, father figure sense of morality. And that is what most Republicans instinctively look for in their candidates.

Fight Back, With a Message

Here is a way to make your voice heard. It isn't new, but I like it. Send them a message --and make them pay for it.



Not sure about the wooden shingle; you can probably find some free cardboard lying around.

Blowing Up the Economy

Here's Rachel Maddow giving an excellent overview of how Wall Street blew up the economy. This is the corrupt casino mentality that now dominates our lives. It is what happens when wealth is dramatically concentrated in the hands of so few that they literally don't know how to put it all to productive use. 

It doesn't help that many of those same people are America's most rapacious and reckless, the ones that want you to think they are creating wealth and should only be envied. Perhaps you have heard that investment bankers show personality characteristics very similar to psychopaths. And no, it is not the occasional rogue trader.

And who protects these guys? Who refused to investigate years of fraud? Who denounces Occupy Wall Street as unAmerican practitioners of class warfare, but has shown remarkable indifference to Wall Street's trillion dollar scams?

Who were Elliot Spitzer's mortal enemies, the ones who gleefully rejoiced when he was brought down?

Those are not rhetorical questions. You know the answer.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Conservatives Get Their Way

At the heart of America's often shallow debate about political economy, policy, and the direction this country should take, is the cluster of variables surrounding taxes, regulation, economic policy, and the proper role of government. The basic conservative argument is that taxes are too high, regulation is too onerous and counterproductive, and business is too hobbled by misguided bureaucrats. 

The Republican prescription has been simple, persuasive for some, and amazingly consistent for a generation: cut taxes and everything good will happen. It is the elixir, the panacea, the cure-all for all that ails you. And if tax cuts are not enough (they are always a prerequisite), then just cut back on all that wasteful spending, which for conservatives means the welfare state and other transfers that go from deserving producers to the undeserving takers. 

To hear Republicans tell it, America is near comatose because of high taxes, radical unions ("big labor," as they say with a straight face), and more recently, government spending, not on defense of course, but on character-destroying entitlements such as social security, medicare, welfare, public education, and infrastructure boondoggles. 

Millions of Americans believe this argument; teabaggers in particular have been convinced that they are "taxed enough already" and that Democrats are transferring massive amounts of money "we don't have" to undeserving liberals who vote Democrat for that precise reason. Joshua Holland has an excellent article the title of which precisely captures what has become a real problem for the reality-based community: Thanks to Decades of Conservative Spin, Americans Are Hopelessly Confused About Taxes, Spending and the Deficit. 

As Holland states:

A good number of Americans are hopelessly confused about taxes, deficits and the debt. And it's no mystery why – conservatives have spent 30 years divorcing the taxes we pay from the services they finance. They've bent themselves into intellectual pretzels arguing that cutting taxes – on the wealthy – leads to more revenues in the coffers. They've invented narratives about taxes driving “producers” to sunnier climes, killing jobs by the bushel, and relentlessly spun the wholly false notion that we're facing “runaway spending” and are “taxed to death.”

Holland implicates the mainstream media for its failure to critically assess and challenge what has been Republican class warfare disguised as common sense. It is a narrative that has proved persuasive to people who do not often hear, and don't want to hear, analyses that challenge that narrative.

My immediate purpose is not to resolve ideological differences or to prove the efficacy of certain policy preferences. In this occasional series; let's call it "Conservatives Get Their Way," I want to show that regardless of how else you or I might feel about it, the inescapable conclusion is that on economic policy and legislation, including taxation, conservatives, the right-wing, the Republican party, and most assuredly, corporate America, have gotten most of what they have wanted on the policies, legislation, and legal opinions that overwhelmingly benefit them.

It is not a matter of conservatives wanting to move away from what they consider to be harmful, liberal policies. The reality is that Republicans, with the help of some Democrats, have undercut what they hate, and have already turned over power to wealthy oligarchs. The conservative charge that liberals, socialists, Democrats, dirty fucking hippies, a black President, "teh gays," and all the rest are destroying America, is demonstrably false. We do not have "Big Labor", high taxes, or profit-killing regulations, a large and expensive public sector, high social spending, or job-killing environmental regulations. In fact, we lag other industrialized nations on each of these points; our taxes are among the lowest, as is union membership and pubic sector spending.

So where does the US lead? Corporate profits and executive compensation. And of course, we do spend a pantload on defense, precisely what most conservatives and nearly all Republican politicians demand. 

The evidence more clearly shows that corporate America, the Republican party, and the conservative policies and legislation they say we need, but have already enacted, are undermining America's economic strength, its political institutions, and its social fabric. In other words, America's right wing not only has got its arguments mostly backwards, it is precisely the conservative policies they claim we need that have created the current mess, one that has been in the making for 35 plus years.

Conservatives get their way and they have the results one would expect; massive inequality, an unending gravy train for our bloated defense industry, executive compensation that has reached obscene levels, is largely detached from job performance (golden parachutes anyone?), and is loaded with money-saving perks denied to the rest of us. 

They succeeded in largely gutting private pension systems for workers, outsourced much of our manufacturing base to cheap labor countries, hobbled unions, have enjoyed significant productivity increases but have not shared those increases with their employees, and have beat back nearly all efforts to hold them accountable on the environment, tax loopholes, and regulations.

Much of this is vividly on display on Wall Street, where the perpetrators of massive fraud and malfeasance have managed to beat back essentially all efforts to hold them accountable and to rein in their ridiculously irresponsible behavior. 

Any no, it is not because Congress can't do anything; progressive Dems favor and vote for legislation that would return us to more stable and equitable times, legislation that we once had in place, such as Glass-Steagal.

It is because nearly all Republicans, joined by a few Blue Dog Democrats, have voted for the legislation that is so overwhelming favorable to the overclass.

It isn't Congress; it is Republicans in Congress.

Tax Loafers? Maybe Not

Conservative media continues to repeat the infantile and laughably incomplete argument that roughly half of Americans don't pay taxes, the implication of which is that rich guys are bearing the burden and that millions of Americans are loafing off the hard work of others.

There is a lot to this Republican morality play, except maybe for facts. I will set aside the political psychology of conservative morality for the moment, except to say that it drives all conservative attitudes; not facts, not empiricism, not logic.

The federal income tax burden may be low for many of us, but payroll taxes disproportionately hit the working poor and the middle class. The tax-free argument really falls apart when we include all taxes. Republicans either don't notice, or hope you don't notice, these numerous other taxes; they are much more regressive, and they hit lower income people much harder. These include sales taxes, especially those on food and other basic needs, and indirect or semi-hidden taxes, such as those on phone bills, or those with a tax already built into the price, such as gasoline.

Here is David Leonhart of the New York Times, explaining why the conservative spin is so misleading:

The reason is that poor families generally pay more in payroll taxes than they receive through benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s not just poor families for whom the payroll tax is a big deal, either. About three-quarters of all American households pay more in payroll taxes, which go toward Medicare and Social Security, than in income taxes.

Focusing on the statistical middle class — the middle 20 percent of households, as ranked by income — underlines this point. Households in this group made $35,400 to $52,100 in 2006, the last year for which the Congressional Budget Office has released data. That would describe a household with one full-time worker earning about $17 to $25 an hour. Such hourly pay is typical for firefighters, preschool teachers, computer support specialists, farmers, members of the clergy, mail carriers, secretaries and truck drivers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Taking into account both taxes and tax credits, the average household in this group paid a total income tax rate of just 3 percent. A good number of people, in fact, paid no net income taxes. They are among the alleged free riders.

But the picture starts to change when you look not just at income taxes but at all taxes. This average household would have paid 0.8 percent of its income in corporate taxes (through the stocks it owned), 0.9 percent in gas and other federal excise taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. Add these up, and the family’s total federal tax rate was 14.2 percent.

If anything, the government numbers I’m using here exaggerate how much of the tax burden falls on the wealthy. These numbers fail to account for the income that is hidden from tax collectors — a practice, research shows, that is more common among affluent families. “Because higher-income people are understating their income,” Joel Slemrod, a tax scholar at the University of Michigan, says, “We’ve been overstating their average tax rates.”

State and local taxes, meanwhile, may actually be regressive. That is, middle-class and poor families may face higher tax rates than the wealthy. As Kim Rueben of the Tax Policy Center notes, state and local income taxes and property taxes are less progressive than federal taxes, while sales taxes end up being regressive. The typical family pays a lot of state and local taxes, too — almost half as much as in federal taxes.

There is no question that the wealthy pay a higher overall tax rate than any other group. That is an American tradition. But there is also no question that their tax rates have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades. The only reason they are paying more taxes than in the past is that their pretax incomes have risen so rapidly — which hardly seems a great rationale for a further tax cut.

I have slightly edited the original due to length. Go here to read the whole article.

Gallows Humor

In solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, I share with you a few timely and appropriate funnies. They would be funnier if they were not so true.

This last one is my favorite. I recall the John Maynard Keynes quote: "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."

Our Corrupt and Fraudulent Economy

Here's Dylan Ratigan from a while back, just in case you missed it the first time. Ratigan's anger is what Occupy Wall Street is all about.

I share that anger and disgust. The only thing unusual about his critique is that it aired on mainstream television.


Hat tip to Angel Guerrero for refreshing my memory.

Why Occupy Wall Street is Angry

This country once had a stable financial system. It was the direct result of the New Deal. The crash of '29 had been created by greed, lax rules, and government institutions unequipped and ideologically unprepared to tame capitalism's most rapacious players.

Enter FDR and the New Deal. With it Americans enjoyed roughly 50 years of prosperity and a largely stable banking system. The good 'ol days, as conservatives seem to pine. And there was good reason why we look fondly at what seems to have been our economic heyday. What conservatives forget is that we had far less income inequality, higher taxes, greater union membership, lower consumer, state and federal debt. We had a trade surplus, a much larger manufacturing base, and little outsourcing. And we did not have job-killing free trade agreements, such as NAFTA!

Underlying all of this was a rigid set of banking rules that, among other things, kept commercial banks out of the stock market and enforced prudent capitalization requirements. Upon assuming office, President Reagan immediately worked to overturn regulations and help Wall Street's rise to dominance, a rise that continues today despite Obama's half-hearted and ineffectual efforts to reprioritize Main Street.

Banks quickly capitalized on the changes Reagan set in motion; systemic banking failure began within a few years. Those failures have been with us in regular intervals ever since, all the while wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of those who created the economic chaos in the first place.

Here is Elizabeth Warren explaining the process.

Occupy Wall Street's Message

Leave town for a week and look what happens. Our corporatist media is finally paying some attention to Occupy Wall Street. Not that it is offering many insights. The prevailing characteristics seem to be that protesters are malevolent malcontents, dirty fucking hippies, and anarchists, all in a stew of disorganized resentment. In particular, the claim is that the OWS protesters do not have a coherent message.

No coherent message? Really? Anyone who cannot immediately grasp the significance of the protest is likely to be uninformed teabaggers, fearful of all that they don't understand, or class warriors, like the Republican presidential candidates, Romney and Cain in particular.

How obtuse, or ideologically rigid, do you have to be to not see that America's wealthy corporatist media is determined to delegitimize citizens who have decided to fight back against Wall Street's recklessness?

Here is Alan Grayson taking the small amount of time needed to explain to dickhead PJ O'Rourke what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about.

The privileged class is letting its fear show. Nice to see we got their attention.

Bread and Circus

Hey sports fans. Some wonder why I am so indifferent to pro sports these days. Classmates will recall that I was a typical American school kid; I loved pro sports. Once I went to college, my interests.. uh... diversified. More recently I had a rekindled interest in college football, though that too is waning. I realize more than ever that money and power dominate and corrupt what is supposed to be an amateur enterprise. Not on my dime; not if I can help it.

We have become more like Rome than we realize. It is bad enough that modern sports are a diversion that help keep our public discourse so inane and uninformed.

It's actually much worse. Here is an interview of sports writer Dave Zirin. The essential problem, as he points out, is that wealthy owners get the public to pay for their arenas and stadiums. Massive tax breaks are usually involved. The owners are enjoying outsized profits precisely because they get taxpayers to underwrite their business. To cap it off, the owners use their profits to fund right-wing, anti-government agendas. They want you to think they are self-made captains of capitalism. They don't say much about the millions of tax dollars they pocket.

Hypocrisy anyone?  Dave Zirin's most recent book, Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love, tells the whole story.




I still want the Pac-12 to do well. Anyone but the SEC.

Republican Platform

So how many of these early warning signs do you recognize? Twenty-first century America sounds a lot like 1920s Italy. And if its similarity to Republican talking points doesn't unnerve you, you may be part of the problem. Read more on pre-fascist America
from Naomi Wolf, here, here, or watch her video here.