Tag Archives: 99percent

Back to Newt and Mitt: Populism and Envy

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From Markos on Gingrich’s current populist and, seemingly, Occupy-Wall-Street-inspired campaign against Romney:

South Carolina exit polls--Romney last all groups except +$200K

Translation: Republicans in the 99 percent don’t like the guy with the Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island tax shelters.

Newt’s outrage is driven by the polls.

If Newt wins the GOP nomination, will he be able to pull off this sudden interest in populist issues like income inequality and fairness better than a president and his party who have been discussing them all along?

Howard Schweber says,

[T]hese voters don’t care that Gingrich was a Washington insider, or has a record on family values that would give pause to one of the Borgia popes. It’s why they don’t really care that he contradicts himself, or says crazy things. They want crazy. They want to hear their anger and resentment made into a national platform. They are the victims of an evil conspiracy — no one plays the victim better than Gingrich when cornered — and they resent it.

They don’t really care what Gingrich says he will do, or whether it makes sense, or even whether they would approve of his policies or benefit from them. …only Newt has captured the key emotive element that drives the Republican core this year: resentment. The hard right core of the Republican Party is filled with resentment, and they have found just the man to let us all know about it.

But seriously, when Mitt Romney is nominated this summer, here’s an indication of the Reality Shitstorm that has been unleased and will continue through Election Day:

EXCLUSIVE: Romney Profited From Mortgage Lenders Foreclosing On Thousands Of Floridians

In October, Romney suggested that the solution to the foreclosure crisis was “don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” While that process is bad for Florida homeowners, these investments show it may have been good for the Romneys.

Paul Sancya/AP

Maddow Blog: AP sends this picture of Mitt Romney yesterday at National Gypsum in Tampa, Florida, under a sign that reads “OBAMA ISN’T WORKING.”

That has been a theme of Mr. Romney’s campaign, but not usually on the day Mr. Romney releases his tax returns and shows he made many millions on his investments and puts nothing in Line 7 — the one for wages, the one for money you made while working.

No one, not one person on this earth, is amused by Mitt or his tax returns and income.

Bob Cesca notes,

One week ago Mitt Romney referred to his income garnered from speaking fees as “not very much,” and “not very much” turned out to be $362,000 in 2010 as reported by USAToday

Upon today’s release of Mitt Romney’s tax return, we find out the USAToday report was wrong. “Not very much” was actually $529,000 in 2010.

And this from John Cook,

Rich asshole Mitt Romney released his 2010 tax returns and an estimated return for 2011 [yesterday]. Together they total more than 500 pages, because purposefully structuring your wealth so as to maximally exploit the massive tax loopholes you have lobbied for over the decades is very complicated. The topline: Romney made $45 million in 2010 and 2011, almost exclusively from sitting there and watching his investments belch out money. He paid a tax rate of 13.9%. According the IRS, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid an average tax rate of 16% in 2008.

Get this: Not only did Mitt pay just 14% federal tax on the $21.6 million he earned in 2010 by doing nothing / producing nothing, but Mitt and Mrs. Mitt paid a higher tax rate to FOREIGN COUNTRIES. Let the eagle soar! 

DNC Video: “An Ordinary Swiss Account”:

Occupy DC / Occupy Congress LIVE Video & schedule

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LIVE video from Tim Pool in DC now… I’m having a really hard time embedding this video so go to the link.

See also occupyallstreets:

A very large crowd just came marching into Occupy Congress. A few hundred people are present. More expected to come.

There are approx. 1000 people at Occupy Congress. DCPD are arriving on the opposite side of the gate*.

SCHEDULE:

West Front Lawn at Capitol Hill:
9am – Converge at West Front Lawn at Capitol Hill (Meetings with Representatives concurrent)
10 am – Training for volunteers on De-escalation, Legal Observing, Medical, Direct Action
11 am – Teach-ins and Open Mic start and go all day
12 noon – Multi-Occupation General Assembly
2 pm – Open Activities and Idea Sharing Sessions
*6pm* – Occupy Congress Rally and Protest and DC Voting Rights Vigil
8pm – 11pm - OCCUParty featuring local DC artists including RADIO RAHIM.

Mitt Romney’s “politics of envy” (i.e. bottom to top income redistribution via tax laws)

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It’s only class warfare if the riff-raff complains.

Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet

Andy Rosenthal gets a bit of a laugh out of Mitt Romney’s insistence that the only reason anyone would talk about inequality is the “politics of envy”, and that if the subject is discussed at all, it should only be in “quiet rooms”.

Indeed. Because there’s no way anyone who isn’t motivated by envy could be interested in and possibly concerned about [the above image].

Trickle-down economics has now become shut-your-trap economics.

source: ryking

If only the little people (you and I) could afford lobbyists to get Congress to write tax laws that enriched our personal quintiles! And here’s some more Romney-goodness for America! Via Think Progress:

Republican presidential candidate Romney’s plan for federal taxation begins with a hefty portion of Bush-era tax policy: Permanently extend all the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003, including those that mainly benefit the extremely wealthy. Then Romney layers on a heaping batch of new tax cuts for the rich, including a full repeal of the estate tax—which is currently paid by only the richest 0.14 percent of estates—and a massive corporate tax cut.

The result is a tax code that asks even less of the rich than George W. Bush’s did.

Romney’s plan also gives nearly 60 percent of its benefit to the richest 1 percent of Americans, while preserving the loopholes that let the wealthy pay less than middle class families.

Romney constantly claims that he’s “not worried about rich people,” and that his tax plan is “focused” on the middle class. In fact, he’s absurdly claimed that he’s not proposing any tax cuts for the wealthy at all. But as it turns out, he would lavish even more tax breaks onto the rich than did George Bush, even after Bush’s tax cuts were a significant factor leading to today’s large budget deficits.

Read more…

Does ANYONE believe Romney, the King of Bain, is running for any other reason that to enrich himself and his cronies even further? Anyone? And does anyone believe that for Mitt Romney, a quarter-billion dollar fortune is enough?

But watch: the rightwing base will fall in lockstep in November and vote for Willard — and, at the same time, against their own best interests. ODS is a terrible disease. These people really do hate Obama more than they respect themselves.

Survey: rising perception of class tension (or, as Romney would say, more people are envious)

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The NY Times reports,

Conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society, according to a survey released Wednesday.

About two-thirds of Americans now believe there are “strong conflicts” between rich and poor in the United States, a survey by the Pew Research Center found, a sign that the message of income inequality brandished by the Occupy Wall Street movement and pressed by Democrats may be seeping into the national consciousness.

[...] The demographics were surprising, experts said. While blacks were still more likely than whites to see serious conflicts between rich and poor, the share of whites who held that view increased by 22 percentage points, more than triple the increase among blacks. The share of blacks and Hispanics who held the view grew by single digits.

What is more, people at the upper middle of the income ladder were most likely to see conflict. Seventy-one percent of those who earned from $40,000 to $75,000 said there were strong conflicts between rich and poor, up from 47 percent in 2009. The lowest income bracket, less than $20,000, changed the least.

The grinding economic downturn may be contributing to the heightened perception of conflict between rich and poor, said Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

“Rich and poor aren’t terribly distinct from secure and unemployed,” he said.

The survey attributed the change, in part, to “underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in American society,” citing a finding by the Census Bureau that the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of the population increased to 56 percent in 2009, from 49 percent in 2005.

I think most of us realize we’re one layoff away from poverty ourselves.

But in Mitt Romney’s world, this simply means more people are envious. Here’s some information on what might be fueling our ‘jealousy’:

Click for larger image:

What’s actually happened with working and middle class wages along with the decline in unions? CEO pay has skyrocketed 300% since 1990, corporate profits have doubled. Average “production worker” pay has increased 4%. The minimum wage has dropped.

Since 1990, your pay and mine increased only 4% (if we’re lucky enough to have jobs), while the 1 percent have enjoyed a massive pay increase of 300%!  I suppose that’s justified if the 1 percent contributed and produced and worked 296% more than the rest of us — but my guess is that they didn’t.

Related: 

Mitt Romney is giving the “riff-raff” too much information about the lavishly wealthy

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Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (01/11/2012) Source: blogs.ajc.com via: randomactsofchaos

The one-percenters (the incredibly wealthy) can’t be happy with all this scrutiny that Mitt’s being subjected to in this most recent presidential campaign of his. Especially when you consider the current state of affairs with the underclass and their lack of money and homes and jobs and cake. You can imagine how upsetting it must be for some of these billionaires, waiting for their butlers to serve dinner, crouched around their enormous dining room tables, in their mansions, set on fortified and guarded acreage, sipping their martinis and whispering between clenched teeth: “What if the rabble is listening to all this, for God’s sake!“

Then consider this:

Have the Super-Rich Seceded From the United States?

[...]  There have been hundreds of books about globalization and how it would break down borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession in terms of physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens occasionally. It means a withdrawal into enclaves, a sort of internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension – and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?

To some degree, the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; for example, their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity toward public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than one-half trillion dollars in federal, state and local education dollars into private hands, meaning themselves and their friends.(ii) A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an Army pack. Now, the military is for suckers from the laboring classes, whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to employ Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. Courtesy of Matt Taibbi, we learn that the sentiment among the super-rich toward the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, says about the views of the 99 percent: “Who gives a crap about some imbecile?”

Read more…

via: azspot

Here’s a fun game to play from liberalsarecool: GUESS WHO SAID IT –

“Voters are just now meeting the Real Romney — the buyout tycoon who executed takeovers, bankrupted businesses, and sent jobs overseas while killing American jobs.” — Guess who said it!

“Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money? I do draw a distinction between looting a company, leaving behind broken families and broken neighborhoods, and then leaving a factory that should be there.”— Guess who said it!

Oops! Romney’s competition had better watch it, or we’re all going to see how the one-percent really makes their millions and billions (and NOT because they work harder). Therefore, naturally, and quicker than you can light a $200 cigar with a $100 bill, the GOP establishment is rushing to defend Romney’s Vulture Capitalism from this populist backlash… we mustn’t call it “Capitalism” — let’s say we’re defending economic freedom!

Mitt Romney: speaking out for himself and the one percent since 1966

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Mitt Romney has been a dick since at least age nineteen. For reals. From The Daily Mail:

A newly-unearthed photograph showing Mitt Romney demonstrating in favour of the Vietnam War draft might leave the presidential candidate feeling somewhat embarrassed.

The veteran Republican, then 19, can be seen picketing an anti-war sit-in at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1966.

Romney received a draft exemption based upon his status as a “minister of religion” – basically, an exemption for having been a Mormon missionary. He received numerous deferments after that for educational reasons. Romney portrays his mission in Paris as a time of humbling poverty, but The Daily Telegraph has a different story…

via: cognitivedissonance

Romney and his five sons won’t fight wars for American — that’s for you and your (not one percent) kids to take care of. President Romney would have no qualms about sending other people’s kids to fight his wars — and he loves certain wars, like Vietnam and Iraq.

It’s these kinds of people in Washington who get to carry the name Chickenhawk. Mitt Romney’s been a proud chickenhawk, and a hypocritical asshole, since 1966.

Related: 

The Republican Strategy according to George Carlin and Robert Reich:

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“The Republican Strategy” via Robert Reich:

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans hope to deflect attention from the big story. That’s the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

The GOP has effectively split the middle and working class with social issues like God, guns, and gays for 30 years, deflecting attention from the ever-increasing income disparity between the richest one percent and the rest of us. The GOP will continue to use this strategy until it doesn’t work anymore.

Judging from the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, it will continue to work for a long, long time.

Related:

The GOP is against welfare for people, unless by ‘people’ you mean ‘corporations’

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“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.” — Rick Santorum 

Why did Santorum single out black people (or for that matter, people?) The truth is:

[T]he people who benefit most from welfare programs are white people.

Among the poorest of the poor—single mothers, living below the poverty line with minor children to support 39.7 percent of AFDC clients are Black single mothers and 38.1 percent are White women with children. Food stamp recipients are 37.2 percent Black and 46.2 percent White. Medicaid benefits are paid to 27.5 percent Black recipients compared to 48.5 percent White clients. source

And which “people” (according to Mitt Romney) benefit from government welfare most of all?

Thirty corporations paid less than nothing in aggregate federal income taxes over the entire 2008-10 period.

In fact, in the last three years, 78 corporations had at least one year where they paid no federal income tax at all, while 30 corporations paid not a dime over the entire three years. Those 30 corporations paid nothing, even though they made $160 billion in profits over that period:

[...] These companies, whose pretax U.S. profits totaled $160 billion over the three years, included: Pepco Holdings (–57.6% tax rate), General Electric (–45.3%), DuPont (–3.4%), Verizon (–2.9%), Boeing (–1.8%), Wells Fargo (–1.4%) and Honeywell (–0.7%).

Instead of giving corporations “other people’s money” in the form of more tax cuts, loopholes and federal subsidies, shouldn’t we think about “giving them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families“?

More tax cuts for the wealthy paid for with austerity for the rest of us. Go GOP!

The Republicans candidates’ economic agenda for the 1 percent.

Tough times all around

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military.christmas.afp

It’s an unlikely sight at one of the biggest US military bases: young families lining up and waiting patiently outside a warehouse for free gifts to slip under the Christmas tree.

Times are tough as much for military families as for anyone else in America this Christmas, making donated toys for the children — from teddy bears and Barbies to board games and bicycles — more welcome than ever.

Read the rest…

Clearly, tax cuts for the wealthy are just what this country needs — because you know who’s really suffering right now: billionaires who feel they’re being treated unfairly.

It’s tough being enormously wealthy too. Think about it and show a little respect, imbeciles.

The Occupy movement already needs to clean house #OWS #99percent

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Here’s one issue that many people believe the Occupy movement should focus on — bottom to top income redistribution that will only continue if the GOP has its way, with extending Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy with austerity measures for the rest of us:

(VIDEO) Dennis Kucinich: [IN 2008] the Fed gave $7.77 Trillion in secret, non-congressionally approved loans to big banks that made them an estimated $13 Trillion. They’ve used tax payer money to get rich, then insist we need to cut social services that they won’t use. In Mr. Kucinich’s words, “Now do you understand Occupy Wall Street?” (via: jonathan-cunningham)

However, Bob Cesca feels the Occupy movement is losing its way, as it’s hijacked by anarchists and libertarians, with plans to protest a DCCC fundraiser:

Protesting a DCCC fundraiser does nothing to “change the conversation” when those in attendance are already discussing the things you want them to discuss.

Jobs. Taxing the rich and shameless. Financial regulations.

Nancy Pelosi even presided over the most sweeping regulation of Wall Street in decades while she was Speaker of the House, which President Obama later signed into law.

And “elitist?”

And this is from last night:

More than 100 Occupy Wall Street protesters marched to a Midtown hotel on Wednesday night to protest a fund-raising event for President Obama.

[...] Demonstrators held signs that leveled some of the Occupy protest’s most pointed criticism to date of the president. “Obama is a corporate puppet,” one said. “War crimes must be stopped, no matter who does them,” read another, beside head shots of President George W. Bush and President Obama.

One man, wearing a mask of the president’s face and holding a cigar, carried a sign that read, “I sold out!”

Regardless if you feel that both parties are the same — much of the support coming to the Occupy movement from ‘average’ working and middle class people would have been from which voting block, do ya think: Democrats or Republicans? Union members: Democrats or Republicans? Want tax increases only on the wealthy so spending cuts for the rest of us don’t need to be as deep: Democrats or Republicans? Are they planning to occupy the NRCC or any GOP presidential candidate forums?

I give up.

DEFINITION OF LIBERTARIAN:

A libertarian is someone who wants to take America back to the way it was run in the 1800s, regardless of how much the world has changed since then. Libertarians also have mean hard-ons for unregulated capitalism, believing that the “Invisible Hand” will erase poverty and create a utopia instead of what ACTUALLY happens when you let companies do whatever they want, which is:

-Children working in factories and mines

-Corporate monopolies

-Workplaces where death is likely

-Low, low wages

-Shit in your food (Read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”)

-Even more extreme corporate corruption and political pawns than we have now.

-Getting the living fuck stomped out of you by company-hired goons for trying to organize a union (Battle of the Overpass)

via: ryking

Meanwhile in the United Kingdom: anti-austerity protests / strike

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occupywallstreet: Today, more than two million public sector workers across the United Kingdom are on the picket lines, protesting planned cuts to their pensions and austerity measures. The strike includes transport workers, teachers, health workers and other government employees. Protests and occupations are taking place in cities across the country, which have closed the majority of schools and impacted health and transport services. This is being hailed as the largest strike for many sectors in more than thirty years.

We express solidarity with the workers of the United Kingdom. Anywhere the interests of the few are crushing the hard-work of the many, our struggle is the same, and we stand united calling for justice.

CNN, Telegraph, BBC News (photos), Sky News, CSM

The Guilded Age we’re not supposed to talk about

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Income redistribution and class warfare — we haz it. Two Americas. Steve Benen discusses a NYTimes article:

In the eight decades before the recent recession, there was never a period when as much as 9 percent of American gross domestic product went to companies in the form of after-tax profits. Now the figure is over 10 percent.

During the same period, there never was a quarter when wage and salary income amounted to less than 45 percent of the economy. Now the figure is below 44 percent.

For companies, these are boom times. For workers, the opposite is true.

There’s just no way to spin this. We’re looking at an era in which, at least as a share of the larger economy, after-tax corporate profits have soared to levels unseen since we began keeping track, whole after-tax incomes have fallen to levels unseen in generations.

[...] Republicans look at these conditions and, with a straight face, insist that more must be done to intensify these circumstances, and blame President Obama for creating an uncooperative climate for corporations.

Read it all…

Look at the personal wage and salary income vs. corporate profits charts above during the ’90s (Clinton) as compared to the 00′s (Bush). I guess we can ‘fix’ things with more tax cuts for the rich. Right? But the Occupy protesters are the crazy ones…

Taxing the wealthy wouldn’t raise enough money to matter? Think again.

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Paul Krugman wants those of you who think it would be “silly” to tax the wealthy at higher rates because it wouldn’t raise enough money to matter to think again:

Folks, you’re living in the past. Once upon a time America was a middle-class nation, in which the super-elite’s income was no big deal. But that was another country.

The I.R.S. reports that in 2007, that is, before the economic crisis, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — roughly speaking, people with annual incomes over $2 million — had a combined income of more than a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money, and it wouldn’t be hard to devise taxes that would raise a significant amount of revenue from those super-high-income individuals.

For example, a recent report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out that before 1980 very-high-income individuals fell into tax brackets well above the 35 percent top rate that applies today. According to the center’s analysis, restoring those high-income brackets would have raised $78 billion in 2007, or more than half a percent of G.D.P. I’ve extrapolated that number using Congressional Budget Office projections, and what I get for the next decade is that high-income taxation could shave more than $1 trillion off the deficit.

It’s instructive to compare that estimate with the savings from the kinds of proposals that are actually circulating in Washington these days. Consider, for example, proposals to raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67, dealing a major blow to millions of Americans. How much money would that save?

Well, none from the point of view of the nation as a whole, since we would be pushing seniors out of Medicare and into private insurance, which has substantially higher costs. True, it would reduce federal spending — but not by much. The budget office estimates that outlays would fall by only $125 billion over the next decade, as the age increase phased in. And even when fully phased in, this partial dismantling of Medicare would reduce the deficit only about a third as much as could be achieved with higher taxes on the very rich.

So raising taxes on the very rich could make a serious contribution to deficit reduction. Don’t believe anyone who claims otherwise.

And then there’s the idea of taxing financial transactions, which have exploded in recent decades. The economic value of all this trading is dubious at best. In fact, there’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading is going on. Still, nobody is proposing a punitive tax. On the table, instead, are proposals like the one recently made by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Peter DeFazio for a tiny fee on financial transactions.

And here’s the thing: Because there are so many transactions, such a fee could yield several hundred billion dollars in revenue over the next decade. Again, this compares favorably with the savings from many of the harsh spending cuts being proposed in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Read it all…

Krugman is, once again, arguing that you can’t reduce the deficit ONLY by cutting programs and services for the rest of us — increased revenue MUST BE PART of deficit reduction. Taxes on the wealthy would, indeed, make a big difference.

If only the entire GOP hadn’t pledged their souls to Grover Norquist…