Tag Archives: ows

May Day protests: banks feel victimized, “like elk defending themselves from attacking wolves”

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Just pathetic:

Organizers and protesters around the world will come together to commemorate International Workers Day tomorrow, and they are taking on familiar targets. Large protest actions are planned in more than 115 American cities, where activists will continue the anti-Wall Street message started by the 99 Percent Movement last fall. The action will again center in New York, where protesters have identified 99 targets in Manhattan, including large Wall Street banks like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America.

[...] Though the New York-based banks offered no specifics on how they plan to deal with the protests, one security adviser made the laughable comparison that Wall Street banks — the same ones whose errors include triggering the financial crisis and wrongfully foreclosing on thousands of Americans — were innocent elk defending themselves against attacking wolves, Bloomberg reports.

[...] It’s no secret why the banks view the 99 Percent Movement so negatively — the movement took Wall Street’s excesses and abuses to the mainstream, refocusing the national discussion on rising income inequality, exploding student debt, and fraudulent banking practices.

Continue: Wall Street Banks Coordinate To Fight May Day Protests, Compare Themselves To Elk Hunted By Wolves

Right. These guys are victims.

Glenn Beck is trying desperately to be outrageous…

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…or he’s off his meds. In any case, Beck is currently on an ‘I Need Attention / Mo’ Money’ Tour:

Beck: We have a ‘righteous calling’ to lead a ‘new civil rights movement’

Former Fox News personality Glenn Beck said he believed Tuesday morning that he was capable of leading a “new civil rights movement” in America after claiming that fascism was coming to Europe.

Appearing on televangelist James Robison’s Life Today show, Beck commented on the popular Occupy Wall Street movement.

“We are in an era now of a new civil rights movement,” he said. “We are the ones that have the righteous calling for the civil rights movement. We are the ones. When you try to say that Martin Luther King would have been there with the rapes and the murders and everything else with Occupy Wall Street, I’m sorry, you are wrong.”

Watch video…

Don’t forget Beck is also going to start thrilling the nation with weekly “Reagan-esque” speeches from his newly built “Oval Office” set.

It’s funny how someone can remind you of someone else, whether it’s because of a resemblance in appearance or a similarity in personality or thought-process. Remember John List and the reasons he gave for killing his entire family?

List was described by a psychiatrist as having obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. A psychiatrist who interviewed List testified that he saw only two solutions to his family’s financial and health problems – either go on welfare or kill his family and send their souls to heaven. He was especially concerned about the soul of his daughter, Patty, who showed little interest in church. She was also active in the theater department, smoked marijuana, and was interested in Wicca. He was afraid that welfare would expose them to ridicule, show that List did not love them, and violate his own authoritarian father’s teachings to always care for and protect the family. [Wikipedia]

See, Beck says he has a righteous calling (!) now — and that’s not any old ordinary calling. Beware of men who claim to be burdened with such a grandiose affliction, especially when they say it’s for another person’s own good.

Actually, Mitt Romney is in the top .0025%

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This means the “real streets” that Romney claims to live in must be paved with platinum, not gold:

“According to a calculation from Emmanuel Saez, the economist at the University of California at Berkley, who has become the top expert on top incomes, Mitt Romney’s income of $21.7 million puts him well above the 1%. In fact, his income puts him in about the 99.9975% income bracket. Put another way, Mitt is in the top 0.0025%.” —  Wall St. Journal >>

Meanwhile, Mr. .0025% calls the president “detached from reality:”

ORLANDO — Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney offered a tough review Wednesday of President Obama’s State of the Union speech, accusing him of being “detached” from the realities of a still lagging economy. Read full article >>

Maybe if Mr. Romney and his friends had invested all of the money they earned from this country IN this country, and paid more of their share of taxes to our domestic treasury, instead of paying more tax to foreign countries, our economy wouldn’t be lagging so badly? Or am I detached from reality too?


image: socalwayfarer

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.

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!

Falling out of lockstep

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An exchange between Sean Hannity and Rick Perry, regarding Perry’s statements that Bain Capital (and likely GOP candidate Romney) were vultures who preyed on distressed companies:

HANNITY: “It almost sounds like Occupy Wall Street. It doesn’t sound like someone who is governing Texas as a conservative.”

PERRY: “There is a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism. Venture capitalism we like. Vulture capitalism, no. And the fact of the matter is that he is going to have to face up to this at some time or another.”

Hannity’s right — it does sound like OWS because it makes sense, it’s factual. When someone in wingnuttia falls out of lockstep and starts spouting facts and truth, they’re accused of being like the “liberals.” Heh.

Related:

The Daily Show — The GOP: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Wealthy

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On [last] night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart took a look at some of the GOP infighting and realized there’s only two things that the field can agree on: that class warfare is bad and that Mitt Romney is too rich. (via: Gawker)


…

Jon Stewart says Romney’s political competitors are now acting like the 99 percent — of the one percent:

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 War on Terror and the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)

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Click for larger image:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” – George Orwell, 1984

Related:

Obama: Congress ‘shouldn’t go home’ until payroll tax cut is extended

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I wonder how this will turn out with the Party of No:

Congress needs to pass an extension to the payroll tax cut and shouldn’t adjourn until they do, President Obama said in his weekly address.

“Both parties came together to cut payroll taxes for the typical middle-class family by about $1,000, but that tax cut is set to expire at the end of this month,” Obama said. “We can’t let that happen.”

Democrats and Republicans leaders support extending the payroll tax cuts, but have different plans on how to offset the cost.

The Republican conference is split on the issue. House Republican leaders plan to add two of their own priority bills to a year-end legislative package that would extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance benefits.

Let me take a stab at the “behind closed doors” Republican plan: some form of tax cuts for the wealthy and austerity measures for the rest of us.