Tag Archives: plutocracy

The grotesque arguments against raising the minimum wage: when will we demand a decent society?

Posted on by

ROBERT REICH: Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 should be a no-brainer. Republicans say it will cause employers to shed jobs, but that’s baloney. Employers won’t outsource the jobs abroad or substitute machines for them because jobs at this low level of pay are all in the local personal service sector (retail, restaurant, hotel, and so on), where employers pass on any small wage hikes to customers as pennies more on their bills. States that have a minimum wage closer to $9 than the current federal minimum don’t have higher rates of unemployment than do states still at the federal minimum.

A mere $9 an hour translates into about $18,000 a year — still under the poverty line. When you add in the Earned Income Tax Credit and food stamps it’s possible to barely rise above poverty at this wage, but even the poverty line of about $23,000 understates the true cost of living in most areas of the country.

Besides, the proposed increase would put more money into the hands of families that desperately need it, allowing them to buy a bit more and thereby keep others working.

A decent society should do no less.

HEIDI MOORE: “There is something truly grotesque about corporate leaders who earn millions of dollars – or even hundreds of thousands of dollars – arguing over paying their workers literally pennies more. Those workers often have to rely on food stamps or government welfare programs to make up the difference. Meanwhile, company CEOs have barely received a cut in pay for years, and on average they make 231 times as much as the average worker. That’s a lot of money, obviously. So the idea that paying $1.50 an hour more in minimum wage would break their companies and force them to save on costs is patently ridiculous. The first and most obvious cost they would have to think about cutting would be their own pay packages. What if those CEOs made, say, only 200 times the average worker? Or 100 times? One suspects their companies could afford that uptick for poorer workers then.”

73% OF AMERICANS SUPPORT raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour: Republicans in Congress oppose any increase to the federal minimum wage, but they might want to do some polling first, as data suggest an increase is incredibly popular among voters. As The Daily Change notes, polling conducted by Lake Research in February 2012 found that not only is support for Obama’s proposed increase “stratospherically high,” voters actually want to go further than the President suggests. Their polling shows 73 percent of voters want to see the minimum wage raised to $10 an hour by 2014, including 50 percent of Republicans (Note: just don’t tell the those Republicans that the president supports it).

  • According to Think Progress, a study published in the Review of Economics and Statistics back in November 2010 found “no detectable employment losses from the kind of minimum wage increases we have seen in the United States.” Another study, published in 2011 “found no impact on hours worked or employment levels.”
  • In a March 2011 report, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) found that raising the minimum wage has no “discernible impact” on employment. CEPR concluded that wage increases are more likely to result in more, rather than fewer, jobs.
  • A major study of the minimum wage, done by economists David Card and Alan Krueger and published in September 1994, supports the notion that raising the minimum wage actually increases employment. investigating the effects of New Jersey’s 1992 minimum wage increase from $4.25 to $5.05, the pair revealed job creation was actually strengthened by the increase.

WH FACT SHEET:

Raising the minimum wage mostly benefits adults, and especially working women: Around 60 percent of workers benefiting from a higher minimum wage are women, and few are teenagers — less than 20 percent.

Raising the minimum wage helps parents: The average worker who would benefit from a rise in the minimum wage to $9 an hour brought home 46 percent of his or her household’s total wage and salary income in 2011, according to the Current Population Survey.

For a working family earning $20,000 – $30,000, the extra $3,500 per year from raising the minimum wage would cover:

  • The family’s spending on groceries for a year; or
  • The family’s spending on utilities for a year; or
  • The family’s spending on gasoline and clothing for a year; or
  • Six months of housing.

Raising the minimum wage will boost wages without jeopardizing jobs while improving turnover and productivity: A range of economic studies show that modestly raising the minimum wage increases earnings and reduces poverty without measurably reducing employment, and that in fact employers may see a more stable workforce due to reduced turnover and increased productivity.

Labor organization and job growth: our national McDonald’s / Walmart problem

Posted on by

Robert Reich discusses how low wages are strangling the economy and why job growth, and not the deficit, needs to be the nation’s #1 priority:

Yesterday in New York, hundreds of workers at dozens of fast-food chain stores went on strike, demanding a raise to $15-an-hour from their current pay of $8 to $10 an hour (the median hourly wage for food service and prep workers in New York is $8.90 an hour)… These workers are not teenagers. Most have to support their families. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median age of fast-food workers is over 28; and women, who comprise two-thirds of the industry, are over 32. The median age of big-box retail workers is over 30.

…

McDonald’s — bellwether for the fast-food industry — posted strong results during the recession by attracting cash-strapped customers, and its sales have continued to rise.

Its CEO, Jim Skinner, got $8.8 million last year. In addition to annual bonuses, McDonald’s also gives its executives a long-term bonus once every three years; Skinner received an $8.3 million long-term bonus in 2009 and is due for another this year. The value of Skinner’s other perks — including personal use of the company aircraft, physical exams and security — rose 19% to $752,000.

…

Wal-Mart – the trendsetter for big-box retailers – is also doing well. And it pays its executives handsomely. The total compensation for Wal-Mart’s CEO, Michael Duke, was $18.7 million last year – putting him at number 82 on Forbes’ list.

The wealth of the Walton family – which still owns the lion’s share of Wal-Mart stock — now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

Last week, Wal-Mart announced that the next Wal-Mart dividend will be issued on December 27 instead of January 2, after the Bush tax cut for dividends expires — thereby saving the Wal-Mart family as much as $180 million. (According to the online weekly “Too Much,” this $180 million would be enough to give 72,000 Wal-Mart workers now making $8 an hour a 20-percent annual pay hike. That hike would still leave those workers under the poverty line for a family of three.)

America is becoming more unequal by the day. So wouldn’t it be sensible to encourage unionization at fast-food and big-box retailers?

Yes, but here’s the problem.

The unemployment rate among people with just a high school degree – which describes most (but not all) fast-food and big-box retail workers – is still in the stratosphere. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts it at 12.2 percent, and that’s conservative estimate. It was 7.7 percent at the start of 2008.

High unemployment makes it much harder to organize a union because workers are even more fearful than usual of losing their jobs. Eight dollars an hour is better than no dollars an hour. And employers at big-box and fast-food chains have not been reluctant to give the boot to employees associated with attempts to organize for higher wages.

Meanwhile, only half of the people who lose their jobs qualify for unemployment insurance these days. Retail workers in big-boxes and fast-food chains rarely qualify because they hadn’t been on the job long enough or were there only part-time. This makes the risk of job loss even greater.

…

Washington’s obsession with deficit reduction makes it all the more likely these workers will face continuing high unemployment – even higher if the nation succumbs to deficit hysteria. That’s because cutting government spending reduces overall demand, which hits low-wage workers hardest. They and their families are the biggest casualties of austerity economics.

And if the spending cuts Washington is contemplating fall on low-wage workers whose families are under the poverty line – reducing not only the availability of unemployment insurance but also food stamps, housing assistance, infant and child nutrition, child health care and Medicaid – it will be even worse. (It’s worth recalling, in this regard, that 62 percent of the cuts in the Republican budget engineered by Paul Ryan fell on America’s poor.)

By contrast, low levels of unemployment invite wage gains and make it easier to organize unions. The last time America’s low-wage workers got a real raise (apart from the last hike in the minimum wage) was in the late 1990s, when unemployment dropped to 4 percent nationally – compelling employers to raise wages in order to recruit and retain them, and prompting a round of labor organizing.

That’s one reason why job growth must be the nation’s number one priority. Not deficit reduction.

Continue reading: Wal-Mart and McDonald’s: What’s wrong with U.S. employment

Fix the Debt: plutocrats are turning up the volume on the class war

Posted on by

“Listening to these people talk about the national economy is like listening to a burglar tell you that you should really polish the silver more often.” – Charles P. Pierce

“The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t.

The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in an open election. […]

Consider, as a prime example, the push to raise the retirement age, the age of eligibility for Medicare, or both. This is only reasonable, we’re told — after all, life expectancy has risen, so shouldn’t we all retire later? In reality, however, it would be a hugely regressive policy change, imposing severe burdens on lower- and middle-income Americans while barely affecting the wealthy. Why? First of all, the increase in life expectancy is concentrated among the affluent; why should janitors have to retire later because lawyers are living longer? Second, both Social Security and Medicare are much more important, relative to income, to less-affluent Americans, so delaying their availability would be a far more severe hit to ordinary families than to the top 1 percent.

Or take a subtler example, the insistence that any revenue increases should come from limiting deductions rather than from higher tax rates. The key thing to realize here is that the math just doesn’t work; there is, in fact, no way limits on deductions can raise as much revenue from the wealthy as you can get simply by letting the relevant parts of the Bush-era tax cuts expire. So any proposal to avoid a rate increase is, whatever its proponents may say, a proposal that we let the 1 percent off the hook and shift the burden, one way or another, to the middle class or the poor. […]

So keep your eyes open as the fiscal game of chicken continues. It’s an uncomfortable but real truth that we are not all in this together; America’s top-down class warriors lost big in the election, but now they’re trying to use the pretense of concern about the deficit to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Let’s not let them pull it off.”

— Paul Krugman: Class Wars of 2012

While finance executives urge Congress and the President to rein in spending, finance companies are raking in profits. [...] Meanwhile, workers are struggling. Average hourly pay, when adjusted for inflation, has fallen 0.7 percent over the past year, according to the Labor Department. And the unemployment rate in October was 7.9 percent — it was at a low of 4.4 percent in May 2007 before the recession. It’s a “zero-sum game,” Moody’s Analytics economist Aaron Smith told The Huffington Post in February. Companies are earning record profits largely because they are squeezing more productivity out of their workers without paying them more. — Corporate Profits Reach Record High, While Workers Struggle

Several CEOs — under the guise of a campaign known as “Fix the Debt” — have recently called for cuts to Social Security and other entitlements. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, for instance, said that “there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised.” “The solutions [to the fiscal cliff] are – it’s the retirement age; means testing Social Security and Medicare,” said Aetna CEO Mark Berolino. [...] Blankfein has nearly $12 million in retirement assets, while Bertolini has $1.5 million. Adding insult to injury, many of the CEOs calling for cuts to the social safety net are underfunding their workers’ retirement accounts — CEOs Looking To ‘Fix The Debt’ By Cutting Social Security Sit On Huge Retirement Accounts

The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks – IPS: The Fix the Debt campaign has raised $60 million and recruited more than 80 CEOs of America’s most powerful corporations to lobby for a debt deal that would reduce corporate taxes and shift costs onto the poor and elderly.

Key findings:

  • The 63 Fix the Debt companies that are publicly held stand to gain as much as $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves one of their main proposals — a “territorial tax system.” Under this system, companies would not have to pay U.S. federal income taxes on foreign earnings when they bring the profits back to the United States.
  • The CEOs backing Fix the Debt personally received a combined total of $41 million in savings last year thanks to the Bush-era tax cuts. The top CEO beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, saved $9.9 million on the Bush tax cuts. The private equity fund leader reaped $215 million in taxable income last year just from vested stock.
  • Of the 63 Fix the Debt CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes. All but six of these firms reported U.S. profits last year.

Sign this petition to tell Congress that it’s time to let the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2% expire and that they must reject any Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefit cuts.

Super-rich Goldman Sachs CEO wants ‘you people’ to work until age 70

Posted on by

Pat Garofalo reports that Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, whose net worth is $450 million and whose bank received $10 billion in the taxpayer-funded bailout, wants to increase the retirement age to 70, because he believes the proletariat aren’t going to get the “entitlements” they expect:

BLANKFEIN: You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations — the entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to — they’re not going to get it.
PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?
BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. … So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.
PELLEY: Because we can’t afford them going forward?
BLANKFEIN: Because we can’t afford them.

How many of us will retire at 65-67 (to receive full SS benefits) and live for another 30 fuckin’ years?! And, by the way, something I’ve been paying into since I was 16-years-old and won’t stop paying into for the next FIFTY YEARS or so really isn’t much of an ENTITLEMENT is it?  As Garofalo points out:

“For starters, Social Security can pay full benefits for decades without any changes at all. (Imagine the accolades that would received if any other federal program had guaranteed funding for that stretch of time.) One simple change, raising the cap on the payroll tax, can guarantee that the program will pay nearly full benefits for three-quarters of a century. In the meantime, Social Security is statutorily barred from adding one dime to the federal deficit, so cutting it doesn’t change the nation’s deficit or debt picture.

Raising the retirement age, meanwhile, adversely impacts those workers most in need of a robust social safety net. While a year or two of extra work may not seem like much to a Wall Street CEO with his cushy corner office, for a factory worker or janitor, it can mean real problems. Life expectancy is only increasing for wealthier workers in non-physical jobs. Poorer workers doing physical labor have not seen the same gains. Overall, raising the retirement age to 70 would “cut benefits for the average retiree by 19 percent.”

Related: 

(Nov 8, 2009) – Goldman Sachs chief: “I’m just a banker doing God’s work”

(Jun 28, 2011) — Less than three years after receiving $10 billion in bailout money from American taxpayers, Goldman Sachs informed its employees recently that it will fire 1,000 workers in the United States and elsewhere, shifting their jobs to the cheaper Singaporean labor market. – ThinkProgress

(Apr 13, 2012) — Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein’s compensation increased 14.5 percent to $16.2 million in 2011 despite a sharp decline in profits and share price during the year, leaving the bank open to more attacks on its pay policies. …Goldman earned a $2.5 billion profit during 2011, down from $3.6 billion in 2010, and its share price fell 46 percent last year, amid a slowdown in investment banking deals and volatile trading conditions. Management reduced the average employee’s pay by 15 percent in 2011, to $367,057. That compares with a pre-crisis high of $568,732 per employee in 2007. The median household income in the United States is about $50,000. – Reuters

The Walton family and trickle-down

Posted on by

Consider where you want your hard-earned money going on Black Friday. Maybe you don’t want it going straight into the already heavy-lined pockets of the Walton children and their over-paid CEO?

[Walmart's] role as [the] marginal employer [in many US counties] often serves to drive down workers’ wages county-wide. …Concretely, between 2007 and 2010, while median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent, the wealth of the Walton family members rose from $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion …In 2007, it was reported that the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families. And in 2010, as the Walton’s wealth has risen and most other Americans’ wealth declined, it is now the case that the Walton family wealth is as large as the bottom 48.8 million families in the wealth distribution (constituting 41.5 percent of all American families) combined.

— Inequality, exhibit A: Walmart and the wealth of American families | Economic Policy Institute

###

current: Before you hit the streets on Black Friday to shop till you drop here are some key figures about Wal-Mart’s powerful position compared to its employees that might make you think twice about what retailers to support.

1.3 million – Wal-Mart employees in the United States. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the world.

$15.7 billion – Wal-Mart’s 2011 profits. The company is currently number 2 on the Fortune 500.

$8.75 per hour – average starting salary for a new Wal-Mart employee. That’s turns out to be an annual salary of $15,500, which is about even with the federal poverty level for a 2-person household.

$8,653 per hour – Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke’s $18 million annual salary converted to a 40 hour-a-week hourly wage.

$13 per hour – Hourly wage the OUR Walmart group is demanding from Wal-Mart.

$4.83 million – The fine Wal-Mart agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Labor in 2012 for failing to pay overtime wages to more than 4,500 employees nationwide, .

$56,068.58 – Online donations received to sponsor striking employees on Black Friday.

12 – number of cities where Wal-Mart is currently facing strikes since October 4, 2012.

0 – number of strikes Wal-Mart has faced since 1962.

$312 billion — Wal-Mart’s revenue in 2005.

4,700 – number of children of Wal-Mart’s Alabama employees receiving Medicare assistance in 2005.

16 million – the number of US children – that’s 1 in 6 – that struggle with hunger. As Current has previously reported, roughly 20 percent of American children live in a home with parents who are unable to regularly put food on the table.

###


…

Mitt Romney’s “gifts” remarks: straight from the Southern Strategy playbook

Posted on by

Mitt Romney on Wednesday attributed his defeat in part to what he called big policy “gifts” that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

In other words, Romney’s last words on the national stage might be the dying gasp of the Southern Strategy. It’s how Mitt really feels. Finally, after everything, through all the years of running a presidential campaign and the flipping and gyrating and etch a sketching, we got to see the core of the hollow man. Bottomline: if you’re not white and rich, Mitt Romney hates you.

Listen to the late Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the evolution of the GOP’s Southern strategy:


…

Atwater: ‘‘You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N—er, ni—er, ni—er.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘ni—er’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N—er, ni—er.”’        

It’s interesting to note that two loyal members of the GOP tribe who are publicly denouncing Romney’s comments, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and New Mexico governor Susana Martinez, are not conservative white men:

Jindal: “This is not where the Republican party needs to go,” he said. “Look, If you want voters to like you, the first thing you’ve got to do is to like them first. And it’s certainly not helpful to tell voters that you think their votes were bought.” [...] “Look, the Republicans, we need to stick to our principles, but we need to treat other people with respect,” he said. “Even those we don’t agree with, we need to show them we respect them and their beliefs.”

Martinez: ”That unfortunately is what sets us back as a party — our comments that are not thought through carefully,” Martinez told Yahoo’s Chris Moody. Martinez, who previously criticized Romney’s “47 percent” remarks in September, added that his fundraiser video was a “ridiculous statement.” “You want to earn the vote of every single person you can earn, whether they be someone who relies on,” she said. “Why would you ever write off 47 percent?”

The Fox Infotainment Channel, however, has decided to stick with the Southern Strategy (anger! racist viewers! ratings!) because it’s good for business. As JM Ashby notes, “they’re running wild with the Makers vs Takers meme. Watch Varney and Kilmeade speak about giving “goodies” and “handouts” to people in exchange for votes:”

Varney: Look over here. What position are we in in American today? I say we’re just getting started. We’re throwing the handouts out left right and center.
Kilmeade: Mitt Romney mentioned that yesterday. He says he couldn’t win because all these other people are giving things away.
Varney: Buying votes with taxpayer money. Handouts all over the place. [...]
Varney: The president thinks that if you tax the top 2 percent some more, you will pay for all the goodies, all the handouts that we’ve got going.
Kilmeade: There’s not a single person who knows how to add that believes it’ll make any significant difference…

JM Ashby accurately reflects: “The problem for Republicans seeking reelection or higher office in the near future is that Fox News has a much larger audience and wields much greater power over the conversation than any single conservative politician. And if anyone on the right side of the aisle is going to issue a memo on how to cover a situation, it’ll be Fox delivering the orders. It only took one week for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to be demoted from future king of the GOP to someone you don’t want to be caught associating with because he had the audacity to cooperate with the Obama administration following one of the worst disasters New Jersey has ever seen. If Fox News continues to select candidates for the Republican party, the party will never change. There’s too much money to be made in maintaining the status quo.”

Is Fox bad for the Republican Party? I’d say only if you’re currently a member of the Republican Party.

Bobby Jindal wants the Republican Party to look less like the Republican Party

Posted on by

“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything. We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.”

– Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), urging Republicans to “stop being the stupid party.”

Andrew Sullivan remarks: “I’ll believe him when he names Limbaugh as one critical source of the problem. I’ll believe him even more if he were able to find space within the GOP for those who support marriage equality, efforts to combat climate change and a non-absolutist position on abortion rights. But he cannot change theology in a religious party – especially when he is one of its high priests.”

And Charles Johnson laughs at this newly found “enlightenment” from the guy who mocked volcano monitoring: “Politico’s article doesn’t mention it, of course, but Gov. Jindal is rather infamous at LGF for pushing the very stupidest of stupid right wing positions; he enthusiastically promoted and signed into law a bill in Louisiana that legitimizes the teaching of creationism under the disguise of “academic freedom.” Jindal’s promotion of creationism outraged scientists across America; one scientific organization actually cancelled a major convention in protest. More recently, Jindal has also promoted legislation that allows Louisiana state funding to go to private religious schools that teach creationism and all kinds of other anti-science mind rot. And that’s not all, by a long shot. While a college student, Jindal took part in an exorcism that he claimed cured a woman of cancer…

Bob Moser thinks Jindal isn’t calling for actual change, just a re-branding: “But beyond embracing some parts of Dodd-Frank and the “Volcker Rule,” Jindal—who’s been a right-wing governor, gutting public schools and slashing funds for hospitals—basically limited his idea of change to rejiggering the party’s image. His solution, beneath the frank talk, comes down to figuring out new ways to make Republicans once again look like a populist party—a new spin on the faux-populism Republicans used, from Nixon to Bush, to convince working- and middle-class folks they were on their side while working to make the wealthy wealthier.”

And Jed Lewison lists all the conservative beliefs Jindal has no problem with (even though the voters do have a problem with them) and summarizes that Jindal doesn’t want to change the substance of GOP ideals — he’s just calling for a change in tone.

###

On Mitt Romney’s douchey phonecall yesterday, Political Wire reports:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) “forcefully rejected Mitt Romney’s claim that he lost because of President Obama’s ‘gifts‘ to minorities and young voters,” Politico reports.

Said Jindal: “No, I think that’s absolutely wrong. Two points on that: One, we have got to stop dividing the American voters. We need to go after 100 percent of the votes, not 53 percent. We need to go after every single vote. And, secondly, we need to continue to show how our policies help every voter out there achieve the American Dream, which is to be in the middle class, which is to be able to give their children an opportunity to be able to get a great education. … So, I absolutely reject that notion, that description. I think that’s absolutely wrong.”

Related: 

Mitt Romney describes the sad he haz

Mitt Romney describes the sad he haz

Posted on by


via: whitepeoplemourningromney

Salon: In a call with his disappointed donors Mitt Romney attributed his election loss to “gifts” President Barack Obama gave to important constituencies like young and African American voters. The Los Angeles Times reported: Obama, Romney argued, had been “very generous” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters. He cited as motivating factors to young voters the administration’s plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and the extension of health coverage for students on their parents’ insurance plans well into their 20s. Free contraception coverage under Obama’s healthcare plan, he added, gave an extra incentive to college-aged women to back the president.

NY Times: Mr. Romney’s comments in the 20-minute conference call came after his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, told WISC-TV in Madison on Monday that their loss was a result of Mr. Obama’s strength in “urban areas,” an analysis that did not account for Mr. Obama’s victories in more rural states like Iowa and New Hampshire or the decrease in the number of votes for the president relative to 2008 in critical urban counties in Ohio. [...] “I’m very sorry that we didn’t win,” Mr. Romney said on the call. “I know that you expected to win, we expected to win, we were disappointed with the result, we hadn’t anticipated it, and it was very close, but close doesn’t count in this business.” He continued: “And so now we’re looking and saying, ‘O.K., what can we do going forward?’ But frankly, we’re still so troubled by the past, it’s hard to put together our plans for the future.”

###

I wonder what he calls the tax breaks he planned to give himself and other millionaires? Were those “gifts” (for a select few) as well? Couldn’t the hundreds of millions of dollars donated to his campaign from the super rich be considered “bribes” for Romney to push an agenda that only benefited a very select group of voters? Heaven forbid The Help should have someone advocating for their interests.

This goes to show that his 47% comments were, in fact, what he really thinks of half of America. What’s amusing is that this includes most of the rubes who voted for him, the non-millionaires.

Right this way, Willard…


victoriastation: winning (at Brick Lane Cafe)

Sorry, Republicans, I won’t ever consider Bain Capital a “small business”

Posted on by

Nor will I ever believe such businesses need more tax cuts to stay afloat or to finally (at long last!) create some jobs.

The wealthy need to cut their level of greed, not the level of taxes they owe the government.

liberalsarecool: 97% of all small businesses make under $250,000.

FACT: Mr. Obama is correct that only a tiny sliver of business owners make enough to land in the top tax brackets. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan Congressional office, estimated last month that 3.5 percent of taxpayers with business income in 2013 would fall in the tax brackets that would rise under the president’s proposal. – NYTimes.com

FACT: In any event, recent studies have challenged the notion that small businesses are a key engine of job creation. Older small businesses, it seems, cut more jobs than they create. Research by the economist John C. Haltiwanger and others showed that the only small businesses that create more jobs than they destroy are those less than five years old — in other words, start-ups. “The small-business sector per se is not necessarily a dynamic part of the economy,” Mr. Gale said. – NYTimes.com

FACT: What Congressional Republicans Define as “Small Businesses” Include Millionaires and Billionaires, Law Partners, Hedge Fund Managers, and Passive Investors. Congressional Republicans define as small businesses any individual who receives “small business income” – The White House

Looking back: Farewell, Willard and Marie Anntoinette!

Posted on by


…

Whew! That was way too close, wasn’t it?

Update:

politicaldirtylaundry:

Rachel Maddow lists the huge implications of what an Obama win means…or more precisely, what a Romney loss means in terms of what is not going to happen. There’s some pretty big stuff here and a good reminder of the tragedy that could have been.
We are not going to have a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe vs. Wade.
There will be no more Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alioto’s added to this court.
We are not going to repeal health reform.
Nobody is going to kill Medicare.
Nobody is going to make old people in this generation fight it out in the open market for health insurance.
We are not going to give 20% tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires and expect programs like food stamps and kids health to cover the cost.
We are not going to make you clear it with your boss if you want to get birth control from your health provider.
We are not going to redefine rape.
We are not going to amend the United States Constitution amendment to stop gay people from getting married.
We are not going to double Guantanamo.
We are not eliminating the Dept of Energy, the Dept of Education, the Dept of Housing at the Federal level.
We are not going to spend 2 trillion dollars on the military that the military does not want.
We are not scaling back on student loans because the new plan is you should borrow money from your parents.
We are not vetoing the dream act.
We are not self-deporting.
We are not letting Detroit go bankrupt.
We are not starting a trade war with China on inauguration day.
We are not going to have as President, a man who once led a mob of friends to run down a scared gay kid to hold him down and forcibly cut his hair off with a pair of scissors while that kid cried and screamed for help. And there was no apology, not ever.
We are not going to have a Secretary of State John Bolton.
We are not bringing Dick Cheney back.
We are not going to have a foreign policy shop stocked with the architects of the Iraq war. We are not going to do it.
We had the choice to do that if we wanted to do that as a country, and we said no.

Screw Papa Johns (and Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Applebees, and Longhorn Steakhouse)

Posted on by

Consequences: free speech and the public’s right to boycott Pure Greed.


via: soupisnotameal

Huffington Post: Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter said he plans on passing the costs of health care reform to his business onto his workers. Schnatter said he will likely reduce workers’ hours, as a result of President Obama’s reelection, the Naples News reports. Schnatter made headlines over the summer when he told shareholders that the cost of a Papa John’s pizza will increase by between 11 and 14 cents due to Obamacare.

Gawker: Darden Restaurants Inc., the parent company of popular casual dining establishments such as Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and LongHorn Steakhouse, is no longer offering full-time work schedules to employees at “a select number” of restaurants in four markets across the country. Though details were scant, the company did say there were no immediate plans to expand the “test,” which is aimed at “help[ing] us address the cost implications health care reform will have on our business.” [...] Darden said in its statement that employees at restaurants where the pilot program was put in place will be limited to 28 hours a week. [...] Darden, which, ironically, bills itself as “the world’s largest full-service restaurant company,” made headlines last year when it started a “tip sharing” program requiring the waitstaff to share its tips with all other employees. According to the Associated Press, “That allows Darden to pay more workers a far lower ‘tip credit wage’ of $2.13, rather than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.”

Huffington Post: An Applebee’s New York area franchisee is the latest CEO to go public threatening drastic plans to avoid costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.”We’ve calculated it will [cost] some millions of dollars across our system. So what does that say — that says we won’t build more restaurants. We won’t hire more people,” Zane Tankel, chairman and CEO of Apple-Metro, told Fox Business Network on Thursday. Apple-Metro, which runs 40 Applebee’s restaurants, employs from 80 to 300 people at each of its locations. Obamacare mandates that businesses with more than 50 workers must offer an approved insurance plan or pay a penalty of $2,000 for each full-time worker over 30 workers. Most small businesses with 50 or more employees already do offer health insurance, notes John Arensmeyer, CEO and founder of Small Business Majority, a national small business advocacy organization. But restaurant chains typically are among the sliver of businesses not offering insurance to workers. Other food chains have commented publicly that they would take strong measures to avoid the effects of Obamacare, but so far none of them have taken that action.

oinonio: “These restaurants have pledged to cut employees or work hours to avoid providing healthcare under Pres. Obama’s Affordable Care Act.  Ironic for restaurants that draw clients in with images of wholesomeness, family, and care. But you can push back by taking your appetite elsewhere.” 

These plutocratic CEOs have the right to hire, fire, and cut hours of any and all of their staffs for political reasons — and they have every right to crow about it in the media, as they’re doing. WE, the dining public, have the right to take our appetites elsewhere.

I mean, really. Does anyone NEED to eat at any of these places?

UPDATE * * * * * * 

HAPPENING NOW: George W. Bush at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit

Posted on by

Bush and Romney (and the richest Americans) built that! Romney plans to give even more tax cuts to the super rich — maybe he’ll keynote the Summit one day.

Buzzfeed: Former President George W. Bush is set to deliver the keynote address at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit on Grand Cayman just a few days before the election. The conference will feature Bush as the keynote speaker on the first night, and British billionaire Sir Richard Branson on the second night. ”Institutional investors, private investors, asset allocators, fund managers, service providers, academics and regulators will benefit from this discussion on the future of the industry,” reads to the FAQ section of the website.

http://www.caymanai.com

Privatization of government services HURTS taxpayers

Posted on by

Privatization of Government Services Hurts Taxpayers- and Not Only In Their Wallets

A new backgrounder brief, Six Reasons Why Government Outsourcing Hurts the Middle Class, describes how the public sector provides quality middle-class jobs, and details extensive research showing how privatization eliminates these good jobs and increases economic inequality.

Here’s the six reasons.

  1. Contracting out often ends up costing more and lowering service quality
  2. When governments contract out public work, many good jobs disappear – wages, benefits, and hours decrease.
  3. Contracting out creates hidden costs for government and taxpayers.
  4. Government outsourcing disproportionately impacts African American workers.
  5. Contracting out hurts families and communities
  6. Contracting out leads to greater economic inequality.

Privatization proponents claim that handing public services over to private contractors will save taxpayer money. The evidence shows otherwise. Contract costs often are higher than promised and turning middle class jobs into low wage jobs without benefits simply shifts costs to hospital emergency rooms and public income support programs.

When Willard Romney has a “belief,” follow the money

Posted on by

“Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has vowed to boost the size of the Navy by roughly 15 percent as part of a broader defense buildup. “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,” he complained in Monday night’s debate. “That’s unacceptable to me.”

But for one of Romney’s most important advisers on Navy issues, a man who oversaw a massive naval expansion for Pres. Ronald Reagan, there’s more at stake than U.S. national security. John Lehman, an investment banker and former secretary of the Navy, has strong and complex personal financial ties to the naval shipbuilding industry. He has profited hugely from the Navy’s slow growth in recent years — raising the prospect that he could make even more if Romney takes his advice on expanding the fleet.”

— Romney’s Big Navy Guru Made Millions From Building Ships | Wired.com