Tag Archives: the elite

The entitlements of the job “creators” (i.e. the sneering plutocrats)

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Steven Pearlstein wrote an excellent “manifesto” for the entitled, the job “creators.” Here is some of it, be sure to click through and read the whole thing:

I am entitled to a healthy and well-educated workforce, a modern and efficient transportation system and protection for my person and property, just as I am entitled to demonize the government workers who provide them.

I am entitled to complain bitterly about taxes that are always too high, even when they are at record lows.

[...] I am entitled to have my earned income taxed as capital gains and my investment income taxed at the lowest rate anywhere in the world — or not at all.

I am entitled to inside information and favorable investment opportunities not available to ordinary investors. I am entitled to brag about my investment returns.

I am entitled to pass on my accumulated wealth tax-free to heirs, who in turn, are entitled to claim that they earned everything they have.

I am entitled to use unlimited amounts of my own or company funds to buy elections without disclosing such expenditures to shareholders or the public.

[...] I am entitled to fire any worker who tries to organize a union. I am entitled to break any existing union by moving, or threatening to move, operations to a union-hostile environment.

I am entitled to a duty of care and loyalty from employees and investors who are owed no such duty in return.

I am entitled to operate my business free of all government regulations other than those written or approved by my industry.

I am entitled to load companies up with debt in order to pay myself and investors big dividends — and then blame any bankruptcy on over-compensated workers.

I am entitled to contracts, subsidies, tax breaks, loans and even bailouts from government, even as I complain about job-killing government budget deficits.

I am entitled to federal entitlement reform.

I am entitled to take credit for all the jobs I create while ignoring any jobs I destroy. Continued…

Speaking of which:


image: destroythegop

“The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.”

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“The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district. That’s what money buys you: goods and services that make your life easier. That’s what money has bought Romney, too. He’s a guy who sold his dad’s stock to pay for college, who built an elevator to ensure easier access to his multiple cars and who was able to support his wife’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! That’s the dream. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.” — Ezra Klein (via azspot)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Mitt and Ann Romney wouldn’t last two weeks living ordinary people’s lives. Not when Ann describes the toughest time they’ve had is when they had to sell some stock to allow her to be a stay-at-home mom (serving tuna!!) while Mitt attended Harvard.

What they don’t know, apparently, is that that sounds like a pretty sweet deal to most of us.

The dreams of the shallow

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The man who thinks he deserves the presidency:

  

via: sandandglass

When Mitt Romney and Lindsay Lohan sound uncomfortably similar. No wonder people like Romney sneer at jobs like “community organizer.”

The Resentment of the Plutocrats: “Stop it. This is hard.”

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“Any gratitude toward the country we’ve all built, Romney seems to be saying, is misplaced. Instead, the feelings Romney regards as proper ones for the rest of us to assume are a cheerful appreciation of the wealthy and an eager resolve to be just like Mitt—and also a little nicer to him. Romney has reduced the great issues of fairness and a just society to the rather boring question of whether people are being fair to him and his friends, and whether they admire his fine qualities. Among other things, this cannot help him electorally: What is less attractive than a manifestly lucky man sulking about how everyone is jealous of him?”

— Mitt Romney’s Resentment (via azspot)

People respond to Romney’s “47 percent” crack

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Recently, Mitt Romney held a high dollar fundraiser behind closed doors.

We asked Americans what they thought about what he said to his donors.

As one woman shares: “I don’t think anybody’s ever looking for a handout. I think that… we all want chances and opportunities.”

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“The idea that half of Americans are just grifters is grotesque.”

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“…if you look at the facts, you learn that the great bulk of those who pay no income tax pay other taxes; also, many of the people in the no-income-tax category are (a) elderly (b) students or (c) having a bad year, having lost a job — that is, they’re people who have paid income taxes in the past and/or will pay income taxes in the future. The idea that half of Americans are just grifters is grotesque.” — Paul Krugman

Earnings vs. taxes: hardly a picture of moochers waging war on heroic entrepreneurs

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theatlantic:

The Most Misleading Part of ‘The 47%’: Total U.S. Taxes Are Barely Progressive

Mitt Romney is worried that half of make the wealth and half of us take the wealth. So is his running mate Paul Ryan. If this sounds like something out of a dystopian novel, that’s because it is. The world we live in is far different from the world Ayn Rand imagined. Just take a look at total taxes.

The chart above, from the Citizens for Tax Justice, looks at how much households earn and how much they pay in all taxes. In other words, it compares what percent of overall income they make and what percent of overall taxes the government takes from them. It’s not exactly a picture of moochers waging war on heroic entrepreneurs.

Read more. [Image: Citizens for Tax Justice]

And a reminder when Romney talks about his tax plan (more tax cuts for the wealthy): Decades of tax cuts for the wealthy have not led to a more robust and growing economy — instead they’ve created greater income inequality and a modern economy that’s growing at a much slower pace. 

Mitt Romney’s Oedipal conflicts

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Mitt Romney’s lovely mother, Lenore LaFount Romney, talking about how his father George was on welfare relief as a child, after he came to America as a refugee from Mexico.

[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Mitt Romney isn’t just detached from half of America, he’s detached from his own heritage. George and Lenore might have been better served if they’d loaded that silver spoon they placed in li’l Willard’s mouth (as most parents who can, will do) with some grace, empathy, and appreciation.

For their troubles, they received a kid who felt entitled, who spent his childhood bullying others: a blind teacher, an unpopular gay classmate, or pranking friends and strangers while dressed like a police officer.  A son who spent his young adulthood living in a mansion in France, avoiding the Vietnam draft, and then felt that selling some stock to live on while attending Harvard was the true measure of suffering. A man who went on to become the “King of Bain,” the real-life basis of Hollywood’s Gordon Gekko character, leveraging businesses for personal profit, wiping out American jobs that once paid living wages with benefits, shuttering factories and halting manufacturing across the land. A man who took the fortune he made in all that destruction, and put it in bank accounts all over the world — ensuring the United States government would never see a penny of tax. A man who then decided he had so much, he also deserved to be President. A man who refuses to reveal his tax returns to voters — completely contrary to what his own father practiced and believed.

  
  
  
  

source: sandandglass

OR Mitt Romney would consider his own father’s family to be among ‘those people’ who it’s his job not to worry about — those people who are “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them… people who pay no income tax.” 

Oh, the Willardity!

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From the always and forever awesome Charles P. Pierce:

Romney Speech After Secret Tape – The Comeback Speech Romney Should Be Giving –

…Got a little secret for you all. I don’t care if I win. I never did. Oh, I want the job because I’m entitled to it. It’s the inexorable next step in my golden existence. But it’s not like I actually wanted to do the job. It was a prize, something to hang over one of my mantlepieces or another. But, you know what happens the day after I lose to Obama? A whole bunch of you start typing your resumes, and writing your essays about how I fked the whole thing up six ways from Sunday, and Whither The Conservative Movement? and all that malarkey. Maybe I take some folks from Congress down with me, and they all go to the Fox studios and run around the set of Hannity’s program until the music stops, and one of them doesn’t find a chair, and that one has to go home and do morning drive in East Jesus, Florida.

Me? You know what I do? I go to Malibu and I ride the car elevator up and I look at the sun go down over the Pacific. And then I do the same thing the next day. And the day after that. And do you know what my great-grandchildren are going to do, while yours are groping through the Cormac McCarthy novel that President Paul Ryan’s two terms have left them after 2026?

The same thing I did.

I’m bulletproof, motherfkers. My money is safely tucked away not in Switzerland, or in the Caymans, but in the corners of a distant future. My money is beyond the physical limits within which the rest of your scratch out your lives. My money is infinite. It is beyond time and space. It is transcendent. It is an immortal being, the next step in human evolution. It lives, but it has no need for a fragile, corporeal shell, not even one as obviously perfect as my own.

So go ahead, have your fun this week. Hell, have your fun all the way through November. You need a little amusement in your drab little lives and I’m happy to oblige because, when it comes right down to it, you will all die but I will not because my money will not. It lives forever, and therefore, I live forever and because, well:

I’m Mitt Romney, bitches, and I’m all you got left.

Class War: The things self-satisfied millionaires tell each other vs. Reality

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Jonathan Chait says the hidden camera video that went viral yesterday exposes Mitt Romney “as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it…”

“The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.”

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There’s inequality all right, but it’s certainly not being felt by the one percent who secretly deride half of America for being lazy, shiftless bums.

motherjones – Mitt gave us an occasion to dust off our old inequality charts. We love dusting off our old inequality charts.

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think-progress –  the bottom 95 percent of Americans have $1.48 in debt for every $1 in earnings. The top 5 percent, meanwhile, have 64 cents in debt for every $1 in earnings.

Check out the 9 other charts you need to see on income inequality

Rachel Maddow and David Corn: Sneering Plutocrat caught on tape!

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Here is a link to some of those videos that Maddow is talking about: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UChMTCCC6dzR-VkgTDWo7H_A/videos?flow=grid&view=0 (thanks John Roach!)

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Steve Benen reports that last night, the Republican candidate delivered a brief statement, hoping to quell the controversy:

“…the full transcript of his comments is available, but the key part of the statement is the fact that Romney simply endorsed everything seen in the clip. He conceded his recorded comments were “not elegantly stated,” and were delivered “off the cuff,” but nevertheless recommitted himself to the underlying sentiment.

“As a reporter asked, “Governor, are all of the things you said in the video things you believe? Are those core convictions?” Romney walked off the stage.”

Choices: who really represents you

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barackobama: Don’t boo—vote.

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This is Ayn Rand thinking. The Makers and the Takers.

“Well, the president has his group. I have my group. I want to keep my team strong and motivated and I want to get those people in the middle.” — Mitt Romney, addressing his hidden camera comments, dismissing the more negative tone — and sharper messaging — in the closed-door fundraiser, chalking it up to talk about “process.”

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Video: the top 5 reasons Mitt Romney won’t release more tax returns

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The top 5 reasons Mitt Romney won’t release more tax returns:

5. He pays a lower tax rate than you do.
4. Romney has millions of dollars in offshore accounts.
3. Romney used loopholes (available only to the super rich) to pay less in taxes.
2. Under a plan Paul Ryan proposed, Romney would pay only 1% in taxes.
1. He thinks coming clean will hurt him in the election.

What else is he hiding? Only Mitt Romney knows.

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Under Romney’s tax “reforms,” Sheldon Adelson could reap 9 times what he’s invested in Mitt

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Think Progress reports:

“Romney’s corporate tax reforms would also provide Adelson’s casino company approximately $1.2 billion in tax breaks on overseas profits and $565 million from Romney’s proposed shift to a territorial tax system. Adelson’s share of that, the report says, would be upward of $900 million, nine times what he pledged to spend to get Romney to the White House.“

No wonder Adelson and the other billionaires consider the millions they’re throwing at Romney a sound business investment — Adelson stands to get NINE TIMES what he’s giving to Romney’s campaign. $900 million! Naturally, someone’s got to pay for Adelson’s windfall… and that will be you and me, the peasantry:

“While Romney’s tax plan would further enrich billionaires like Adelson, it would have to raise taxes on middle class families by as much as $2,000 if Romney were to keep his plan to maintain current levels of revenue.” 

Summary: if you’re a billionaire / millionaire looking to keep even more of your income by paying even less in federal taxes, then it makes sense that you’d vote for Romney. However, if you’re an ordinary working stiff who earns less than $250,000 and you want to vote for Romney, check yourself into the nearest hospital for a thorough evaluation. You’re obviously suffering some kind of head and/or psychological trauma.

think-progress:

  • Romney’s tax plan would personally save Sheldon Adelson a total $2.3 billion in taxes. 
  • It saves Adelson approximately $1.5 million in tax cuts on his CEO salary.
  • In one year, Adelson could more than earn back his $100 million in political donations, since Romney will save him $120 million on dividend taxes.
  • His casino company would get $1.2 billion in tax cuts. 
  • By eliminating the estate tax, Adelson would get a $8.9 billion windfall for his heirs.

Read more facts about Sheldon & Mitt at ThinkProgress

Don’t like the thought of the wealthy elite buying our the Republican Party and our elections? Guess what: you can do something about it. Vote.

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