Month: October 2010

Folks have no bloody idea what a billion dollars can do. When billionaires fund electioneering, what’s democracy?

Snippet:

The idea that Americans are rational in their opposition to redistribution is ludicrous.

Otherwise they’d have been screaming bloody murder for the past 30 years as incomes have been distributed up. You have to be able to explain the change that occurred between, say, the 50’s and the 80’s. We went from steeply progressive redistributive tax rates to nearly flat rates, from high to low taxes on capital, usury laws overturned, etc.

Something happened to the American psyche in the interim. I think it was a result of deliberate manipulation by the plutocrats, but I suppose other explanations are possible —floridation of the water supply maybe or a brain virus placed in our flu vaccines.

We had more than a modicum of fairness in the earlier era. We had an extreme level of fairness, at least relative to what we have today.

From the 40s to the early 70s, average incomes of all five income quintiles went up almost exactly equally, roughly doubling in real terms over that period; right in line with productivity growth. The rising tide lifted all boats; the classic analogy for ‘fair’. Today, in contrast, all but the yachts are taking on water.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt says laws are written by lobbyists. Politicians are merely preserving a wealth preference. Shame on us.

Lawrence Lessig says corporations spend unlimited amounts to promote political candidates. Shame on us.

Canada has already reacted. Bill C-24 enacted in 2003 says corporations can’t donate over $1000 to a party and no person may donate over $5000.

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Tom Junod says,

“Barack Obama, then, is not the agent of change; he’s the fulfillment of a change that is already occurring culture-wide, in every place but politics.

That’s why the Republicans fear him so much; why, while waiting for him to fail, they just come off as the political party for people who want to hit their kids.”

Spitwad in the Third Eye^™ Productions presents

E=MC^screwed
via RJ Matson:

“A man learns by two things. One is reading. The other is association with smarter people.”- Will Rogers

Indiana University has launched Truthy.indiana.edu, a sophisticated new tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation. FastCompany calls it a ‘Swiftboat Torpedo’.

Mainstream folks turned out in high numbers to the One Nation Rally despite slack media coverage. Satellite shots confirm a greater turnout than Glen Beck’s Whitestock Tea Party —275,000 vs 87,000. Only C-Span detailed the event’s variety of people and its depth of focus on jobs and education. Wingnuts label the attendees as Communists.

Snippet:

What’s attacked? Check out academics, elites, bureaucrats, scientists, the ivory tower, advocates, radicals, muckrakers, ‘community organizers’…. And please note that they are only under attack if they are seeing and warning of hazards to the people.

Where’s Our Billions of dollars going? And when spent?

National Defense Consumption

2000 —371,000,000,000
2001 —393,000,000,000
2002 —430,000,000,000
2003 —498,000,000,000
2004 —551,000,000,000

2005 —589,000,000,000
2006 —625,000,000,000
2007 —662,000,000,000
2008 —737,000,000,000
2009 —772,000,000,000

Stunning no matter how familiar.
When God arranges votes, what arrogance appears!

Friends implored Reed—the former executive director of the Christian Coalition and one of the key architects of the GOP congressional takeover in 1994—to get back in the game.

As Reed tells his audience at the Mayflower, a phone call from Sean Hannity persuaded him. “I wanted to know that this was not me,” Reed says, “that this was not any ambition of mine. I wanted to know that this was the Lord.” Reed breaks into a sly grin as he recounts Sean Hannity’s bargaining: “Ralph, God is speaking through this phone line right now and he’s using me to deliver the message.”

[link] Note: Hannity is a premier news anchor; never revealed as a political operator; merely characterized as a ‘journalist’.

Shameful Days,
more critical than budgets or war,
because we let lies arrive.

Too polite:

…constituencies with the means and the bureaucratic endurance to get what they want slowly hack away at the government over time, carving out exemptions to their civic responsibilities…

Hedge-fund gazillionaires pay less than half the top tax rate paid by most middle and upper-middle class Americans.

Matt Taibbi:

• Constituencies with the means and the bureaucratic endurance to get what they want slowly hack away at the government over time, carving out exemptions to their civic responsibilities while ordinary people suck the proverbial egg.

• A 100% or 200% tax break for hedge fund and private equity billionaires is not the sort of thing that one passes instantly, by standing up in front of big campaign crowds and urging on a mob; it takes a long time and a lot of behind-the-scenes baby steps.

• Once upon a time, we didn’t make very many distinctions about taxable income. Whether you made your money driving trucks or buying and selling stocks, you made what you made and you paid the rate outlined in your bracket.

• Then a movement coalesced behind the idea that the government should give a tax break to those persons who made their money investing…

Washington Post

Oops. Republican debt will be $1.5 trillion higher than under the president’s budget.

Details. Details. Details.

The deficit would be $200 billion larger under the ‘Pledge to America’ than it would be with Barack Obama.

The ‘Pledge to America’ accrues $11.1 trillion. By 2020, their federal deficit would be 6% of GDP, the federal debt would exceed 93% of GDP, and interest payments on the debt would be $1 trillion per year.

“The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP.

[It] will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. [Rolling Stone]