U.S. politics isolation tank

[rosco rathbone]

Thanks for these. Both are thought-provoking.

I remember talking to a U.S. senator years ago, telling me that the greatest threat to democracy was the accelerating gap between the uber-rich and everyone else (he was ultimately defeated by the ultimate corporate-shill-dressed-in-populist clothing, btw).

What, exactly, is it going to take to get average Americans to realize we are being raped by the rich and their political surrogates, and to start screaming?

There's a very long, but fascinating article on that Michael Hudson site called something like "From Marx to Goldman Sachs" which is basically a mini-history of finance showing how Anglo-American style finance is parasitic on real production. Takes some effort to plow through it, but worth it.

 

[WriterDom]

Thanks for these. Both are thought-provoking.

I remember talking to a U.S. senator years ago, telling me that the greatest threat to democracy was the accelerating gap between the uber-rich and everyone else (he was ultimately defeated by the ultimate corporate-shill-dressed-in-populist clothing, btw).

What, exactly, is it going to take to get average Americans to realize we are being raped by the rich and their political surrogates, and to start screaming?

You know the evil rich pretty much fund the federal government right? How much of their income as a percentage do you feel like the government is entitled to? Pretend you are the tax Czar and throw out a number. 90% over a million? Is that fair? That means they get to keep 100,000 out of every additional million they make. And we could just take it all after 10 million. Say Julie Roberts gets 100 million for the year's best movie. She keeps 500,000 out of the first million. Another 900,000 out of the next 10 million. The rest goes to the government. That's 1.4 million a year after taxes. Surely that's enough. I mean, if we are going to fuck the rich lets do it right.

That leaves the government with 98 million or so to give away to each according to their needs. Budget problems solved!

 

[JMohegan]

You know the evil rich pretty much fund the federal government right? How much of their income as a percentage do you feel like the government is entitled to? Pretend you are the tax Czar and throw out a number. 90% over a million? Is that fair? That means they get to keep 100,000 out of every additional million they make. And we could just take it all after 10 million. Say Julie Roberts gets 100 million for the year's best movie. She keeps 500,000 out of the first million. Another 900,000 out of the next 10 million. The rest goes to the government. That's 1.4 million a year after taxes. Surely that's enough. I mean, if we are going to fuck the rich lets do it right.

That leaves the government with 98 million or so to give away to each according to their needs. Budget problems solved!

http://coloradoindependent.com/68079/billionaire-buffet-tax-me-please-trickle-down-doesnt-work

 

[WriterDom]

http://coloradoindependent.com/68079/billionaire-buffet-tax-me-please-trickle-down-doesnt-work

Well lets fuck them good with the WriterDom tax plan and not quibble over a few %.

WriterDom for President 2012

Fuck the Rich Party!

No one in America gets to keep more than 1.4 million after federal taxes. And this means you too Mr. Buffet!

 

[DeepGreenEyes]

You know the evil rich pretty much fund the federal government right? How much of their income as a percentage do you feel like the government is entitled to? Pretend you are the tax Czar and throw out a number. 90% over a million? Is that fair? That means they get to keep 100,000 out of every additional million they make. And we could just take it all after 10 million. Say Julie Roberts gets 100 million for the year's best movie. She keeps 500,000 out of the first million. Another 900,000 out of the next 10 million. The rest goes to the government. That's 1.4 million a year after taxes. Surely that's enough. I mean, if we are going to fuck the rich lets do it right.

That leaves the government with 98 million or so to give away to each according to their needs. Budget problems solved!

I like the way you think. In fact, as I think I posted here earlier, the top rate under Eisenhower was 92 percent on income over $400,000. And, not coincidentally, he was also the last Republican to balance the budget. We were also fighting a war (and a cold war) and building the interstate highway system, and ascension to the middle class was spectacularly successful. I stand with Ike! Although I think taking it all after $10 mil isn't necessary.

Does it bother you at all that the richest one percent now take home 24 percent of the income, up from 9 percent in 1976? That's a direct result of the tax cuts Reagan and W awarded the rich. At what point would you view it as a problem? 30 percent? 50 percent? 80 percent? At whatever point it instigated a revolution?

The rich should pay more.

 

[rosco rathbone]

The rich should pay more.

There's rich and rich. The FIRE-sector parasites and rentiers should certainly pay more. They're nothing but a drag on the real economy, as set out in those links I posted.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Party Inversion Watch: 2010

http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/79647/tea-party-wrecking-republican-foreign-policy

These freshly invigorated voices within the Republican Party are already finding common cause with doves inside the Democratic Party. Ron Paul has joined with Barney Frank in calling for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as from Germany, Japan, and South Korea. “We don’t need to be the world’s policeman,” Paul said, echoing the Vietnam war protesters of an earlier era.

Hawkish Republicans have taken note. Casting a suspicious eye at the Tea Partiers, John McCain has said, “I worry a lot about the rise of protectionism and isolationism in the Republican Party.” There was a truce within the party until the elections, but now, as Richard Viguerie warned, “a massive, almost historic battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party begins.” Onlookers can expect to hear a great deal of name calling in coming months as charges of “isolationist” and “imperialist” fly back and forth.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Mr. Obama’s Most Recent “2%” Sellout is his Worst Yet

The second pretense is that cutting taxes for the super-rich is necessary to win Republican support for including the middle class in the tax cuts. It is as if the Democrats never won a plurality in Congress. (One remembers George W. Bush with his mere 50+%, pushing forward his extremist policies on the logic that: “I’ve got capital, and I’m using it.” What he had, of course, was Democratic Leadership Committee support.) It’s all “to create jobs,” headed by employment of shipyard workers building yachts for the nouveau riches and foreclosing on the ten million Americans whose mortgage payments have fallen into arrears. It sounds Keynesian – or at least, reminiscent of Thomas Robert Malthus’s claim (as lobbyist for Britain’s landed aristocracy) that landlords would use their rental collection to hire footmen, carriage-makers and butlers to keep the economy going.

It gets worse. Mr. Obama’s “Bush” tax cut is only Part I of a one-two punch to shift taxes onto wage earners. Congressional economists estimate that extending the tax cuts to the top 2% will cost $700 to $750 billion over the next decade or so. “How are we going to go out and borrow $700 billion?” Mr. Obama asked Steve Croft on his Sixty Minutes interview on CBS last week.

It was a rhetorical question. The President has appointed a bipartisan commission (right-wingers on both sides of the aisle) to “cure” the federal budget deficit by cutting back social spending – to pay yet more bailouts to the economy’s financial wreckers. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform might better be called the New Class War Commission to Scale Back Social Security and Medicare Payments to Labor in Order to Leave more Tax Revenue Available to Give Away to the Super-Rich. A longer title than the Deficit-Reduction Commission used by media friendlies, but sometimes it takes more words to get to the heart of matters.

 

[rosco rathbone]

I thought this was kind of interesting:

Food Fight Becomes Open Class Warfare

It comes as news to my churchgoing conservative friends here in Coastal Liberal Land that making sure your kids limit sugary snacks and junk food is something only liberals care about. None of us are what you’d call foodies, and none of us go to the gym. It’s just understood that living responsibly, especially in a culture that celebrates the abolition of limits, requires a great deal of vigilance, especially when it comes to child-raising. That’s why though fasting is not really a part of American religious life today, there is still among my conservative friends real moral awareness of a religious duty to live a self-disciplined life, and to avoid the sin of gluttony. Why is the South – the most culturally conservative part of the country, in most respects, especially in Christian piety – so thoughtlessly permissive about eating?

The obvious answer is that they don’t see food choices as having moral weight. That stance is groundless from a Biblical point of view. Scripture aside, how can that point of view be sustainable from a common-sense conservative position when so many people are coming down with diabetes, a chronic disease closely related to overeating? New neuroscience research suggests that overeating certain foods earlier in life changes one’s brain in ways that make it harder to stop later in life. This means that parents who let their kids eat lots of sugar set them up for a lifetime of diabetes, and other obesity-related diseases. How is that not a moral failing?

 

[midwestyankee]

I thought this was kind of interesting:

Food Fight Becomes Open Class Warfare

Fascinating. I'm sure this difference in attitudes about food and nutrition between the classes is why you hear Glen Beck make so much noise about how Michelle Obama wants to tell the country what they can eat.

 

[WriterDom]

Fascinating. I'm sure this difference in attitudes about food and nutrition between the classes is why you hear Glen Beck make so much noise about how Michelle Obama wants to tell the country what they can eat.

Or it could be that Ms. Obama has seven pies for Thanksgiving while pushing McDonalds to serve carrots with their Big Macs.

 

[midwestyankee]

Or it could be that Ms. Obama has seven pies for Thanksgiving while pushing McDonalds to serve carrots with their Big Macs.

No doubt it's the seven pies that allow her to keep that obese shape of hers so perfectly round.

 

[Netzach]

If Michelle Obama ate lettuce for Thanksgiving it would also be proof of her elite out of touchness.

In the meantime, hope we all have fun paying for the coming diabetes cases.

 

[WriterDom]

If you really wanted to do something healthful you could extend the school day an hour and give every grade PE. Somehow I think the systems who give kids a "Fat" grade to take home are only making things worse. It's almost like giving an acne grade. Borderline cruel.

 

[midwestyankee]

If you really wanted to do something healthful you could extend the school day an hour and give every grade PE. Somehow I think the systems who give kids a "Fat" grade to take home are only making things worse. It's almost like giving an acne grade. Borderline cruel.

Fat grades? Proof or we don't buy this last shipment of bullshit.

 

[midwestyankee]

If Michelle Obama ate lettuce for Thanksgiving it would also be proof of her elite out of touchness.

In the meantime, hope we all have fun paying for the coming diabetes cases.

No problem. All we need to do to pay the estimated $300 billion in increased costs due to diabetes all we have to do is cut the taxes of everyone who makes over 100K. I learned this from the gawd of economics hisself, Mitch McConnell.

 

[Netzach]

If you really wanted to do something healthful you could extend the school day an hour and give every grade PE. Somehow I think the systems who give kids a "Fat" grade to take home are only making things worse. It's almost like giving an acne grade. Borderline cruel.

Dunno, GOP gov here is busy cutting the school day, wtf do you want? Doesn't sound very no new taxes to me, WD, you're slipping.

 

[WriterDom]

Dunno, GOP gov here is busy cutting the school day, wtf do you want? Doesn't sound very no new taxes to me, WD, you're slipping.

I'm fine with the Obama Tax Cut for the Rich of 2011. Can't call it Bush's anymore since it expired. Right MWY?

But at some point taxes will have to go up on everyone and the budget will have to be European Unioned. Well, first we'll have to bail out CA and NY and that's much worse than Ireland and Greece.

 

[Netzach]

I'm fine with the Obama Tax Cut for the Rich of 2011. Can't call it Bush's anymore since it expired. Right MWY?

But at some point taxes will have to go up on everyone and the budget will have to be European Unioned. Well, first we'll have to bail out CA and NY and that's much worse than Ireland and Greece.

Oh so at some later point in the universe we'll have to get civically minded and have education and health care and consumption taxation, but till that point when it's 00syd's problem, w00t, let's do some meth and go feral while Goldman gets a better quarter?

Sounds boomerish, I guess.

 

[00Syd]

Oh so at some later point in the universe we'll have to get civically minded and have education and health care and consumption taxation, but till that point when it's 00syd's problem, w00t, let's do some meth and go feral while Goldman gets a better quarter?

Sounds boomerish, I guess.

:sadface:

 

[Netzach]

:sadface:

Hey, I don't think you should be on the hook for later retirement, later medicare enrollment and everyone takes a collective shit if we let you stay on your 'rents' insurance for five more minutes.

That would make me a fiscal "conservative" - as long as I've got mine, you know.

"passing debt to our grandchildren" = I'm systematized in -5 years, fuck all y'all!

 

[midwestyankee]

Hey, I don't think you should be on the hook for later retirement, later medicare enrollment and everyone takes a collective shit if we let you stay on your 'rents' insurance for five more minutes.

That would make me a fiscal "conservative" - as long as I've got mine, you know.

"passing debt to our grandchildren" = I'm systematized in -5 years, fuck all y'all!

And don't you even think of making cuts to my Medicare, because you know I'm a fiscal conservative and all.

 

[WriterDom]

Oh so at some later point in the universe we'll have to get civically minded and have education and health care and consumption taxation, but till that point when it's 00syd's problem, w00t, let's do some meth and go feral while Goldman gets a better quarter?

Sounds boomerish, I guess.

Yeah, like are the littlel EU minions are having their socialistic nirvana fail and corrective action taken by choice. It will be forced on us as well. And wait until the bigger countries like Spain fails.

This was your dream to have the US become more European. Welcome to their nightmare.

 

[WriterDom]

And don't you even think of making cuts to my Medicare, because you know I'm a fiscal conservative and all.

Why do you hate people who work all their life and then retire under the rules they played by?

Oh, they vote republican. I get it now.

 

[JMohegan]

Why do you hate people who work all their life and then retire under the rules they played by?

Oh, they vote republican. I get it now.

I don't have a problem with the "a deal's a deal" point of view, as in: I paid FICA my whole adult life and expect the corresponding benefits.

But I do have a problem with people who scream "SOCIALISM!" in an attempt to delegitimize proposed or existing government programs that don't benefit them personally, while at the same time defending those that do.