The Ruling Class

February 21, 2012 by siteadmin · Comment
Filed under: Class Warfare 

10% of the 1% makes more money in a year than 97 million Americans do. The same people due to differed dividends, off shore tax haven banking, stock options in lieu of cash, loopholes, tax rebates on capitol investment and depreciati­on write offs, clever accounting and tax lawyers pay between 1 and 15% in taxes.

If their tax rates go up, they aren’t going to move anywhere else and as for moving their production overseas, they’ve been doing that a pace for years, to avoid even contributi­ng decent salaries to Americans and the corporatio­n headquarte­rs are now nothing more than a brass plate in a tax haven and a post box.

You couldn’t find more unAmerican­s than these people. I go so far as to say they are anti American and only love us for the opportunit­ies for business expansion through the lives and blood of our military service people and the protection it affords them in imperial looting with no pay back.

60% of the 1% wants taxes to rise, which throws into perspectiv­e how few people the Republican­s work for. Considerin­g even registered republican­s are far in the majority when it comes to raising the taxes on the very rich and there is still a majority, as low as the $250.000 per annum threshold.

The choices are, teachers, firemen, police, roads that aren’t falling apart, bridges that aren’t on the verge of collapse, people in houses with jobs and a decent salary, clean air and water, affordable healthcare and a guaranteed pension or everything floods up to those that have most of everything any way.

Every vote for a Republican is a vote for corporate greed and totalitari­anism and their partners in crime are corporate democrats, they’re easy to spot as they always vote for the corporatio­ns on every issue and against anything for the people.

These are the candidate’­s policies and constituen­ts they represent.
Religion is only a door opener to enter closed minds, twisted by fear and the great unknowable that will dispel their ignorance. It has always been a tool for those that seek to control people.

Evolution is only a reality for people who can evolve and the dark ages are no place you’d want to visit, let alone base a government in America on.

You’re in the losing class trying to convince yourself you don’t know it because of the propaganda that has taken control of your thought processes.

Deeply inside even their hearts the Republican base knows these things to be true.

Outlandish poster from HuffPo

Tags:

GOP says Keeping Teacher Pay Low ‘A Biblical Principle’

February 1, 2012 by Tom · Comment
Filed under: Class Warfare 

The Huffington Post
First Posted: 02/ 1/2012 4:03 pm Updated: 02/ 1/2012 4:07 pm

Someone alert the unions: raising teacher pay will actually make for worse teachers–according to one GOP lawmaker.

Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill said that increasing teacher pay is against “a biblical principle” because it might attract people who otherwise wouldn’t do the job.

“Teachers need to make the money that they need to make,” McGill said, according to the Times-Journal. “If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach … and these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em.”

McGill’s comments came at a prayer breakfast this week in Fort Payne, Ala. State legislators are currently weighing raising teacher pay. One GOP leader proposed raising salaries of newer teachers by 2.5 percent, but critics argue that it isn’t fair to longer-serving educators, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.

A recent report might justify critics’ worries, showing that Alabama is actually leading the nation in starting teacher salaries, while lagging behind in average teacher pay, the Dothan Eagle reports.

The national average starting salary for a teacher is $39,000. New York Times columnist Nick Kristof has argued that paying teachers more would help attract better people to the profession, and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has repeatedly vocalized his assertion that teachers should have salaries starting at $60,000 and the opportunity to make up to $150,000 based on performance.

Tags:

American privilege rots an empire from within Well-paid professionals are contributing to U.S. economy’s demise

December 13, 2011 by Tom · Comment
Filed under: Class Warfare 

A rising empire rewards people who contribute to its growth and invest in its future. The empire’s decline begins when certain members of society are over-rewarded by means of privileges, and the empire’s money is wasted on outdated endeavors.

Against this backdrop, the United States is experiencing a full-blown economic crisis. The nation’s real unemployment rate, which includes idled workers who’ve given up looking for jobs, is 18%. One-tenth of the nation’s properties have been foreclosed since 2007, and another tenth have negative equity. The poverty rate is more than 15%, and another 20% of the population is struggling on incomes near the poverty line. Looming over these grim statistics is the federal government’s budget deficit, which is equal to about 10% of the nation’s GDP.

Read More

Tags:

The 1% nearly triple their income, CBO says

October 27, 2011 by siteadmin · Comment
Filed under: Class Warfare 

October 25, 2011, 4:09 PM, MarketWatch.com

More fuel for the Occupy Wall Street protests: “The distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979,” the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday in a special report. Read the CBO’s analysis of income inequality.

The top 1% of households more than doubled their share of national income in the years between 1979 and 2007, as their real (inflation-adjusted) incomes increased by an astonishing 275%, the CBO reported.

More…

Tags:

The study that shows why Occupy Wall Street struck a nerve

October 27, 2011 by siteadmin · Comment
Filed under: Class Warfare 

By Eugene Robinson, Thursday, October 27, 6:53 PM

The hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party claim to despise the redistribution of wealth, but secretly they love it — as long as the process involves depriving the poor and middle class to benefit the rich, not the other way around.

That is precisely what has been happening, as a jaw-dropping new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office demonstrates. Three decades of trickle-down economic theory, see-no-evil deregulation and tax-cutting fervor have led to massive redistribution. Another word for what’s been happening might be theft.

The gist of the CBO study, titled “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” is that while we’ve become wealthier overall, these new riches have largely bypassed many Americans and instead flowed mostly to the affluent. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t remember voting to turn the United States into a nation starkly divided between haves and have-nots. Yet that’s where we’ve been led.

Overall, in inflation-adjusted dollars, average after-tax household income grew by 62 percent during the period under study, according to the CBO. This sounds great — but only until you look a little closer.

For those at the bottom — the one-fifth of households with the lowest incomes — the increase was just 18 percent. For the middle three-fifths, the average increase was 40 percent. Spread over nearly 30 years, these gains are modest, not meteoric.

By contrast, look at the top 1 percent of earners. Their after-tax household income increased by an astonishing 275 percent. For those keeping track, this means it nearly quadrupled. Nice work, if you can get it.

This is not what Republicans want you to think of when you hear the word redistribution. You’re supposed to imagine the evil masterminds as Bolsheviks, not bankers. You’re supposed to envision the lazy free-riders who benefit from redistribution as the “poor,” and the industrious job-creators who get robbed as the “wealthy” — not the other way around.

If Americans were to realize they’ve been the victims of Republican-style redistribution — stealing from the poor to give to the rich — the whole political atmosphere might change. I believe that’s one reason why the Occupy Wall Street protests have struck such a nerve. The far-right and its media mouthpieces have worked themselves into a frenzy trying to disregard, dismiss or discredit the demonstrations. Thus far, fortunately, all this effort has been to no avail.

The right maintains that inequality is the wrong measure. To argue about how the income pie should be sliced is “class warfare,” and what we should do instead is give the private sector the right incentives to make the pie bigger. This way, according to conservative doctrine, everyone’s slice gets bigger — even if some slices grow faster than others.

Indeed, the CBO report says that even the poorest households saw at least a little income growth. Why is it any of their business that the high-earners in the top 1 percent saw astronomical income growth? Isn’t this just sour grapes?

No, for two reasons. First, the system is rigged. Wealthy individuals and corporations have disproportionate influence over public policy because of the often decisive role that money plays in elections. If the rich and powerful act in their self-interest, as conservative ideologues believe we all should do, then the rich and powerful’s share of income will continue to soar.

Second, and more broadly, the real issue is what kind of nation we want to be. Thomas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal” is properly understood as calling for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. But the more we become a nation of rich and poor, the less we can pretend to be offering the same opportunities to every American. As polarization increases, mobility declines. The whole point of the American Dream is that it is available to everyone, not just those who awaken from their slumbers on down-filled pillows and 800-thread-count sheets.

So it does matter that as the pie grows, the various slices do not grow in proportion. We’re not characters in one of those lumbering, interminable, nonsensical Ayn Rand novels. We believe in individual initiative and the free market, but we also believe that nationhood necessarily involves a commitment to our fellow citizens, an acknowledgment that we’re engaged in a common enterprise. We believe that opportunity should be more than just an empty word.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com

Tags:

What class warfare really looks like

July 12, 2011 by siteadmin · Comment
Filed under: Class Warfare 

By: Dee Dee Myers, Politico.com
July 11, 2011 10:22 PM EDT

Here we go again. Democrats single out glaring examples of tax preferences or spending priorities that favor the wealthy and Republicans cry “class warfare!”

The latest round came in the wake of President Barack Obama’s calls to eliminate tax breaks for corporate jet owners. Ending special deductions for the depreciation of corporate aircraft would save roughly $3 billion over the next decade. Republicans argue — correctly — that amounts to less than half of 1 percent of the current national debt. So it was striking how quickly, and passionately, conservative pols and commentators rose to defend the subsidy.

“Dangerous!” “Full-fledged demagoguery!” cried Rush Limbaugh. The president’s “aim is for one group of Americans to hate and despise another!”

“Unprecedented class warfare!” claimed Glenn Beck. The president again showed “his sheer, unadulterated disgust for the wealthy, the successful and anyone who’s ever tried to do anything with their life here in America.”

Really? Closing a single loophole worth less than one-half of 1 percent of the national debt is all that?

The knee-jerk conservative response confirms two things. First, they know the president landed a punch. Second, they’re utterly unwilling to acknowledge how much the playing field in American life has now tilted in favor of the haves.

We know the president’s proposal was largely symbolic. He doesn’t believe that eliminating a $3 billion tax break is really going to break the back of a $14 trillion problem.

But he does believe that highlighting small, but galling, inequities can stimulate a broader conversation about fairness. In our collective effort to deal with our very real fiscal challenges, how do we share the burden? The president’s argument resonated with ordinary Americans precisely because it’s a stand-in for their growing sense that things are out of whack.

This is the conversation conservatives don’t want to have.

It’s indisputable that the gap between the rich and everyone else in this country has grown dramatically. The top 1 percent of Americans now take home nearly a quarter of all income and control more than 40 percent of the country’s wealth — roughly the same amount as the bottom 90 percent.

It’s also indisputable that that gap has gotten far bigger in the past 25 years. In the past decade alone, the wealthiest percentile has seen its income grow by a robust 17 percent, while the middle class has seen its real income fall.

What could possibly account for such gross distortions? Are the superwealthy really that much smarter and productive than the rest of us? Are the organic veggies and hormone-free meat that affluent parents feed their children paying off?

Or could it be something else?

How about the tax structure? The 400 Americans with the highest adjusted gross income saw their effective tax rates plummet from 30 percent in 1995 to 17 percent in 2007.

That’s not according to some left-wing think tank. It comes from a recent cover story in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. General Electric paid no corporate taxes in 2010. ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable companies in the world, still benefits from hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies — and it still couldn’t explain, let alone prevent, a devastating oil spill in the Yellowstone River.

Even tax breaks that are supposed to help the middle class too often skew toward the wealthy. Consider the mortgage interest deduction. While political leaders in both parties have long considered it untouchable, it actually helps those at the top of the income scale far more than those at the bottom.

First, low- and middle-income earners are less likely to itemize deductions, so most aren’t even eligible for the benefit. If the mortgage interest deduction were eliminated, according to the Tax Policy Center, the bottom 40 percent of earners would be virtually unaffected.

Those in the middle brackets would see a small increase in their taxes. While those in the top brackets — the same folks who have seen their incomes and wealth skyrocket in recent decades — would take the biggest hit.

Second, it provides the biggest benefit to people who buy the most expensive homes. The deduction on a million-dollar loan at an elevated jumbo rate is worth a heck of a lot more than one for a $250,000 conforming loan.

Third, because people in lower brackets pay lower rates, if a person making $50,000 a year and person making $150,000 a year bought the same house, the higher earner would get a bigger tax break.

Reducing the amount of eligible debt from $1 million to, say, $250,000 is now under discussion. That would help. But it would still provide a bigger benefit to people with bigger incomes.

So the dirty little secret is that the pool man, who’s making $30,000 a year, is subsidizing the million-dollar mortgage for the family whose pool he cleans. No wonder people want to get rid of tax breaks for corporate jets.

And no wonder the American people overwhelmingly support raising taxes on the rich — as well as cutting spending — to reduce the deficit and improve income equality. They don’t believe it’s class warfare.

For generations, Americans who aren’t rich have been generous and admiring of their wealthy compatriots — they want a country where people who work hard can succeed, where the same rules apply to everyone. They expect to have their own shot at getting rich. But increasingly, they are seeing that the game is rigged.

So as Republican congressional leaders stand their ground in the battle over raising the debt ceiling and lowering the debt — no net revenue increase! — Obama must stand his. He must ensure that any deal he may be able to strike moves us back toward a society where the burdens are shared equally — by all our people.

The U.S. now lags behind every country in Donald Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe” in terms of income equality.

“The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote recently in Vanity Fair, “the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend on the common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security — they can buy these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had.”

That, my friends, is what class warfare really looks like.

Dee Dee Myers, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, served as White House press secretary in the first two years of the Clinton administration.

Tags:


(March 20, 2012)

13-DEC-2011 UPDATE. Welcome to the Madison County Democratic Organization, our newest resource. 27-NOV-2011 UPDATE. The Edgar County Dems have a NEW facebook site. Visit them at Edgar County Democratic Boosters! Vote Straight Democratic VOTE STRAIGHT DEMOCRAT Vote For QUINN