Original Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-03/griffin-of-citadel-helps-fill-coffers-of-rove-s-political-group.html
By Jonathan D. Salant and Traci McMillan
Kenneth Griffin, chief executive of Citadel Investment Group LLC, and his wife Anne each contributed $250,000 to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads fundraising group, new Federal Election Commission reports show.
Griffin, who runs the $12.5 billion hedge fund based in Chicago, called the U.S. government’s role in the financial system “frightening” at an April 2009 conference. His wife is managing partner of Aragon Global Management LLC, also based in Chicago.
American Crossroads took in $3.8 million between Oct. 14 and Nov. 22, including $250,000 from Thomas Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems Inc. and now chairman of Palo Alto, California- based First Virtual Group; and $950,000 from B. Wayne Hughes, chairman of Glendale, California-based Public Storage, bringing his total contributions to the group to $3.3 million.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has subpoenaed Citadel as part of an investigation into insider trading, the Wall Street Journal reported Nov. 23.
Griffin also gave $650,000 to the Republican Governors Association, including $150,000 on Oct. 11, Internal Revenue Service filings show.
Devon Spurgeon, a spokeswoman for Citadel, declined comment.
$71 Million
American Crossroads, which discloses its donors, and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, which doesn’t, raised $71 million for the 2010 elections, according to Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for both groups. American Crossroads is the biggest of the so- called “super” political action committees, which can take in unlimited donations from corporations, unions and individuals.
The Crossroads groups spent $38 million, more than any other organization, to help elect Republican candidates in this year’s mid-term elections. Both groups were advised by Rove, former President George W. Bush’s chief political strategist.
The elections resulted in a Republican net gain of six governorships, six Senate seats and at least 63 House seats, with a race still undecided in a New York district. Republicans will control the House in the new Congress that convenes in early January and control 47 seats in the 100-member Senate.
The Crossroads groups plan to remain active on issues such as taxes and health care, Collegio said.
Concerned Taxpayers
Another Republican super PAC, Concerned Taxpayers of America, took in $307,500 between Oct. 14 and Nov. 22, all but $30,000 from Robert Mercer, co-chief executive of Renaissance Technologies Corp., an East Setauket, New York, hedge fund. The PAC raised $957,500 for the elections, with $627,500 coming from Mercer. Concerned Taxpayers spent $789,452, all on House races.
Labor unions were the biggest contributors to Democratic super PACs in the campaign’s last three weeks. The National Education Association contributed $400,000 and the Service Employees International Union gave $250,000 to Commonsense Ten, a Washington-based group run by Democratic strategists.
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees contributed $300,000 to Patriot Majority, which aired advertisements in support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Nevada Democrat defeated Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle Nov. 2.
The trial lawyers’ trade group, the American Association for Justice, gave $325,000 to Commonsense Ten, increasing its total donations to the PAC to $575,000.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
9 Biggest Conservative Lies About Taxes and Public Spending
Original Link: http://www.alternet.org/story/149265/the_9_biggest_conservative_lies_about_taxes_and_public_spending
By Joshua Holland
Here are the things the corporate media won't tell you about the tax-cut rhetoric in Washington
It’s difficult to know where to begin deconstructing conservative rhetoric on taxes and spending. It's such a central part of their worldview, and yet it's a view informed by a whole slew of falsehoods that have been repeated again and again during this year's debates over the Bush tax cuts, public spending and the deficit. What follows are nine of the biggest fact-free whoppers that conservatives insist are true.
1. Cutting Taxes Leads to More Money for the Government
Conservatives can't say they oppose popular programs on ideological grounds, and they can't admit they're happy to run up huge budget deficits, so they've come up with the fiction that cutting taxes actually brings in more revenues to finance the public sector.
What's especially brazen about this is that it's usually preceded by debate-stifling phrases such as “as everyone knows,” “history shows us” or “every single time taxes have been cut.”
In 2007, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said, “Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues”; Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, claimed that “Every major tax cut we've had in history has created more revenue," and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY said earlier this year that the myth represented “the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."
It's also complete nonsense, and it's worth noting that only conservative politicians and pundits make the claim -- economists across the ideological spectrum agree that the argument is cursed by voodoo math.
As Time Magazine's Justin Fox noted in 2007, "Every economics Ph.D. who has worked in a prominent role in the Bush administration acknowledges that the tax cuts enacted during the past six years have not paid for themselves—and were never intended to.” Harvard professor Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, dedicated a whole section of his economics textbook to debunking the claim.
And in an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal responding to Bush's claim that "You cut taxes, and the tax revenues increase," Andrew Samwick, who served as chief economist on Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote, “You are smart people....You know that the tax cuts have not fueled record revenues... You know that the first order effect of cutting taxes is to lower tax revenues.”
2. Conservatives' Favorite Economist Proves the Point
As I note in my book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, that falsehood is based in large part on an abuse of “Laffer’s curve,” the conservative media’s favorite economic theorem. The idea, first scribbled on a cocktail napkin by economist Arthur Laffer (according to lore), is pretty simple. It holds that you can raise income taxes to a degree, but when the top tax rate exceeds a certain point, people will go to such extraordinary lengths to avoid paying the piper that the government will actually end up collecting less revenue.
When Dylan Matthews asked a number of experts where the Laffer Curve “bends” for the Washington Post, the economists (he asked some conservative opinion columnists as well) all agreed that a top rate of 50 percent – several went as high as 70 percent – would still fall below the curve. That's important to keep in mind as we debate the merits of letting the top rate return to the 39 percent that prevailed during the Clinton years.
Each time taxes have been cut in the past few decades, it's led to a drop in revenues, which is why people like McCain like to go back to the Kennedy era, when cutting the top rate did spur growth and bring more money into the government's coffers. What they don't mention is that Kennedy cut the top rate from 91 percent to 70 percent, which has no bearing on the debate we're having today.*
3. Taxes on the Rich Keep 'Wealth Producers' from 'Creating Jobs'
We're all familiar with this one. In a New York Post column last week, Fox Business columnist Charles Gasparino claimed that businesses have "been hoarding cash instead of hiring" because of "the likelihood for higher taxes.” Media Matters responded by citing the CBO's finding that "[I]ncreasing the after-tax income of businesses typically does not create much incentive" to hire.
What's noteworthy about the narrative is the degree to which it defies simple common sense. It shouldn't be a matter of debate that only one thing creates jobs, and that's demand for companies' goods and services. The idea that a business that was booming would refuse to hire people and forego expansion because top tax rates might nudge upward is as silly as the idea that a business that has no customers would add new employees because its owners expect taxes to be low.
4. The Opposite: Tax Cuts for Upper Earners Spur Job Growth
Demand creates jobs, and U.S. Demand is way down because American households lost around $15 trillion dollars in wealth during the downturn. So it's important to note that research has shown that when you give a tax break to high-earners, they bank it, and when you give relief to working people, they spend it, increasing demand.
Like other types of public spending, giving cuts to those at the top does stimulate the economy, but very, very badly. According Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's, a dollar in tax cuts on capital gains adds .38 cents of economic growth and a dollar in corporate tax cuts brings us just .30 cents worth of stimulus, but a dollar in unemployment benefits gives the economy a boost of $1.63 and a buck worth of food stamps adds $1.73 in stimulus (PDF).
5. Only Half of American Families Pay Taxes
Rush Limbaugh put it this way: “The bottom 50 percent is paying a tiny bit of the taxes.... Remember this the next time you hear the ‘tax cuts for the rich’ business. Understand that the so-called rich are about the only ones paying taxes anymore.”
That's an entirely false narrative that emerges from some rather transparent sleight-of-hand. You have to look at the federal income tax in isolation and then pretend that it represents the government’s entire take. But the reality is that the government isn't financed from federal income taxes alone – far from it. Payroll taxes, for example, represent the biggest tax bite for the average worker.
When you add it all up—state and local taxes, federal taxes, sales taxes and excise fees—it turns out that the rich, the poor, and those in between all end up with about the same tax rate. That’s the conclusion of a 2007 study by Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson. They summarized, “The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.”
6. Americans Are Taxed to Death
This is one of those claims made so frequently that it becomes a matter of faith. But faith doesn't rely on fact, and this one is totally untrue.
In 2008, we ranked 26th out of the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in terms of our overall tax burden -- the share of our economy we fork over to the government. The U.S.came in almost 9 percentage points below the average of the group of wealthy nations, and some 20 percentage points below highly taxed countries like Denmark.
7. We're Being Killed by Runaway Government Spending
Public spending has increased with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, temporarily, with the stimulus package. And it will rise in the future as more baby boomers retire. But beyond that, it's important to understand how “limited” our government really is relative to other wealthy countries.
Sabina Dewan and Michael Ettlinger of the Center for American Progress crunched the data and found that between 2004 and 2007, the U.S. ranked 24th out of 26 OECD countries in overall government spending as a share of our economic output. Only Ireland and South Korea, both relative newcomers to the club, had a more “limited government” than we did during that span. Again, we came in around 7 percentage points of GDP below the OECD average -- and almost 20 percentage points beneath that of big spenders like France
8. Conservatives Favor Low Taxes and Limited Government
The Right loves “Big Government” as long as it's pursuing their preferred agenda. What they don't like are the government's most popular functions – assuring a social safety net, protecting consumers and the environment, subsidizing education, etc. They don't want to debate priorities, so they claim an ideological preference for a smaller government while showering tons of money on the military, law-enforcement, corporate subsidies, etc.
That's why the share of the economy represented by government spending (at the local, state, and federal levels combined) has been remarkably consistent during the last 40 years or so, regardless of which party controlled the White House or Congress.
In the two years that Gerald Ford presented budgets, government spending as a share of GDP averaged 31.4 percent; in ultra-liberal Jimmy Carter’s four years, it dropped to 30.7 percent; Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of fiscal conservatism, came into office, and it rose to 32.2 percent. It nudged slightly higher during the first George Bush’s term in office, then dropped to an almost Nixonian 30.3 percent during the Clinton years, before rising to 31.6 percent during the second Bush administration.
Looking at the other side of the ledger, overall government revenues have also remained relatively stable, but the pattern is reversed. The government’s take, as a share of GDP, dropped during the Ford era, rose again under Carter, and fell again under Reagan. Revenues rose by almost 2 percent under Clinton and fell by a percent and a half under George W. Bush. (The only exception: government revenues rose from 27.3 percent of GDP during the Reagan years to 27.6 percent under George Herbert Walker Bush – that was the “peace dividend.”)
Although the government taxes and spends at fairly similar rates, under Republican leadership the nation shells out a bit more for government services and takes in just a bit less in taxes. With a $15 trillion economy, those little differences add up to pretty big deficits, and this, rather than hot school lunches for poor kids, is responsible for a large chunk of our federal debt.
Given that reality, it's a wonder that conservatives have managed to convince the mainstream media and much of the country that they’re the fiscally responsible ones who are always ready to step in and clean up the nation’s budgetary mess.
9. Taxes on Top Earners Are Actually Taxes on 'Small Businesses'
For years, Republicans have pushed the spin that most of the Bush cuts for the highest earners were going to “small business owners,” the proverbial lifeblood of Small Town U.S.A. Then Republican national committee chair Ed Gillespie launched the meme in a 2003 speech, saying that “80% of the tax relief for upper income filers goes to small businesses.”
Fact-check.org, the nonpartisan campaign watchdog, looked at the claim, which was cooked up by GOP staffers on the House Economic Committee, and concluded that “it’s untrue—and a classic example of a statistical distortion gone amok.” The lie is pretty simple: around 80 percent of the wealthiest Americans report some business income on their tax returns, either from private partnerships (think big law firms) or from “hobby” businesses. And the GOP committee counted everyone who reported even a dollar on Schedule C of their returns as a “small business owner.”
The reality? Less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by people in the top two income brackets. As a Washington Post analysis concluded, “If the objective is to help small businesses, continuing the Bush tax cuts on high-income taxpayers isn't the way to go -- it would miss more than 98 percent of small-business owners and would primarily help people who don't make most of their money off those businesses.”
By Joshua Holland
Here are the things the corporate media won't tell you about the tax-cut rhetoric in Washington
It’s difficult to know where to begin deconstructing conservative rhetoric on taxes and spending. It's such a central part of their worldview, and yet it's a view informed by a whole slew of falsehoods that have been repeated again and again during this year's debates over the Bush tax cuts, public spending and the deficit. What follows are nine of the biggest fact-free whoppers that conservatives insist are true.
1. Cutting Taxes Leads to More Money for the Government
Conservatives can't say they oppose popular programs on ideological grounds, and they can't admit they're happy to run up huge budget deficits, so they've come up with the fiction that cutting taxes actually brings in more revenues to finance the public sector.
What's especially brazen about this is that it's usually preceded by debate-stifling phrases such as “as everyone knows,” “history shows us” or “every single time taxes have been cut.”
In 2007, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said, “Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues”; Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, claimed that “Every major tax cut we've had in history has created more revenue," and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY said earlier this year that the myth represented “the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."
It's also complete nonsense, and it's worth noting that only conservative politicians and pundits make the claim -- economists across the ideological spectrum agree that the argument is cursed by voodoo math.
As Time Magazine's Justin Fox noted in 2007, "Every economics Ph.D. who has worked in a prominent role in the Bush administration acknowledges that the tax cuts enacted during the past six years have not paid for themselves—and were never intended to.” Harvard professor Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, dedicated a whole section of his economics textbook to debunking the claim.
And in an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal responding to Bush's claim that "You cut taxes, and the tax revenues increase," Andrew Samwick, who served as chief economist on Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote, “You are smart people....You know that the tax cuts have not fueled record revenues... You know that the first order effect of cutting taxes is to lower tax revenues.”
2. Conservatives' Favorite Economist Proves the Point
As I note in my book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, that falsehood is based in large part on an abuse of “Laffer’s curve,” the conservative media’s favorite economic theorem. The idea, first scribbled on a cocktail napkin by economist Arthur Laffer (according to lore), is pretty simple. It holds that you can raise income taxes to a degree, but when the top tax rate exceeds a certain point, people will go to such extraordinary lengths to avoid paying the piper that the government will actually end up collecting less revenue.
When Dylan Matthews asked a number of experts where the Laffer Curve “bends” for the Washington Post, the economists (he asked some conservative opinion columnists as well) all agreed that a top rate of 50 percent – several went as high as 70 percent – would still fall below the curve. That's important to keep in mind as we debate the merits of letting the top rate return to the 39 percent that prevailed during the Clinton years.
Each time taxes have been cut in the past few decades, it's led to a drop in revenues, which is why people like McCain like to go back to the Kennedy era, when cutting the top rate did spur growth and bring more money into the government's coffers. What they don't mention is that Kennedy cut the top rate from 91 percent to 70 percent, which has no bearing on the debate we're having today.*
3. Taxes on the Rich Keep 'Wealth Producers' from 'Creating Jobs'
We're all familiar with this one. In a New York Post column last week, Fox Business columnist Charles Gasparino claimed that businesses have "been hoarding cash instead of hiring" because of "the likelihood for higher taxes.” Media Matters responded by citing the CBO's finding that "[I]ncreasing the after-tax income of businesses typically does not create much incentive" to hire.
What's noteworthy about the narrative is the degree to which it defies simple common sense. It shouldn't be a matter of debate that only one thing creates jobs, and that's demand for companies' goods and services. The idea that a business that was booming would refuse to hire people and forego expansion because top tax rates might nudge upward is as silly as the idea that a business that has no customers would add new employees because its owners expect taxes to be low.
4. The Opposite: Tax Cuts for Upper Earners Spur Job Growth
Demand creates jobs, and U.S. Demand is way down because American households lost around $15 trillion dollars in wealth during the downturn. So it's important to note that research has shown that when you give a tax break to high-earners, they bank it, and when you give relief to working people, they spend it, increasing demand.
Like other types of public spending, giving cuts to those at the top does stimulate the economy, but very, very badly. According Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's, a dollar in tax cuts on capital gains adds .38 cents of economic growth and a dollar in corporate tax cuts brings us just .30 cents worth of stimulus, but a dollar in unemployment benefits gives the economy a boost of $1.63 and a buck worth of food stamps adds $1.73 in stimulus (PDF).
5. Only Half of American Families Pay Taxes
Rush Limbaugh put it this way: “The bottom 50 percent is paying a tiny bit of the taxes.... Remember this the next time you hear the ‘tax cuts for the rich’ business. Understand that the so-called rich are about the only ones paying taxes anymore.”
That's an entirely false narrative that emerges from some rather transparent sleight-of-hand. You have to look at the federal income tax in isolation and then pretend that it represents the government’s entire take. But the reality is that the government isn't financed from federal income taxes alone – far from it. Payroll taxes, for example, represent the biggest tax bite for the average worker.
When you add it all up—state and local taxes, federal taxes, sales taxes and excise fees—it turns out that the rich, the poor, and those in between all end up with about the same tax rate. That’s the conclusion of a 2007 study by Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson. They summarized, “The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.”
6. Americans Are Taxed to Death
This is one of those claims made so frequently that it becomes a matter of faith. But faith doesn't rely on fact, and this one is totally untrue.
In 2008, we ranked 26th out of the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in terms of our overall tax burden -- the share of our economy we fork over to the government. The U.S.came in almost 9 percentage points below the average of the group of wealthy nations, and some 20 percentage points below highly taxed countries like Denmark.
7. We're Being Killed by Runaway Government Spending
Public spending has increased with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, temporarily, with the stimulus package. And it will rise in the future as more baby boomers retire. But beyond that, it's important to understand how “limited” our government really is relative to other wealthy countries.
Sabina Dewan and Michael Ettlinger of the Center for American Progress crunched the data and found that between 2004 and 2007, the U.S. ranked 24th out of 26 OECD countries in overall government spending as a share of our economic output. Only Ireland and South Korea, both relative newcomers to the club, had a more “limited government” than we did during that span. Again, we came in around 7 percentage points of GDP below the OECD average -- and almost 20 percentage points beneath that of big spenders like France
8. Conservatives Favor Low Taxes and Limited Government
The Right loves “Big Government” as long as it's pursuing their preferred agenda. What they don't like are the government's most popular functions – assuring a social safety net, protecting consumers and the environment, subsidizing education, etc. They don't want to debate priorities, so they claim an ideological preference for a smaller government while showering tons of money on the military, law-enforcement, corporate subsidies, etc.
That's why the share of the economy represented by government spending (at the local, state, and federal levels combined) has been remarkably consistent during the last 40 years or so, regardless of which party controlled the White House or Congress.
In the two years that Gerald Ford presented budgets, government spending as a share of GDP averaged 31.4 percent; in ultra-liberal Jimmy Carter’s four years, it dropped to 30.7 percent; Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of fiscal conservatism, came into office, and it rose to 32.2 percent. It nudged slightly higher during the first George Bush’s term in office, then dropped to an almost Nixonian 30.3 percent during the Clinton years, before rising to 31.6 percent during the second Bush administration.
Looking at the other side of the ledger, overall government revenues have also remained relatively stable, but the pattern is reversed. The government’s take, as a share of GDP, dropped during the Ford era, rose again under Carter, and fell again under Reagan. Revenues rose by almost 2 percent under Clinton and fell by a percent and a half under George W. Bush. (The only exception: government revenues rose from 27.3 percent of GDP during the Reagan years to 27.6 percent under George Herbert Walker Bush – that was the “peace dividend.”)
Although the government taxes and spends at fairly similar rates, under Republican leadership the nation shells out a bit more for government services and takes in just a bit less in taxes. With a $15 trillion economy, those little differences add up to pretty big deficits, and this, rather than hot school lunches for poor kids, is responsible for a large chunk of our federal debt.
Given that reality, it's a wonder that conservatives have managed to convince the mainstream media and much of the country that they’re the fiscally responsible ones who are always ready to step in and clean up the nation’s budgetary mess.
9. Taxes on Top Earners Are Actually Taxes on 'Small Businesses'
For years, Republicans have pushed the spin that most of the Bush cuts for the highest earners were going to “small business owners,” the proverbial lifeblood of Small Town U.S.A. Then Republican national committee chair Ed Gillespie launched the meme in a 2003 speech, saying that “80% of the tax relief for upper income filers goes to small businesses.”
Fact-check.org, the nonpartisan campaign watchdog, looked at the claim, which was cooked up by GOP staffers on the House Economic Committee, and concluded that “it’s untrue—and a classic example of a statistical distortion gone amok.” The lie is pretty simple: around 80 percent of the wealthiest Americans report some business income on their tax returns, either from private partnerships (think big law firms) or from “hobby” businesses. And the GOP committee counted everyone who reported even a dollar on Schedule C of their returns as a “small business owner.”
The reality? Less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by people in the top two income brackets. As a Washington Post analysis concluded, “If the objective is to help small businesses, continuing the Bush tax cuts on high-income taxpayers isn't the way to go -- it would miss more than 98 percent of small-business owners and would primarily help people who don't make most of their money off those businesses.”
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed: Study
Original Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/17/fox-news-viewers-are-the-_n_798146.html
UPDATE: Fox News senior vice president for news Michael Clemente has responded to the study which found that his network's viewers are more misinformed about American political issues than any other channel. In a statement to the New York Times' Brian Stelter, Clemente disparaged the University of Maryland, where the study was done.
"The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with," Clemente said.
"For the record, the Princeton Review says the University of Maryland ranks among the 'Best Northeastern Colleges," Stelter notes. "It was No. 19 on the Review’s list of 'Best Party Schools.'"
ORIGINAL POST: Fox News viewers are much more likely than others to believe false information about American politics, a new study concludes.
The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, judged how likely consumers of various news outlets and publications were to believe misinformation about a wide range of political issues. Overall, 90% of respondents said they felt they had heard false information being given to them during the 2010 election campaign. However, while consumers of just about every news outlet believed some information that was false, the study found that Fox News viewers, regardless of political information, were "significantly more likely" to believe that:
--Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)
--Most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
--The economy is getting worse (26 points)
Story continues below
Advertisement--Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
--The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
--Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
--The auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
--When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
--And that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)
In addition, the study said, increased viewership of Fox News led to increased belief in these false stories.
UPDATE: Fox News senior vice president for news Michael Clemente has responded to the study which found that his network's viewers are more misinformed about American political issues than any other channel. In a statement to the New York Times' Brian Stelter, Clemente disparaged the University of Maryland, where the study was done.
"The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with," Clemente said.
"For the record, the Princeton Review says the University of Maryland ranks among the 'Best Northeastern Colleges," Stelter notes. "It was No. 19 on the Review’s list of 'Best Party Schools.'"
ORIGINAL POST: Fox News viewers are much more likely than others to believe false information about American politics, a new study concludes.
The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, judged how likely consumers of various news outlets and publications were to believe misinformation about a wide range of political issues. Overall, 90% of respondents said they felt they had heard false information being given to them during the 2010 election campaign. However, while consumers of just about every news outlet believed some information that was false, the study found that Fox News viewers, regardless of political information, were "significantly more likely" to believe that:
--Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)
--Most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
--The economy is getting worse (26 points)
Story continues below
Advertisement--Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
--The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
--Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
--The auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
--When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
--And that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)
In addition, the study said, increased viewership of Fox News led to increased belief in these false stories.
GOP Has Abandoned Fiscal Responsibility By Adopting ‘Theology’ Of Tax Cuts
Original Link: http://forums.contracostatimes.com/topic/gop-has-abandoned-fiscal-responsibility-by-adopting-%E2%80%98theology%E2%80%99-of-tax-cuts
By ED CHAINEY
We don't have a spending problem in American government so much as we have a revenue problem, through plutocratic influences, the wealthiest elites and most corporations in America have succeeded over the last thirty years, through the enactment of voodoo economic policies in transferring the tax burden from themselves and onto the American middle- and working-classes.
Yesterday [11/28/2010] Warren Buffett restated it AGAIN, saying the richest Americans didn't sacrifice at all, during this recession. In fact, they have prospered at the expense of the average American – normally I would say worker here, but too many of our former workmates are unemployed.
In an interview on ABC’s "This Week," Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said that the rich should be paying more taxes and that the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy should be left to expire at the end of December.
Buffett said, "If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further."
He said, "But I think that people at the high end -- people like myself -- should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it."
Buffet said, "There's no sacrifice among the rich. There's plenty of sacrifice going on now."
He said, "I mean, if you look at Iraq and now Afghanistan, there's been sacrifice. But I would doubt if you take the people on the Forbes 400 list - whether many of them have a child or a grandchild that served in Iraq or Afghanistan - they come home in body bags to Nebraska, but they don't have to call up anybody up at the country club to notify them."
“A rising tide raises all yachts, not all boats.” - Warren Buffett
And remember the RICH don’t have to pay payroll taxes. They contribute nothing to Social Security, and in fact are hell bent on eviscerating it
On CNN, Reagan Budget Director David Stockman revealed: GOP Has Abandoned Fiscal Responsibility By Adopting ‘Theology’ Of Tax Cuts:
David Stockman continues to make the [media] rounds after bucking with the Republicans on tax cuts for the rich last summer. He is a Republican statesman who is in favor of returning to higher tax rates on the truly wealthy.
David Stockman has never been one to shy away from a roaring economic-policy debate. The former boy-wonder budget director in the first Reagan administration and the architect of Reagan’s supply-side economic policies, Stockman has been very busy lately rejecting the tax-cutting recommendations of Republicans in Washington and arguing that we must get our fiscal house in order or watch our way of life continue its decline. As an “imperialist power,” he says, America is in danger of being at “sundown.” Stockman, who turned 64 on Wednesday, has always been ahead of the curve on tax and fiscal issues, and it appears that he is ahead of it again this time, too.
As Congress prepares to take up extension of the Bush tax cuts during its lame duck session, Republican lawmakers have been unanimous in demanding that the cuts for the richest two percent of Americans be extended, claiming they are necessary for economic growth and that tax cuts (miraculously) pay for themselves.
While independent economists have shown these arguments to be false, today [11/28/2010] on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, President Reagan’s former budget director took on his own party for pushing this faulty logic. David Stockman, who led the all-important Office of Management and Budget under Reagan and was a chief architect of his fiscal policy, criticized today’s GOP for misreading Reagan’s legacy by adopting a “theology” of tax cuts.
Stockman has spoken out before, but took perhaps his strongest stance yet against his own party today, saying “I’ll never forgive the Bush administration” for “destroying the last vestige of fiscal responsibility that we had in the Republican Party.”
(Excerpted From ABC, CCN & Crooks & Liars.)
So, what should we average Americans do?
Unearned income should be taxed at a progressive rate – with a base income level exemption for the fixed-income retired – and not at the flat rate it is now.
It is the capital gains tax rate’s regressiveness that motivated Warren Buffett to expose the Republican’s dark secret: due to the capital gains rate reductions and counting payroll taxes, Buffett pays taxes at a lesser rate than his secretary and everyone else in his office.
We don’t really have a spending problem in America – we have an unfair tax revenue problem.
By ED CHAINEY
We don't have a spending problem in American government so much as we have a revenue problem, through plutocratic influences, the wealthiest elites and most corporations in America have succeeded over the last thirty years, through the enactment of voodoo economic policies in transferring the tax burden from themselves and onto the American middle- and working-classes.
Yesterday [11/28/2010] Warren Buffett restated it AGAIN, saying the richest Americans didn't sacrifice at all, during this recession. In fact, they have prospered at the expense of the average American – normally I would say worker here, but too many of our former workmates are unemployed.
In an interview on ABC’s "This Week," Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said that the rich should be paying more taxes and that the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy should be left to expire at the end of December.
Buffett said, "If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further."
He said, "But I think that people at the high end -- people like myself -- should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it."
Buffet said, "There's no sacrifice among the rich. There's plenty of sacrifice going on now."
He said, "I mean, if you look at Iraq and now Afghanistan, there's been sacrifice. But I would doubt if you take the people on the Forbes 400 list - whether many of them have a child or a grandchild that served in Iraq or Afghanistan - they come home in body bags to Nebraska, but they don't have to call up anybody up at the country club to notify them."
“A rising tide raises all yachts, not all boats.” - Warren Buffett
And remember the RICH don’t have to pay payroll taxes. They contribute nothing to Social Security, and in fact are hell bent on eviscerating it
On CNN, Reagan Budget Director David Stockman revealed: GOP Has Abandoned Fiscal Responsibility By Adopting ‘Theology’ Of Tax Cuts:
David Stockman continues to make the [media] rounds after bucking with the Republicans on tax cuts for the rich last summer. He is a Republican statesman who is in favor of returning to higher tax rates on the truly wealthy.
David Stockman has never been one to shy away from a roaring economic-policy debate. The former boy-wonder budget director in the first Reagan administration and the architect of Reagan’s supply-side economic policies, Stockman has been very busy lately rejecting the tax-cutting recommendations of Republicans in Washington and arguing that we must get our fiscal house in order or watch our way of life continue its decline. As an “imperialist power,” he says, America is in danger of being at “sundown.” Stockman, who turned 64 on Wednesday, has always been ahead of the curve on tax and fiscal issues, and it appears that he is ahead of it again this time, too.
As Congress prepares to take up extension of the Bush tax cuts during its lame duck session, Republican lawmakers have been unanimous in demanding that the cuts for the richest two percent of Americans be extended, claiming they are necessary for economic growth and that tax cuts (miraculously) pay for themselves.
While independent economists have shown these arguments to be false, today [11/28/2010] on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, President Reagan’s former budget director took on his own party for pushing this faulty logic. David Stockman, who led the all-important Office of Management and Budget under Reagan and was a chief architect of his fiscal policy, criticized today’s GOP for misreading Reagan’s legacy by adopting a “theology” of tax cuts.
Stockman has spoken out before, but took perhaps his strongest stance yet against his own party today, saying “I’ll never forgive the Bush administration” for “destroying the last vestige of fiscal responsibility that we had in the Republican Party.”
(Excerpted From ABC, CCN & Crooks & Liars.)
So, what should we average Americans do?
Unearned income should be taxed at a progressive rate – with a base income level exemption for the fixed-income retired – and not at the flat rate it is now.
It is the capital gains tax rate’s regressiveness that motivated Warren Buffett to expose the Republican’s dark secret: due to the capital gains rate reductions and counting payroll taxes, Buffett pays taxes at a lesser rate than his secretary and everyone else in his office.
We don’t really have a spending problem in America – we have an unfair tax revenue problem.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Tax the Rich
Original Link: http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/11/tax-the-rich/
By Al Engler
High government deficits are being used to justify cuts to public employment and social programs. It is not a surprise that transnational finance, the corporate media and right-wing political parties demand that returns on investments be given priority over employment, workers’ income, and the well-being of the marginalized. Having aggressively supported cuts to business and income taxes, they have reason to worry about the real returns on government bonds.
It is also not a surprise that unions and students in Europe have mobilized millions against these cuts. Unions, public sector workers, pensioners, immigrants and the poor are not to blame. Government deficits are a direct result of tax cuts, capitalist speculation, the 2008 financial crash, government bailouts, and the resulting loss of employment, income and government revenues.
If public deficits were the real problem—not just a pretext—military spending particularly in the U.S. would be drastically cut. Taxes would be raised. Of course, tax increases have consequences. Higher sales and value-added taxes reduce consumer purchasing power, further weakening markets in times of recession. Taxes on enterprise revenues can reduce expenditures for plant and equipment and lead to the failure of more businesses.
Steeply graduated income taxes would upset the super-rich but are otherwise benign. Taxing income over $200,000 a year at rates of 75 per cent, and over $500,000 at 90 per cent would substantially increase government revenues without reducing markets for most goods and services. Taxing profits on the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, real estate, and currencies could raise additional revenues. International agreement to raise tariffs to 15 to 25 per cent from the current average of five to ten per cent would raise more. Although the profits of transnational corporations would be squeezed, the resulting growth in local production for local consumption would expand employment, income, and public revenues everywhere.
Increasing taxes on capitalist income is anathema to the supply-side economists who have dominated government policy for thirty years. They claim that increasing taxes on the wealthy reduces the supply of funds available for private investment, causing job loss, reduced real incomes, and economic decline. Supply-side economics was a wealth-holders’ reaction to Keynesian demand-side policies.
The Keynesian period—from World War II through the 1970s—had been a response to destructive twentieth century wars, financial crashes, prolonged economic declines, and rising support for militant unionism, socialism, and communism. To counter growing opposition to capitalism, to stimulate consumer demand and to revive opportunities for profitable investments, governments increased spending on pensions, unemployment insurance, education, healthcare and income support. Laws were changed to make it easier for unions to organize and to bargain collectively.
Much of the cost of stimulating demand was covered by steeply graduated income taxes. In Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. the highest incomes were taxed at marginal rates up to 90 per cent during the war and after. Although lowered in the 1960s, income taxes remained steeply graduated through the 1970s. The share of total income going to capital as profits, dividends, interest payments, and rent did decline. Nonetheless, investments in machinery, equipment, buildings, infrastructure (bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, public transit), and housing stock rose steadily.
By the 1970s many of the very rich and corporate oligarchs had concluded that the welfare state was not in their interests. Unions were in decline. Communism was clearly not outperforming capitalism economically or militarily. At the end of the decade, neoconservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were winning political office claiming that Keynesian policies had increased demand at the expense of the supply of capital for investments. The result, they said, was not growth, but inflation and stagnation.
In fact, the Keynesian period was a time of steady, impressive growth in investment and consumer income. Inflation rates did reach double digits in the 1970s. Neoconservatives blamed this on rising social spending and government deficits. A more obvious explanation was the combination of rising oil prices and massive inflows of capital from abroad. Oil prices had risen from under $3 to over $30 a barrel, increasing the price of nearly all goods and services. Suddenly awash in revenues, the rulers of oil exporting countries invested billions in the U.S., U.K, Europe and Canada. Governments that were already cutting taxes paid by the rich and accumulating deficits, responded by borrowing more. U.S. government decisions to finance war in Indochina with borrowed money, not tax increases, compounded the problem.
In the 1980s, after supply-side policies became the economic orthodoxy, taxes on corporations and upper incomes were methodically lowered. Industries were deregulated. Laws were changed to make it more difficult for unions to organize and to engage in effective collective bargaining. Public utilities and services were privatized.
The rich did get richer—the super-rich substantially richer—but economies did not flourish as supply-siders had predicted. The quality of public services declined. Social infrastructure was allowed to decay. Employment in manufacturing and service industries fell. The real income of wage and salary workers stopped growing. Markets for consumer goods stagnated.
Supply-side theorists ignored the evidence. Instead, they turned phrases from Adam Smith into a mantra. More income for capitalists, they intoned, meant more savings, more investment, more economic growth. But Smith was not talking of twentieth century corporate oligarchs when he equated capitalist income with savings and investment. He was describing a middle class of prosperous farmers, shopkeepers, and merchants, whose frugality he contrasted with the aristocracy’s fondness for luxury. The middle class, he said, turned their surplus income into savings for investment in the future; aristocrats spent and borrowed for their current pleasure.
Today’s super-rich are more like eighteenth-century aristocrats than the middle classes of Smith’s day. They are mega and giga-consumers who transform revenues from productive assets and social labour into personal wealth—into mansions, yachts, beachfront condos, and winter retreats. As a class, they are obsessed with maximizing returns on their wealth, but they have little interest in productive investment. For them, innovation means new more profitable investment instruments: futures, derivatives, dubious mortgages packaged as collatoralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps (bankruptcy insurance).
Even when pyramid scams and outright fraud are not involved, nothing is added to means of livelihood when one capitalist buys and another sells stocks. Financial entitlements are merely shuffled from one to another. When the rich do invest in actual plant and equipment this is likely to be abroad where labour is cheaper and profits are higher.
The economic argument
Steeply graduated income taxes would make public debt manageable. Unlike taxes on consumption, taxes on the highest incomes would not dampen markets for consumer goods. Additional public revenues could be used to improve education, healthcare, social housing, income support, public transit. As employment and markets expand, enterprises would be encouraged to invest more.
Undistributed corporate profits are the main source of investment in research, development, plant, and equipment. By discouraging the distribution of profits as dividends, executive salaries, and bonuses, confiscatory tax rates on the highest incomes would give enterprises more reason to retain earnings, increasing the funds available for investment in real means of livelihood.
With far higher taxes on capitalist income, the super-rich will have to make do with less sumptuous homes, fewer and less luxurious automobiles, yachts, and vacation spots. For everyone else, the cost of keeping up with the Joneses will be less. People in all income groups are likely to save more, making more funds available for investment in housing and local enterprises.
The democratic argument
Capitalism claims to be a system of individual opportunities. Increasing the revenues for education, healthcare, pensions, and income-support would expand opportunities. Steeply graduated income taxes would transfer control of social surpluses from a corporate oligarchy to elected national, regional, and local governments.
Can governments and elected representatives be trusted to act in the common interest? With steeply graduated income tax, a small self-serving minority would have less money to influence legislation and corrupt politicians. Billionaires, like the Koch brothers—two of the wealthiest men in the U.S. who have bankrolled the U.S. Tea Party—would have less spare cash to dominate and manipulate political agendas in their narrow class interests.
Steeply graduated income taxes alone would not end capitalist entitlement, but as elected governments gain more revenues to expand social entitlements and public employment, people will demand to have a voice in economic decisions. The right of wealth-holding minorities to impose their immediate interests will be replaced with the transparent, democratic right of people to direct economic life in the common interest, in the interests of human and environmental well-being.
The environmental argument
The wealthiest one per cent presently claim twenty per cent and more of total income. If their share were reduced to five per cent, extravagant consumption and the accompanying waste of resources would be greatly reduced.
Governments would have the funds needed to replace dependence on private automobiles with fast, accessible public transportation. Federal, regional, and local governments could be provided with the funds to construct public heating and cooling systems that require less fossil fuels. Investments could be made in local agriculture for local markets. Environmental protection agencies could employ enough inspectors to investigate complaints and to act against corporate damage to ecosystems.
As control of social surpluses passes from the hands of wealth-holding minorities to elected governments, people will mobilize to demand that national, regional, and local communities provide more employment and goods and services as human rights. Fewer people will come to depend on the profitability of capital in general and of transnational corporations in particular. More people will be free to oppose environmentally destructive industrial activity.
As communities replace private corporations as the institutions making economic decisions, industrial and service workers, professionals, the retired, homemakers, students, farmers, mushroom pickers, loggers, and ecologists will all have the right to a voice and equal vote. The interests of major shareholders and top corporate executives will no longer take precedence over the income and employment of common people, or over the carrying capacity of environments.
By Al Engler
High government deficits are being used to justify cuts to public employment and social programs. It is not a surprise that transnational finance, the corporate media and right-wing political parties demand that returns on investments be given priority over employment, workers’ income, and the well-being of the marginalized. Having aggressively supported cuts to business and income taxes, they have reason to worry about the real returns on government bonds.
It is also not a surprise that unions and students in Europe have mobilized millions against these cuts. Unions, public sector workers, pensioners, immigrants and the poor are not to blame. Government deficits are a direct result of tax cuts, capitalist speculation, the 2008 financial crash, government bailouts, and the resulting loss of employment, income and government revenues.
If public deficits were the real problem—not just a pretext—military spending particularly in the U.S. would be drastically cut. Taxes would be raised. Of course, tax increases have consequences. Higher sales and value-added taxes reduce consumer purchasing power, further weakening markets in times of recession. Taxes on enterprise revenues can reduce expenditures for plant and equipment and lead to the failure of more businesses.
Steeply graduated income taxes would upset the super-rich but are otherwise benign. Taxing income over $200,000 a year at rates of 75 per cent, and over $500,000 at 90 per cent would substantially increase government revenues without reducing markets for most goods and services. Taxing profits on the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, real estate, and currencies could raise additional revenues. International agreement to raise tariffs to 15 to 25 per cent from the current average of five to ten per cent would raise more. Although the profits of transnational corporations would be squeezed, the resulting growth in local production for local consumption would expand employment, income, and public revenues everywhere.
Increasing taxes on capitalist income is anathema to the supply-side economists who have dominated government policy for thirty years. They claim that increasing taxes on the wealthy reduces the supply of funds available for private investment, causing job loss, reduced real incomes, and economic decline. Supply-side economics was a wealth-holders’ reaction to Keynesian demand-side policies.
The Keynesian period—from World War II through the 1970s—had been a response to destructive twentieth century wars, financial crashes, prolonged economic declines, and rising support for militant unionism, socialism, and communism. To counter growing opposition to capitalism, to stimulate consumer demand and to revive opportunities for profitable investments, governments increased spending on pensions, unemployment insurance, education, healthcare and income support. Laws were changed to make it easier for unions to organize and to bargain collectively.
Much of the cost of stimulating demand was covered by steeply graduated income taxes. In Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. the highest incomes were taxed at marginal rates up to 90 per cent during the war and after. Although lowered in the 1960s, income taxes remained steeply graduated through the 1970s. The share of total income going to capital as profits, dividends, interest payments, and rent did decline. Nonetheless, investments in machinery, equipment, buildings, infrastructure (bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, public transit), and housing stock rose steadily.
By the 1970s many of the very rich and corporate oligarchs had concluded that the welfare state was not in their interests. Unions were in decline. Communism was clearly not outperforming capitalism economically or militarily. At the end of the decade, neoconservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were winning political office claiming that Keynesian policies had increased demand at the expense of the supply of capital for investments. The result, they said, was not growth, but inflation and stagnation.
In fact, the Keynesian period was a time of steady, impressive growth in investment and consumer income. Inflation rates did reach double digits in the 1970s. Neoconservatives blamed this on rising social spending and government deficits. A more obvious explanation was the combination of rising oil prices and massive inflows of capital from abroad. Oil prices had risen from under $3 to over $30 a barrel, increasing the price of nearly all goods and services. Suddenly awash in revenues, the rulers of oil exporting countries invested billions in the U.S., U.K, Europe and Canada. Governments that were already cutting taxes paid by the rich and accumulating deficits, responded by borrowing more. U.S. government decisions to finance war in Indochina with borrowed money, not tax increases, compounded the problem.
In the 1980s, after supply-side policies became the economic orthodoxy, taxes on corporations and upper incomes were methodically lowered. Industries were deregulated. Laws were changed to make it more difficult for unions to organize and to engage in effective collective bargaining. Public utilities and services were privatized.
The rich did get richer—the super-rich substantially richer—but economies did not flourish as supply-siders had predicted. The quality of public services declined. Social infrastructure was allowed to decay. Employment in manufacturing and service industries fell. The real income of wage and salary workers stopped growing. Markets for consumer goods stagnated.
Supply-side theorists ignored the evidence. Instead, they turned phrases from Adam Smith into a mantra. More income for capitalists, they intoned, meant more savings, more investment, more economic growth. But Smith was not talking of twentieth century corporate oligarchs when he equated capitalist income with savings and investment. He was describing a middle class of prosperous farmers, shopkeepers, and merchants, whose frugality he contrasted with the aristocracy’s fondness for luxury. The middle class, he said, turned their surplus income into savings for investment in the future; aristocrats spent and borrowed for their current pleasure.
Today’s super-rich are more like eighteenth-century aristocrats than the middle classes of Smith’s day. They are mega and giga-consumers who transform revenues from productive assets and social labour into personal wealth—into mansions, yachts, beachfront condos, and winter retreats. As a class, they are obsessed with maximizing returns on their wealth, but they have little interest in productive investment. For them, innovation means new more profitable investment instruments: futures, derivatives, dubious mortgages packaged as collatoralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps (bankruptcy insurance).
Even when pyramid scams and outright fraud are not involved, nothing is added to means of livelihood when one capitalist buys and another sells stocks. Financial entitlements are merely shuffled from one to another. When the rich do invest in actual plant and equipment this is likely to be abroad where labour is cheaper and profits are higher.
The economic argument
Steeply graduated income taxes would make public debt manageable. Unlike taxes on consumption, taxes on the highest incomes would not dampen markets for consumer goods. Additional public revenues could be used to improve education, healthcare, social housing, income support, public transit. As employment and markets expand, enterprises would be encouraged to invest more.
Undistributed corporate profits are the main source of investment in research, development, plant, and equipment. By discouraging the distribution of profits as dividends, executive salaries, and bonuses, confiscatory tax rates on the highest incomes would give enterprises more reason to retain earnings, increasing the funds available for investment in real means of livelihood.
With far higher taxes on capitalist income, the super-rich will have to make do with less sumptuous homes, fewer and less luxurious automobiles, yachts, and vacation spots. For everyone else, the cost of keeping up with the Joneses will be less. People in all income groups are likely to save more, making more funds available for investment in housing and local enterprises.
The democratic argument
Capitalism claims to be a system of individual opportunities. Increasing the revenues for education, healthcare, pensions, and income-support would expand opportunities. Steeply graduated income taxes would transfer control of social surpluses from a corporate oligarchy to elected national, regional, and local governments.
Can governments and elected representatives be trusted to act in the common interest? With steeply graduated income tax, a small self-serving minority would have less money to influence legislation and corrupt politicians. Billionaires, like the Koch brothers—two of the wealthiest men in the U.S. who have bankrolled the U.S. Tea Party—would have less spare cash to dominate and manipulate political agendas in their narrow class interests.
Steeply graduated income taxes alone would not end capitalist entitlement, but as elected governments gain more revenues to expand social entitlements and public employment, people will demand to have a voice in economic decisions. The right of wealth-holding minorities to impose their immediate interests will be replaced with the transparent, democratic right of people to direct economic life in the common interest, in the interests of human and environmental well-being.
The environmental argument
The wealthiest one per cent presently claim twenty per cent and more of total income. If their share were reduced to five per cent, extravagant consumption and the accompanying waste of resources would be greatly reduced.
Governments would have the funds needed to replace dependence on private automobiles with fast, accessible public transportation. Federal, regional, and local governments could be provided with the funds to construct public heating and cooling systems that require less fossil fuels. Investments could be made in local agriculture for local markets. Environmental protection agencies could employ enough inspectors to investigate complaints and to act against corporate damage to ecosystems.
As control of social surpluses passes from the hands of wealth-holding minorities to elected governments, people will mobilize to demand that national, regional, and local communities provide more employment and goods and services as human rights. Fewer people will come to depend on the profitability of capital in general and of transnational corporations in particular. More people will be free to oppose environmentally destructive industrial activity.
As communities replace private corporations as the institutions making economic decisions, industrial and service workers, professionals, the retired, homemakers, students, farmers, mushroom pickers, loggers, and ecologists will all have the right to a voice and equal vote. The interests of major shareholders and top corporate executives will no longer take precedence over the income and employment of common people, or over the carrying capacity of environments.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
5 Right-Wing Scumbags Bankrolling Dangerous (and Plain Weird) Conservative Causes
Original Link: http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/149011/5_right-wing_scumbags_bankrolling_dangerous_(and_plain_weird)_conservative_causes/
By Brad Reed
Much ink has been spilled about the Koch brothers. But there are plenty of other wealthy right-wingers promoting dangerous policies.
A non-insane observer of American politics might wonder why our elite policy makers are considering curbing our budget deficit by cutting Social Security and Medicare payments all while further lowering tax rates for high-income earners.
The answer is that most of our political class and establishment media have bought into the meme that rich people are so super-special that if we hurt their feelings by making them pay the same amount in taxes that they paid in the 1990s, they will get so depressed they will lose the will to work and no one in the country will ever have jobs again.
While this idea may seem insane to all sane people, it’s actually one of many ideas promoted over the past several decades by wealthy right-wingers who have plunged significant sums of money into conservative think tanks, political candidates and advertising campaigns. You see, for some reason rich Americans aren’t content to have five yachts and a butler named Willivers -- rather, they seem obsessed with having the entire country leave red, white and blue smooch marks all over their rear ends.
And just who are these multimillionaire propagandists, you ask? Well, I’m sure you know all about the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch, since they’ve all been relatively high-profile lately. But there are plenty more right-wing sugar daddies out there. So without further ado, let’s get started!
Right-Wing Sugar Daddy #1: Sheldon Adelson
Like most neoconservatives, Adelson’s goal in life is to make sure the United States and Israel remain in a state of perpetual warfare against Arab countries until most of the world is destroyed. Adelson, who made his fortune as a Las Vegas casino mogul, made headlines in 2007 when he funded Freedom’s Watch, a neoconservative advocacy group that supported wars wherever and whenever it could find them.
The group’s first campaign was a $15 million ad blitz urging Americans to support the Iraq troop surge. One of the group’s most notorious ads featured an Iraq war vet who lost both his legs during the war imploring Congress to keep funding the war indefinitely because “if we pull out now everything I’ve given and sacrificed will mean nothing.” The ad also shamelessly conflated the Iraq war with the September 11 terrorist attacks by showing pictures of the World Trade Center burning as the vet firmly reminded Americans that “they attacked us.”
From there, the group held a conference hyping up the dangers of Iran and radical Islam in general. Freedom’s Watch disbanded in late 2008 after a sizable chunk of Adelson’s spare cash went up in smoke -- quite possibly the only good outcome from the global financial crisis.
Although Adelson’s impact on U.S. policy is relatively small, he is much more of a factor in Israel where he invested a reported $180 million to launch the free Israel Hayom tabloid in 2007. The Israeli media apparently refer to the paper as “Bibi-ton” because it serves as a propaganda rage for Netanyahu’s hard-line Likud government. The paper, which now has the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in Israel, mercilessly attacked the government of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, particularly his handling of the 2006 mini-war with Lebanon (sample headline, per the New Yorker: “The Ass-Covering of the Government”). Adelson was also upset that Olmert had the audacity to support a two-state solution where Palestinians are actually given some level of autonomy over their lives.
Right-Wing Sugar Daddy #2: Richard Mellon Scaife
Scaife got his start in politics by giving Richard Nixon’s campaign $1 million in 1972 and he hasn’t looked back since. As an heir to the Mellon fortune, Scaife didn’t exactly have to pick himself up by his bootstraps on his way to the top. And instead of doing something useful with his life, Scaife has blown hundreds of millions of dollars keeping wastoids like Jonah Goldberg employed by funding conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and right-wing opinion rags such as the American Spectator.
Scaife really hit his stride in the 1990s when he became obsessed with forcing President Bill Clinton and his penis from office. He kicked things off in 1993 by funding the so-called “Arkansas Project” that sent Spectator hacks down to Little Rock to dig up embarrassing dirt on the Clintons. Although that failed to produce the goods, Scaife decided to simultaneously fund Paula Jones’ unsuccessful sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton, thus setting the stage for later sex scandals that would result in the president getting impeached by the Republican House.
Scaife also got another “gift” when the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster sparked a litany of crazed conspiracies asserting that the Clintons had actually murdered Foster themselves.
“The death of Vincent Foster: I think that's the Rosetta Stone to the whole Clinton Administration,” Scaife told the New York Times in 1995. “There are just too many questions that have no answers. ”
In order to unlock this "Rosetta Stone," Scaife funded “journalists” who were willing to keep the Foster-was-murdered conspiracy alive. As New York Times reporter Tim Weiner noted at the time, Scaife’s Tribune-Review was “the only daily newspaper in the nation trying to prove that Mr. Foster might have been murdered.”
To make a long story short, Scaife never truly nailed Clinton like he wanted to, but he did get to watch Clinton get impeached for lying about a blowjob. God, America was a much nicer country back when we had no real problems to deal with.
Right-Wing Sugar Daddies #3 and #4: The Wyly Brothers
Sam and Charles Wyly gained notoriety during the 2000 Republican presidential primary by bankrolling the most comically Orwellian front group ever assembled. Dubbed “Republicans for Clean Air” the group spent more than $2 million for ads that attacked John McCain’s environmental record while praising George W. Bush’s green credentials. The Wylys similarly went to bat for their boy Bush by donating $10,000 a piece to the infamously dishonest Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that attacked John Kerry’s war record in Vietnam. The Wylys also donated more than $1 million to the Republican National Committee from 2000 through 2004, although they significantly curbed those donations once the Securities and Exchange Commission started investigating them for tax fraud.
Other than funding conservative campaigns, the Wylys’ favorite hobby seems to be getting in trouble for alleged tax evasion. The Wylys, who started making money in the software business and then branched out to clothing stores, restaurants and energy companies, first got the attention of the SEC in 2004 when they refused to provide Bank of America with details on their offshore assets. Oops!
From there, it was one unfortunate event after another for the Wylys. In 2005 the brothers copped to “inadvertently” hiding company profits in offshore trusts. In 2006, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report detailing a series of trusts the Wylys set up on the Isle of Man that were used to shelter $720 million worth of profits from taxation. And this past summer the SEC finally brought the hammer down on the Wylys, accusing them of reaping more than $30 million from an insider trading scheme related to the sale of their Sterling Software company. The SEC is seeking millions of dollars in fines from the brothers, which would presumably leave them with less cash to use on political smear campaigns. And what a sad, sad tragedy that would be.
Right-Wing Sugar Daddy #5: Peter Thiel
This super-wealthy technodork, who made his money cofounding the PayPal online payment service and being one of Facebook’s earliest investors, is using his cash to influence hearts and minds, albeit in a significantly different way from the previous right-wing sugar daddies we’ve examined. For instead of funding right-wing political campaigns, advertising blitzes and think tanks, Thiel is instead trying to influence his fellow libertarians to flee society, not change it.
Thiel officially lost faith in American society after the 2008 presidential election and he confessed on the Cato Institute’s Web site that he thought democracy and freedom were no longer compatible. The big reason for this, Thiel said, was that over the past century too many people went on welfare and women got the right to vote. Since welfare recipients and women are “two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians,” Thiel reasoned, then “the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’” has become “an oxymoron. ”
To rectify this, Thiel sunk more than $500,000 into the hilariously bone-headed “Seasteading” project being headed up by Patri Friedman, the grandson of famous conservative economist Milton Friedman. With money from Thiel and other like-minded rich libertarians, the seasteading project aims to build large, floating, concrete platforms in international waters where libertarians can live without the greedy hands of Uncle Sam taking their hard-earned cash.
They also plan to make money for themselves by using these platforms as intranational havens for drugs and prostitution, since no legal authority would be able to arrest them out in the open waters. And presumably, women living on the platforms won’t have any say in how the seasteads are run, lest they transform these aquatic libertarian paradises into scummy socialist hellholes. Thiel is also interested in funding transhumanist life-extension projects, as he has given the Methuselah Foundation excess of $3.5 million to ensure that he and his buddies can haunt the Earth with their presence for at least the next few hundred years.
When you think about it, Thiel’s devotion to dopey libertarian escapism, while elitist and horribly sexist, actually makes him the most palatable of all the right-wing sugar daddies we’ve examined. Unlike Scaife, Adelson and the Wylys, Thiel doesn’t want to influence how we think about the world. Rather, he wants to flee the wretched mediocrity of his fellow fleshbags and escape to a no-girls-allowed cyber-treehouse out in the middle of the ocean. To which I say, “You go, Galt!” The only tragedy is that if Thiel succeeds he likely won’t bring any of his brethren with him to the seastead platforms. Because what America needs now more than ever is for a bunch of its self-appointed Atlases to go shrug themselves.
By Brad Reed
Much ink has been spilled about the Koch brothers. But there are plenty of other wealthy right-wingers promoting dangerous policies.
A non-insane observer of American politics might wonder why our elite policy makers are considering curbing our budget deficit by cutting Social Security and Medicare payments all while further lowering tax rates for high-income earners.
The answer is that most of our political class and establishment media have bought into the meme that rich people are so super-special that if we hurt their feelings by making them pay the same amount in taxes that they paid in the 1990s, they will get so depressed they will lose the will to work and no one in the country will ever have jobs again.
While this idea may seem insane to all sane people, it’s actually one of many ideas promoted over the past several decades by wealthy right-wingers who have plunged significant sums of money into conservative think tanks, political candidates and advertising campaigns. You see, for some reason rich Americans aren’t content to have five yachts and a butler named Willivers -- rather, they seem obsessed with having the entire country leave red, white and blue smooch marks all over their rear ends.
And just who are these multimillionaire propagandists, you ask? Well, I’m sure you know all about the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch, since they’ve all been relatively high-profile lately. But there are plenty more right-wing sugar daddies out there. So without further ado, let’s get started!
Right-Wing Sugar Daddy #1: Sheldon Adelson
Like most neoconservatives, Adelson’s goal in life is to make sure the United States and Israel remain in a state of perpetual warfare against Arab countries until most of the world is destroyed. Adelson, who made his fortune as a Las Vegas casino mogul, made headlines in 2007 when he funded Freedom’s Watch, a neoconservative advocacy group that supported wars wherever and whenever it could find them.
The group’s first campaign was a $15 million ad blitz urging Americans to support the Iraq troop surge. One of the group’s most notorious ads featured an Iraq war vet who lost both his legs during the war imploring Congress to keep funding the war indefinitely because “if we pull out now everything I’ve given and sacrificed will mean nothing.” The ad also shamelessly conflated the Iraq war with the September 11 terrorist attacks by showing pictures of the World Trade Center burning as the vet firmly reminded Americans that “they attacked us.”
From there, the group held a conference hyping up the dangers of Iran and radical Islam in general. Freedom’s Watch disbanded in late 2008 after a sizable chunk of Adelson’s spare cash went up in smoke -- quite possibly the only good outcome from the global financial crisis.
Although Adelson’s impact on U.S. policy is relatively small, he is much more of a factor in Israel where he invested a reported $180 million to launch the free Israel Hayom tabloid in 2007. The Israeli media apparently refer to the paper as “Bibi-ton” because it serves as a propaganda rage for Netanyahu’s hard-line Likud government. The paper, which now has the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in Israel, mercilessly attacked the government of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, particularly his handling of the 2006 mini-war with Lebanon (sample headline, per the New Yorker: “The Ass-Covering of the Government”). Adelson was also upset that Olmert had the audacity to support a two-state solution where Palestinians are actually given some level of autonomy over their lives.
Right-Wing Sugar Daddy #2: Richard Mellon Scaife
Scaife got his start in politics by giving Richard Nixon’s campaign $1 million in 1972 and he hasn’t looked back since. As an heir to the Mellon fortune, Scaife didn’t exactly have to pick himself up by his bootstraps on his way to the top. And instead of doing something useful with his life, Scaife has blown hundreds of millions of dollars keeping wastoids like Jonah Goldberg employed by funding conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and right-wing opinion rags such as the American Spectator.
Scaife really hit his stride in the 1990s when he became obsessed with forcing President Bill Clinton and his penis from office. He kicked things off in 1993 by funding the so-called “Arkansas Project” that sent Spectator hacks down to Little Rock to dig up embarrassing dirt on the Clintons. Although that failed to produce the goods, Scaife decided to simultaneously fund Paula Jones’ unsuccessful sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton, thus setting the stage for later sex scandals that would result in the president getting impeached by the Republican House.
Scaife also got another “gift” when the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster sparked a litany of crazed conspiracies asserting that the Clintons had actually murdered Foster themselves.
“The death of Vincent Foster: I think that's the Rosetta Stone to the whole Clinton Administration,” Scaife told the New York Times in 1995. “There are just too many questions that have no answers. ”
In order to unlock this "Rosetta Stone," Scaife funded “journalists” who were willing to keep the Foster-was-murdered conspiracy alive. As New York Times reporter Tim Weiner noted at the time, Scaife’s Tribune-Review was “the only daily newspaper in the nation trying to prove that Mr. Foster might have been murdered.”
To make a long story short, Scaife never truly nailed Clinton like he wanted to, but he did get to watch Clinton get impeached for lying about a blowjob. God, America was a much nicer country back when we had no real problems to deal with.
Right-Wing Sugar Daddies #3 and #4: The Wyly Brothers
Sam and Charles Wyly gained notoriety during the 2000 Republican presidential primary by bankrolling the most comically Orwellian front group ever assembled. Dubbed “Republicans for Clean Air” the group spent more than $2 million for ads that attacked John McCain’s environmental record while praising George W. Bush’s green credentials. The Wylys similarly went to bat for their boy Bush by donating $10,000 a piece to the infamously dishonest Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that attacked John Kerry’s war record in Vietnam. The Wylys also donated more than $1 million to the Republican National Committee from 2000 through 2004, although they significantly curbed those donations once the Securities and Exchange Commission started investigating them for tax fraud.
Other than funding conservative campaigns, the Wylys’ favorite hobby seems to be getting in trouble for alleged tax evasion. The Wylys, who started making money in the software business and then branched out to clothing stores, restaurants and energy companies, first got the attention of the SEC in 2004 when they refused to provide Bank of America with details on their offshore assets. Oops!
From there, it was one unfortunate event after another for the Wylys. In 2005 the brothers copped to “inadvertently” hiding company profits in offshore trusts. In 2006, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report detailing a series of trusts the Wylys set up on the Isle of Man that were used to shelter $720 million worth of profits from taxation. And this past summer the SEC finally brought the hammer down on the Wylys, accusing them of reaping more than $30 million from an insider trading scheme related to the sale of their Sterling Software company. The SEC is seeking millions of dollars in fines from the brothers, which would presumably leave them with less cash to use on political smear campaigns. And what a sad, sad tragedy that would be.
Right-Wing Sugar Daddy #5: Peter Thiel
This super-wealthy technodork, who made his money cofounding the PayPal online payment service and being one of Facebook’s earliest investors, is using his cash to influence hearts and minds, albeit in a significantly different way from the previous right-wing sugar daddies we’ve examined. For instead of funding right-wing political campaigns, advertising blitzes and think tanks, Thiel is instead trying to influence his fellow libertarians to flee society, not change it.
Thiel officially lost faith in American society after the 2008 presidential election and he confessed on the Cato Institute’s Web site that he thought democracy and freedom were no longer compatible. The big reason for this, Thiel said, was that over the past century too many people went on welfare and women got the right to vote. Since welfare recipients and women are “two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians,” Thiel reasoned, then “the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’” has become “an oxymoron. ”
To rectify this, Thiel sunk more than $500,000 into the hilariously bone-headed “Seasteading” project being headed up by Patri Friedman, the grandson of famous conservative economist Milton Friedman. With money from Thiel and other like-minded rich libertarians, the seasteading project aims to build large, floating, concrete platforms in international waters where libertarians can live without the greedy hands of Uncle Sam taking their hard-earned cash.
They also plan to make money for themselves by using these platforms as intranational havens for drugs and prostitution, since no legal authority would be able to arrest them out in the open waters. And presumably, women living on the platforms won’t have any say in how the seasteads are run, lest they transform these aquatic libertarian paradises into scummy socialist hellholes. Thiel is also interested in funding transhumanist life-extension projects, as he has given the Methuselah Foundation excess of $3.5 million to ensure that he and his buddies can haunt the Earth with their presence for at least the next few hundred years.
When you think about it, Thiel’s devotion to dopey libertarian escapism, while elitist and horribly sexist, actually makes him the most palatable of all the right-wing sugar daddies we’ve examined. Unlike Scaife, Adelson and the Wylys, Thiel doesn’t want to influence how we think about the world. Rather, he wants to flee the wretched mediocrity of his fellow fleshbags and escape to a no-girls-allowed cyber-treehouse out in the middle of the ocean. To which I say, “You go, Galt!” The only tragedy is that if Thiel succeeds he likely won’t bring any of his brethren with him to the seastead platforms. Because what America needs now more than ever is for a bunch of its self-appointed Atlases to go shrug themselves.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
The Politicians’ Bible: Bringing in the Receipts
Original Link: http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/10/the-politicians%E2%80%99-bible-bringing-in-the-receipts/
By Rosemary and Walter Brasch
It will be cold tonight in Pennsylvania, but that means nothing to dozens of politicians who are in their final week of a ubiquitous campaign to get a government job.
There isn’t a household in Pennsylvania that has active voters that hasn’t been subjected to at least two dozen TV political ads each day, several robo-calls a week, and a few dozen direct mail full-color 8-1/2-by-11 inch postcard campaign ads. Many households have already received three or four dozen such ads in the past month.
Pennsylvanians aren’t the only ones who have been subjected to a deluge of political campaign ads the past six months. In California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, in every state in which there is a possibility of Republicans taking Senate, House, and governor seats from Democrats, there is a battle. The tactic is fear. The facts don’t matter. It makes little difference. It’s the results the politicians, their parties, and innumerable special interest groups care most about.
This year, more than $4 billion will be spent on Congressional and Gubernatorial races on the mid-term election. From individuals. From corporations. From special interest groups. Leading the donations from special interest groups are the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which pledged to spend more than $75 million; American Crossroads and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, formed by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political advisor, which is expected to spend about $65 million; and the Republican Governors Association, which has already donated more than $30 million, leaving the Democratic Governors Association, which has contributed about $10 million, in its dust. Other Democrat-leaning organizations are Act Blue, which will spend about $15 and Moveon, which will probably spend about $25 million, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
Thanks to a 5–4 ruling by the Supreme Court in January, corporations now enjoy the First Amendment rights of individuals. And corporate money, mostly to conservative causes, has poured into the campaigns. None of the special interest groups — no matter which political ideology they embrace — are taxed.
In the third quarter alone, 23 individuals have contributed more than $100,000 each — 15 to conservative causes, seven to liberal causes, one to a non-profit, according to the CRP. Five of the six who gave more than $1 million in the past three months have donated to Republican/conservative campaigns.
The leader in campaign giving, according to Federal Election Commission data, is Bob J. Perry, owner of Texas-based Perry Homes. During the past decade, Perry donated about $35 million to conservative candidates and special interest groups, and was a founder of Swift Boat Veterans, which targeted John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.
Perry isn’t the only financial whale. Former eBay CEO, Meg Whitman, has put up about $140 million of her own fortune in a bitter contest against Jerry Brown for the governorship of California. The job pays $212,000 a year. In Connecticut, Linda McMahon will spend almost $50 million of her own fortune to try to defeat Richard Blumenthal, who has spent about $6 million, to be one of the state’s two senators, according to CRP data.
While persons, corporations, and special interest groups are donating billions to the mid-term elections, American companies and corporations in every village, town, borough, and city will have outsourced about 1.6 million jobs in 2010, according to data compiled by Forrester Research; the same companies and corporations have outsourced about 5.5 million jobs in the past decade to foreign countries in order to increase the “bottom line.” About 14.8 million Americans are unemployed, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
On the streets of America, banks and various lending institutions will have foreclosed on about 1.2 million families in 2010, according to Daily Finance.
Here is another statistic. While persons, corporations, and special interest groups are donating billions to the mid-term elections, in every village, town, borough, and city in America about 750,000 persons will be homeless tonight. By the time the winners in the November 2 election take office in January, more than 3.5 million Americans, about one-fourth of them veterans, will have been homeless in the year in which more than $4 billion was spent to elect political candidates. The politicians will be warm during their inaugurals; the homeless won’t be.
By Rosemary and Walter Brasch
It will be cold tonight in Pennsylvania, but that means nothing to dozens of politicians who are in their final week of a ubiquitous campaign to get a government job.
There isn’t a household in Pennsylvania that has active voters that hasn’t been subjected to at least two dozen TV political ads each day, several robo-calls a week, and a few dozen direct mail full-color 8-1/2-by-11 inch postcard campaign ads. Many households have already received three or four dozen such ads in the past month.
Pennsylvanians aren’t the only ones who have been subjected to a deluge of political campaign ads the past six months. In California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, in every state in which there is a possibility of Republicans taking Senate, House, and governor seats from Democrats, there is a battle. The tactic is fear. The facts don’t matter. It makes little difference. It’s the results the politicians, their parties, and innumerable special interest groups care most about.
This year, more than $4 billion will be spent on Congressional and Gubernatorial races on the mid-term election. From individuals. From corporations. From special interest groups. Leading the donations from special interest groups are the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which pledged to spend more than $75 million; American Crossroads and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, formed by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political advisor, which is expected to spend about $65 million; and the Republican Governors Association, which has already donated more than $30 million, leaving the Democratic Governors Association, which has contributed about $10 million, in its dust. Other Democrat-leaning organizations are Act Blue, which will spend about $15 and Moveon, which will probably spend about $25 million, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
Thanks to a 5–4 ruling by the Supreme Court in January, corporations now enjoy the First Amendment rights of individuals. And corporate money, mostly to conservative causes, has poured into the campaigns. None of the special interest groups — no matter which political ideology they embrace — are taxed.
In the third quarter alone, 23 individuals have contributed more than $100,000 each — 15 to conservative causes, seven to liberal causes, one to a non-profit, according to the CRP. Five of the six who gave more than $1 million in the past three months have donated to Republican/conservative campaigns.
The leader in campaign giving, according to Federal Election Commission data, is Bob J. Perry, owner of Texas-based Perry Homes. During the past decade, Perry donated about $35 million to conservative candidates and special interest groups, and was a founder of Swift Boat Veterans, which targeted John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.
Perry isn’t the only financial whale. Former eBay CEO, Meg Whitman, has put up about $140 million of her own fortune in a bitter contest against Jerry Brown for the governorship of California. The job pays $212,000 a year. In Connecticut, Linda McMahon will spend almost $50 million of her own fortune to try to defeat Richard Blumenthal, who has spent about $6 million, to be one of the state’s two senators, according to CRP data.
While persons, corporations, and special interest groups are donating billions to the mid-term elections, American companies and corporations in every village, town, borough, and city will have outsourced about 1.6 million jobs in 2010, according to data compiled by Forrester Research; the same companies and corporations have outsourced about 5.5 million jobs in the past decade to foreign countries in order to increase the “bottom line.” About 14.8 million Americans are unemployed, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
On the streets of America, banks and various lending institutions will have foreclosed on about 1.2 million families in 2010, according to Daily Finance.
Here is another statistic. While persons, corporations, and special interest groups are donating billions to the mid-term elections, in every village, town, borough, and city in America about 750,000 persons will be homeless tonight. By the time the winners in the November 2 election take office in January, more than 3.5 million Americans, about one-fourth of them veterans, will have been homeless in the year in which more than $4 billion was spent to elect political candidates. The politicians will be warm during their inaugurals; the homeless won’t be.
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