Do you have money in a big bank that you, as a taxpayer, are bailing out, yet it continues to demand more money—nothing but extortion—from the government so it doesn’t…well, what? They’re not lending money to individuals and businesses, they’re raising credit card rates through the roof in an effort to squeeze an extra dollar out of some while driving others into bankruptcy. They’re not giving homeowners with crushing mortgages a break. But they are giving gigantic bonuses and paying themselves huge salaries for taking that government money. And they’re using the money to buy off legislators with lobbying $$$$$$$$$, all paid for by you and me.
At the same time, small local banks and credit unions that are doing everything they can to help people like you and me are getting squeezed to support these big, profligate institutions that caused their own problems with investments that any fool could have seen would be a bad idea.
That’s the problem. It’s not just fools, it’s a special class of fools that are running these financial giants. They think that you and I are even more foolish than they are.
What the hell do you owe them? Nothing. Stop doing business with them.
Take your money out. Move your money to a local financial institution. You owe it to yourself and to your local economy.
They are trying to destroy us for short-term gain, with the blessing of the government. Don’t let them do it. Starve them.
The RNC has announced that its rebuttal tonight of President Obama’s national address to schoolchildren will be delivered by Hiram Walker Jones, a part-time worker at a 7/11 in Oklahoma. Michael Steele, National Chairman, characterizes the upcoming speech as a “strong statement for parental rights and American public opinion.”
Jones, who dropped out of middle school when he reached age 16 after being held back 3 times, “has been proudly working for corporate America,” said Mitch McConnell, who added that he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with working Americans who are not afraid to stand up for free market principles.
“Jones will speak out against education as a scam that elitist liberals use to cheat their way into positions of power and control over the media. He will also talk about reverse discrimination and reverse racism endemic in the current administration. He will speak about the rights of parents not to have their kids in school lectured to by an uppity black man,” said Rush Limbaugh, when asked for a comment.
“He will come out against socialist policies like universal health care, food stamps, and unemployment compensation, which are breaking the backs of the hardest-working Americans, the wealthy, and creating a nation dependent on government handouts,” said John Boehner, in a statement to the press. “We are proud that an uninsured American like Jones, who has not fallen for liberal lies about health care reform despite having a diabetic child who is unable to see a doctor and a mother who died from cancer last year after her health insurance company rescinded her policy for not telling them her feet hurt after working a double shift at the local truck stop, where she was a waitress, serving proud American truckers, who are the lifeblood of this country.”
Said Betsy McCaughey, “Jones will wisely come out against major changes to the health care system, changes that might result in health care services being provided to the tens of millions undeserving living in our midst.”
A spokesman for the National Heritage Foundation said that real Americans like Jones are showing us that polls do not represent what real Americans really think about the issues. “Real Americans understand that it is necessary to first balance the budget and cut taxes to the wealthy, even if it means increasing taxes to the working poor, eliminating all social services, and a return to debtor’s prisons.”
Jones became involved in the Tea Party movement when he heard about it in April while watching the Glenn Beck show and listening to Rush Limbaugh, as he does daily. He attended the April 15th rally, but was unable to attend a July4th rally, as he couldn’t afford to put gas in his car.
Jones is currently working his shift at the convenience store, and could not be reached for comment. A 7/11 spokesman said that under no circumstances are employees permitted personal calls while at work.
Jones is living with his wife and 3 children in his father’s basement.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the “teabag” parties, at least if you are an American. For those of you who aren’t, or haven’t been paying attention to movement on the fringes, what happened is that Rick Santelli, a derivatives trader who plays a business reporter on television, staged a little stunt during his CNBC business show trying to prove that Americans think that everybody but investment bankers and traders is a loser who deserves to lose their homes. The fact that he had a few other traders agree with him vocally meant that it was time to start a movement.
Notwithstanding the fact that people who report on the news are not supposed to be using their position to make the news—or start political movements, for that matter—he got involved with a website that apparently had previously been set up just for this and ran with the “tea party” concept.
Again, for those of you who are not familiar with the concept, prior to the start of the American Revolution, a small group of colonists attacked a ship in Boston Harbor and dumped its load of tea overboard as a sign of their refusal to endure “taxation without representation”. The issue was that the King had put heavy taxes on many things to cover the expenses of financial mismanagement of government back home, and somebody had to cover the costs. This is now known as the “Boston Tea Party”.
Right after Santelli’s rant, there were a few gatherings called “tea parties” around the country, though attendance was rather spotty. Some only had a few dozen attendees. There were a few where the size of the crowd was claimed to be in the thousands, but official estimates (by public authorities) put it significantly lower. So altogether nationwide it didn’t total the attendance at one typical Obama rally.
The thing is, even among right wingnuts, there isn’t that much enthusiasm for raising taxes for the poor so that rich people can keep more of their money. They have to keep the issue abstract and hope that their supporters don’t start calculating how much money they have lost in real wages and buying power in the last 8 years.
Example:
I answered a question on Yahoo Answers a week or so ago, written by someone who claimed to be in the bracket where he would be paying more taxes, but thought that he and his wife ought to be able to keep their money because “they work hard”.
I answered that if he’s making $250K he should be able to afford to pay the extra few dollars a day, and everybody works hard. The guy sent me an email complaining about how he has paid $70,000 for special schools and rehabilitation services for his autistic child. I was like, “Whoa, you’re complaining to the wrong person. I think the government ought to pay all of that, whether a person is rich or poor.”
He didn’t respond.
So many of the people who show up at these “parties” have some other agenda. They may be “birthers” who believe that Obama was born elsewhere and therefore can’t be President. They may be opposed to abortion rights. They may be anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, anti-civil rights. Or they may be just plain nuts.
The “parties” are all organized from the top down to try to generate the appearance of populist sentiment. That’s about all that Republicans seem to be able to do nowadays, and it’s not working out all that well. Fox News is pushing these parties hard to try to get people to attend. So is the Huffington Post, which is looking for “citizen reporters” to upload videos and write stories about their local parties. So it is not impossible that many of the parties will be attended by mostly moles.
At this link you will find several videos recorded at the last round of tea parties. I don’t want to put them all in here, so I’ll just give you one.
By now of course Rick Santelli has found that he was losing credibility by being associated with this “movement” and has dissociated himself from it.
But anyway, the big “teabagging” issue is how they thought they could squeak that name by. While many people involved in the parties do not seem to have been aware of what the term also means, it seems like at least some of them thought they could use the sexual allusion to their heart’s content and not have it turned against them. Or at least not for comedy.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “teabagging”, you will by the time you have watched both these videos.
What Cramer is saying is that the only consideration in determining the economic health of the nation as a whole should be stock market prices. This is an interesting perspective. Clearly a great many investors feel this way. That is why the administration has been putting so much effort into boosting investor confidence. The media, locked into worship of the market as a be-all and end-all, has responded by declaring that the depression is over and it’s back to normal for the country. It takes the pressure off announcements of continuing job losses, foreclosures, corporate corruption and looting, etc.
The administration “fixed” the stock market to get the media off their backs.
The stock market “creates wealth”? I thought that was the problem with investment in this country, money from nothing creating bubbles.
Bill Moyers did a show about the real problem, which is nowhere near being addressed: corporate fraud.
I hang out on Yahoo Answers, which is a great place for people who tend to become addicted to things like competitive speed-answering.
The Politics & Government categories are full of right wingnut trolls, many of whose questions are patently foolish and merely intended to waste the time of real people trying helpfully to point out to someone the error of their ways.
Hanging out on a site like that has fine-tuned my BS meter. But anyway, I sometimes put so much effort into answering a question that I think I should repost it here. So here goes:
Question:
Why Do Republicans Voters think the Rich need Handouts(aka Tax Cuts)?
Answer:
They have fallen for what I would call The Great Republican Lie of Income Redistribution”, which is, “Rich people work hard for their money, and people who work hard for their money deserve to keep it.” This lie is based on false premises and leads people to internally inconsistent conclusions. Here are the arguments, as you can read in the thread.
1. “Rich people work hard for their money”
Implied: How hard a person works can be shown by their income, so a person who makes $20,000 a year is working 2x as hard as someone who is making $10,000 a year, and the person making $10 million a year is working 1000x as hard.
False conclusion that the listener is supposed to draw: “People who don’t make much money aren’t actually working hard and are lazy, but I work hard for my money, too, so I am like a rich person.”
Truth rating: False. Most rich people do not work any harder for their money than anyone who works a job and does it well. The hardest, dirtiest, and most dangerous work out there is some of the worst-paying.
Not only that, but most rich people started higher on the ladder than poor people. They had someone to pay for their education at a pricey school where students hobnob with the wealthy and well-connected, and their connections that enabled them to get a job that a person born poor could never hope for his children to achieve, even if he borrowed enough money to pay for their college. Or like many rich people, they were already born rich.
2. “People who work hard for their money deserve to keep it.”
False conclusion: We should lower taxes for people like the rich who work hard. I work hard, so therefore I will get a tax cut, too.
Inconvenient fact: Historically, Republican “tax cuts” have resulted in huge tax cuts to the wealthy and much smaller if any tax cuts to the rest.
Hidden inconvenient fact #1: Lowering taxes disproportionally for one group of people means increasing the tax burden for all other groups. During the past generation the tax burden in real dollars on the working poor and middle class has risen while their incomes have fallen.
False conclusion: We can just lower taxes, and nothing will be affected, or the government will cut programs to those who don’t deserve it. (Remember, we have defined “undeserving” above as “not making as much money as a rich person”.).
Fact: Money invested in speculation rather than production of goods and services does not result in the creation of new wealth, but rather in a bubble effect.
Fact: Government policy over the past generation has encouraged the abandonment of our manufacturing base and funneling of money into high-risk investments and fraud schemes based only on the ability of the designers to get away with what any other citizen would be charged with a crime for doing.
Fact: Following this path has brought the country to its knees. Continuing to do more of the same will destroy us.
Conclusion: The Republican establishment has been manipulating their voters to vote against their own self-interest for a generation. Without not only the support of these voters but their complicity in attacking their fellow workers, government would have long ago had to answer for their crimes.
The article is long and filled with slides. Just to sum up, he feels the US is in much worse shape and highly unlikely to recover anytime soon from what he saw at that time as its inevitable economic collapse.
The solution? As he sees it, there is nothing anyone can do to prevent it. The majority of systems in this country are geared toward providing profit to business at the expense of infrastructure, transportation, health, and agricultural stability. Politicians have nothing to gain by fixing the system. They feed off it and are rewarded not by making the sort of really hard decisions that have not even been considered yet, but by focusing on trivialities and irrelevancies.
So what can we do? His surprising recommendation is that we as individuals should start hunkering down. We should do whatever it takes to remove ourselves to the margins of society and become accustomed to a low but sustainable standard of living. We should remove our money from financial institutions and put it into durable goods.
We should definitely grow our own food, as best we are able.
Pretty scary stuff, and so prescient. It rather reminds me of a ’50’s era cookbook and survivalist guide I once read, whose mission was getting people through the coming nuclear holocaust. The method for achieving wealth when money became valueless due to hyperinflation or the necessity of barter for survival? Lay in a supply of tobacco. When the chips are down, you will be able to charge whatever you want.
Or, how it suddenly became all Obama’s fault. Everything that happened is Obama’s fault, from daily fluctuations in the stock market (but only when they are in the downward direction), to the market and economic slide that began long before the election, to continued participation in two wars of highly dubious origin that he has not yet been able to extract us from.
There was a bombing in Iraq yesterday and people died! Impeach him for war crimes!
Any of the deregulation that the Republicans fought so hard for was actually Barney Frank’s or Ted Kennedy’s or Harry Reid’s or Nancy Pelosi’s fault. The administration that rammed though endless such policies with full Republican support and Democratic acquiescence (can you say “bi-partisanship”?) actually played no role, and was forced against its will to do all these things. That’s why Bush wrote all those signing statements that he was actually going to ignore deregulation and continue to enforce the laws as they previously stood, right?
No, wait! It was Bill, Clinton’s fault, Jimmy Carter’s fault! It was all FDR’s fault!
The banks were manipulated by poor people who forced them to make loans without asking for their income or verifying it! And now those poor people have lost their jobs and and want to collect unemployment, how dare they try to get something for nothing! Get off their lazy butts and find a job, there’s plenty of work for everybody who wants it!
And of course, my favorite: We don’t need to have regulations enforced, because anybody who would permit themselves to be ripped off deserved it!
Ahem.
Bush didn’t have anything to do with any of the disaster! And he’s not really a conservative anyway! He was actually a puppet, a President who sat helpless as the minority party around him controlled him like a puppet!
It has gone beyond “sore loser” into irrationality with a good dose of mental illness thrown in. Watch Glenn Beck cry on television sometime and tell me he doesn’t recall Howard Beale, the mentally ill newscaster in the movie Network being manipulated for news ratings.
Some amazing psychological delusions are taking place around us, not just on the right, of course. After reposting yesterday’s blog entry on how Rasmussen is perceiving the true political divide to be between not Republicans and Democrats, nor liberals and conservatives, but rather between two groups they term “Populists” and “the Political Class”, my diary there was filled with snarky comments from people who didn’t even read it or the links. They ignored the point, which was nothing more than “This is really interesting. It could mean something. We should keep an eye on it” and wrote comments on how polls actually don’t mean anything if they don’t agree with you, and Rasmussen polls are worthless.
There then followed a long diary complaining that those on the left should stop criticizing Obama’s choice of Geithner, because (a little sketchy here) it doesn’t matter who is Secretary of the Treasury or whether they have the confidence of the American people or their unpopularity is dragging down the entire administration. It doesn’t matter what the policy of the Treasury or the administration is. And besides, we couldn’t possibly understand what those people do. They are much smarter than us. Blah, blah, blah. And that Paul Krugner is an idiot, something only a moran, thought processes paralyzed with self-delusion, could say with a straight face.
But getting back to the “It’s all Obama’s fault” delusion, these people are finally recognizing what a mess the country is in. They voted for that guy twice, they supported him fully, they viciously attacked everybody who didn’t support him fully. He did exactly what he said he was going to do. They got what they asked for, what they were told to demand, and it didn’t work. It was not a disaster, not even a catastrophe, but a cataclysm. As Jon Stewart said, “He broke the world.” So now they need a way to absolve themselves from the shame of their collusion.
For 8 years he was their man. It is weighting them down like a ton of bricks, and truth and reconciliation can only come from within, and not from the voices on the radio.
The stages of grief:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
