Why Is The Media Echoing The Conservative Deficit Zombies When They Do Not Represent The Views of Real Americans

Why Is The Media Echoing The Conservative Deficit Zombies When They Do Not Represent The Views of Real Americans

Why are so many Washington officials obsessed with budget deficits?  And why are they so willing to entertain big cuts to social programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and education, while being reluctant or outright unwilling to increase taxes on the highest income earners?  The answer cannot be that most Americans want these choices. Survey after survey shows that large majorities support asking the wealthiest to pay more in taxes and want to maintain or increase spending on Social Security and federal health and education programs.

A possible answer to where budget hawks get energy and inspiration comes from the first systematic survey social scientists have managed to do of the political attitudes of wealthiest one percent of Americans. Working with a team of scholars from several disciplines, I have conducted a study called the “Survey of Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good.” Most national surveys include only a tiny number of very wealthy citizens, but we used additional data sources to identify a larger sample of wealthy individuals living in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.  Further research would be needed to explore attitudes among the very wealthy living everywhere in the United States.  But our findings are highly suggestive of what would be found in a nationwide study.  For the first time, we are able to pinpoint issues on which the very wealthiest agree or disagree with other Americans.

On Key Budget Questions, the Wealthy Have Distinctive Priorities

The wealthy respondents to our survey expressed great concern about budget deficits:

    Fully 87% called deficits a “very important problem” facing the United States, more than attributed such importance to unemployment, education or anything else on a list of eleven potential national challenges.
    On an open-ended question that asked respondents to name the most important problem facing the country, a hefty 32% of the wealthy mentioned budget deficits or excessive government spending, far more than cited any other problem.
    Only 11% of the wealthy mentioned unemployment or education as America’s top problem.
    Wealthy respondents tilted toward cutting back – rather than expanding – federal government spending on Social Security and health care.

By contrast, in a national survey taken about the same time as our survey, only seven percent of all Americans mentioned deficits or the national debt as the most important problem, while 53% cited jobs and the economy as the top problem.  Average Americans also leaned toward expanding rather than cutting back on major federal outlays for Social Security and health care.

Disagreements on Jobs and Income Supports

Most wealthy respondents to our survey opposed a wide range of job and income policies that majorities of ordinary Americans favor. Our respondents were against setting the minimum wage above the poverty line; providing a decent standard of living for the unemployed; increasing the earned income tax credit; and having government provide jobs for everyone able and willing to work who cannot find private employment.

Likewise, the wealthy opposed – while most Americans favor – providing health insurance financed by tax money; spending “whatever is necessary” to ensure that all children can attend good public schools; making sure that everyone can go to college can do so; and investing more in worker retraining and education to help workers adapt to changes in the economy.

The general American public favors more regulation of big corporations, but our wealthy respondents tend not to favor this idea. Most Americans favor using corporate income taxes “a lot” to get revenue for government programs, but most of the wealthy do not favor this.

Darth Vader's human embodiment Dick Cheney famously said that deficits did not matter, he and his conservative comrades tanked the economy, and Democrats took the wheel of the ship they sunk. Suddenly deficits were the most important thing in the world. What is important is rising more revenue, creating jobs, protecting the environment, educating the next generation, reeducating adults to have the skills for new jobs and getting everyone health. What the wealthy want or want conservatives want is irreverent. Conservatives and the conservative wealthy trashed America. They deserve what they reaped. To be ignored.

Fox News and CNN conservative pundit Erick Erickson : Give A Medal To Store Employee Who Beat Shopper's Child With Belt. How can the USA call itself a merit based society when this assclown makes a six figure salary for being a political analyst.

Why Do America's Plutocrats Hate Workers? Starbucks Tycoon CEO Howard Schultz Bullies the Baristas

 Why Do America's Plutocrats Hate Workers? Starbucks Tycoon CEO Howard Schultz Bullies the Baristas

The billionaires peddling austerity have always insisted that they’re in it for the common man. A recent TV ad for Fix the Debt—the well-heeled group demanding that we cut tax rates and Social Security benefits—stars a teacher and a farmer. But Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz did his peers one better: conscripting countless low-wage workers into the austerity army.

....Days before the so-called New Year’s “fiscal cliff” deadline, the Starbucks stunt seized a decent chunk of media attention. Some celebrated its spunk; others slammed its seeming naïveté. A smaller number noted the moral bankruptcy of its premise: that the national debt is a crisis, and one the working class should sacrifice to fix. But in mainstream circles, there was little outrage over what was most outrageous about the Come Together campaign: Starbucks’ decision to draft its employees as a delivery system for austerity.

Schultz’s use of hourly employees was both shrewd and deceptive. Logistics aside, a Come Together message inscribed by a billionaire CEO and printed on coffee cups could never pack the same punch as one that was handwritten by workers making $8-something an hour. Schultz’s blog post was quickly followed by a mass e-mail from Fix the Debt, bragging that “Baristas at Starbucks are showing their support for bipartisan solutions this week.” CEOs hawking “shared sacrifice” are a dime a dozen. A working-class seal of approval is much more valuable, even if—like so much in the American workplace—it’s coerced. (Starbucks assured CNN that workers could decline to participate. But not all who are drafted will risk becoming a conscientious objector.)

As sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has observed, and Starbucks has unwittingly reminded us, the service sector is replete with “emotional labor”: not just physical production but interpersonal performance. Workers are paid not only to perform a task but to act out a part—from speaking from a company script, to smiling despite verbal abuse or physical pain, to urging that Congress embrace a deal that could imperil their retirement.

The Come Together episode illustrates the rise of political coercion in the workplace. That trend drew rare attention last year with a series of stories about companies that told their employees whom to vote for (Koch Industries), tracked workers’ political donations (Murray Energy) or warned of layoffs if President Obama was re-elected (Westgate Resorts). In the Citizens United era, companies have even greater freedom to impose their politics on employees, from convening a mandatory meeting devoted to political “persuasion” to firing an employee for affixing the wrong candidate’s bumper sticker to her car.

American law generally protects the freedom of bosses to force their politics on workers, but not the freedom of workers to take independent political action (even outside work) without being fired.

The plutocrats deeply feel that they are doing the peasants a favor by letting them have a job. You know the jobs held by people who make having a business possible, that help generate the millions of dollars that go into the pockets of these modern day Marie Antoinettes.

There is No Reasoning With Republican Freaks Who Have No Values: Conservatives Invent New Bengahzi Conspiracy Theory: Top U.S. Intel Official Is A Liar

There is No Reasoning With Republican Freaks Who Have No Values: Conservatives Invent New Bengahzi Conspiracy Theory: Top U.S. Intel Official Is A Liar

The Republicans’ new focus of attack in the faux “Benghazi-gate” scandal is Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, claiming that he lied about the source of changes to talking points on the Benghazi attack given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

Yesterday, a DNI spokesperson debunked accusations made by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other Republicans that the White House changed Rice’s Benghazi talking points, saying that it was the intelligence community that made the “substantive” changes to the talking points. Moreover, former CIA head David Petraeus and other top intelligence officials have said there was no politicization of the process and that the talking points were not altered to minimize the role of extremists but to reflect the best intelligence at the time.

McCain appeared to accept the new information but wondered why Clapper and other DNI officials did not provide this information during closed door hearings last week. And now that all their earlier attacks on Rice have fell apart, Republicans and conservative media figures are directing their attacks at Clapper, a George W. Bush appointee:

    – BILL O’REILLY: Now it’s James Clapper, President Obama’s national security guy who is saying, “Oh, it’s me. I sent Rice out there and I took out all the al Qaeda stuff.” I’m not buying it. None of this adds up. … All right so there’s a lot of lying going on here.

    – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’m not buying it because the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said that a week ago in classified testimony that same Clapper said that they had no idea who changed the talking points and now a week later he seems to say he did? That’s kind of strange. I mean I’ve seen amnesia in my day in my clinical days and that one is pretty quick, one week.

    – TUCKER CARLSON: I hate to think that the director of National Intelligence lied, is a liar. But I’m not sure I see an alternate explanation. Apparently, he’s contradicting what he testified to just last week. Is there another explanation for this?”

    – FOX NEWS’ STEVE DOOCY: They did say it is out of the [DNI] office. It’s not him per se, so we’re supposed to believe that a Clapper aide changed what Petraeus had said? That’s very, very curious.

[   ]....The right wing has spent months trying to bring down the Obama administration in politicization the attacks in Benghazi that left four Americans dead and after all of their conspiracy theories and baseless attacks have been debunked, the rabbit hole appears to have led to Clapper and who knows where it will end.

Everyone one of these conservative truth seekers has a record of lying over and over again to the American people, here, here, here and here. They have no credibility, they have no integrity and lack the humility and moral backbone to apologize for their serious lies. If Republicans hate the USA so much maybe its time for them to start packing. They can start the totalitarian theocratic dystopia they have always dreamed of.

Macy’s CEO to American People: Drop Dead

Science for Hire: Why Industry's Deep Pockets May Be Depleting the Last of Our Fisheries

Corporate Welfare Queens Walmart Owners Look to Slash Federal Tax Payments

Bill O'Reilly Says Single Women, Hispanic-Americans, and African-Americans Are Not Part Of Traditional America. Pasty faced Anti-American proto-fascists such as Bill are not part of traditional America.

The Conservative Republican Plutocrats Don't Understand That Economic Collapse Happens When They Get All the Money

The Conservative Republican Plutocrats Don't Understand That Economic Collapse Happens When They Get All the Money

Let’s face it, if your opponent in Monopoly scoops up Boardwalk, Park Place, North Carolina Avenue, Pacific Avenue, both utilities, and the four railroads – that’s game over.

The other players, all of whom have been relegated to mere consumers instead of property owners, will slowly go bankrupt having to pay higher and higher costs for rent and services, utilities, and transportation. Eventually, one player has all the money and the losers have to clean up the board game and put it away.

But let’s assume the Monopoly game doesn’t end there. Let’s assume the broke players keep rolling the dice and keep going around the board. They essentially keep living their lives desperate and broke, using their credit cards and home lines of credit to stay in the game. Maybe they end up in jail. If they’re lucky, they land on Baltic Avenue and can afford to stay a night in the slums.

Meanwhile, the oligarch who owns everything can no longer collect any income. The other players can’t afford to pay rent, they can’t pay utilities, and they can’t ride on the railroads. Eventually, without consumers spending money, the Monopoly oligarch goes broke, too. His properties and businesses disappear and suddenly everyone is broke!

That’s what Monopoly’s version of economic collapse looks like. And it’s very similar to what global economic collapse in the real world looks like, too.

Now put the Monopoly game board away and consider this: Researchers in Zurich, Switzerland have found [3] that there are roughly 43,000 transnational corporations that dominate the global economy. Of those, there are about 1,300 companies that control 80% of all the global revenues for all the transnational corporations on the planet. Now let’s take it a step further. Of those 1,300 core companies, only 147 companies, which all happen to own each other in some way, control 40% - or nearly half – of all the wealth in the entire transnational corporate network. That means 1% of transnationals own 40% of all the world’s business wealth.

In other words, the global 1% has its own 1%.  

This is similar to a Monopoly situation in which just one player owns 40% of the board. And just like it’s game over for Monopoly, it’s game over for the global economy, too. 

Right now, you can count the number of banks that own half of all the wealth in the U.S. economy on just one hand. There are just five of them [4] and they are the usual suspects: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. Their total assets equal 8.5 trillion, which is 56% of our entire economy.

In 2007 we all learned the consequences of disproportionate wealth and power concentrated in the hands of just a few companies. When one company begins to fail, they all begin to fail. And when they all fail, well, that’s what collapse looks like.

That why policymakers labeled the banks “Too Big to Fail” and bailed them out to prevent total collapse. Today, these banks are even bigger. And thanks to globalization, their tentacles are wrapped around the entire world’s economy. It won’t just be the United States imploding the next time these giants fall: it will be much of planet Earth itself. 

This is the danger of raw, unfettered capitalism. This is where the demands of higher and higher quarterly profits take down the economy. Companies begin devouring each other, sucking whatever wealth they can from each other. This was made easier by deregulation policies in the 1980’s and 1990’s that trigged a mergers and acquisitions mania under Reagan, and free trade policies under Clinton that opened up the game board for these transnational corporation to feast on even more industries abroad. 

Out of this, the few strong survive and have enormous power to fix prices for consumers. The inventors of Monopoly were right about what happens when one person owns all the railroads or all the utilities or all the apartment buildings: prices go up.

And to secure even more profits, these companies begin extracting wealth from their own workers, cutting their salaries and benefits. And like broke Monopoly players, real world consumers can’t afford to pay their mortgages, put gas in their car, or buy groceries. In the game-world, the corporate masters win. But in the real world, they eventually lose like the rest of us.

The corporate masters seem to have forgotten they depend on working people for their own survival. And today things have gotten really bad.

This corporatocracy made up of just over 100 transnational corporations are desperately trying to garner more wealth by toppling governments in Europe and demanding wealth-extracting austerity (or what has been referred to in the United States since the 1980’s as “Starve the Beast”).

This was predicted [5] by Bill Clinton’s former Deputy Secretary of Treasury, Roger Altman, back in 2011. He explained that these corporate forces, “oust entrenched regimes where normal political processes could not do so. They force austerity, banking bail-out and other major policy changes. Their influence dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, leaving aside unusable nuclear weapons, they have become the most powerful force on Earth.”

The violence on display in Greece is a consequence of the Monopoly endgame the world economy is in. No matter how much austerity that nations like Greece, Spain, and Europe endure, these corporate masters will be unsatisfied and they’ll demand even more. They’ll take their harvesting machines to Germany, the U.K., and eventually the United States. In fact, they’ve already begun. Until eventually they’ve destroyed the one thing that keeps their own hearts beating: working people.

That’s when collapse happens.

As the researchers in Zurich have discovered with actual data, we’re all living in a functional oligarchy today with just a handful of corporations – all of which are wealthier and more powerful than most sovereign governments – sucking whatever remaining wealth they can from the rest of us.

And just like how the oil industry is willing to suck the last trillion dollars of oil out of the ground  with no plans about what to do when it’s all gone, these corporate masters are willing to suck the last wealth out of the middle class without any plans of what to do when their consumers disappear.

Everyone needs to wake up to this economic reality before we’re all dragged toward collapse. If not, the mess will be a lot bigger to clean up than just a few scattered dice, thimbles, and a chance card.
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Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/thom-hartmann
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/sam-sacks
[3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-16/obama-bid-to-end-too-big-to-fail-undercut-as-banks-grow.html
[5] http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12628-monopoly-endgame-for-the-global-economy#axzz1fnNHC8YP
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economy-0
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economic-collapse
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/oligarchs
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Conservatives - that includes conservative Democrats and Republicans never really trusted the people and democracy. The conservative plutocrats do not want an economy that benefits the most people most of the time - a well regulated capitalist economy. No, they want the USA to become a land of overlords and a permanent powerless serfdom. They spend more money on lobbyists and buying legislation than they do on taxes. The story is not just about money and geed, it is about money buying power for people with a near psychotic addiction to power. Funny how in the South and parts of the mid-west, we have working class Americans fighting for this vision of the USA and complain that they feel powerless.They the Bill O'Reillys and Glenn Becks of rural and suburban America, plastic imitation populists.

Jon Stewart examines the various "suspicious" theories about David Petraeus' affair and subsequent resignation

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Why Should You Vote? Visualize The Nightmare of Romney World

Why Should You Vote? Visualize The Nightmare of Romney World

My wife, Jan Schakowsky, and I are friends with a wonderful woman named Bea. Bea is now 95 years old. Bea was born in 1917.

She was born in a country where women couldn't vote. In some areas of the country, just fifty years before, slavery had been legal. Collective bargaining was not recognized under the law. Poverty was rampant -- especially among the country's oldest citizens.

Bea was born in a country where there was an unimaginable gulf between a few fabulously wealthy oligarchs, and the masses of ordinary people. It was a country where only a tiny fraction of the population ever went to college -- or even graduated from high school -- a country were hardly anyone was considered "middle class." It was a country where there were few regulations to protect health and safety on the job, no national child labor laws, no federal minimum wage, and very little to prevent corporations from recklessly destroying the environment.

Bea was born in a country where people of color were considered second-class citizens and discrimination against them was enshrined into law -- a country where gays and homosexuals could be prosecuted for their sexual orientation.

Bea was born in the United States of America.

Over her lifetime, Bea has been involved in many of the great social movements of our time -- movements that helped transform our country into the envy of the world.

She was active building the labor unions that build the middle class. won a living wage, weekends and a 40-hour work week, pensions for retirement, and the passage of Social Security and Medicare that ensured a retirement free of poverty.

She marched with the civil rights movement that gave people of color an equal status in American society.

Bea became a public school teacher and helped educate an ever-expanding number of ordinary Americans -- watching more and more of them go on to college to fulfill their dreams.

She was part of the women's movement that demanded equal status and equal pay for women -- as well as the right for women to control their own decisions about contraception and abortion.

This year, Bea -- at 95 years old -- is working on a phone bank to turn out voters for Barack Obama. She says that if Mitt Romney and the Republican Right win the election on Tuesday, they have made clear that they absolutely intend to destroy all of the things for which she has struggled her entire life. She's right.

Mitt Romney has demonstrated over the years that he has only one real core value: his own success.

Throughout his career, Mitt has demonstrated that he will do whatever is necessary to benefit himself -- and his investors. At Bain Capital he didn't flinch when it came to destroying other people's jobs and lives if it would make him and his investors money.

Now his "investors" are the oligarchs of the Republican Right -- people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson -- who, between them, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. Many are the same people who funded the Tea Party movement. Others are the Wall Street hedge fund barons whose recklessness collapsed the economy and came very close to recreating a Great Depression.

These people -- and their Tea Party allies in Congress -- have shown the country that they have no intention of compromise. They are intent upon rolling back all of the things Bea has fought for -- on sending us back to the Gilded Age. They truly believe that America would be a better place without labor unions. They want to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers of ever-shrinking value that pay private insurance companies.

They want to be free to despoil the environment, do away with public education, eliminate jobs, cut wages, and continue to appropriate every dime of economic growth that is generated by our increasingly productive labor force.

As President Obama said in the second presidential debate, they want send us back to the foreign policy of the 1980's, a social policy of the 1950's and an economic policy of the 1920's. They believe in a society where the law of the jungle reigns supreme -- where you look out for yourself above all else -- where, if you believe you are your brother and sisters' keeper, that we shouldn't leave anyone behind, that we should have each other's back -- you're simply a chump.

If Mitt Romney becomes president, Republicans keep control of the House and win the few seats necessary to control the Senate, there will be nothing to restrain them from making their vision of society a reality in America -- from taking America backward to a time most of us cannot imagine.

What are some of the things a President Romney has promised to do?

    Eliminate Medicare and convert it into a voucher for private insurance -- ending the most popular and successful health care program in American history and raising out of pocket costs for seniors by6,500 a year.

    Privatize and cut Social Security - handing over the Social Security Trust fund to Wall Street and eliminating guaranteed benefits.

    Appoint -- most likely two -- Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, outlawing abortion rights -- and most likely make the Court a firm ally of unrestrained corporate and Wall Street power for generations.

    Repeal Wall Street Reform. Return us to the pre-crash law that would allow Wall Street to once again run wild, gamble with more and more exotic financial instruments, make a fortune for itself -- and once again wreck the economy.

    Repeal ObamaCare. That by itself would end the promise that no one will ever again be bankrupt by a sudden illness. It will return us to a very recent time when someone who has a pre-existing condition can be denied insurance coverage - and that insurance companies can call the shots when it comes to your health care.

    Pass the Ryan Budget. That would mean slashing critical federal expenditures that benefit the middle class and those who aspire to the middle class, like cutting Medicaid that pays for health care for the poor, children and those in need of nursing homes or home care -- and slashing funds for education and college grants.

    Increase military spending by two trillion dollars above the amount requested by the military leadership. That might benefit big defense contractors, but it would make it practically impossible to reduce the giant federal deficit.

    Give the wealthy an additional 5 trillion dollar tax cut and pay for it by increasing the effective tax rate paid by the middle class.
    Stop funding for Planned Parenthood and any other family planning programs that we fund around the world that use their own funds to pay for abortions.

    Try to pass the "Personhood" Amendment that would effectively outlaw all abortions and many forms of hormonal contraception.

    Allow many of the same Neo-Con foreign policy advisers who got us into the Iraq War to once again take control of American foreign policy.

    Veto the Dream Act that would allow young people who were brought to America as children to apply for citizenship.

    Eliminate the Presidential Directive that prevents the deportation of Dream Act-eligible young people.

    Empower people like Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who wrote the Arizona "papers please" law and now serves as Romney's chief adviser on immigration.

    Slash environmental regulations and investment in clean energy development.

The list goes on and on.

But worse than the individual initiatives that Romney and Ryan have made clear they would undertake, is the attitude they would bring to decision-making.

Romney's true views were laid bare in the now famous "47 percent video" where he explained how he could not convince 47% of Americans to take responsibility for their lives -- people like retirees who worked all of their lives for their Social Security and Medicare -- people like veterans who risked their lives for the country -- people like the disabled -- in fact, pretty much anyone who doesn't agree with his "we're all in this alone" view of American society.

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are elected on Tuesday, they will turn back the clock on progress in America. If they are allowed to do so by a Republican House and Senate, they would return us to a time we could scarcely imagine.

For those who believe in a society where we're all in this together, Tuesday's election is the mother of all battles.

Every conservative Republican president since Nixon has moved further and further to the extreme Right. Many thought George W. Bush would be the last radical right-wing president. Most Americans saw that radical conservatives had lied us into a $3 trillion dollar war and their accumulated economic policies were the cause of the worse economic crash since 1929 - Americans lost between $14 and $17 trillion dollars of their wealth. yet somehow here we are again with a clueless plutocrat that wants to mold the USA into 17th century France, with the overlords at the top and everyone else working hard just to get survive.

Obama Gains Edge in Campaign's Final Days - still every vote is needed.

Romney staff refusing to let frostbitten children leave PA rally