Criminal Elite Club McCain "unsure how many houses he owns"

Class warfare is very real, stupid. (And you're not winning. And if McCain and his entrenched, er..."experienced" special interest cadre wins (or is close enough to steal), you'll almost certainly have higher taxes, at least one nuclear war that he can finally "win," less veteran care, more and more disastrous hand-outs for multi-millionaires and international billionaires leading to more credit crisis and international recession, gutted social security, crumbling bridges, more expensive food and gas and big swaggering unilateral CEO-style executive government in your bedroom, hospital and everywhere.)

McCain doesn't think you can be considered "rich" unless you make at least five million dollars a year.

-- He is a son of privilege from an elite military family (his father and grandfather were admirals). Despite a mediocre academic record at his fancy prep school, he was admitted to the highly prestigious Naval Academy (those family connections do come in handy). At the Academy, he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class.

-- His abysmal record at the Academy notwithstanding, McCain was "offered the most sought-after Navy assignment -- to become an aircraft carrier pilot." His instructor at flight school said that McCain was "positively one of the weakest students to pass our way," and McCain crashed five planes while he was there. Yet in spite of his poor performance, he continued to receive "plum assignments" throughout his military career.

[...]

The McCains pay about $273,000 per year for their household staff of butlers and maids, and one of their children had an American Express card that permits a balance of up to $50,000 per year. Meanwhile, McCain pays only $18,000 per year in alimony to the loyal wife he abandoned.

[..]

Barack Obama was raised by a single mom and grew up in a lower middle class home. His family sometimes struggled economically, and there were times his mother collected food stamps. Yes, Obama attended an elite high school, but he got there on a scholarship, and he lived in his grandparents' modest two-bedroom apartment while attending school. He went on to graduate from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, but he never would have been able to afford to study at those places without considerable financial aid. He also had a distinguished academic record, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, where he was president of the law review. Unlike McCain, Obama has spent significant amounts of time with poor and working class people, most notably during the years when he was a community organizer in Chicago.

Also unlike McCain, Obama could certainly never be accused of marrying for money. Michelle Obama grew up in a working class family on the South Side of Chicago. Her parents never went to college and her father had a blue collar job with the city. Like Barack, Michelle worked hard and won admission to elite universities (in her case, Princeton and Harvard Law School). And like Barack, she paid for school by taking out student loans. In fact, it was only recently that the Obamas were able to finally pay off those student loans -- it was the money they made from Barack's two books that finally gave them the wherewithal to do so.

[...]

The right would have you believe that, no, you're not being oppressed by the CEO of the company you're working at, who makes 364 times as money as you; nor by the credit card companies bleeding you dry. And it isn't the moneyed special interests which are robbing this country blind and driving us into a ditch. It is, rather, those liberal elitists who are the root of all evil. In the contemporary conservative imagination, liberals serve the symbolic role that Jews play in the ideology of anti-Semites[...]

Compared to 1990s, middle-class working families lose ground in the 2000s (Link)

From the Wiki on Regressive Taxation:

The New York Times in June 2005 ran a high-profile campaign arguing that at the very-high incomes United States tax-payers actually face regressive taxation rates, equating income tax across wage and rental incomes. For instance, they project that if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent: “By 2015, those making between $80,000 and $400,000 will pay as much as 13.9 percentage points more of their income in federal taxes than those making more than $400,000.”^[16]

The Nation Magazine: "The [Even] New[er] Inequality"



On average and after loopholes, all those making more than $350,000 in America last year paid only 29% in taxes (they are supposed to pay 35%).

Before Reagan it was 70%, for the highest bracket. After Reagan it was 50%.

Most recently, the top 400 billionaires last year each paid an average of only 19% in income tax!

That's six percent LESS than someone making only $32,500 was forced to pay.

Under Eisenhower, the highest tax bracket paid 90%.

Anyone for trust-busting?

Meanwhile...

"The minimum wage is at its lowest real value in over 50 years and has not been raised since 1997. This is the longest stretch of federal inaction since the minimum wage was first instated in 1938...."

...

The large mahogany, oak, hickory, walnut and cherry board is currently for sale: $120.

new cherry, walnut, birch end grains

tax the rich, close the loopholes, regulate the hedges, grant a living wage, bring back electric cars, invest smart infrastructure, support the unions

In which we count the obvious ways to make Americans less deeply embarrassed for their country...

One would surely be hard pressed to find a way on a national scale to erase or re-direct 30 years of ideological brainwashing, especially as manifested in vigorous knee-jerking, historical revisionism and sentimentalism and tired clichés concerning the fundamental evils of "Socialism," spasms brought on by any brave whiff of skepticism directed toward the fundamentalist "free" (private) market madness. This senseless dogma and basic paranoia is so acute precisely because it is a badge of pride for pathetic creatures, a sort of group-identity grunt and license to avoid thinking altogether–a desirable thing to do as repressing residual guilt over supporting criminally high discretionary and non-taxable income, in this day of modern suffering and failure, is as American as...whatever. Attending a wedding recently, sipping a $6 yuengling, some elder gent in the Sheraton Hotel evinced this mentality exactly. His stock response to courteous and factual rebuttals? "Well really that's all your concern now, you know....It's no longer up to me; it's up to your generation to come up with something." What's a young man to do? Tactful charming and prodding, slipping in the truth whenever possible. More satisfying to break bottles over heads, but you know, it was a wedding, after all so it was merely "Well...thanks a lot."

The Nation's Special Issue proves indispensable: Gabriel Thompson rips the lid off hedge-fund elitists/US plutocrats Bruce Kovner and John Paulson:

The living wage as socialist plot, unions as massive drain on the economy and Walmart as corporate savior: this is the sort of scholarship that Kovner subsidizes. Without squinting too hard, the outlines of such a capitalist dream world–imagined by well-paid fellows and funded by a billionaire–comes into focus: out from under the thumb of Big Labor, workers are free to work long hours for whatever wages a boss feels like paying. If they fall il, they're free to visit the emergency room. If they're really sick, they're free to declare bankruptcy. With Wal-Mart as the model, all workers become associates, free from the bonds of health coverage and overtime pay.

And on a local note:

In 2006 the loophole allowed Kovner to avoid paying $28.6 million in taxes; last year, it allowed Paulson to pocket an additional $150 million.
The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that Levin's bill, which also eliminated the ability of fund managers to shift compensation to offshore havens, would bring in nearly $50 billion to the Treasury within ten years. Edwards, Clinton and Obama all came out in support of the legislation; even Fortune magazine concluded it was a sensible proposal On November 9 it passed the House.
The industry responded agressively. A primary target was Senator Charles Schumer, who sits on both the Banking and Finance committees and is close to the hedge-fund industry. Checks started flowing in to the Democractic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), which Schumer chairs. Schumer, author of a book whose subtitle is Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority, publicly expressed his opposition to the bill, arguing that it unfairly targeted the two industries. In December the Senate overwhelmingly signed a bill leaving the tax loopholes in place.

On the day before the Senate vote, Frederick Iseman, then head of the private-equity arm of Caxton Associates, donated $28,500 to the DSCC. The day after the bill was passed, Paulson wrote the DSCC another $25,000 check. The gifts made up what was a record year for hedge-fund contributions, with individual giving more than doubling to nearly $10 million in the 2007-08 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. About three-quarters of those donations went to Democrats.

Whatever tortured excuse for this exists, I'm sure no working American wants to hear it.

See Firedoglake: Survival in an Economic Darwinism America

one fewer elitist prick

Good stuff on Jesse Helms at firedoglake [update: especially this broadcast by Laura Flanders:

For sixteen long days, even with the senate majority against him, in 1983, he filibustered the bill making Dr King's birthday a national holiday. “ Dr. King’s action-oriented Marxism is not compatible with the concepts of this country,” said Helms. Even fellow racist Senator Strom Thurmond came around on the King Holiday. Not Senator No.

Which invites the question: where's the Democrat's Senator Helms? Where's the anti-war Helms who'll filibuster for what he or she believes?

...and some humorous anecdotes slip through the S.C.U.M.GOP/media complex:

Etsy, roots

An interesting article on how the grassroots/handmade movement is growing, responsibly. (Did I mention all my items are on sale, this week only?)

elitist prick

Take a Google Earth tour of McCain's 13 or so multi-milllion dollar houses.

McCain's economy, wondrous developments

Expect trends to continue (if Obama decides to protect the rich, not buck the 30-year-old tide, that is):

Their wages may be falling, but one thing has certainly increased as young Americans struggle to maintain a middle-class lifestyle: their debt burdens. In households headed by someone aged twenty-five to thirty-four, average debt has climbed to over $55,000, up 70 percent from the 1980s (after accounting for inflation). Indeed the average debt load for young Americans--comprised largely of housing debt and college loans--actually exceeds their annual household income, a sharp change from two decades ago.

And the safety net for young workers is in sorry shape. All told, more than one-fourth of the 45 million workers under age thirty-five do not have health insurance from any source--by far the highest rate of any age group. As for young workers with just high school degrees, two-thirds do not receive health coverage in their entry-level jobs, up from just over one-third in 1979.

Corporate America's increasing tightfistedness over pensions is also hitting young workers hard. The share of workers twenty-five to thirty-four participating in an employer-sponsored pension plan or 401(k) slid to 42 percent in 2005, down from 50 percent five years earlier.

As Anya Kamenetz points out in her book Generation Debt, the Internet Generation will enter the prime of life in a nation as gray as Florida is today, and as a result that generation will face an unprecedented burden in sustaining the Social Security system. In 1960, sixteen Americans were working for each retiree. Today there are four active workers contributing taxes to Social Security for each retiree. In 2030, there are expected to be just two-and-a-half workers per retiree. Today's young workers may well face a double squeeze--to keep Social Security solvent, Congress might increase the younger generation's payroll taxes as well as trim their Social Security benefits. Also disturbing is the fact that the folks in Washington are building mountainous budget deficits, and they're simply passing the bill to their children's and grandchildren's generations. How fair is that?

All these trends have fostered considerable pessimism. Forty percent of voters surveyed in exit polls conducted on Election Day, 2006 said that life would be worse for the next generation, while just 30 percent said it would be better. Still, it is important to remember that some things are better for the younger generation--longer life spans, lower crime rates and wondrous developments like the Internet.

A special issue of The Nation states the obvious well:

Over the past three decades, market-worshiping politicians and their corporate backers have engineered the most colossal redistribution of wealth in modern world history, a redistribution from the bottom up, from working people to a tiny global elite.[...]

A worker making $10 an hour would have to labor for more than 10,000 years to earn what one of the 400 richest Americans pocketed in 2005.

How vast has our parallel universe of the ultrarich become? The Wall Street Journal now dedicates a full-time beat reporter, Robert Frank, to cover what he calls Richistan. Richistan did not suddenly appear on the American scene. Our top-heavy era has evolved from a heavily bankrolled effort by conservatives and corporations to instill blind faith in the market as the magic elixir that can solve any problem. This three-decade war against common sense has preached that tax cuts for the rich help the poor, that labor unions keep workers from prospering, that regulations protecting consumers attack freedom. Duly inspired, our elected officials have rewritten the rules that run our economy--on taxes and trade, on wage policies and public spending--to benefit wealthy asset owners and global corporations.

To reverse this reckless course, we need to change our nation's dominant political narrative and restore faith in the critical role that government must play to protect the common good. But we can't stop there. We need to confront directly the threat posed by this inequality.[...]

The Senate couldn't even manage to eliminate a tax loophole for gazillionaire hedge-fund managers last year. And even progressive wish lists tend to call only for a return to pre-George W. Bush tax rates, a step that would undo a mere one-sixth of the rise in income inequality we have experienced since the late 1970s, according to the Brookings Institution.

Future historians, we have no doubt, will note a certain irony here. The "real problems" we Americans face owe their intensity--and often their origin--to issues of income and wealth distribution our society simply refuses to address.

For more sophisticated analysis and links, please see The Existence Machine.

more gratuitous documenting...

Deserving of a good home other than my kitchen counter...

cherry and maple
white hickory, wenge and maple

ash and quarter-sawn oak


cats need to get jobs

OH, Poor Saint McCain!

Josh Marshall is my hero as the "big club" swings predictably down. Among others actually able to take legitimate criticism.

As for Obama, apparently busy reassuring the owners...well, it's equally predictable but what becomes of this cowering remains to be seen. Clearly he needs to feel more pressure from the genuine left, and will continue needing it...if only they can pull their roots together and hurl them at his window.

Update: The Obama campaign's impressive online response to criticism on the FISA issue is up here. The Nation comments:

While Obama's advisers may view this week's activism as inevitable liberal tensions in a general election -- an odd gloss, given the Fourth Amendment's bipartisan credentials -- the key dynamic is the development of a sophisticated network of activists. After all, they're not asking the candidate to be more liberal, they're asking him to hold strong on his own promise to oppose the spying legislation.

Even conservative bloggers are impressed that the Obama Campaign provides an open platform for supporters to organize against the candidate's position. "Rather than react in accordance with the practices of most campaigns by shutting and muffling dissent," observed the GOP blog The Next Right, "Obama is providing dissidents (many of whom are supporters of his) the opportunity to organize on his campaign web-site." The blog contrasted the approach to top-down campaigns on the right. "Can you imagine a Bush campaign reacting like this? I can't."

breadboards, reclaimed wenge

Wenge, birch and mahogany, all reclaimed except for the birch. And the one that is for sale: just for fun, a small cherry cheese block with offset wenge legs. Blogger discounts!

opportunity to reverse the last 30 years...or shine

Ian Welsh:

At the height of the Japanese real-estate bubble, the value of Tokyo's land was more than the value of all land in the entire rest of the world put together...(read the whole thing)

bleg

I know, times are tough. If, by any chance, they are not so tough for you, (if perhaps you are in academia), and you have been tempted to invest in something from my shop, please do. Everything is on MAJOR TWO WEEK BLOWOUT SALE, and built to be an heirloom if treated properly. I need the money, any money, right now, bad. Thank you.

Carlin's farewell to Bush

...and last interview...

burying the Russert

As memorialized by one Jon Swift (via Scott McLemee):

...Russert brought something to television journalism that had never been tried before. Instead of asking questions off the top of his head, he had his staff do research on his interviewees and actually used some of that research in his interviews. Many politicians had never been confronted with their own words before and his unique interview style caught many of them off guard, but it also gave them a chance to look good by showing that they could withstand tough questioning by giving vague, noncommittal answers. Unfortunately, Russert's shoes will be very hard to fill because while many television journalists do have staffs that have access to LEXIS/NEXIS, few of them know what follow-up questions to ask after an interviewee gives his boilerplate answer and will simply go on to another topic. Russert's ability to ask the same question over and over again using different words is one that has sadly died with him. He will be missed. [...]

The fact that politicians could trust that Russert would safeguard their secrets instead of releasing them to the public prematurely where they might get distorted made him the go-to guy for administration officials who wanted to get their side of the story out without having to worry about being contradicted or embarrassed while still looking like they were being vetted by Russert's very tough-looking questions. When Dick Cheney wanted to sell the War in Iraq to the American people, his staff immediately called up Russert to book Cheney on NBC's Meet the Press (which Cheney's communications director called "our best format") to say that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a nuclear bomb, citing as evidence a story that appeared in the New York Times that morning, which his assistant Scooter Libby had conveniently leaked to reporter Judith Miller. He knew that citing a Times story he himself planted would be all the evidence he would need and he wouldn't have to worry about Russert asking the kinds of skeptical questions that might throw him off message.

In one of the many moving tributes Russert received, Chris Matthews pointed out that one of the secrets of Russert's success was that he was not smarter or more sophisticated than his audience. "It may be tricky to say this," Matthews said, "and I'll say it, when we went to war with Iraq, he and I had a little discussion about that, and this is where Tim is Everyman, he is Us as a country. I said: 'How can you believe this war is justified?' And he said: 'The nuclear thing. If they have a bomb that they can use, we gotta deal with it. We can't walk away from that.' And that, to me, was the essence of what was wrong with the whole case for the war. They knew that argument would sell with Mr. America, with The Regular Guy, with the True American Patriot. They knew the argument that would sell, that would get us into that war. Tim was right on the nail. He was Us, the American People. . . . That was the thing that sold America, and the guys who wanted the War used that one thing that would sell the Patriot in Tim Russert." What could be more patriotic than a journalist who believes what the government is telling him instead of questioning it like some reporters used to do back in the 1970s before they got columns and wrote best-selling books? And if there is anything members of the Washington elite hate it is someone who seems too elite by looking like they are intelligent and thoughtful and not the salt of the earth. Perhaps there is no greater tribute to Russert than the fact that the Washington elite accepted this humble man from Buffalo as a member of their club and went on television and showed up at his funeral to proclaim in unison, "One of us! One of us!"

Even though Russert was a Democrat and a liberal, he was not one of those radical, un-American liberals. His mentor was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, every conservative's favorite Democrat until Joe Lieberman came along. Moynihan worked in the Nixon administration where he helped develop Nixon's Civil Rights policy of "benign neglect" toward African-Americans where nothing was actually accomplished even though it appeared on the surface that progress was being made. That was the kind of liberalism Russert subscribed to. And unlike many members of the liberal media, Russert bent over backwards to appear to be "fair" by asking liberals harder questions and taking it easy on conservatives, something conservative journalists don't need to do because our views are so rarely aired. Russert inspired a whole generation of liberal journalists who compensated for their partisan views by bashing liberals and praising conservatives whenever they could to demonstrate their objectivity, a legacy that is much appreciated by this conservative.

The whole thing worth reading from the start.

the political situation

Gary Younge repeats in The Nation (sub) what surely by now encapsulates the only true responsible leftist position and fundamental rallying cry. It's also something I've been saying for months now:

There are symbols, and there is substance–the way things look, and the way things are. But in between there is the way things might be: a sense of possibility that image might precede content or even provide space for it to emerge...such is the tension in the American left's response to Obama's candidacy. There are some–let's call them dreamers–who believe his nomination marks a paradigm shift in progressive politics in this country. And there are others–let's call them materialists–who dismiss the excitement surrounding his nomination as little more than an emotional distraction from what really matters...Obama [in his actions thus far] is little more than a mainstream Democrat offering sops that are better than the Republicans' but inadequate to the needs of working-class Americans and the world at large [...] ...the materialist arguments have their merits, as far as they go. The trouble is they don't go that far because they are crippled by a lack of imagination.

Materialists do not deny the energy and expectations Obama's candidacy has unleashed. They simply refuse to engage with either the reasons underlying it or the potential it might hold. In a country where 80 percent of the people feel things are heading in the wrong direction, a huge number feel they have found a liberal change agent. Materialists have the option of insisting that all these people are deluded or finding out why they believe what they do. [...]

Between them, the young and the black increased their share of the Democratic primary electorate by roughly 25 percent compared with 2004–two constituencies that can now assert their place in the Democratic coalition as never before. If the materialists have an alternative project that could engage this number of people in progressive politics, they are keeping it very quiet. In the meantime, you do not have to binge-drink the Obama-Kool-Aid to see the possibilities here. We can try to engage the direct this energy toward a more progressive agenda or abandon it in favor of a more reactionary one. We can pressure his campaign to meet expectations or abandon them to disappointment and cynicism.

While symbols should never be mistaken for substance, they are not insubstantial either.

big club, an you ain't in it.

looking for a wedding present?

A lot of new items in my online shop, here. Priced to sell, so I can eat.

recent work...

behind the curve of weird

As read about in The Nation (and probably soon enough if not already on Unfogged): weird.