Mitt’s lucky he’s not a Democrat, or a lot of older Americans would be sending each other this picture right now from their aol email accounts.
(via)
by DougJ| 34 Comments
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Jump! You Fuckers!
Mitt’s lucky he’s not a Democrat, or a lot of older Americans would be sending each other this picture right now from their aol email accounts.
(via)
by DougJ| 151 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Assholes
Even though this post (I won’t tell you how I stumbled across it) is about how deregulation caused a change for the worse, as soon as I saw this, I knew this dude had to be a libertarian:
For an economist, the most fascinating aspect of Pan Am is the highly attractive flight attendants — or rather, stewardesses, since the show is set in the early 1960s. If you’re young enough, you might think that’s just TV. But I’m just old enough to remember flying in the 1970s, and I recall stewardesses who really were, in fact, hot. Okay, I was too young to understand the concept of “hot” — but I was definitely aware that I was being attended by some very pretty young women.
Not so anymore. Flight attendants aren’t necessarily unattractive now, but they’re no more fetching than people in any other service profession that doesn’t get tips. And what’s changed? In a word, deregulation.
Let’s skip the obvious things — Pan Am is a freaking tv show (you could could have the same thought experiment about Taco Bell employees), the guy’s actually basing an economic theory on a 40 year-old recollection of “very pretty young women”. Why the fuck are libertarians so blind to their own sublimely clueless sexism?
Maybe I should be a little more half-full about this whole thing and be thankful that very few non-glibertarians speak this way.
by Zandar| 79 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Kochsuckers, Republican Venality, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?
The newest iteration of the GOP Grand Hypocrisy is declaring that taxes are too high on the one percent, and to declare war and insist that more taxes are needed on the 47% of Americans who didn’t need to pay income tax in 2009 while of course yelling TEA MEANS TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY. The resolution of reality means Republicans want to raise taxes on the middle class. TPM’s Benjy Sarlin explains:
Now the 47% number only tells part of the story: most of those “non-payers” pay payroll taxes, gas taxes, state and local taxes, etc. And in an ironic twist, the phenomenon is almost entirely a result of Republicans’ own enthusiasm for tax cuts. In the 1990s, the GOP majority demanded that any programs aimed at helping poor and middle-income households be structured as refundable tax credits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, rather than as direct payments like welfare. President Bush added to the trend by lowering marginal rates across the board. Then Obama structured large chunks of the stimulus as tax breaks in order to garner bipartisan support. The non-payer rate, which had hovered around 20% – 25% since the 1950s, shot over 30% in 2002 and never looked back. And because the tax credits are refundable, many taxpayers aren’t just paying nothing, they’re actually gaining a net positive on their income tax.
But now that Obama is playing hardball on raising revenue, Republicans are rethinking the idea.
“It’s Republican class warfare,” former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett told TPM. “The Democrats say ‘Oh, the millionaires, we need to tax them’ and so they respond in kind.”
Bartlett’s not opposed to the idea of a broader tax code. But the problem is there’s no obvious way to get there without violating other Republican sacred cows on taxes or running into political territory that few politicians dare to tread.
The first issue is that any Republican proposal can’t raise revenue overall — a principle that’s only become more ironclad in the Tea Party era. The obvious solution then is to raise taxes on the middle class but give the money back to the rich and that’s exactly what two of the Republican presidential candidates have proposed. Jon Huntsman would eliminate all tax breaks without exception and use the money to lower income marginal rates — the net effect of which would be a middle class tax hike.
Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan would do the same, reducing overall revenues by hundreds of billions while raising taxes on a vast majority of Americans, and lowering them substantially on the rich…and then of course cutting social spending. The reality is that Republicans view the middle class as immoral parasites on society, and want the middle class to share that view in the vain hope that by supporting the GOP’s rise to total power, they in turn will spare their supporters.
Nothing of course could be further from the truth. But as long as Republicans are able to convince Americans to vote for them because they believe “Well, the Republicans won’t target me as a parasite, it’s all those other guys who are the problem” then they’ll discover too late what the GOP truly intends to do.
And if this is the best the GOP can do against the 99% movement, they’re in deep trouble.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 123 Comments
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Election 2012
The Obama re-election effort raised $70 million last quarter. 98% of that was from donors giving less than $250, with an average donation of $56. If anything demonstrates the need for a primary challenge more than those numbers, I don’t know what it is.
Over in the Republican race, Perry raised $17 million and has $15 million on hand. Romney hasn’t released his numbers yet, but he’s likely to have raised less than Perry and end up with about the same amount of cash on hand. They’ll both blow it on primaries, as will the new front-runner, Herman Cain, who isn’t running a serious fundraising operation. Last quarter, he raised $2.5 million and loaned his campaign $5 million. His recent surge probably won’t net him anything like Perry or Romney numbers in a filing that covers a period where he was mainly considered an also-ran.
From the campaigns I’ve watched, it’s crystal clear that the best use of money by a campaign is when it spends from its own bank account. Special interests have their own agenda, they mainly focus on advertising (not GOTV and organizing), and the single-issue advocates sometimes hurt more than they help. (For example, does the kinder, gentler version of Mitt Romney who will emerge after the primaries really want a bunch of anti-gay, anti-immigrant ads run in his name?) All the Citizens United Koch money in the world won’t make up for Romney’s need to spend time and effort raising money for the general election, and Obama is already $150 million ahead of Mitt.
Update: The “primary Obama” comment is sarcasm. Must be a little early for it.
by DougJ| 112 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Assholes, Jump! You Fuckers!, Our Failed Media Experiment
Just 17 percent said they were following the protests “very closely”. Independents — at 19 percent — were keeping the closest eye on the “Occupy” efforts while just 12 percent of Republicans did the same.
Both businessman Herman Cain and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich critiqued the “Occupy Wall Street” protests during Tuesday night’s debate in New Hampshire; Gingrich said that a portion of the protesters were “left-wing agitators who would be happy to show up next week on any other topic”. (He also noted that a portion were “sincere middle class people”.)
Of course, defenders of the relevance of the “OWS” protests will, rightly, note that it remains very much in its infant stages and that many big things in politics once started off quite small.
True enough. And with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden both mentioning the protests in high-profile forums last week, it’s possible that in a few weeks time these numbers could look very different.
But, today they don’t. And that fact will embolden conservatives.
So in other words, a poll showing a surprisingly uniform (if not all that high yet) amount of interest in the protests across parties will embolden conservatives to Newt Gingrich to continue to describe the protests fairly accurately: as a mix of people who go to a lot of protests (I wouldn’t use the word “agitators” obviously) and middle-class people who don’t usually go to protests.
Also too, it’s simply ridiculous to discuss the comparison with the teahadists without mentioning the fact that Fox News practically invented the tea party. It’s hard for people not to know about something when it’s on the tube 24/7. Let’s compare this to the percentage of NFL fans who are forced to follow that Whitney show, while we’re at it.
Back to the interest among independents…John tells me “Every time someone mentions independents I want to kick a puppy”. But I see it differently here: Democrats have not done enough for the working class. Yeah, that’s partly because Republicans have impeded their efforts. But if you’re not a particularly political person and you hear Democrats wanking about debt reduction and cutting your Social Security at time when you’re out of job, I can see why you might think neither party gives a fuck about you while at the same time being interested in movement that does give a fuck about you.
Poll after poll shows that there’s plenty of real Applebee’s-going Americans who hate the banksters. If the Occupy Together movement truly takes off, it will be in large part because of unions. If there’s a hard-hat riot this time, it won’t be the protesters the hard-hats attack.
by Imani Gandy (ABL)| 76 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything
I find the obsession with Guy Fawkes Day and the V for Vendetta masks to be somewhat ridiculous, to the extent that it advocates passivity while waiting for a black-caped savior to rescue the masses from government control. (Think about it — the downtrodden Brits in the film did little aside from show up at the alloted time and place wearing a creepy mask.)
Nonetheless, November 5 is as good a day as any to move from big banks to credit unions:
The growing anger directed at U.S. banks (especially the big ones that took federal bailout funds) over recent fee increases coalesced this weekend into a Facebook-driven campaign urging Americans to close their accounts at large banks and move their money to credit unions by Nov. 5.
Though not initiated by the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York and other cities around the country, the effort has been embraced by the protesters, and their “We are the 99%” mantra is all over the “Bank Transfer Day” Facebook page — making this the first specific action by a political movement that has been criticized as unfocused and incoherent.
Bank Transfer Day was started by a 27-year-old Los Angeles art-gallery owner, Kristen Christian. She says she’s not affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street protesters but that many organizers of those demonstrations had reached out to her to express support.
Christian chose Nov. 5 because of its association with 17th century British folk hero Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up the House of Lords but was captured on that date in 1605. In an interview with the Village Voice, however, Christian and Occupy Wall Street leaders who discussed the effort to get Americans to move their money from large banks to small institutions emphasized that they weren’t trying to create a collapse of the financial system. ”I’ve been very careful to state that this is not … anarchy,” Christian told the Voice. “It’s shifting the money to a company people respect the practices of. It’s like, if you don’t like Walmart’s practices, shopping at a local grocery store instead.”
I’m planning on moving my money from Citibank to a credit union. Even if I were still making the big bucks and therefore had no concerns about maintaining a balance of $6,000 per month, it’s important, I think, for The Riches™ to stand in solidarity with The Poors™.
I also think it’s important to flip big banks a vigorous bird.
UPDATE: You can find a credit union near you here, and here’s a link to the Facebook event.
[via TIME]
P.S. My griftathon — as some are wont to call it — enters its second week.
[cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]by $8 blue check mistermix| 79 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything
Dick Durbin’s amendment to cap fees on debit card transactions to 23 cents has led Visa to charge the maximum fee for every transaction, but only for small retailers who have no clout:
Before the Durbin Amendment, a one-store coffeeshop might pay a 7-cent fee on a $2 cup of coffee and a 35-cent fee on a $20 group order. Durbin hoped to cap the latter fee at 23 cents, and leave the first unaffected: a ceiling, not a guideline. Instead, that $2 coffee may now come with a 22-cent interchange fee, an increase of over 200%, which will result in higher prices for consumers. Visa and MasterCard’s actions ensure that, far from paying lower interchange fees, small merchants will actually face much higher costs than before.
A lot of independent retailers already have signs urging customers to pay with cash instead of cards, because little shops pay top dollar for credit card interchange. I assume that a lot of them will just stop accepting debit cards if banks can take more than 10% off the top of a small transaction.
A few months ago, I moved my banking to USAA. USAA doesn’t have ATMs, so they reimburse me for ATM fees. Since they limit the number of withdrawals they reimburse, I’ve been taking out more money at every ATM trip, and I carry a lot more cash. I like it, because paying cash is easier and faster than using a credit card, especially with the rinky-dink point-of-sale machines that a lot of retailers use.
It’s a tiny action in the scheme of things, but if you want to send a little fuck you to Wall Street, move your money to a locally-owned bank or credit union (or USAA) that won’t charge you $5 to have a debit card, and start paying cash at all the small local shops.
Visa – It’s Everywhere You’re Going to be GougedPost + Comments (79)