Saturday, July 28, 2012

Romney knows Obama isn't a Muslim...


...so why doesn't he say so?

And Muslims also know that Obama isn't a Muslim either, but Christian evangelists in the Deep South will swear that Obama is Muslim, and will vote for a Mormon instead. Why would that be?

Could the real reason be that President Obama has a black father from Africa, and that all those God-fearing good Christian people in the Bible Belt just WANTS to believe that Obama's a Muslim, so that they can have the excuse they need to vote for Mitt Romney (a white Mormon), rather than vote for Obama (a half-black Christian)?

In the Deseret News (the Mormon publication owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah) there's the headline: "Lingering doubt, discomfort with President Barack Obama's religion"

In the article they note that the Pew survey shows 30 percent of Republicans identify President Obama as Muslim. The AFP reports "U.S. poll shows persistence of Obama Muslim lie."

Muslim-American community leaders have expressed concern that the lingering inability to recognize Obama's true faith showed a disturbing undercurrent in American politics, indicating a possible rise of Islamophobic discourse. (I think it's old fashion southern racism.)

Haris Tarin from the Muslim Public Affairs Council says that for "13 percent of people to believe Obama is a Muslim shows there's a lot of fear-mongering and politicking in America." (I still say it's racism.)

Joel Belz, founder of the evangelical bi-weekly World magazine, said that he doesn't believe Obama is Muslim, but like others, he will either let others believe so, or allow others to use the excuse.

Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author, posted on CNN, "There is something deeply troubling about the state of religion and politics in America today. And among those troubles is the cynical manipulation of religion for political gain — the use of God as a pawn in our political projects."

Prothero doesn't blame the disinformation about Obama's faith entirely on what he sees as politically motivated manipulators. He also says an electorate that is largely ignorant about religion must also take responsibility to become better informed.

"I have no problem with voters who care about the religious faith of their presidential candidates. But if religion is so darn important to our public life, can't we at least make a modest effort to learn something about it?" he asked. "If so, let's start with these two indisputable facts: Mitt Romney is a Mormon. And Barack Obama is not a Muslim."

Ahhhhhh. But Romney is ALL white, and Obama is only HALF white.

Former secretary of state under the Republican George W. Bush administration, Colin Powell, dealt a blow to the controversy of Obama's religion, when he asked in an interview on NBC's Meet The Press, "What if Obama is" a Muslim?

I'd like to believe Colin Powell (born to Jamaican immigrant parents) meant the same as "so what if he's black?"; or as Southern Baptists might say of Mitt Romney, "So what if he's Mormon?"

Only 49 percent of those polled by Pew correctly identified Obama as a Christian, while another 31 percent said they did not know. (But they know the color of his skin.)

Some 60 percent of voters correctly identified Obama's Republican opponent in the November presidential elections, Mitt Romney, as a Mormon. (100% knows he's white.)

I suspect America has a lot of "dumbed down" people, living mostly in rural areas, who watch Fox News and stupidly believe everything Fox News reports.

It's either that (they are very ignorant) or they're hypocritical racist bigots. So which is it? It has to be one or the other.

They always vehemently deny being racists, but me thinks "thou dost protest too much."

It's a pity really, that all those "good folks" will vote for a man based on his skin color when it's apparent that Mitt Romney defends the top 1%,  while Obama would fight more for the middle-class. Racism will always make a person vote against their own best interests.

Friday, July 27, 2012

An Easy Tax Fix that Everyone Ignores

Why is it that someone like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates (or Mitt Romney) can buy an expensive piece of art (or a horse) and then a year later sell it for a $1 million profit and only pay a 15% capital gains tax (if they report the sell to the IRS) and pay no Medicare or Social Security taxes?

But a neurosurgeon who goes to work everyday for a whole year must pay a 35% federal income tax rate AND pay for Medicare taxes on 100% of his/her earnings and Social Security taxes on the first $110,000 he/she earns?

A firefighter or cop risks their lives everyday and earns $50,000 a year and has to pay a 25% tax rate on their income and pay Medicare and Social Security taxes on 100% of their incomes, but Mitt Romney can sit back and do nothing for a whole year and only pay a 15% tax rate on carried interest and no Medicare or Social Security taxes at all.

It's common knowledge that multi-millionaires and billionaires earn most of their income with capital gains.

A fair and honest and fiscally responsible way to fix the tax code would be to tax capital gains income earned from stocks, dividends, SWAG investments, carried interest (etc.) as ordinary wages.

Also, tax capital gains income for Medicare and Social Security (which is currently exempt), while removing the $110,000 “cap” for Social Security taxes. Everyone else earning $110,000 a year or less pays this tax on 100% of their wages.

Then create a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades over $1,000 so that we can at least take in some tax revenues from the banker's financial speculations --- in case they ask for another bailout.

The Republicans and the banker Andrew Mellon created the preferential tax treatment of capital gains for the wealthy back in 1921, and this should be repealed. That way, the actual marginal tax brackets could be left as they are, and the rich would be taxed just like everybody else. Then we could properly fund government, fix our infrastructure, and pay off our debt --- and do so without cutting defense or Social Security.

We could also hire more IRS auditors to go after all the tax dodgers, bringing in more revenue.

Then we should leave these tax rates permanent, building a surplus in boom times and having extra resources available during recessions. Only temporarily raise taxes to pay for military conflicts, that way everybody has skin in the game when voting to go to war.

It's insane to have a capital gains tax rate of only 15%, which is LOWER than the corporate tax rate. The "statutory" corporate tax rate may be 35%, but the average EFFECTIVE tax rate that they actually pay is usually between 18% to 23%. (Go to "investor's relations" on a Fortune 500 website and download their annual reports to see their tax liability).

With the low and preferential tax rate on capital gains, corporate profits will be funneled into the CEO's pockets rather than reinvested into the business and workforce. Low capital gains tax rates only promotes wealth extraction and hording, not reinvestment into the economy.

More jobs will just go overseas for cheaper labor if the capital saved on foreign labor just goes back into the pockets of the CEOs paying a low tax rate on their personal incomes.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Romney's Grandfather Sued Mexico & Rec'd U.S. Gov't Handout

Miles Park Romney was Mitt’s great grandfather, who fled the United States and crossed into Mexico in 1885 to escape "religious persecution". There he helped build the Mormon enclave of Colonia Juarez in Chihuahua. According to the Univserity of Utah media, polygamy was illegal in Mexico, too, but they were tolerant.

In the U.S. Miles Romney had been prosecuted in 1885 under the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act (for polygamy). This act allowed certain citizenship rights to be stripped of those convicted. Were the Romney's United States citizenship rights threatened under the Edmunds Anti-Polgyamy Act? Absolutely.

On December 1st 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes stated: "The law for the suppression of this offense was enacted with great unanimity by Congress more than seventeen years ago, but has remained until recently a dead letter in the Territory of Utah, because of the peculiar difficulties attending its enforcement. The opinion widely prevailed among the citizens of Utah that the law was in contravention of the constitutional guaranty of religious freedom. The Supreme Court of the United States has decided the law to be within the legislative power of Congress and binding as a rule of action for all who reside within the Territories. There is no longer any reason for delay or hesitation in its enforcement. It should be firmly and effectively executed. If not sufficiently stringent in its provisions, it should be amended; and in aid of the purpose in view I recommend that more comprehensive and more searching methods for preventing as well as punishing this crime be provided. If necessary to secure obedience to the law, the enjoyment and exercise of the rights and privileges of citizenship in the Territories of the United States may be withheld or withdrawn from those who violate or oppose the enforcement of the law on this subject."

At the time the Romneys had been living in Mexico, wealth, political power and access to education in Mexico were concentrated among a handful of families, overwhelmingly of European descent, known as "hacendados", who controlled vast swaths of the country by virtue of their huge estates (one family had an estate in Sonora alone that comprised more than one million acres). Most people in Mexico were landless, laboring on the vast estates or in the mines for little more than slave wages. Foreign companies, mostly from the United Kingdom, France and the U.S.. exercised power in Mexico.

No peasant or farmer could claim the land he occupied without formal legal title. Helpless and angry small farmers and landless peasants saw no hope for themselves and their families under a Diaz regime, and came to the conclusion that a change of leadership would be the only route that offered any hope for themselves and their country. Such famous figures in Mexican history as Francisco I. Madero, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata would launch a rebellion against Díaz, all of which eventually coalesced into what became known as the Mexican Revolution.

More than 95% of Mexico's land was owned by less than 5% of the population. This vastly unequal distribution of land—and, therefore, wealth—had plagued Mexico for many years, to the anger and dismay of the working classes, as this corrupt system allowed the rich to get richer while ensuring that the poor remained poor, or got even poorer. Workers on the vast "haciendas" were often treated like slaves, being beaten for the slightest infraction—real or imagined—and murders of workers by their "masters" was not uncommon. Another way to ensure that farmers and workers were kept under the thumb of the wealthy classes was to make sure that any debt incurred was passed down from generation to generation, thereby ensuring that it would never be paid off and the farmers would be kept in perpetual debt bondage.

Mitt Romney's great grandfather was a hacendado during this time. Was he also guilty of these abuses to the Mexican people?

Most historians mark the end of the Porfiriato in 1911 as the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. Mitt Romney’s family later sued Mexico after using it as a safe haven (when they had fled the United States to escape polygamy laws.)

After the Mexican Revolution broke out, and the Romney’s family had fled and went back to the United States, the Romney family did not help with the Mexican Revolution, nor did they stand their ground and help their new found safe haven. Why does it appear that when the tough gets going, the Romney family has a history of fleeing, not only the United States — but Mexico, too? This isn’t the only war that was dodged by the Romney family, because Mitt Romney also dodged the draft during the Vietnam War era. And not one of Romney's many sons has enlisted for military service either.

From the Boston Globe: "After fleeing the Mexican revolution, Mitt Romney’s grandfather, Gaskell lost his home and possessions. While living in Salt Lake City, Gaskell Romney ran for County Commissioner. Gaskell sued Mexico for the loss of his property and, in 1938, was awarded damages of $9,163.

In other words, Miles Park Romney used Mexico as a safe haven when fleeing polygamy laws here in the United States, so that later Mexico could be sued by Gaskell Romney because the oppressed Mexican people had driven them out with torches and pitch forks.

From the SRE of México: "Twenty-seven years after Miles fled from U.S. government agents and took refuge in Mexico, the Romney family was back in the United States. The U.S. government, which had once chased Miles to Mexico due to his polygamy, now welcomed the Romneys and other Mormons to the United States. Congress established a $100,000 relief fund that enabled the Romneys and other Mormon exiles to receive food and lodging. The case of Gaskell Romney v. United States of Mexico was finalized in Salt Lake City in 1938. Gaskell requested $26,753 in damages. He was awarded $9,163, court records show — a sizable amount in the post-Depression years. The records say that Gaskell was to give half of the award to his son George, helping to set the family on firmer financial footing in the United States.

Was the Romney family U.S. citizenship stripped when they left the United States? No one knows yet. And Romney is steadfastly reluctant to produce tax return papers, even though he happily asks immigrants for their papers.

What we do know is that Mitt Romney has harsh views of immigration when he proudly accepted the endorsement of Kris Kobach. Like his fellow Republican via Russell Pearce (who sponsored the SB 1070 law in Arizona) — Romney supports self-deportation laws, too.

Indeed it is correct to say that the U.S. Government bailed out the Romney family in their time of need when Congress voted $100,000 for Mormon transportation and relief (which calculates to approximately 2.5 million dollars today). Yet, this is strange to hear considering Mitt Romney saying he was not concerned with the very poor.

"Abusador" is a word Mexican-Americans are using to describe Mitt Romney, because they see a pattern of abuse that ranges from Bain Capital to the very poor and voiceless.

It's a farce that Mitt Romney now brags about Mexican roots.

America's Problem: Dumbed Down Republican Voters

Continued Financial Fraud, Massive Job Outsourcing, Poor Regulatory Enforcement, Excessive Defense Spending, Political Corruption, Corporate Greed, Historically Low Taxation and Runaway Tax Evasion...Everything the GOP Leadership Supports.

Is that the new standard for American exceptionalism? Is America only the greatest country in the world just because we might have a little less corruption and greed than most other countries?

Russell Wasendorf Sr., the prominent commodity futures executive and CEO of Peregrine Financial, has recently confessed to “misappropriating” customer cash for almost 20 years. Add him to the long list of financial swindlers. Authorities say another $215 million is missing. But the Peregrine CEO has no regrets about misleading federal regulators. Wasendorf also denies living large. “I don't live a lavish lifestyle.”

Wasendorf’s non-lavish lifestyle includes a million-dollar condo in Chicago, a near-million-dollar home in Iowa, a private jet valued at over $7 million, and a $100,000 wine collection. Wasendorf is now facing criminal charges that could keep him jailed for decades.

Back in 2008 after Lehman Brothers failed, Russell Wasendorf had once said that it comes down to "a lack of transparency and communication. When you have these mammoth investment banks taking positions that they can't even evaluate, you have a very big problem in our financial services industry." Oh really?

But Wasendorf is just one of thousands that has bilked and gamed our system for years, those that the GOP wants to tax, regulate, audit less. Just ask Mitt Romney. What's he hiding in his tax returns? Why is he running for president instead of being prosecuted for tax evasion for having $100 million in a retirement account.? I was told by H&R Block one year that claiming work boots as a tax deduction might raise a "red flag" with the IRS. A multi-million dollar IRA account doesn't raise any red flags? (Mitt Romney's ties to IRS Commissioner)

Over the past 30 years, notes an analysis of IRS tax data this past spring by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, incomes for America’s top 1 percent more than doubled. Average incomes for the nation’s top 0.1 percent, over that same span, more than tripled; and at the tippy top of America’s economic summit — the top 0.01 percent — average incomes more than quadrupled --- but their tax rates have steadily declined.

After inflation, average incomes for America’s bottom 90 percent actually fell — by 4.8 percent — between 1980 and 2010. As higher paying manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to Chinese workers for $1 an hour, executives like Tim Cook of Apple are getting sweet deals like $377 million in Apple shares averaged over a 10-year vesting period. His tax rate? He would pay a tax rate of 15% for capital gains (if he doesn't have a Swiss bank account) while a teacher earning $50,000 a year would be in the 25% tax bracket.

Cheap labor = larger CEO pay. They bribe lobby their local congress-person for favorable regulations and lower tax rates. Then complain government is too big and ask politicians to cut spending for the poor, public education, and Social Security (to "starve the beast", us).

Meanwhile the feds have to print and borrow money to pay the bills because the money supply is being horded by the upper echelons, held in off-shore accounts, and being invested in cheaper labor forces in Asia. That's why the GOP likes to bust local labor unions, to drive down labor costs domestically for even larger CEO paychecks. It seems earning 300 times their employee's wages isn't enough, they want to take in 400 times more. They call this being "globally competitive".

And then there is tax evasion. The lead researcher on the Tax Justice Network’s new research, James Henry, formerly served as the chief economist at the prestigious McKinsey corporate consulting group. In the Network’s new report, "The Price of Offshore Revisited", he mines a wide range of public and private sector data sources to gauge capital flows in and out of “offshore” secrecy jurisdictions all around the world.

These tax havens, notes Henry, host over 3.5 million "paper companies", thousands of "shell banks" and insurance companies, and tens of thousands of "shell subsidiaries" for the world’s largest banks, accounting firms, and energy, software, drug, and defense companies.

This vast web, aided and abetted by weak and poorly enforced government regulations, has enabled fewer than 100,000 people — just .001 percent of the world’s population — to “control over 30 percent of the world’s financial wealth.”

Americans make up, we know from various previous surveys of the world’s ultra rich, almost a third of the global super wealthy. That would put the American share of unrecorded offshore private assets as high as $10 trillion.

But the GOP doesn't want to tax them, regulate them, or audit them. Just the opposite. The Republicans want to tax, audit, and regulate them less, while cutting food stamps for the poor, disability for those that can no longer work, and Social Security and Medicare for the sick and elderly (to "starve the beast", us).

Why do average Republican voters earning low to middle-class wages (less than $50,000 a year) always vote against their own best interests? Fox News dumbs them down the same way Southern plantation owners kept their slaves dumbed down. It's all about control, dominance, greed, and power.

Multi-millionaire Nick Hanauer said in a recent speech: "Somebody like me makes hundreds or thousands as times much as the median American, but I don't buy hundreds or thousands of times as much stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and shirts a year like most American men. Occasionally we go out to eat with friends. I can't buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and under-employed Americans can't buy any new cars, any clothes, or enjoy any meals out. Nor can I make up for the falling consumption of the vast majority of middle-class families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages."

Nick Hanauer Speech at TED University (Video & Text)

The big corporations and their CEOs have always squeezed as much as they could from consumers, no matter what the tax rates were...corporate taxes on  their companies or capital gains on the CEOs themselves. How many Fortune 500 companies went bankrupt because of taxes?

They will knowingly sell dangerous products for a profit after a cost/benefit analyses, and because of "limited liability" in the corporate law, the CEOs never have to take personal responsibility for their actions. The corporation gets slapped with a small fine (which is calculated into their decision making if they were ever to get caught), and the CEO rarely goes to jail.

And then there's the outsourcing of jobs for cheap labor. Mitt Romney created low-paying jobs in America and outsourced whenever possible...just like most CEOs have been doing after the end of the Vietnam War.

And ever since 1921, the Republicans created the preferential capital gains tax for the ultra-wealthy (only 12.5%) when the top marginal rate was 90%. Then we had the "Roaring Twenties" before the Great Recession under the first businessman to become president...Herbert Hoover.

Then after a second businessman became president (George W. Bush), he lowered the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 15% (when under Clinton, the top marginal rate was over 39%). Then we had the housing and stock market crash in 2008 and the Great Recession.

Now Mitt Romney wants to lower taxes "20% across the board", saving himself millions, while only saving most of us a few hundred dollars, that will quickly disappear with higher energy, food, and housing costs.

But you are intelligent, and you already knew all this, right? So then, why is the presidential race so close? It should be a blow out!

Oh yeah....41% of Republican voters have been dumbed down by Fox News. Americans support raising the tax rates on the ultra-rich by a two-to-one margin, says a new Pew Research poll. But almost half the nation's Republican voters, 41 percent, feel that hiking taxes on income over $250,000 would “hurt the economy.”

A bill passed by the Democratic Senate majority yesterday that would increase taxes on dividends and capital gains (up from 15% back to 20% under Clinton). The capital gains tax was once over 40%, and would still be about only half as much as the top marginal rate of 39.6%. The GOP claims many "elderly people" rely on capital gains (And all this time I thought most of the elderly relied on Social Security, which the GOP wants to cut.)

Under the Democratic measure, individuals earning over $200,000 and couples making at least $250,000 would see their top rates rise from 33 percent and 35 percent today to 36 percent and 39.6 percent in January.

The Democratic bill would also boost the top tax rate paid by people who inherit estates to 55 percent, exempting the first $1 million in an estate's value. The GOP measure would maintain today's 35 percent top rate and would not tax the first $5.12 million of an estate's value. (But the GOP thinks that those earning $25,000 a year or less should "put more skin in the game".)

Democrats would impose top tax rates next year of 20 percent on dividends and capital gains, two sources of income enjoyed disproportionately by the wealthy. The GOP top rate would remain at the meager 15 percent rate.

The GOP version of a bill coming up for a vote also ignores some tax credits for low- and middle-income families that Democrats want to extend for college costs; for some low-income couples and large working families; and for families with children.

Social Security taxes would still remain "capped" for the wealthy...meaning millionaires and billionaires pay no tax after their first $110,000 of "regular wages" that they might earn in a base salary and pay no Social Security or Medicare tax at all on any capital gains income, which is the bulk of their income.

But even if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire (just for the rich), the ultra-rich STILL wouldn't be paying their fair share of income taxes.

The super rich hold $32 trillion in offshore havens, but a minority of idiots won't tax them, which is the only way we can ever claw this money back from the evil hoarders who never think they have enough. Ask Mitt Romney if he has enough.

The wealth of the world’s wealthiest, the figures from the new World Wealth Report show, increased a whopping 18.9 percent in 2009 and another 9.7 percent in 2010. The world’s millionaires have upped their assets by over $9 trillion the last three years. Meanwhile we're being paid sub-standard wages trying to cope with the ever-rising costs of the bare essentials.

These global millionaires now total some 11 million individuals in a world of over 6 billion. They hold a combined $42 trillion in wealth. Most of that $42 trillion sits in the vaults of the world’s super rich, those individuals with at least $30 million in investible assets.

Since when did Mitt Romney ever care about HALF of the wage earners in this country who earn less than $25,000 a year? Never. Obama always did. It's almost funny to hear Romney utter the words "middle-class". I can almost imagine what he and his wife say at the dinner table.

~ The Robin Hood Campaign ~

Imagine if the U.S. could raise hundreds of billions, not from ordinary people, but from those who can most afford it. The pay pools at JPMorgan Chase and the nation’s six other largest banks totaled $156 billion in 2010 alone.

All told, this level of financial transaction taxing would raise over $300 billion a year from Wall Street, money, notes the Robin Hood campaign, that could “stop foreclosures, fund new jobs, and help repair the social safety net.”

The Robin Hood campaign is calling for a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades — the equivalent of a 50 cent tax on every $100 of trading — and a smaller levy on Wall Street's heavier-volume, casino-style trading in derivatives, currency, and other speculative instruments.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

What "Off the Cliff" Means...Taxing the Very Rich

Even if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire, the ultra-rich STILL wouldn't be paying their fair share of income taxes.

Most people earning over $1 million a year do so with capital gains earned through stocks, dividends, carried interest, SWAG investments, (etc). And their tax on capital gains would go up from 15% to 20%. Whereas a neurosurgeon could be taxed at the top marginal rate of 39%

Americans support raising the tax rates on the ultra-rich by a two-to-one margin, says a new Pew Research poll. Less than half the nation's Republican voters, just 41 percent, feel that hiking taxes on income over $250,000 would “hurt the economy.”

Who are those idiotic 41 percent of Republican voters that earn less than $250,000 a year and always vote against the own best interests? 41 percent of Republican voters support corporate greed, less regulation for dishonest bankers and private equity firms (listed below), and a 15% tax rate for billionaires. And they still believe in "trickle-down economics" and the tooth fairy too. Where have these people been since the stock market crash in 2008?

And yes, $250,000 a year is a lot of money...even in New York City. I once lived in Manhattan earning a minimum wage as a waiter at the Halloran House at 49th and Lexington.

Fox News is again using scare tactics: "Senate Democrats appear willing to use your paycheck to play political hardball on taxes unless Republicans agree to President Obama's plan to raise taxes on America's top earners."

Notice the use of the words "top earners". Republicans refuse to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires to help pay down our debt, fund the military, and pay for jobs programs, like infrastructure. Instead the GOP wants to more tax breaks for the ultra rich paid for with cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

Fox News writes "Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are hoping to shift around those spending cuts to spare key areas like defense, and to temporarily extend the Bush tax rates for at least some Americans. Some have warned a failure to do so could send the nation back into recession."

Those "some Americans" that Fox News mentions are the 98% of us that earn LESS than $250,000 a year.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., indicated Democrats are willing to let the deadline pass in order to better their negotiating position, saying "If we can't get a good deal, a balanced deal that calls on the wealthy to pay their fair share, then I will absolutely continue this debate into 2013 rather than lock in a long-term deal this year that throws middle-class families under the bus."

The Republicans often use the talking points that Obama extended the Bush tax cuts two years ago and that the economy is off worse today than it was then. But two years ago the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 2,000 points lower than it is today; and the bigger corporations and CEOs have been doing just fine. Many on the Fortune 500 have been paying an "effective" corporate tax rate of 18% (not the highest in the world as the GOP always claims) while their CEOs have paid a 15% tax rate on millions in stock bonuses.

Also, two years ago Obama only extended the Bush tax cuts because the Republicans held the extension of federal unemployment insurance program hostage for millions of out work Americans.

Sen. Patty Murray went on to explain: "If all the tax cuts expire, then that will diminish the GOP argument that the Democratic plan is tantamount to a tax hike -- because come 2013, any change to the tax code would be a tax cut. We will have a new fiscal and political reality. If the Bush tax cuts expire, every proposal will be a tax cut proposal and the [Grover Norquist] pledge (to not raise taxes) will no longer keep Republicans boxed in and unable to compromise."

"If middle-class families start seeing more money coming out of their paychecks next year -- are Republicans really going to stand up and fight for new tax cuts for the rich? Are they going to continue opposing the Democrats' middle-class tax cut once the slate has been wiped clean? I think they know this would be an untenable political position. And I hope this pushes them to come to the table with real revenue now before being forced to the table if we don't get a deal before the New Year," she said.

Fox News scare tactics: "The political strategy underscores how heated the debate over the Bush tax cuts has become, and how risky it is for the American people. President Obama is pushing for an extension of the rates only for American households making less than $250,000, and a tax hike for those earning more than that."

When Fox News says "how risky it is for the American people", they must mean risky for the very RICH American people, those earning over $250,000 a year.

I heard a Republican senator on Fox News this morning outright lie, saying Obama's tax plan would raise taxes on seniors!

Obama only wants to raise taxes on the top 2% of all earners --- such as bankers, CEOs, hedge fund managers, himself and Mitt Romney). But even they will still get a tax break on the first $250,000 they earn starting after January 2013. Then they will pay the old Bill Clinton tax rate on everything they earn over $250,000 a year.

Only 3% of what are defined as "small businesses" (such as those owned by Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton (and private equity firms and hedge funds) earn more than $250,000 a year.

Why would 41 percent of Republican voters not want to raise taxes on these people in the top 2%? Why? A good many of those 41% of Republican voters can't be millionaires, and they have been getting just as screwed as everybody else!. Have they been dumbed down by Fox News? Idiots!

Below is a small sampling of people who will see their taxes rise, just a little, under Obama's tax plan. Don't forget, most of their earnings are with stock options (etc) and are only taxed the top marginal rates on their base salaries.

Yahoo's corporate directors just hired their fourth CEO in four years. The latest, Marissa Mayer, will be raking in $59 million to start. She replaces Scott Thompson. He stood to make $26 million his first year, but Thompson only lasted four months. His predecessor, Carol Bartz, signed on for $32 million. She followed Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, who put in a brief stint after his hand-picked successor Terry Semel flamed out, but not before cashing in $204 million worth of personal option profits in 2004.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple
Compensation: $378 million

David Simon, Simon Property Group
Compensation: $137.2 million

David M. Zaslav, Discovery Channel
Compensation: $52.4 million

Michael S. Jeffries, Abercrombie & Fitch
Compensation: $46.6 million

Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation
Compensation: $29.3 million

Ian M. Cumming, Leucadia National
Compensation: $29.3 million

Gregory W. Cappelli, Apollo Group
Compensation: $25.1 million

Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs
Compensation: $16.2 million

John T. Chambers, Cisco Systems
Compensation: $12.9 million

Robert L. Antin, VCA Antech
Compensation: $12.1 million

The was a short list of CEOs and doesn't include all the billionaires on the Forbes 400 List.

Also, check out this list of "job creators" from our past (excluding AL Capone and other notable mobsters) who the GOP never wanted to raise taxes on.

  • Bernie Madoff holds the world-record for biggest Ponzi scheme in history. Madoff stole billions while chairing the Nasdaq and maintaining cushy relationships at the SEC. He received the maximum sentence of 150 years in prison.
  • Joseph P. Nacchio - The CEO of Qwest Communications International. He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock and was sentenced to six years in federal prison
  • Kenneth Lay and Jeffery Skilling -- Enron -- Total Scammed: $74 Billion.
  • Thomas Joseph Petters - The former CEO and chairman of Petters Group Worldwide and convicted for turning his company into a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme. He received a 50 year federal prison sentence.
  • Raffaello Follieri was accused of misappropriating a $50 million investment from billionaire Ronald Burkle meant to buy up Roman Catholic churches. Bishop Joseph Anthony Galante was implicated in the scandal.
  • Dr. Gerald Barnbaum - Medicaid fraud, mail fraud, identity theft, sexual battery, medical malpractice and second-degree murder.
  • Eugene Plotkin and David Pajcin, both formerly of Goldman Sachs, were the masterminds behind a complex Wall Street con and a scam using strippers to solicit information from Wall Street bankers.
  • Richard Scrushy - He was once the superstar CEO of HealthSouth, a huge provider of outpatient rehab services until federal prosecutors accused him of masterminding a $2.7 billion fraud.
  • Samuel Israel III turns his wall street hedge fund, "Bayou Investments", into a Ponzi scheme after poor management, then attempts a fake suicide to flee prosecution.
  • Dennis Kozlowski - He was once described as "The Most Aggressive CEO in America," now sits behind bars. A poster boy of excess, the former CEO of Tyco stole millions from his company, using the money for a lavish party, a gilded shower curtain and expensive art.
  • Dr. Jorge Martinez - Expensive, painful and unnecessary shots, all part of a multi-million dollar billing scheme.
  • Anthony Elgindy - "The Mad Max of Wall Street" - The founder of Pacific Equity Investigations was a short seller who made millions in a trading scam using government secrets.
  • Lou Pearlman - The manager of bands like *NSYNC and The Backstreet Boys and masterminded scams of $500 million from investors in the longest running Ponzi scheme.
  • Al Parish - An economics professor and a trusted financial advisor was sentenced to federal prison after pleading guilty to financial fraud. Nearly 600 people lost up to $90 million invested in Parish Economic's private investment "pools."
  • Dr. Ronald Mikos - The story of a another murderous Chicago doctor who bilked Medicare.
  • Sholam Weiss - He helps fix the National Heritage Life Insurance's gaping $35 million accounting hole, and ends up partnering up with them - and bilking customers out of $500 million. He was sentenced to 845 years in prison.
  • Robert W. McLean - An investment manager and arts patron who traveled by limousine and ran a Ponzi scheme that had siphoned tens of millions of dollars from close friends and business associates. He eventually killed himself.
  • Stephen Trantel was once a Wall Street insider, a broker making hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Manhattan trading pits. After becoming unemployed, he started robbing banks.
  • Nancy Kissel murders her husband Robert Kissel, who had been a vice president in Goldman Sachs' Asian special situations group. His brother, Andrew Kissel, who had been accused of defrauding a New York co-op board of millions of dollars, was found murdered at his rented Greenwich, Connecticut estate.
  • Troy Titus - A disbarred and disgraced attorney who was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for defrauding clients and friends out of more than $8 million in Ponzi scheme.
  • Alberto Vilar - An investor who was known as "a patron of opera". He was tried and convicted in November 2008 on charges of money laundering, investment advisor fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud and mail fraud, and was sentenced in February 2010 to nine years in prison.
  • Dr. Vilas Likhite - An elaborate sting operation exposes a doctor and former Harvard Medical School professor who was stripped of his medical license and began a new career as a con man selling fake art treasures.
  • Danny Pang - He was the CEO of Private Equity Management Group who ran a Ponzi scheme and made millions betting on when people will die. His wife, ex-stripper Janie Louise Pang, was murdered in the Villa Park house, possibly by a contract killer, after she took steps toward a divorce. He has also since died. Wall Street Journal
  • Marc Harris promised financial freedom to people with off-shore bank accounts as a way to keep assets out of the reach of government. But the "guru" was running a Ponzi scheme and bilking clients out of millions of dollars.
  • Greater Ministries International - A story of religious fraud and a $500 million dollar pyramid scheme.
  • Robert Allen Stanford - He was the chairman of the now defunct Stanford Financial Group and was a sponsor of professional sports - - now accused of a massive Ponzi scheme.
  • Larry Salander - One of the biggest names in New York’s art world (Salander-O’Reilly Galleries), but collectors see red when he swipes more than $100 million from their pockets.
  • Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin - The former CEO of Agriprocessors, now-bankrupt slaughterhouse and meat packing plant. He was convicted of 86 counts of financial fraud, including bank fraud, mail and wire fraud and money laundering. In June 2010, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison.
  • William “Boots” Del Biaggio III - A venture capitalist and former co-owner of the hockey team San Jose Sharks. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and more than $67.4 million in restitution for misappropriating funds from individual investors he advised.
  • Scott W. Rothstein - A disbarred lawyer and the former managing shareholder, chairman, and chief executive officer of the now-defunct Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm. He was accused of funding a massive 1.2 billion dollar Ponzi scheme.
  • The Baptist Foundation of Arizona - Their fraud led to the largest collapse of a religious financial institution in U.S. history.
  • John Bennett - His Foundation for New Era Philanthropy operated a notorious Ponzi scheme. After having raised over $500 million from 1100 donors, he embezzled $135 million.
  • Martin Frankel - A financier and con-man who vanished with $200 million dollars. A story of money laundering, prostitution, bizarre sex and drug abuse.
  • Eric Stein - Masterminded one of the largest Ponzi schemes in Nevada history, cost his victims nearly $34 million.
  • Reverend Abraham Kennard - As many as 1600 churches nationwide are swindled out of $10 million.
  • Reed Eliot Slatkin - An ordained Scientology minister and co-founder of EarthLink was the perpetrator of one of the largest Ponzi schemes in the United States since Charles Ponzi himself.
  • Robert Ray Courtney - A former pharmacist who owned and operated Research Medical Tower Pharmacy. He was convicted of pharmaceutical fraud and sentenced to federal prison.
  • Bernard Ebbers - The CEO of WorldCom becomes the poster child for everything that went wrong on Wall Street in the 1990s. WorldCom's eventual downfall shakes the financial community and the lives of thousands of investors.
  • Stefan Wilson - Operated a fraudulent investment fund. His Ponzi scheme took almost $13 million from over 50 investors and landed him 20 years in prison.
  • Marc Dreier is a high-powered lawyer with celebrity clients. But Dreier is a conman and steals more than $700 million from hedge funds.
  • Dr. Michael Rosin - Convicted of telling patients they had cancer and performing unneeded operations, now sentenced to 22 years for fraud.
  • Arthur Nadel - Manages the hedge fund Scoop Management Co, a $350 million fund. In the blink of an eye, he disappears and leaves clients without their life savings.
  • Joseph Medawar - A television producer runs a scam to rob investors out of millions of dollars.
  • Barton Harry Watson - One the chairman of Cybernet, a wildly successful global technology company, he stood accused of stealing millions in an elaborate fraud.
  • Dr. Mark Weinberger – A self-proclaimed “nose doctor” – has it all and isn’t afraid to flaunt it. But inside The Weinberger Sinus Clinic, all is not what it seems. Malpractice and fatalities are now on his resume.
  • Dana Giacchetto - Advised Hollywood's hottest stars (from Leonardo diCaprio to Ben Affleck) But his star-power faded when nearly $10 million goes missing, for which he spent 5 years in prison.
  • Alfred Taubman - A wealthy art collector and the former chairman of Sotheby's who is now a convicted felon for the price-fixing scandal at Christie's and Sotheby's.
  • Matt Cox and Rebecca Hauck team up to make millions in the real estate fraud.
  • Nevin Shapiro - A University of Miami football booster who is currently imprisoned for orchestrating a $930 million Ponzi scheme. He even purchased a yacht on which sex parties with prostitutes were held.
  • Kenneth Starr - An accountant to stars like Sylvester Stallone, Diane Sawyer, and Wesley Snipes, but mismanages his clients’ money, pockets millions, and then he marries an exotic dancer. But then later he gets more than seven years behind bars for a multimillion-dollar investment scheme.

Al Capone went to prison for 11 years for owing $250,000 in back taxes. How much prison time should Mitt Romney get?

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Plantation America: The South has Risen Again

Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America - By Sara Robinson

America didn't used to be run like an old Southern slave plantation, but we're headed that way now. How did that happen?

It's been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don't know is that they're also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are.

Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that's corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here's what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.

North versus South: Two Definitions of Liberty

Michael Lind first called out the existence of this conflict in his 2006 book, Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. He argued that much of American history has been characterized by a struggle between two historical factions among the American elite -- and that the election of George W. Bush was a definitive sign that the wrong side was winning.

For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush -- nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. Among financial elites, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet still both partake strongly of this traditional view of wealth as power to be used for good. Even if we don't like their specific choices, the core impulse to improve the world is a good one -- and one that's been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.

As described by Colin Woodard in American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the elites of the Deep South are descended mainly from the owners of sugar, rum and cotton plantations from Barbados -- the younger sons of the British nobility who'd farmed up the Caribbean islands, and then came ashore to the southern coasts seeking more land. Woodward described the culture they created in the crescent stretching from Charleston, SC around to New Orleans this way:

It was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity....From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.

David Hackett Fischer, whose Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America informs both Lind's and Woodard's work, described just how deeply undemocratic the Southern aristocracy was, and still is. He documents how these elites have always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press. (Lind adds that they have historically been profoundly anti-technology as well, far preferring solutions that involve finding more serfs and throwing them at a problem whenever possible. Why buy a bulldozer when 150 convicts on a chain gang can grade your road instead?) Unlike the Puritan elites, who wore their wealth modestly and dedicated themselves to the common good, Southern elites sank their money into ostentatious homes and clothing and the pursuit of pleasure -- including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles.

But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).

Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.

In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.

When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.

Once we understand the two different definitions of "liberty" at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all -- the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they've defended these "liberties" across the length of their history.

When Southerners quote Patrick Henry -- "Give me liberty or give me death" -- what they're really demanding is the unquestioned, unrestrained right to turn their fellow citizens into supplicants and subjects. The Yankee elites have always known this -- and feared what would happen if that kind of aristocracy took control of the country. And that tension between these two very different views of what it means to be "elite" has inflected our history for over 400 years.

The Battle Between the Elites

Since shortly after the Revolution, the Yankee elites have worked hard to keep the upper hand on America's culture, economy and politics -- and much of our success as a nation rests on their success at keeping plantation culture sequestered in the South, and its scions largely away from the levers of power. If we have to have an elite -- and there's never been a society as complex as ours that didn't have some kind of upper class maintaining social order -- we're far better off in the hands of one that's essentially meritocratic, civic-minded and generally believes that it will do better when everybody else does better, too.

The Civil War was, at its core, a military battle between these two elites for the soul of the country. It pitted the more communalist, democratic and industrialized Northern vision of the American future against the hierarchical, aristocratic, agrarian Southern one. Though the Union won the war, the fundamental conflict at its root still hasn't been resolved to this day. (The current conservative culture war is the Civil War still being re-fought by other means.) After the war, the rise of Northern industrialists and the dominance of Northern universities and media ensured that subsequent generations of the American power elite continued to subscribe to the Northern worldview -- even when the individual leaders came from other parts of the country.

Ironically, though: it was that old Yankee commitment to national betterment that ultimately gave the Southern aristocracy its big chance to break out and go national. According to Lind, it was easy for the Northeast to hold onto cultural, political and economic power as long as all the country's major banks, businesses, universities, and industries were headquartered there. But the New Deal -- and, especially, the post-war interstate highways, dams, power grids, and other infrastructure investments that gave rise to the Sun Belt -- fatally loosened the Yankees' stranglehold on national power. The gleaming new cities of the South and West shifted the American population centers westward, unleashing new political and economic forces with real power to challenge the Yankee consensus. And because a vast number of these westward migrants came out of the South, the elites that rose along with these cities tended to hew to the old Southern code, and either tacitly or openly resist the moral imperatives of the Yankee canon. The soaring postwar fortunes of cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta fed that ancient Barbadian slaveholder model of power with plenty of room and resources to launch a fresh and unexpected 20th-century revival.

According to historian Darren Dochuk, the author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, these post-war Southerners and Westerners drew their power from the new wealth provided by the defense, energy, real estate, and other economic booms in their regions. They also had a profound evangelical conviction, brought with them out of the South, that God wanted them to take America back from the Yankee liberals -- a conviction that expressed itself simultaneously in both the formation of the vast post-war evangelical churches (which were major disseminators of Southern culture around the country); and in their takeover of the GOP, starting with Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964 and culminating with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980.

They countered Yankee hegemony by building their own universities, grooming their own leaders and creating their own media. By the 1990s, they were staging the RINO hunts that drove the last Republican moderates (almost all of them Yankees, by either geography or cultural background) and the meritocratic order they represented to total extinction within the GOP. A decade later, the Tea Party became the voice of the unleashed id of the old Southern order, bringing it forward into the 21st century with its full measure of selfishness, racism, superstition, and brutality intact.

Plantation America

From its origins in the fever swamps of the lowland south, the worldview of the old Southern aristocracy can now be found nationwide. Buttressed by the arguments of Ayn Rand -- who updated the ancient slaveholder ethic for the modern age -- it has been exported to every corner of the culture, infected most of our other elite communities and killed off all but the very last vestiges of noblesse oblige.

It's not an overstatement to say that we're now living in Plantation America. As Lind points out: to the horror of his Yankee father, George W. Bush proceeded to run the country exactly like Woodard's description of a Barbadian slavelord. And Barack Obama has done almost nothing to roll this victory back. We're now living in an America where rampant inequality is accepted, and even celebrated.

Torture and extrajudicial killing have been reinstated, with no due process required.

The wealthy and powerful are free to abuse employees, break laws, destroy the commons, and crash the economy -- without ever being held to account.

The rich flaunt their ostentatious wealth without even the pretense of humility, modesty, generosity, or gratitude.

The military -- always a Southern-dominated institution -- sucks down 60% of our federal discretionary spending, and is undergoing a rapid evangelical takeover as well.

Our police are being given paramilitary training and powers that are completely out of line with their duty to serve and protect, but much more in keeping with a mission to subdue and suppress. Even liberal cities like Seattle are now home to the kind of local justice that used to be the hallmark of small-town Alabama sheriffs.

Segregation is increasing everywhere. The rights of women and people of color are under assault. Violence against leaders who agitate for progressive change is up. Racist organizations are undergoing a renaissance nationwide.

We are withdrawing government investments in public education, libraries, infrastructure, health care, and technological innovation -- in many areas, to the point where we are falling behind the standards that prevail in every other developed country.

Elites who dare to argue for increased investment in the common good, and believe that we should lay the groundwork for a better future, are regarded as not just silly and soft-headed, but also inviting underclass revolt. The Yankees thought that government's job was to better the lot of the lower classes. The Southern aristocrats know that its real purpose is to deprive them of all possible means of rising up against their betters.

The rich are different now because the elites who spent four centuries sucking the South dry and turning it into an economic and political backwater have now vanquished the more forward-thinking, democratic Northern elites. Their attitudes towards freedom, authority, community, government, and the social contract aren't just confined to the country clubs of the Gulf Coast; they can now be found on the ground from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And because of that quiet coup, the entire US is now turning into the global equivalent of a Deep South state.

As long as America runs according to the rules of Southern politics, economics and culture, we're no longer free citizens exercising our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we've always understood them. Instead, we're being treated like serfs on Massa's plantation -- and increasingly, we're being granted our liberties only at Massa's pleasure. Welcome to Plantation America.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Mitt Romney Got a Government Handout

While the mainstream media agonizes over the “gotchya politics,” leaving no stone unturned, one major detail of the Bain Capital story has gone unexamined: the fact that at Bain Capital, Mitt Romney profited from federal bailout money – and that’s not free enterprise.

Amid the controversy following the Obama campaign’s attack ad on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, there has emerged a consensus, shared even by many Democrats, that attacking capitalism or free enterprise is wrong.

In a campaign ad of its own, the Romney campaign asks, “Have you had enough of President Obama’s attacks on free enterprise?” Meanwhile on CNN, former 2012 presidential hopeful, Newt Gingrich opined: “We found out when we got in a fight with Mitt Romney over this that it didn’t work. People understand free enterprise. People realize that sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail, but they refuse to take a one-sided view of it.”

But what happened at Bain Capital under Mitt Romney wasn’t free enterprise at all. The company was rescued with a federal bailout of $10 million in forgiven loans in a deal that profited Mitt Romney and other Bain Capital executives to the tune of $4 million. As Newt Gingrich said, sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail, but if the government intervenes to save you when you fail, then you’ve got the government, not markets, picking winners and losers. It’s not free enterprise. Free enterprise would have let Bain Capital take the $10 million hit. Instead, with Bain, you have an ugly hybrid system that critics call “crony capitalism,” in which corporate profits are privatized, but corporate losses are socialized and spread out across society.

If it’s wrong to rhetorically attack free enterprise, as Romney’s defenders argue, then what are their thoughts about Romney’s actual subversion of free enterprise via special government privileges that no small business would ever get? If conservatives believe the “social safety net” for poor people is unsustainable and creates perverse incentives, what of a “corporate safety net” for big businesses like Bain Capital? And what do all these sudden champions of free enterprise think about Mitt Romney’s continuing support for government-funded bailouts of big financial institutions, including the TARP bailouts?

And Romney got a federal bailout to "save" the 2002 Winter Olympics with a $1.3 billion "government handout" from us! But Romney got all the credit for that success as well.

The Republicans are now saying that cuts in defense spending could cost jobs. But the GOP says government doesn't create jobs, only "job creators" in the private sector do.

The Republicans are also fond of saying that now isn't a good time to raise taxes on the rich, but never say when is a good time...because they believe that no time is ever a "good time" for the rich to pay their fair share.

And finally, the Republicans always argue that taxing the rich more, or taxing corporate jets, or repealing tax subsidies for big oil companies will "do very little" to reduce the national debt, but they seem to think that cutting food stamps for the poor will solve our problems.

Why do Republican voters earning less than $1 million a every year always vote against their own best interests and vote for Republican politicians? If I'm drinking the Kool-Aid then they're drinking rat poison.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

As Romney Dodged Taxes, Our Net Worth and Pay Declined

Mitt Romney avoided taxes in 2010 by transferring stock in two companies from his personal account to a nonprofit entity he set up, transferring shares of Sensata Technologies, a Bain Capital company currently under fire to offshore Freeport Illinois jobs to China.

While Romney was dodging taxes in 2010, it's being reported that 50% of all American households now hold only 1% of the nation's wealth, while the top 1% holds over a third. The top 10 percent's share was 75%.

As the middle-class shrinks, at this rate there will only be two classes left...rich and poor.

For tax year 2010 almost $1 trillion in personal income was not taxed at all for either Social Security or Medicare. Of that $1 trillion, almost half was taxed for capital gains at the 15% rate instead of the top marginal rate of 35%.

The GOP, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Tea Party, and the Chamber of Commerce (all conservative entities) like to boast that "the top 1 percent of income earners paid 40 percent of all federal income taxes in 2006, while the bottom 50 percent (those who earned less than $25,000 a year) paid 3 percent; while 43 million tax returns filed in 2006 were from people who paid no federal income tax at all."

Fox News ignores the fact that these are the people who are struggling just to survive, and also needed food stamps to eat...those that the Republicans are saying are "gaming the system" and should "put more skin in the game". They never mention that Mitt Romney and the top 1% are the ones who "game the system" with off-shore bank accounts and high-priced tax attorneys.

Fox News says the "top earners already pay enough". Fox News cites IRS figures that show the top 1 percent of earners take home 16.9 percent of the nation's total income, but pay 36.7 percent of the nation's income taxes.

But they always conveniently neglect to mention that a greater proportion of a low earner's incomes goes to discretionary pending (like food and shelter) and to other taxes, such as Social Security. Someone who earns $1 million a year has Social Security taxes "capped", meaning they pay no SS tax at all after their first $110,000 in earnings...whereas most of us pay this tax on 100% on our earnings.

And the top 1% pays ZERO in Medicare taxes on their capital gains from "investment income". They use this savings to invest in their own in-house emergency rooms at a cost of $1 million, while millions of Americans go without access to a doctor and dentist.

The top 1% doesn't have to pay interest to banks over 30 years for home mortgages and car loans, tripling their initial cost (whereas the 1% can pay cash); or if they do, it's for another tax advantage (and at a much lower rate of interest).

Federal income tax rates for middle-class earners earning $50,000 a year (teachers, police, etc) is 25%. A neurosurgeon tax rate is 35%. The top 1% obtains the bulk of their annual earnings through capital gains from stocks and dividends, and pays a tax rate of 15%...the lowest ever since 1921. Under Bill Clinton capital gains was taxed at 28% before he lowered them to 20%, and Bush lowered them to 15% (it used to be over 40%).

The entire tax code is geared to favor the top 1%, and taxes are already historically low for them, but still they want more tax breaks...like an addict who just can't get enough.

The same is true for corporate tax rates. The GOP likes to say it's "the highest in the world", but they never mention that the "EFFECTIVE" corporate tax rate (what they usually actually pay) as about half of that, lower than in China. (Jobs go to China, not for lower taxes, but for cheaper labor and less environmental regulations.)

“There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” - Warren Buffett, 2006. Now why would one of the richest men in the world say that if it weren't true?

People like Mitt Romney aren't part of the solution for the shrinking middle-class, he's the problem. (Read: Mitt Romney's ties to IRS Commissioner. I think they should both be audited for the past 20 years.)

Click image below to enlarge

Friday, July 20, 2012

Mitt Romney's ties to IRS Commissioner

How can anyone have $100 million in an IRA account? Wouldn't that raise a red flag? Was Mitt Romney ever audited by the IRS?

Doug Shulman has been the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service from 2008 under George W. Bush until the present. He was named as one of 100 of the most influential people by Accounting Today.

Like Mitt Romney, Commissioner Shulman is also very much a "private equity" guy. Shulman began his career at the global investment consulting firm of A.T. Kearney from 1996 to 1997 in their New York City office. A.T. Kearney was a direct competitor of Mitt Romney's Bain Capital.

(It's also worth noting that Doug Shulman and Mitt Romney are also both Harvard alumni)

Doug Shulman was the vice president of Darby Overseas Investments Ltd. (a limited liability corporation) from 1998-2000 where he managed financial and legal aspects of the company’s transactions for the holding company and general partner of several private investment funds.

In 2000, Shulman founded his own private equity consulting firm, FoundryOne Inc., which specialized in new business ventures in technology.

Shulman was the executive vice president of the National Association of Securities Dealers from 2001-2007. The NASD, a "self-regulatory" organization of the securities industry, is responsible for the operation and regulation of the Nasdaq stock market and over-the-counter markets. It also administrated exams for investment professionals, such as the Series 7 Exam. All individuals seeking to become a stockbroker must take the General Securities Representative Exam, commonly referred to as the Series 7 or Stockbroker Exam.

Shulman was also the vice chairman of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA, successor to NASD), the parent organization of NASD Regulation, The American Stock Exchange, NASD Dispute Resolution and The Nasdaq Stock Market (overseeing Bernie Madoff)

Shulman also sat on the board at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). He is a very well-connected man. DTCC was established in 1999 as a holding company to combine The Depository Trust Company (DTC) and National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC). It was set up to provide an "efficient and safe" way for buyers and sellers of securities to make their exchange, and thus "clear and settle" transactions.

The DTCC was formed just after The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1999. It repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, opening up the market among banking companies (i.e. Goldman Sachs), securities companies (i.e Enron) and insurance companies (i.e. AIG). The Glass–Steagall Act had prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company.

The full Senate confirmed Doug Shulman to lead the IRS in March 2008. He said he doesn’t intend to stay in the job after his five-year term expires in November

Mitt Romney (also a "private equity" guy) has $100 million in an IRA account. Was Doug Shulman ever audited by the IRS before becoming its commissioner? Did Shulman also have Swiss bank accounts? He would certainly have a lot of knowledge on the subject.

Was there ever a time when Doug Shulman and Mitt Romney ever crossed paths? After all, don't they know their competitors?

The shadowy underworld of the private equity market has been grossly under-regulated and wrought with fraud and Ponzi schemes for a long time. Big accounting firms staffed with the best tax attorneys that money can buy, governed by nobody but a tax commissioner who has also made a career in private equity.

I'm not accusing anybody of anything, I'm just asking. (Google "Bud Meyers Tax Evasion")

>>> The 99% Cheer as 50% of the 1% to be Tried for Tax Evasion

Other "private equity" guys:

  • Bernie Madoff holds the world-record for biggest Ponzi scheme in history. Madoff stole billions while chairing the Nasdaq and maintaining cushy relationships at the SEC. He received the maximum sentence of 150 years in prison.
  • Joseph P. Nacchio - The CEO of Qwest Communications International. He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock and was sentenced to six years in federal prison
  • Kenneth Lay and Jeffery Skilling -- Enron -- Total Scammed: $74 Billion.
  • Thomas Joseph Petters - The former CEO and chairman of Petters Group Worldwide and convicted for turning his company into a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme. He received a 50 year federal prison sentence.
  • Raffaello Follieri was accused of misappropriating a $50 million investment from billionaire Ronald Burkle meant to buy up Roman Catholic churches. Bishop Joseph Anthony Galante was implicated in the scandal.
  • Dr. Gerald Barnbaum - Medicaid fraud, mail fraud, identity theft, sexual battery, medical malpractice and second-degree murder.
  • Eugene Plotkin and David Pajcin, both formerly of Goldman Sachs, were the masterminds behind a complex Wall Street con and a scam using strippers to solicit information from Wall Street bankers.
  • Richard Scrushy - He was once the superstar CEO of HealthSouth, a huge provider of outpatient rehab services until federal prosecutors accused him of masterminding a $2.7 billion fraud.
  • Samuel Israel III turns his wall street hedge fund, "Bayou Investments", into a Ponzi scheme after poor management, then attempts a fake suicide to flee prosecution.
  • Dennis Kozlowski - He was once described as "The Most Aggressive CEO in America," now sits behind bars. A poster boy of excess, the former CEO of Tyco stole millions from his company, using the money for a lavish party, a gilded shower curtain and expensive art.
  • Anthony Elgindy - "The Mad Max of Wall Street" - The founder of Pacific Equity Investigations was a short seller who made millions in a trading scam using government secrets.
  • Lou Pearlman - The manager of bands like *NSYNC and The Backstreet Boys and masterminded scams of $500 million from investors in the longest running Ponzi scheme.
  • Al Parish - An economics professor and a trusted financial advisor was sentenced to federal prison after pleading guilty to financial fraud. Nearly 600 people lost up to $90 million invested in Parish Economic's private investment "pools."
  • Sholam Weiss - He helps fix the National Heritage Life Insurance's gaping $35 million accounting hole, and ends up partnering up with them - and bilking customers out of $500 million. He was sentenced to 845 years in prison.
  • Robert W. McLean - An investment manager and arts patron who traveled by limousine and ran a Ponzi scheme that had siphoned tens of millions of dollars from close friends and business associates. He eventually killed himself.
  • Stephen Trantel was once a Wall Street insider, a broker making hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Manhattan trading pits. After becoming unemployed, he started robbing banks.
  • Nancy Kissel murders her husband Robert Kissel, who had been a vice president in Goldman Sachs' Asian special situations group. His brother, Andrew Kissel, who had been accused of defrauding a New York co-op board of millions of dollars, was found murdered at his rented Greenwich, Connecticut estate.
  • Troy Titus - A disbarred and disgraced attorney who was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for defrauding clients and friends out of more than $8 million in Ponzi scheme.
  • Alberto Vilar - An investor who was known as "a patron of opera". He was tried and convicted in November 2008 on charges of money laundering, investment advisor fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud and mail fraud, and was sentenced in February 2010 to nine years in prison.
  • Danny Pang - He was the CEO of Private Equity Management Group who ran a Ponzi scheme and made millions betting on when people will die. His wife, ex-stripper Janie Louise Pang, was murdered in the Villa Park house, possibly by a contract killer, after she took steps toward a divorce. He has also since died. Wall Street Journal
  • Marc Harris promised financial freedom to people with off-shore bank accounts as a way to keep assets out of the reach of government. But the "guru" was running a Ponzi scheme and bilking clients out of millions of dollars.
  • Greater Ministries International - A story of religious fraud and a $500 million dollar pyramid scheme.
  • Robert Allen Stanford - He was the chairman of the now defunct Stanford Financial Group and was a sponsor of professional sports - - now accused of a massive Ponzi scheme.
  • Larry Salander - One of the biggest names in New York’s art world (Salander-O’Reilly Galleries), but collectors see red when he swipes more than $100 million from their pockets.
  • Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin - The former CEO of Agriprocessors, now-bankrupt slaughterhouse and meat packing plant. He was convicted of 86 counts of financial fraud, including bank fraud, mail and wire fraud and money laundering. In June 2010, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison.
  • William “Boots” Del Biaggio III - A venture capitalist and former co-owner of the hockey team San Jose Sharks. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and more than $67.4 million in restitution for misappropriating funds from individual investors he advised.
  • Scott W. Rothstein - A disbarred lawyer and the former managing shareholder, chairman, and chief executive officer of the now-defunct Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm. He was accused of funding a massive 1.2 billion dollar Ponzi scheme.
  • John Bennett - His Foundation for New Era Philanthropy operated a notorious Ponzi scheme. After having raised over $500 million from 1100 donors, he embezzled $135 million.
  • Martin Frankel - A financier and con-man who vanished with $200 million dollars. A story of money laundering, prostitution, bizarre sex and drug abuse.
  • Eric Stein - Masterminded one of the largest Ponzi schemes in Nevada history, cost his victims nearly $34 million.
  • Reverend Abraham Kennard - As many as 1600 churches nationwide are swindled out of $10 million.
  • Reed Eliot Slatkin - An ordained Scientology minister and co-founder of EarthLink was the perpetrator of one of the largest Ponzi schemes in the United States since Charles Ponzi himself.
  • Robert Ray Courtney - A former pharmacist who owned and operated Research Medical Tower Pharmacy. He was convicted of pharmaceutical fraud and sentenced to federal prison.
  • Bernard Ebbers - The CEO of WorldCom becomes the poster child for everything that went wrong on Wall Street in the 1990s. WorldCom's eventual downfall shakes the financial community and the lives of thousands of investors.
  • Stefan Wilson - Operated a fraudulent investment fund. His Ponzi scheme took almost $13 million from over 50 investors and landed him 20 years in prison.
  • Marc Dreier is a high-powered lawyer with celebrity clients. But Dreier is a conman and steals more than $700 million from hedge funds.
  • Arthur Nadel - Manages the hedge fund Scoop Management Co, a $350 million fund. In the blink of an eye, he disappears and leaves clients without their life savings.
  • Joseph Medawar - A television producer runs a scam to rob investors out of millions of dollars.
  • Barton Harry Watson - One the chairman of Cybernet, a wildly successful global technology company, he stood accused of stealing millions in an elaborate fraud.
  • Dana Giacchetto - Advised Hollywood's hottest stars (from Leonardo diCaprio to Ben Affleck) But his star-power faded when nearly $10 million goes missing, for which he spent 5 years in prison.
  • Alfred Taubman - A wealthy art collector and the former chairman of Sotheby's who is now a convicted felon for the price-fixing scandal at Christie's and Sotheby's.
  • Nevin Shapiro - A University of Miami football booster who is currently imprisoned for orchestrating a $930 million Ponzi scheme. He even purchased a yacht on which sex parties with prostitutes were held.
  • Kenneth Starr - An accountant to stars like Sylvester Stallone, Diane Sawyer, and Wesley Snipes, but mismanages his clients’ money, pockets millions, and then he marries an exotic dancer. But then later he gets more than seven years behind bars for a multimillion-dollar investment scheme.

Doug Shulman's Education:
Georgetown University Law Center, JD
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University, MPA (Mitt Romney also went to Harvard)
Williams College, BA.

Sources:
http://www.finra.org/Newsroom/NewsReleases/2001/P011431
http://www.baincapital.com/Team/ManagingDirectors.aspx?viewType=ManagingDirectors
http://www.darbyoverseas.com/darby/index.jsp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Securities_Representative_Exam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_%26_Company#Competitors
http://uicaccounting.org/Readings/Career/Top-100-Accounting.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Shulman http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/nasd.asp#axzz21B3Dmup7
http://www.allgov.com/Official/Shulman__Douglas http://goingconcern.com/post/doug-shulman-five-years-irs-commissioner-plenty-me-thanks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.T._Kearney