The plutocrats of both parties offer “freedom” all right– the same freedom that has been extended to serfs for hundreds of years:  the freedom to be starved and be taxed out of existence while they continue to get a free ride on the backs of the majority with the tax loopholes that they write for themselves.

Cross Post from IfLizWereQueen

Cross post from IfLizWereQueen

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The Comment From the Reader: You know I could care less about Ron Paul or any other politician but your post seems a bit poor in the reasoning department. What seems most off to me is the implication that making lots of money is morally suspect.

I will say however that is always wise to remember that men are never perfect and politicians always suspect. I’m not sure calling some politician a hypocrite is helpful (or accurate in this case). I could be wrong (it wouldn’t surprise or upset me much to find out that any politician was a hypocrite).

I think a thing that stands out is that once certain accusations are leveled they almost require (in the reader’s mind) support. I know it was a short post and you cannot say everything within such constraints.

But I wonder– do you think the “1%” are guilty of something just because they are in the 1%?

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ILWQ RESPONSE: No I don’t think people of the 1% are “guilty merely because they are rich.” And nothing is wrong with my reasoning.  The 1% are not innocent bystanders.  Most of them are Wall Street investors who have gotten rich off the backs of working Americans.

This is the standard response of the 1%.  ”Just because I’m rich, that doesn’t make me guilty.  I shouldn’t be punished just because I’m rich.  Why should I be punished for being successful?  etc.”

No, I don’t think the 1% are automatically guilty merely because they are in the 1% of the wealthiest in the nation. This is a typical strategy of Wall Street investors–to pretend that they are victims.  Are you perhaps a Wall Street investor?  Note:  It’s also a standard propaganda technique (Ad hominem) to personally attack people as you did by slyly insinuating that something must be wrong with my reasoning.

I think the 1% are guilty not because they are rich, but because of how they got their wealth. You show me one member of the 1% whose wealth has not been dependent on their Wall Street investments for the past 4 years and I’ll be glad apologize to them.

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And how has Wall Street made its money for at least the past four years as Americans have been losing their jobs and homes?

Well we all can agree that it hasn’t been by creating jobs. During the 8 years of George Bush we had zero job growth and it’s not much better under Obama. So that begs the question as to how have Wall Street investors from the 1% made millions over the past four years while the most of Americans have been sliding off into an economic hole? Did you ever think about that?  Did you ever really give it any “reasoning” as to how this is possible?

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Wall Street corporations have made their investors richer by the millions (44% of them multimillionaires in Congress) by “cutting costs”. And how have they “cut costs”? By firing American workers and selling off assets.

And this is the part that makes them guilty. Now do you get it? The 1% have literally gotten richer these past four years especially off the backs of people who work for a living. Then many of the 1%  have the unmitigated gall to call workers “lazy” and to pretend that they did not make their wealth by stealing from those who can least afford.  They continue to pretend that they have nothing to do with the current economic crisis when in fact, they are the root cause.

Not only do I think that many of the 1% are “guilty”, I think that some of them like CEO Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs should be tried for crimes against humanity for what the traders of the Goldman Sachs commodity index did in 2008. By artificially inflating the price of wheat on the world market in a year that represented the largest wheat production in 100 years, Goldman Sachs literally starved millions more human beings to death than those who on average die of starvation each year. Yes, all the 1% are“guilty” of at least willful blindness, if not more.

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Several questions remain:  How long will the American voters continue to play the fake two party game and choose “sides” with a Democrat candidate or a Republican candidate when in fact they are members of the same party–The Wall Street Investor party for the rich.  How long will the American voters continue to believe that their hands are “tied” and they must vote for one or the other  and try to choose the lessor of two evils?  How long will the American people pretend that there are not other better candidates to vote for–even for president we have Jill Stein running.  How long will the American voters continue to participate in the fake primaries across the USA–all staged by the 1%?  How long will they continue to believe that this is the only way, that this is the “American process” and that to buck it is “unAmerican”?  How long will they continue like ignoramuses to watch the shadows flickering on the walls of the cave and believe that is reality?

However long that time is will be exactly how long poverty will continue to increase in in the USA and the middle class will continue to move toward extinction.

What kind of “reasoning” makes you think that a multimillionaire Wall Street investor like John Kerry, Eric Cantor, or John Boehner represent you?  These are the people who increase their personal wealth by voting for trade agreements like the Korean Trade Agreement that will ship 169,000 American jobs overseas and increase the trade deficit by $16 billion within 7 years.  These are the people who vote to make sure that the democratic process is shut down by voting almost unanimously to defund ACORN–an organization whose only “crime” was to empower poor people by registering them to vote.  The rich don’t want the poor to vote–and it doesn’t matter if they are Republican or Democrat.  ACORN was defunded with a Democrat majority in BOTH houses by an almost unanimous vote solely on the testimony of a sleazy and well known right wing operative by the name of James O’Keefe.

Cross Post from IfLizWereQueen

Cross Post from IfLizWereQueen

repost from iflizwerequeen

Where only the rich are represented

It isn’t elite enough for the Wall Street crooks in Washington that 44% of the elected officials in Congress are millionaires. They must elect an even more filthy rich exclusive Wall Street investor elite club, the Super Congress, to make decisions for 80% of us in America–those of us who earn less than $100,000 a year.  75% of this elite decision making group are millionaires.

Numbers Game Iflizwerequeen graphic

Tears in My Eyes, or is that Smoke in My Eyes –iflizwerqueen graphic

Well, today is the day two of the leaders in Washington get together and play the rich’s man’s game for all the nation to see.  If either of them had even one iota of sensitivity they would have found a different venue to discuss their differences, [For example, how about one of the closed schools or factories in Detroit, a city whose poverty rate is at 36%. Both of these jackasses should take note that the poverty rate of Egypt was only at 23% and they had a revolution.] A golf game is the perfect metaphor to illustrate just exactly how much neither of these two multi-milionaires give a damn about the majority.  They are clueless.

“Six months in the making, a much anticipated golf game between two of the world’s most powerful people will unfold on a military base whose location was a closely guarded secret as tee time approached Saturday.

The big question was not who would win or lose. Instead it was whether 18 holes of golf could possibly give President Barack Obama  and House Speaker  John Boehner  enough time to hash out their substantial policy differences on everything from the debt to U.S. military involvement in Libya.  . . ”    Read more at SEATTLE PI

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iflizwerequeen comments

As far as I’m concerned, there is no “big question.”  Even if Obama could win, he would let Boehner win. Anyone who has been paying any attention for the past two years knows that.  Besides, the two are are more in agreement with one another than they are with the majority of the American people. Are you kidding?  You don’t believe me?  Look at the increases in the net worths of these two men over the past two years (2009 and 2010) and look at yours.

If there is any “disagreement” between the two men, its a small degree of separation:  Boehner wants to take the entire cake while Obama is willing to leave the American people a few crumbs.

WAKE UP AMERICA. IT’S LATER THAN YOU MAY THINK

Run for office!  And for goodness sake, let’s find a real candidate for President of the USA!  In the meantime, here’s a pie for the pieholes of these two phonies.  May they enjoy their just desserts.

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Another, more local to where I live, example of how clueless the rich are regarding how the other 90% live:

In the summer of 2010, the city of Plano, Texas gave the property they owned where the city’s only black community center was located to a private organization.  Republicans and Corporate Centrist Democrats are really big on giving away property that is owned by the people–it’s part of their economic ideology called “privatization.”

They gave away a community center and then what did they do a few days later?  They allocated $7 million dollars for the improvement of public golf courses.

Think about it a minute.  What percentage of people do you think play golf?  If you think the black people whose community center was closed are not going to be paying their taxes for others to play golf–you are very wrong.  Are you getting the picture yet regarding the priorities of the rich?  If not, open your eyes to how the leadership in your community is spending your tax money.

File this one under “Class War”.

Cross Post from iflizwerequeen.com
The way it works in our world is that the rich (and greedy Wall Street banksters and financial wheeler dealers in particular) make the poor who can least afford it pay the most for the money they borrow.

Queen Graphic

And why can they? One of the reasons is that they have brought their own “evaluation” team with them to judge what they call the “credit worthiness” of others.  Convenient isn’t it? But this is only one of the many ways that Wall Street and the rich have loaded the deck against the majority of us.

They justify what amounts to their theft from the poor by working in concert with one of Wall Streets Big Three credit rating agencies–Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investor Service and Fitch Ratings.  One of the many problems with these credit rating agencies (CRAs) is their close ties to the SEC and their Wall Street corporations.

The problem is one of collusion (as is often the problem when the rich make their backroom deals with other rich).  This particular “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” routine works this way:  companies pay credit rating companies like Standard & Poor’s to rate their debt issues. As a result, many critics have rightly contended that Standard & Poor’s and other CRAs are beholden to these issuers and that their ratings are not as objective as they should be.  Of course they are not!  DUH.

We have been building up to today’s crisis over the past 40 years and helped greatly along with the leadership of BOTH parties embrace of Milton Friedman’s harsh economic ideology for the rich. That is key to remember when arguing that one party is better than the other. BOTH parties embrace the same broken conservative economic ideology and that is why it really does not make much of a damn which party is in office.

Karl Marx predicted what we are seeing today.  According to Marx, capitalism will inevitably lead to ruin in accordance with certain laws of economic movement. These laws are the “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”, the “Law of Increasing Poverty”, and the “Law of Centralization of Capital.”  Small capitalists go bankrupt, and their production means are absorbed by large capitalists. During the process of bankruptcy and absorption, capital is gradually centralized by a few large capitalists, and the entire middle class declines. Thus, two major classes, a small minority of large capitalists, and a large proletarian majority are formed. [SOURCE WIKI]

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Two Examples of their Bias in Action:

#1  Standard & Poor’s and other CRAs assigned top ratings of AAA to the collateralized debt obligation(CDO) market. Investors, (many of them Mutual funds handling pensions of ordinary Americans) trusting the low risk profile that AAA implies, loaded up on these CDOs that later became unsellable. Those that could be sold often took staggering losses. For instance, losses on $340.7 million worth of CDOs issued by Credit Suisse Group added up to about $125 million, despite being rated AAA by Standard & Poor’s. [Ironic, isn't it that "poor" is part of their Corporate moniker.]

#2 We see it today in the way that the banksters, IMF and wealthy countries are acting toward poorer nations.  No finer example than Greece. Bloomberg reported today that  “Spain, Greece and Italy faced higher borrowing costs at debt auctions today after Standard & Poor’s downgraded Greece and said it is “increasingly likely” that the nation will default. . . The gap between Greek [poor] and German [rich] borrowing costs surged to the widest since the start of the single currency today after S&P slashed Greece’s rating to the lowest in the world and said it was likely to become the first euro nation to default.”

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AND HERE IS THE CLINCHER FOLKS, THE REAL INSULT TO THE MAJORITY:

It’s not THEIR money these greedy bastards are loaning out.  It’s OUR money–yours and mine.  Ordinary citizens like us who actually do pay our taxes.  Our taxes are the primary source of the money that is loaned out through IMF.

How is this money appropriated by Congress?  It is slipped into other legislation. I haven’t been keeping close tabs on it lately but the last time it happened that I am aware of was in June of 2009 when they slipped in $108 billion for IMF funds into another piece of legislation that was being passed.  This report from Reuters was before the fact but it provides details on how it is done.

So perhaps you see now why I often say that we get the crumbs from the rich of a banquet that we paid for.  I say it because it is, unfortunately, the truth in the most literal sense of the word.

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Closing remark on how Milton Friedman’s conservative ideology for the rich fits into this particular picture.  It’s the fifth commandment from this harsh ideology for the rich that helps to promote this particular theft.

5) Thou shalt eliminate the concept of public good or conscience. The worst thing for profits of wealthy Wall Street Investors is people with a social conscience. That makes profiteers look really bad. Pressure the poorest people in our society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education and social security all by themselves. If they fail, then blame them and call them “lazy.”

Before solutions, we must first identify the real causes of the problems.

We the people need to end the Slapstick Logic of Millionaires in Congress and replace it with real solutions for real problems.

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MAKE SURE THAT THE TRUE CAUSE HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED BEFORE WORK IS BEGUN TO FIND THE SOLUTION

Never automatically assume that Congress has identified the real cause of any problem because it is highly likely that they have not. Furthermore, you can safely assume that the leadership of BOTH parties are more in agreement with one another than with the majority of the American people–however well they may perform their professional wrestler “hate” routine public displays.

Masters of the Non-Sequiter, they announce the cause of problem and then push for a solution that promotes their best interests.  Non-sequiter is a Latin phrase for “it does not follow.”  Thus they incorrectly assume (or try to force us to assume) that one thing has caused another.  In so doing they commit a basic logical error that is referred to as the fallacy of the false cause and all that follows will also be false. And it won’t work folks–at least not for you and me.

For example, it is a logical fallacy to assume that Big government spending has caused our debt.  

As long as the American voters accept this false cause as true, we are hooked into their propaganda and we will debate and squabble, united in agreement to what really is the false cause, but not the solution. That is exactly what we see Congress doing in their current deadlock over raising/not raising the debt ceiling.  Adjusting the debt ceiling has very little, if anything, to do with resolving the problem–at least permanently.

This is also where their good cop/bad cop routine for the rich comes into play. It is to the advantage of the wealthy leadership of both parties for people to believe that big government spending has caused our national debt.  The outcome will be a win/win for the rich and a lose/lose for the majority because our only solutions will be 1)  to raise the debt ceiling so they can borrow even more money (totally insane) or 2) to cut expenses.  If we let them persist in this fraud, the millionaires in Congress will end up taking huge cuts from entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Then this extra money will be put into tax coffers that will then be used–not to pay down debt, or to even repair our infrastructure. Instead, it will be handed over to corporate Wall Street War profiteers to pay for more government war contracts.  Some money from this will of course be recycled back to the millionaire elected officials in Congress as they own stock in these corporations.  [I guess we have to hand it to rich for understanding at least part of the concept of recycling.]

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The Family as an Analogy to explain the Current Congressional “Solutions” being proposed for big government spending.

We have a family of four adults and they have a budget. They all live in the same big house.  They all work and earn money.  They contribute their money to the common household budget. The mother and two adult children contribute 25% of their income to the household budget which represents a chunk of their spendable income.  The father who earns considerably more money pays 17% of his income to the household budget and he complains about that.  Some years he makes up excuses to pay even less.  Some years he even contributes nothing to the household budget.  One day the family wakes up and they are deep in debt. The father insists that they must stop spending so much of the household budget, but the mother and two adult children are already scraping by. The only things to cut are more of the grocery budget. So they do that and the mother and adult children are hungry.  The father doesn’t mind because he buys expensive lunches away from home.  (Oh, I forgot to mention.  The money is kept in a sugar bowl in the kitchen and the father is forever taking from it for this and that little extra for himself.  Also their home is falling down around them because there is not enough money in the family budget to repair it.)

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The leadership of the two parties will put on a good show.  They have had almost 25 years practice at it–ever since their rich leadership kicked out the League of Women Voters in 1987 and the two parties formed the Commission on Presidential Debates, their own nonprofit (501)(c)(3) Corporation sponsored by private contributions from foundations and corporations. Walter Cronkite referred to this commission as the biggest fraud that was ever perpetuated on the American voters in our history.

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