Exemption for Eating the Rich will be allowed for those who earn abovve $250,000k on proof of empathy.
Fact 1 – Rudy 9/11,9/11,9/11 Guiliani says a massive wealth transfer from “rich to poor” is taking place and that people who earn $250,000 + are “really struggling”. He also hopes health care reform fails.
GIULIANI: We already have major distribution of wealth going on in this country. … Redistribution of wealth, from rich to poor. The rich pay – the so-called rich. We’re talking about $250,000 or more in New York City. I know this is hard for people to understand. These people sometimes are two-earner families. They’re really struggling
The fact is, the Wealthy Corporatists hate spending because it leads to taxes, which they can easily afford, but never mind that. I got mine, you can go fuck yourself. That seems to be the GOP plan, and it has been for the last 90 years.
They don’t want health care reform, or anything at all, since they can afford it, so why can’t you.
They have NO IDEA what real Struggling is.
Go cry me a fucking river banker boy. You want to see struggling? It ain’t paying more for first class, it ain’t having your taxes go up 3%, it ain’t having the taxpayers pay for your bailout bonus. It is living in a tent under a bridge.
I don’t need to tell you that unemployment is through the roof. U6 is at 20+% nationwide, and in NYC it is as bad as anywhere else. At some point, we as a nation need to figure out that the private sector will not save us, rather they are strangling us, but, that is not why I write today, although it is an issue that must be addressed if we are to recover from the Bush/Cheney depression anytime soon.
In New York City you can see the class warfare at it’s prime. A few bonus baby Wall St types who tanked the whole economy on us yuk it up over drinks while a ton of busboys sweat it out for that extra buck.
Well, I have hit my breaking point. I have no job, no money, and no more patience. As much as I love the Big Rotten Apple, I have to say Good Bye, New York City.
This town is too rich for my blue collared blood. I have tried bootstraps. I have tried denying things like health care and dentist appointments, eating out and other non-necessities.
This map represents the connections and relationships of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Goldman Sachs International, Goldman Sachs Japan, Goldman Sachs Europe Limited, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund Strategies LLC, Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Goldman Sachs (Asia) LLC
Below I will post a link to the interactive version where you can click on each of the boxes with a + sign and get more information and see even further connections. I will also post a list of all these many connections. I posted a smaller version of this wheel last night in Badabing’s diary, Matt Taibbi Pulls the Rug Out on Goldman Sachs – AGAIN… and am flushing it out for you all by request. Consider this a reference. I hope others will add to it.
I have been feeling lately that the entire country has been hit by a storm, that people are drowning or are standing on their roofs waving their arms, but that the most other people are ignoring them, their eyes set on some different horizon, looking for golden pots beneath rainbows.
The President and his family this week have been sampling the fine wines of Northern Italy with the worthless G-8, visiting an earthquake stricken town there. He has pontificated with the evil Santa that is the Pope and now having a delightful visit, no doubt, in Ghana.
The mainstream media has been preoccupied with sex, politics and celebrity death. Huge numbers of television watching Americans have been fueling those Networks’ ad revenue, distracted by these baubles of the macabre. The blogosphere seems more fragmented than ever, either being enraptured with its own meta, or having its sights set on foreign revolutions and wargames. Quite a number too have been focused on the macroeconomy, noting the incredible hypocrisy and corruption of the big houses on Wall Street. There are those too who are completely focused on healthcare legislation, which does get closer to the core issue. That issue is that people are hurting badly in this country and are slipping through its cracks.
What do Hillary Clinton, John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Bill Nelson, and Tom Coburn have in common?
They are either members or friends of the Elitist Christian Right group The Family. The family holds weekly prayer meetings or “advisory” meetings where members discuss their problems, both personal and political, and give each other veto power over each others lives.
The Family has operated under various names since its formation in 1935. They have gone under the names:
National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, the National Leadership Council, Fellowship House, the Fellowship Foundation, the National Fellowship Council, the International Foundation
They hold their prayer meetings at the Defense Department, the Pentagon and have their own little cul de sac of houses called Ivanwald where they groom future leaders. They also have a house in Washington where senators and congressmen live called C street. Residents of the C street house include Brownback, Coburn and Ensgin, including both Democrats and Republicans. The Family has connections to the CIA as well as to governments around the world including the former Suharto dictatorship, the current dictator in Uganda,Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, the former president of Honduras, Ricardo Marudo and The Family has been involved with coups in Fiji, of all places.
If Reform Costs X and Fighting it costs Y – choose the lesser of the two everytime.
Executives of three of the nation’s largest health insurers told federal lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday that they would continue canceling medical coverage for some sick policyholders, despite withering criticism from Republican and Democratic members of Congress who decried the practice as unfair and abusive.
The line between taking a profit and making a killing is where ethics ends and Super Profits begin. There are thousands of examples we can find in our economy today where taking a profit is not good enough, and thus making a killing is what we do.
It seems as though once the line between making a profit ethically is crossed there is no going back. Once the people who profit by stepping over the line and making a killing have gone there, the damage is already done and it is too late. What good is it to us if we fine a polluter some millions they can afford after they have made the Super Profit and ripped the resources out of the bare earth, or by denying someone Health Care they paid the Insurance for, or by ginning up a war fro their contractor buddies. The war still happens, people die of preventable disease and no one can put the environment back together again.
This is how our economy works. Whoever can fuck over the most people the best win. You can be too big to fail but if there is any competition to worry about, don’t worry, the Government will take care of it for you, but if average Joe Sixpacks demand the same thing that is socialism, and that is bad.
So what is a person to do?
The first step to fighting the Class War is to know your enemy.
An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.
It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.
You see, if they actually provided the health care insurance policy holders are paying for, they would not make such a big profit. It is as simple as that. $300,000,000 over 5 years is hard for a Board of Directors to turn down.
The Murder By Spreadsheet Industry is not alone here. Many industries and big businesses claim they can not survive without there special little exceptions around basic decency and common sense.
Some examples are
Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining
You can call this Environmental Disaster Capitalism
First off, these companies will NEVER invest in Green Technology and Green energy, because that costs money and any initial investment towards progress will hurt their profits, and that makes Executives cry.
Never mind the fact that there are other, less destructive ways to mine for coal, but that costs money, and is less profitable than the Super – Profits that can be made by wrecking the place. Never mind the fact that coal is toxic, toxic to the air, the rivers, everything around it. That is not important, making money, now that is what is important.
Labor Unions
If companies do not have the ability to bust unions, how will they make their Super Profits? Can large employers like WalMart get by when their employees can demand better wages and benefits? Of course.
Will they admit that? Hell no!
What costs more, making TV ads or actually paying employees more? Do the long term benefits to society and our economy outweigh the initial costs? Of course not, that would get in the way of making a killing. What are you, some kind of socialist?
Well, yes, if by socialist you mean something other than an unfettered free market capitalist. If that is what you mean by socialist I am guilty as charged.
Wall St
This one is so big I will not get into it too much, suffice it too say that they are certainly making a killing on Wall St. I have yet to hear when the Wall St Bailout will be paid back
No matter how bad the risk, the people who take those risks never feel the pain of their failure. They are Too Big To Fail. You are not.
Socialism for the rich is fine, just don’t go getting socialist on the rest of the proletariat. If you feed them once you will never get rid of them.
War and The Military Industrial Complex
This is true Disaster Capitalism at work, and the heart of all class warfare. War is class warfare.
If we do not have wars to fight how will we ever justify spending a quarter of our federal budget on our military, plus supplemental spending and all the other goodies we hand out to the MIC year to year?
And if there are no actual wars to fight, we can just invent them with a little help from the Corporate controlled media
Now that Sonia Sotomayor has been named by President Obama to be his first (of hopefully many) nominee to the Supreme Court the political wing of the Oligarchy will attack her for voting in her interests as a minority, a female and a plebian.
Republicans and other plutocrats find it threatening when poor/non-white/non-Christian/minority people vote and act in their own interests. The only way to win an election for the 1% is to trick another 50% into voting for rich people. Fear and hatred is to trick them into it with falsity and wedge issues. If more people succeed like Judge Sotomayor the GOP will lose. The last thing they want is educated and informed plebeians acting in their best interests. If that shit catches on it is the end of the GOP.
Sotomayor’s confirmation will be opposed on the front lines of the class war. Whether she or we know it or not, Sotomayor just stepped up to the status quo. Expect them to take this threat seriously.
The only arguments the GOP can make against Sotomayor will be on sexist/racist/elitist or flat out ridiculous grounds. This is class warfare. Sotomayor just took center stage.
There are times I really want to go all S.L.A on the fucking rich and terminally clueless. Not just the AIG assholes and Banker types that are lighting the fires of even their own eventual demise, but the self-absorbed bitches like Madonna and Angelina Jolie-Miller-Shmizu-Thorton-Pitt who think plucking a child or 6 out of poverty and lavishing them with untold fortunes and nannies makes them humanitarian. At least Brangelina actually does some humanitarian work, but still. JOKE. Then there are the yacht club intellectuals and jet set Bonos of the media preaching it down to us, all while comparing the relative value of a French versus a Brazilian celebration of the Easter services. Yeah, that resonates with us poor slobs. NOT! Clueless fuck didn’t even get how that would sound.
I wanna grab a pitchfork and extend the Conneticut AIG Mansion Tour into a Tour of All of them. I wish I wasn’t the queen of non-violence.
I listen as even Congress critters whine about their diminishing 401’s and think to myself they need the Reverse Tour. Make every one of those Washington families live on MY income, with no outside help for a fucking year. You assholes could sell ONE of your fucking houses, boats, or luxury cars and pay my bills for a year.
In the ongoing media Battle of the Bulge of the finance oligarchs that has brilliantly sold idiot America the blatant falsehood that the economy has turned for the better (tell that to all the poor bastards in the tent cities that are sprouting up across the fruited plain) the big boys have struck back. In a masterpiece of propaganda only surpassed in recent history by the great General Petraeus led SURGE that flushed a bloody defeat in Iraq down the memory hole the same strategy has been applied in selling the notion that the zombie banks are alive and well. I am going to address this in far more detail in my upcoming piece that will be out in the next few days entitled Hooray! The Surge is Working…Again but I just wanted to chime in on this news.
Congressional Republicans on Sunday predicted a doomsday scenario of crushing debt and eventual federal bankruptcy if President Barack Obama’s massive spending blueprint wins passage.
Let’s see the “doomsday scenario,” which Republicans fear in a few years, is crushing debt and federal bankruptcy.
Hmm… …Wait a sec… …Oh.My.God… Doomsday is here already!!!
There are times I really want to go all 
