"Where else would you go when you have an ax to grind?"

Showing posts with label "arise ye prisoners of starvation". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "arise ye prisoners of starvation". Show all posts

Thursday, July 30, 2009

First against the wall when the revolution comes

Stop the presses!

The President had a beer with a professor and a policeman! Why is it that I can't read these stories without this song going through my head?

Meanwhile, back in the American heartland, in the shining city on a hill, there is good news as the the latest minimum wage increase kicked in last week. The federal minimum wage is now $7.25 per hour (about $15,000 a year based on a 40 hr week) Of course some states don't even have minimum wage laws. About 13 percent of the population of the United States lives below the poverty line (set in 2001 at $18,000/year for a family of four).

There are about 45 million americans without health insurance of any kind and millions more with wholly inadequate insurance. Kids are dying of toothache because their family doesn't have the money to take them to a doctor. The current health care proposal in front of congress now is estimated to cost $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over the next ten years and some people oppose it because it would be funded by a one percent increase in income taxes for people making more than $200,000 a year. That's in addition to the roughly 3% income tax hike Obama already has proposed for the top tax bracket, bringing their tax rate to 38%.

Handing over 38% of your taxable income to the government sounds like a lot until I see stories like this:

Bank Bonus Tab: $33 Billion

Nine Lenders That Got U.S. Aid Paid at Least $1 Million Each to 5,000 Employees

By SUSANNE CRAIG and DEBORAH SOLOMON

Nine banks that received government aid money paid out bonuses of nearly $33 billion last year -- including more than $1 million apiece to nearly 5,000 employees -- despite huge losses that plunged the U.S. into economic turmoil.
(snip)
Wall Street has shown little sign of slowing down the pay train this year. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley recently disclosed that they have set aside $11 billion and $6 billion in compensation and benefits, respectively, for their employees so far this year. Goldman's second quarter was among its best ever. Morgan Stanley lost money for its third straight quarter.Goldman and Morgan Stanley declined to
comment on the report.Meanwhile, some big banks that received government bailouts, including Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., are offering handsome pay packages to lure stars. Citigroup -- which received about 25% of the aid going to the nine banks -- has the No. 1 pay recipient. Andrew Hall, who heads Citigroup's energy-trading unit Phibro LLC, received $98.9 million in 2008, according to a government official. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, by comparison, received more than $38 million last year."


Poor Vikram, he's the CEO and he has to struggle along on a paltry $38 million a year.

The U.S. government in the past year has spent about $1.8 trillion on bailing out and proping up the banking industry: $31.1 billion on bank takeovers, $117.9 billion on bailing out AIG, $1.4 trillion on Fed financial rescue efforts including the Bear Stearns bailout effort, $40 on the capital investment in Citigroup and Bank of America, $20.4 billion on the Capital Purchase Program to bail out banks, and another $5 billion in assest guarantees for BoA and Citi. This is money spent, not just money committed or earmarked for bailout programs - those numbers are even higher. And it doesn't include the more than $1 trillion spent on the GM bailout or the stimulus plan or the money spent on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and mortage relief for homeowner facing foreclose. Nope, that $1.8 trillion is just what has been forked over to shore up the banking industry. (figures from here)

And that's just the financial sector payoff. How about the military industrial complex?

They say if you aren't angry, then you aren't paying attention.

People often wonder why the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution were so brutal. How could ordinary French peasants and townsfolk cheer to see people they formerly respected as their "social betters" being marched to guillotine? How could the Bolsheviks be so hardhearted as to machine-gun to death the Tsar and his family, even the young children?


I think I might understand it.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Some animals are more equal than others

It is one thing to chase an evil incompetent smirking son of priviledge from the White House and elect a decent president, but there are more, a lot more, where he came from and something must be done about it eventually.

From the Huffington Post (click through for more juicy robber baron audio)


Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.
Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.
Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.
"This is the demise of a civilization," said Marcus.
"This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it."



First, they destroy the economy through greed and ignorance. Then they belly up to the public trough demanding the taxpayers bail them out. Then they take that money and use it to expand their empires, fund executive perks, line their pockets and make sure the poor get poorer. -Fuck these "I'm all right, Jack"-asses.

From the New York Times



By almost any measure, 2008 was a complete disaster for Wall Street — except, that
is, when the bonuses arrived.

Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year. That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.


(snipped for length, go read the whole thing)


On Wall Street, where money is the ultimate measure, some employees apparently feel slighted by their diminished bonuses. A poll of 900 financial industry employees
released on Wednesday by eFinancialCareers.com, a job search Web site, found that while nearly eight out of 10 got bonuses, 46 percent thought they deserved more.

And yet, when someone suggests that the progressive income tax could be a little more progressive after eight years of tax cuts for the rich, he's derided as a socialist who is engaging in class warfare. Sometimes I really wonder, in light of things like this, why there aren't angry pitchfork-and-torch wielding mobs in the streets of America