Plutocracy Now

[Momanohedhunter]

Ummm, nope.

The armed forces of the United States did not violate any civil or criminal statute in connection with their activities at Waco in 1993. While the armed forces of the United States provided extensive support for law enforcement agencies, including reconnaissance, equipment, training, advice, and medical assistance, they were careful in their conduct and well-advised legally as they determined exactly what support to provide. In fact, in at least two instances, law enforcement agencies solicited assistance from the armed forces that the armed forces either rejected or scaled back due to concern about remaining within the bounds of federal law.

Who drove the tanks?

Plutocrats.

 

[georgephillip]

No war?

No arson.

Thanks for clearing that up.

"It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence..."
--Martin Luther King Jr., Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution

King Quotes...

 

[Liberty]

no one cares.

 

[georgephillip]

The great unmentioned reality in this is that Reagan and the two Bushes lowered taxes for the rich and created a huge National Debt.

This act effectively transferred $11 trillion dollars from middle class taxpayers to the wealthy.

It is the greatest redistribution of wealth in human history.

Gee, Didn't Obama just do the same thing? Lowered taxes for the rich and create even bigger deficits?

Are you really that stupid? No need to answer, as we all know the answer is yes.

Now explain how voting Republican OR Democrat in 2012 doesn't qualify as stupidity?

 

[Douger]

My aren't we being the hypocrite today, don't you claim to earn a 6 figure income Chrissypoo? That would...uhhh make you a plutocrat you twit.

Oh. OK. Anyone who earn 6 figures is a plutocrat now eh ? My take on the households in the empire who are NOT earning six figures are probably feeling some pain here lately.
Once your masters ( Plutocrats)........ To be more precise they are The Plutarchy...........
jack the oil up, as planned, the cost of food and energy will skyrocket, as planned, and those earning under 6 figures will be at the New Poverty Level,as planned

plu·toc·ra·cy (pl-tkr-s)
n. pl. plu·toc·ra·cies
1. Government by the wealthy.
2. A wealthy class that controls a government.
3. A government or state in which the wealthy rule.

NO.

Certainly not everybody who is wealthy is remotely a PLUTOCRAT.

In order to be a plutocrat one must be enormously wealthy and also be involved in running the government -- either directely as in the cases of FDR or the BUSHes OR KENNEDYs, or by remote control as in the Koch Bros or Geroge Soros.

Of the 400 wealtiest people in the nation, I doubt collectively we can name 25 people. We all know a few names of a few billionaires, but for the most part?

The UBER-WEALTHY remain invisible by choice.

And if you think about it, if you were one of those fabulously wealthy people, you'd probably elect to stay sub rosa, too.

Nah. I could never get that wealthy. I'd head down to S.Amurka ( with an A)and build everybody a cool little house and greenhouses to grow stuff in.Get'em the fuck out of the cities.Take a hit team with me to deal with the fatcats.
At 6 grand per house, with Bill Gates money, that an assload of cool little houses.
Think about that. Do the math.That's just Gates. There's a shitload of these greedy motherfuckers on this prison planet.
I mean c'mon. 1 million is +/- rich.10 million is nicely rich. 100 mil is enormously rich. 1000 million = sociopathic greedy piece of shit.

 

[Ringel05]

Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

It doesn't take a multivariate correlation to conclude that these two things are tightly related: If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they've enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. And if you're not rich yourself, this is a problem. First and foremost, it's an economic problem because it's siphoned vast sums of money from the pockets of most Americans into those of the ultrawealthy. At the same time, relentless concentration of wealth and power among the rich is deeply corrosive in a democracy, and this makes it a profoundly political problem as well.

Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About | Mother Jones

Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

Interesting. How did Bartels qualify his research parameters? The study itself is an exercise in subjective rationalization not objective observation simply based on the subject matter which in and of itself is primarily subjective in nature unless all factors are taken into account.
By the way, I'm familiar with Bartels, lets just say he is anything but unbiased in his political views.

"I examine the differential responsiveness of U.S. senators to the preferences of wealthy, middle-class, and poor constituents. My analysis includes broad summary measures of senators’ voting behavior as well as specific votes on the minimum wage, civil rights, government spending, and abortion.

"In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call vote.

"Disparities in representation are especially pronounced for Republican senators, who were more than twice as responsive as Democratic senators to the ideological views of affluent constituents.

"These income-based disparities in representation appear to be unrelated to disparities in turnout and political knowledge and only weakly related to disparities in the extent of constituents’ contact with senators and their staff."

Bartels: Economic Inequality...

If US Senators were apportioned by income instead of geography and the richest 1% of Americans shared a single senator, would you expect subjective or objective rationalizations from the Koch brothers?

Your quote shows he quantified based on limited dimensions of datum which constitutes a fallacy when conducting these kinds of "studies". Hence you just proved my point by using his own words, i.e he did not completely qualify his parameters, they're subjective, not objective.

 

[mudwhistle]

These charts are over three years old. Also it doesn't allow for inflation. I'd like to see how the last 3 years have gone.

 

[mudwhistle]

The great unmentioned reality in this is that Reagan and the two Bushes lowered taxes for the rich and created a huge National Debt.

This act effectively transferred $11 trillion dollars from middle class taxpayers to the wealthy.

It is the greatest redistribution of wealth in human history.

Gee, Didn't Obama just do the same thing? Lowered taxes for the rich and create even bigger deficits?

Are you really that stupid? No need to answer, as we all know the answer is yes.

Seems the only people that Obama has hurt is the Middle Class.

The rich are making more then ever before and taxes are still going up, but it seems only for consumers.

 

[Chris]

The great unmentioned reality in this is that Reagan and the two Bushes lowered taxes for the rich and created a huge National Debt.

This act effectively transferred $11 trillion dollars from middle class taxpayers to the wealthy.

It is the greatest redistribution of wealth in human history.

Gee, Didn't Obama just do the same thing? Lowered taxes for the rich and create even bigger deficits?

Are you really that stupid? No need to answer, as we all know the answer is yes.

Seems the only people that Obama has hurt is the Middle Class.

The rich are making more then ever before and taxes are still going up, but it seems only for consumers.

Obama has not hurt the middle class.

But Reagan and the Bushes did.

 

[georgephillip]

Given his mandate for change, Obama hasn't helped the middle class nearly as much as he could have.

If it's true that the richest 1% of Americans have increased their share of national wealth by nearly 2% over the last two years, some of that shame falls on Obama.

It is almost impossible for me to imagine ANY Democrat OR Republican running for office in 2012 who's worthy of a vote from any American earning less than $1million/year.

 

[G.T.]

If the CEO's are doing so much better than ever before, and Obama's coddling to their tax breaks, Reaganites, why aren't they HIRING?

 

[editec]

Given his mandate for change, Obama hasn't helped the middle class nearly as much as he could have.

If it's true that the richest 1% of Americans have increased their share of national wealth by nearly 2% over the last two years, some of that shame falls on Obama.

It is almost impossible for me to imagine ANY Democrat OR Republican running for office in 2012 who's worthy of a vote from any American earning less than $1million/year.

Yeah here's the thing, GP.

There are dems (maybe even Rs) who I'd trust to be POTUS.

But they cannot do much unless CONGRESS is with them.

What we do not have is the CRITICAL MASS of HONEST POLS it takes to run a just society.

It isn't like every pol is a crook...just WAY too many.

 

[georgephillip]

And every freshman member of congress is immediately initiated into the corruption process by fund-raising. Members of the House are raising money for their next campaign almost before they swear their first oath to uphold the Constitution.

Critical mass COULD be achieved if enough voters from Maine to Maui, with established third party candidates already appearing on their ballot, simply voted against EVERY congressional incumbent running in 2012.

I suspect Republicans will be even less likely than Democrats to actually pull this trigger; however, if 100 Democrats are FLUSHED in 2012 and replaced by 90+ Greens and other progressives, ... well, I'm not exactly sure what happens next.

FLUSHING is a political leap of faith.

But continuing to "choose" between Democrat OR Republican only makes Wall Street and the Pentagon stronger. The only other thing voting for either major party accomplishes is reproving Einstein's Theory of Insanity.

Republicans, Democrats and Wall Street have outlived their usefulness to America.

Pick off the low-hanging fruit in November 2012.

 

[Wry Catcher]

I'm afraid the rulling in Citizens United v. FEC has exacerbated the political process beyond repair. If and only if a firewall can be created to keep money out of the political process our destiny is assured. Mr. Benjamin Franklin cautioned we were given a Republic and sadly was prophetic when he suggested "if you can keep it".
Our Republic exists in name only, every member of congress is influenced by their need to raise money, lots and lots of it. Most of the money comes with strings attached; no demands need to be made nor words exchanged, simply do what's best for the donor, or next years donation will go to someone else.

 

[georgephillip]

And since the quid pro quo exists on an unspoken level, it doesn't officially exist according to most corporate pundits.

Wall Street wins regardless of which corporate party wins the most votes.

 

[Chris]

I'm afraid the rulling in Citizens United v. FEC has exacerbated the political process beyond repair. If and only if a firewall can be created to keep money out of the political process our destiny is assured. Mr. Benjamin Franklin cautioned we were given a Republic and sadly was prophetic when he suggested "if you can keep it".
Our Republic exists in name only, every member of congress is influenced by their need to raise money, lots and lots of it. Most of the money comes with strings attached; no demands need to be made nor words exchanged, simply do what's best for the donor, or next years donation will go to someone else.

I hear you, and I had the same thought myself.

But the makeup of the Supreme Court will change one day, and perhaps we can take our country back.

In the meantime, we need to vote with our feet, and stop giving money to people who do evil.

 

[kiwiman127]

Worth posting once again, the echo chamber's efforts to 'censor' anything which challenges the dogma of the far right inteferred with others considering one aspect of Reaganomics.

So it's not that you don't have enough to be comfortable, it's that someone else has more?

Envy is a very bad basis for policy, and income redistribution by its very nature means those less fortunate get to benefit from the hard work of those more fortunate. Guess where your taxpayer funded pension puts you?

Yeah, great point if it was true,,but it isn't.

REAL WAGES
1964-2004
Average Weekly Earnings (in 1982 constant dollars)
For all private nonfarm workers
Year Real $ Change
1964 302.52
1965 310.46 2.62%
1966 312.83 0.76%
1967 311.30 -0.49%
1968 315.37 1.31%
1969 316.93 0.49%
1970 312.94 -1.26%
1971 318.05 1.63%
1972 331.59 4.26%
1973 331.39 -0.06%
1974 314.94 -4.96%
1975 305.16 -3.11%
1976 309.61 1.46%
1977 310.99 0.45%
1978 310.41 -0.19%
1979 298.87 -3.72%
1980 281.27 -5.89%
1981 277.35 -1.39%
1982 272.74 -1.66%
1983 277.50 1.75%
1984 279.22 0.62%
1985 276.23 -1.07%
1986 276.11 -0.04%
1987 272.88 -1.17%
1988 270.32 -0.94%
1989 267.27 -1.13%
1990 262.43 -1.81%
1991 258.34 -1.56%
1992 257.95 -0.15%
1993 258.12 0.07%
1994 259.97 0.72%
1995 258.43 -0.59%
1996 259.58 0.44%
1997 265.22 2.17%
1998 271.87 2.51%
1999 274.64 1.02%
2000 275.62 0.36%
2001 275.38 -0.09%
2002 278.91 1.28%
2003 279.94 0.37%
2004 277.57 -0.84%


Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Look how the hard working working class progressed and benefited from record worker productivity. Yes, they should be happy they have jobs, right?

It amazes me. Many facts have been posted on this subject within various threads and the folks who are in denial about wealth redistribution upwards keep in singing the same ole tune. "If you work hard you'll be rewarded", yet facts don't back them up one bit. But have no fear, they'll just keep on singing the same tune because their masters told them to do so.

 

[georgephillip]

I'm afraid the rulling in Citizens United v. FEC has exacerbated the political process beyond repair. If and only if a firewall can be created to keep money out of the political process our destiny is assured. Mr. Benjamin Franklin cautioned we were given a Republic and sadly was prophetic when he suggested "if you can keep it".
Our Republic exists in name only, every member of congress is influenced by their need to raise money, lots and lots of it. Most of the money comes with strings attached; no demands need to be made nor words exchanged, simply do what's best for the donor, or next years donation will go to someone else.

I hear you, and I had the same thought myself.

But the makeup of the Supreme Court will change one day, and perhaps we can take our country back.

In the meantime, we need to vote with our feet, and stop giving money to people who do evil.

Consumer boycotts, national strike and public banking need to be taken far more seriously, IMHO. That would mean targeting elites from Wall Street to Hollywood where it hurts them most, i.e., in their overinflated bank accounts and sense of self-worth.

SCOTUS came under corporate control before anyone reading these words was born. I can't imagine that changing if we continue sending Republicans OR Democrats to DC.