Can you spot the real Mayor Bloomberg?
Tonight and tomorrow morning are going to be pivotal points in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Mayor Bloomberg has announced that his storm troopers will begin evicting protesters from Zuccotti Park at 7 a.m. for “cleaning”—when they are through, demonstrators will not be allowed to take anything back inside except for the clothes on their backs.
I fully expect to be writing about mass arrests and rampant police brutality tomorrow; I also expect that this latest tactic will only lead to further public outrage and support for the 99%.
On October 15, in 868 cities in 71 countries (so far), members of the 99% will take to the streets in earnest. Next month, thousands of people will close their accounts with all major banks and take their business to local credit unions. For more information, go to http://15october.net/.
Herman Cain: "Tax the poor!"
Herman Cain, who has called the OWS protesters “un-American,” is still trying to hoist his 9-9-9 plan on the public. He says that its simplicity appeals to voters because those poor bastards are too dumb to understand anything else … which might be true, because not too many people seem to realize that this plan will do nothing more than lower taxes on the wealthy and raise taxes for everyone else.
Bruce Bartlett, a senior official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, described the plan as a “distributional monstrosity.”
“The poor would pay more while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that economic growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase,” Bartlett recently wrote in the New York Times. “Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain’s tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill conceived.”
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According to MSNBC: “The reason the plan would hit poor people much harder than the wealthy is also simple. The current tax code provides a series of deductions, credits and exemptions that ease the tax burden on all households, but they have a greater positive impact on those at the bottom of the income ladder. As a result, some 38 percent of U.S. households pay little or no income taxes. They would now suddenly be hit with what amounts to a tax bill that represents 27 percent of their income, according to USC law professor Edward Kleinbard, who published a paper this week calling the 9-9-9 plan ‘a terrific example of fiscal hocus pocus.’”
“It is presented as a low-tax panacea, but it actually would raise the tax bills of many Americans very substantially,” he said.
All of which just goes to show you that Republicans, for all of their blustering and bullshit about not raising taxes, don’t give a tinker’s damn as long as it doesn’t affect the top 1%.
You know, all of these fiendish cons—like the one that just about destroyed the world economy in 2008—are made possible by people’s stupidity and complacency. Just now, A woman started blathering at me about the Occupy protesters in Minneapolis—she has no idea who they are or why they’re there. I tried to explain it to her and she looked at me with absolutely no comprehension whatsoever. When I tried to outline some basic concepts like investment banking, compound interest, bubble economics, and the like, she thought I was criticizing the tellers down at TCF. I mentioned the global financial crash of 2008 and she didn’t even know what I was talking about.
Click here to watch "Inside Job" online for free
Jesus God. This country is full of fat, stupid dullards who couldn’t name the vice president—but they sure could tell you who the front-runner on American Idol is.
Meanwhile, John McCain is huffing and puffing about the mandatory defense cuts that are sure to come when the supercommittee fails to reach a compromise next month. He has vowed to fight for the integrity of our war machine; however, he is unconcerned about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all of those other bullshit social programs that poor people take advantage of.
Fuck this. I can’t stand to read even one more of these depressing, asinine stories …
… but before I go, here’s one last thing: if you haven’t already, please see the 2011 documentary, Inside Job. This film quite plainly explains the financial disaster of 2008, what led up to it, and who the culprits were (are). You can view it online for free here. Perhaps if that woman had seen this film, she’d understand—but I doubt it.
Here’s your wisdom:
