Obama's Payroll Tax Break-- Right In The Crappy Middle

Wall Street, cognizant of the damage George W. Bush and the Republicans had done to the economy, gave obscene amounts to help elect Barack Obama in 2008. Despite giving Wall Street pretty much everything they could have wanted-- starting with one of their own, Timothy Geithner, as Secretary of the Treasury-- Wall Street has abandoned Obama for the even more compliant Willard "Mitt" Romney. "It's not healthy for rich people to feel maligned," said one ex-Obama supporter who is now donating to Romney. They may not have anything to cry about in regard to Obama's policies, which certainly favor the rich, but they don't like how he "maligns" them rhetorically.



That's the thanks Obama gets for extending the Bush taxcuts for the rich cocksuckers! But now Obama wants to extend a payroll tax cut for wage-earners, a tax break for the middle class. Republicans only favor tax cuts from their rich supporters, not for ordinary Americans. They want to raise taxes on working people.

“We should extend the payroll tax cut as soon as possible, so that workers have more money in their paychecks next year and businesses have more customers next year,” Obama said at the White House on Monday.



The president wants the tax cut extended along with unemployment insurance benefits, and has warned that if Congress fails to do so, “it could mean 1 million fewer jobs and half a percent less growth.”



The administration says the two-percentage-point reduction in the payroll tax put in place for 2011 has cut tax bills by about $1,000.

Right-wing corporate shills Dave Camp (R-MI) and Paul Ryan (R-WI), respectively chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Budget Committee have come out against it. "I'm not in favor of that. I don't think that's a good idea,” said Camp. "We need a more overarching approach to our tax policy. Ryan was even more of a hypocrite, dismissing the proposed payroll tax cut as “sugar-high economics.” And Jeb Hensarling, a senior far right shill on the House Financial Services Committee (and on the new SuperCommittee) also came out against it: "It's always a net positive to let taxpayers keep more of what they earn but not all tax relief is created equal for the purposes of helping to get the economy moving again." Hensarling, like Ryan and Camp, only agrees to tax relief for the wealthiest Americans, not for working stiffs.



Obsessed with preventing Obama from putting through any of his even mild remedies to fight unemployment, the Republican Party is apparently in full bore class warfare against American workers. What I don't ever "get" about Obama-- although it was well explained last week by Michael Tomasky in The Untransformational President-- is how his brand of civic republicanism always means giving away the store and avoiding a fight with his sworn enemies and, much worse, the sworn enemies of the American people, the domestic fascists and terrorists who run the Republican Party.



Everything always starts with a compromise with Obama. By scuttling single-payer or even a public option, he didn't win over any Republicans-- he just made the bill so bad that it will probably be overturned by the fascist-dominated Supreme Court. And this is the hallmark of everything he does! Now he hopes to rally progressives to help him fight for a flawed payroll tax cut. Andrew Fieldhouse explains what progressives should be fighting for instead:

A targeted, partially refundable tax rebate would be more effective than the current payroll tax cut that President Obama endorsed extending in his speech Monday night, a new Economic Policy Institute/The Century Foundation Issue Brief finds. In A bigger and better economic boost, Federal Budget Policy Analyst Andrew Fieldhouse explains that a modified version of the lump-sum tax rebates that were part of the 2008 Economic Stimulus Act (ESA) would cost the government roughly the same amount as the payroll tax cut but would generate more economic activity while doing more to alleviate poverty and help working families.



Enacted in December, the payroll tax cut reduced employees’ share of Social Security payroll taxes from 6.2% to 4.2%. The payroll tax cut replaced the Making Work Pay tax credit that had been implemented as part of the 2009 Recovery Act.



Because the payroll tax cut was not targeted to low- and middle-income workers-- the workers most likely to spend it-- it was not as effective in generating economic activity as a lump-sum tax rebate would have been. Multipliers developed by Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi suggest a refundable lump-sum tax rebate would result in roughly 12% more jobs created per dollar than the payroll tax cut.



Furthermore, the payroll tax cut actually increased taxes for all individuals making less than $20,000 annually. Tens of millions of the lowest-income workers had more disposable income under Making Work Pay than they did under the payroll tax cut.



Finally, the payroll tax cut exposed Social Security to greater political risk by reducing payroll tax receipts and making the program partially dependent on general revenue. Social Security is designed to have a dedicated funding source; a lump-sum tax rebate would leave this funding source intact.

Is Grover Norquist What's Wrong With America?

Few people outside of central Florida's 24nd congressional district have ever heard of Congresswoman Sandy Adams, a doctrinaire right-wing fanatic and member of the House Tea Party caucus. She's in Washington to vote against everything... except for more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. No list of the worst Members of Congress would be complete without her-- and last week, her constituents let her know they've been watching her dismal performance. Blue America's first endorsement for the 2012 cycle went to Nick Ruiz, a former Green Party candidate who joined the Democratic Party and is now mounting a serious progressive campaign against Adams. He wasn't at Adams' acrimonious town hall meeting in Port Orange Thursday night but he told us that her ideological extremism has been bad for the district.

"Our congressional district, like most of America, is made of hard-working people that need government to work for them. Most citizens are not responding favorably to ideologues like Sandy Adams because the Republican plans Sandy presents don't help most people. However, her plans fit real well for the upper 1% of Americans she seems to know so well. Our district rejects such a narrow prescription for America-- and I am glad to bring that voice to Capitol Hill in 2012."

Adams is like a zombie who endlessly repeats right-wing talking points. Rather than participating in discussions of problem solving with her constituents, she parrots mindless focus-group tested Boehnerisms like "I don't believe we have a tax problem. We have a spending problem" and peppers her pronouncements with charged anti-government, class warfare phrases straight from Fox and Limbaugh like "failed stimulus," "job-killing taxes," and "government takeover of health care." And she's far from alone. Her town hall meeting in Port Orange could have been basically anywhere in the country where a teabagger was elected last year. This week, the Washington Post took a look at how Democrats are striking back against the zombie-ism that has infected the Republicans in Washington. The Post story featured another mindless teabagger, this one from Illinois, Randy Hultgren. He tried vomiting out the same catch phrases Adams had. His constituents weren't amused.

“We have clear information that... tax cuts, especially to the super rich, has not increased any more jobs,” one man told him. “I want to know under what conditions you would be willing to consider increasing taxes, especially on those who can afford it?"



“I just have one question for you tonight,” said another. “Did you sign Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise taxes?”-- referring to the promise that has been signed by most congressional Republicans, including Hultgren.



“Don’t you have the confidence in your own ability in Congress to make up your own mind? You need Grover Norquist to tell you?” the man continued.



It is a scene that has been repeated at town hall meetings across the country this August as Democrats make a concerted effort to use this month’s congressional recess to change a national narrative on taxes.



For years, it has been Republicans who have wanted to talk about the issue, winning elections promising not to let government take more from voters.



But since the showdown over raising the debt ceiling, Democrats have been unusually eager to embrace tax increases, gambling that voters will see the Republican refusal to consider higher taxes for the wealthy as recalcitrant and out-of-touch.

Voters are starting to wake up to this everywhere in the country. A random letter to the editor yesterday in Spokane's Spokesman-Review:

Cathy McMorris Rodgers has proved that she is nothing more than a puppet dancing on strings. Those strings are being pulled by the leadership of the tea party. They include people like David and Charles Koch, oil billionaires who fund many of the radical right wing’s unscrupulous activities that allow them to accumulate more wealth.



They also include Grover Norquist, who through his signed pledges forces politicians into a corner and makes it impossible for them to vote in the best interest of the country as a whole or think on their own. (Norquist was also tied to the Jack Abramoff money laundering  scandal.)



Tim Phillips is also a tea party leader who years ago was paid $380,000 to “mobilize religious leaders and pro-family groups” to push energy deregulation in Congress that soon led to an energy crisis and economic meltdown. Sound familiar? Are these wealthy individuals the people you want your representative answering to? Do they identify with the majority of people in our district?



Cathy McMorris Rodgers, start doing the job you were elected to do. Represent the people of your district and not the wealthy elite.



John C. Eagle

Last week Warren Buffett's NY Times Op-Ed, Stop Coddling The Super-Rich served as a wake-up call to many who accepted the right-wing ideology being spouted by tools like Adams in Florida, Hultgren in Illinois and McMorris Rodgers in Washington. It sets up a debate between those who embrace Grover Norquist's goal of shrinking the government (and drowning it in a bathtub) and those who feel there is a robust and crucial role for government to play in balancing the immense power of wealth against the greater good of society.



Less than half a dozen Republicans in Congress have refused to sign Norquist's anti-government pledge. Norquist is basically a sleazy lobbyist, a crony of Jack Abramoff's who managed to get away without a prison sentence. He takes around a quarter million dollars a year from the Republican Party front group, Americans for Tax Reform, and also works as a free-lance lobbyist, pushing every sort of crooked operation near and dear to right-wing extremists' hearts, from stealing from American Indians to overthrowing foreign governments that put their people's interests before corporate interests. A notorious closet case-- and member of the board of the self-loathing anti-gay gay group, GOProud-- Norquist is one of the primary behind the scene's string pullers who has turned the Republican Party into a dysfunctional, treasonous mess that is threatening the social cohesion of the United States while worthless predators, like Norquist and his followers, enrich themselves.

Austerity: Class War Against Working People, An International Plague

Unless you think you'll be winning a lot of lotteries in the future, you're never going to be as rich as Warren Buffett. A significant number of Americans-- rational people in other countries don't think this way-- hold out hope that they will be the exception and that they want to be certain that tax rates on billionaires are low... just in case. Meanwhile, they could be making $40-50,000 a year and paying a higher effective tax rate than the billionaires they're protecting by voting for the billionaire protection racket known as the Republican Party. In yesterday's New York Times Buffett himself begged Americans-- and their representatives in Congress-- to stop coddling the super-rich. (You can watch Buffett discussing his editorial with Charlie Rose Monday night.)

Our leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.



While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.



These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.



Last year my federal tax bill-- the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf-- was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income-- and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.



If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine-- most likely by a lot.



...Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.



I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone-- not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77-- shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.



Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion-- a staggering $227.4 million on average-- but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.



The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)



I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.



Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.



Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.



But for those making more than $1 million-- there were 236,883 such households in 2009-- I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more-- there were 8,274 in 2009-- I would suggest an additional increase in rate.



My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

We've been watching with alarm what the Austerity approach has done to social cohesion in Greece and England. I expect it will be even worse in France and Italy, which the international banksters are forcing in that direction. Italy's largest labor union threatened a general strike yesterday, after Berlusconi hastily pushed through an Austerity plan demanded by World Plutocracy.

Critics say the package-- a mix of spending cuts, job cuts and tax increases, including a "solidarity tax" for high-earners-- will strangle Italy’s stagnant economy, which is now expected to grow by only about one per cent this year.



Other critics, including nine members of Berlusconi’s own coalition, say it unfairly targets the middle class and fails to tackle Italy’s massive tax evasion problem.



Susanna Camusso, leader of the CGIL labour union, criticized measures aimed at liberalizing Italy’s labour market and targeting its pension system, saying a strike is the only way to "change the inequity of this package." She told the La Repubblica newspaper that union officials will meet Aug. 23 to set a strike date and invited other unions to join.

I don't trust Labor's Ed Miliband to get it any more right in England than Obama has here in the U.S., but yesterday Miliband launched a flashy (for him) attack on Cameron's reactionary approach to the riots, calling it "shallow and simplistic." Take that, fascist dog!

Reiterating his call for a national inquiry into the causes of the violence, he said the country had a "deep need" to explain and understand what had happened, but that Cameron had responded with "gimmickry."



The Labour leader said nothing could excuse or justify the actions of the rioters and looters but that, unless the causes were understood properly, the violence could be repeated.



...Miliband said writing the riots off as "pure criminality" or simply blaming parents would not get to the root of the problem. In a direct attack on Cameron, he characterised the government's response as "kneejerk gimmicks," citing talk of water cannon, "supercops" and the "harassment" of gangs.



"A prime minister who used to say 'hug a hoodie' now says the answer is to reform our health and safety laws," he said.



"A crisis like this tells us something about our political leaders. Day by day, the prime minister has revealed himself to be reaching for shallow and superficial answers."



Miliband said individuals were responsible for their actions, questioning why some parents were failing to teach their children right from wrong, but added that everyone had a responsibility for the society we live in.



He also questioned whether an economy that dictates that some parents have to work up to 70-hour weeks, meaning they are largely absent from their children's lives, might have a role in family breakdown.



But he added: "Children's ideas of right and wrong don't just come from their parents. And we can't honestly say the greed, selfishness and gross irresponsibility that shocked us all so deeply is confined to the looters, or even to their parents.



"It's not the first time we've seen this kind of me first, take what you can culture. The bankers who took millions while destroying people's savings-- greedy, selfish and immoral. The MPs who fiddled their expenses-- greedy, selfish and immoral. The people who hacked phones to get stories to make money for themselves-- greedy, selfish and immoral.



"People who talk about the sick behaviour of those without power should talk equally about the sick behaviour of those with power.



"Let's not pretend that the crisis of values in our society is confined to a minority only at the bottom when we see the morality of millions of hardworking, decent people under siege from the top as well."



He said the last Labour government, as well as the coalition, had failed to address the issues of inequality in society, arguing that there is a culture of aspiration for success that is out of the reach of people at the bottom, creating frustration.

Republican Freeloaders

This week Boehner has been raising campaign money from wealthy backers on the links at super-posh Muirfield Village Country Club in the hope of keeping the GOP in control of the House. One of the perks is a golf ball the classy drunken Speaker, according to Politico, gave out to his cronies-- a golf ball with Nancy Pelosi's face on it. Meanwhile Wall Street's boy in Wisconsin, Paul Ryan, is urgently asking rightists to send him money so he can advertise... in Iowa. Ryan doesn't exactly need grassroots contributions since he's taken $2,416,997 in legalistic bribes from the Financial Sector, far more than any other politician in the history of Wisconsin. Ryan and Boehner have been desperately running around to every open mike either can find to insist that the S&P downgrade they forced the country into-- and which was cheered by their teabagger followers (and which resulted in the current stock market crash)-- wasn't their fault; it was Obama's fault! If Obama can be faulted in any way, it was for having too much patience with their nihilism, treason and willful, obvious agenda to destroy the American economy in the name of the 2012 campaign.

Ever since the credit rating agency S&P downgraded U.S. credit to AA+ on Friday night, Republicans have desperately trying to pin the blame on President Obama, even though, as National Journal put it, “it’s hard to read the S&P analysis as anything other than a blast at Republicans.” S&P called out the GOP for using the debt ceiling as a political football and for its flat refusal to consider new revenue as part of any plan to reduce long-term deficits.



Earlier this week Rep. Allen West (R-FL) claimed that the S&P downgrade “has nothing to do with increasing revenues,” while some Republicans have said that passing a Balanced Budget Amendment would have prevented the downgrade, both of which S&P disagreed with. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) yesterday jumped into the same pool, saying that the downgrade could have been avoided if only Democrats had embraced the House Republican budget and its plan to eliminate Medicare:



House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) blamed President Obama and the Democrats Tuesday for the recent downgrading of the U.S. credit rating, saying that if Democrats had joined with Republicans in passing the GOP budget, which the House passed in April, “it’s unlikely anyone would be talking about the United States being downgraded today.”

Both Boehner's and Ryan's states' citizens pay about the same in federal taxes as comes back to them from the federal government in terms of services and infrastructure. Yet both lead the Republican squawkbox against federal taxes that basically subsidize the freeloader Republican states, especially Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, West Virginia, the Dakotas, Louisiana, Alaska, and South Carolina. The state's the give far more than they get in return include Minnesota, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware... all blue states. PoliticalProf, who lives in Illinois, wants his money back:

Most people don’t understand that the federal government doesn’t really take taxes to put in a gilded room in DC to buy teak desks for Senators. Rather, much of the federal government’s operations are a pass through program, meaning taxes taken today are sent out to program beneficiaries today. Both Social Security and Medicare work this way, for example-- and that’s over 40% of the US budget.



As it happens, it is usually the case that the citizens living in a state do not receive the same amount in total benefits and other federal spending as they contribute. The citizens of some states—the ones in various shades of green in this map-- pay more in taxes than they receive. The ones in red receive more federal tax money than its citizens pay.



While the pattern is not perfect, a few things stand out here. First, many “conservative” states are in fact net tax recipients-- e.g., they get more than they pay. Many such states have lots of poverty, farms, military bases and retired persons, and such persons and programs get lots of federal tax support.



Another thing that stands out here is that, in general, the “rich”-- or net tax contributing-- states are those with the United States’ major cities: NY, California, Illinois, Texas, Georgia, etc. (The latter two are exceptions to the “conservative = welfare states point I made above.)

UPDATE



Turns out Boehner wasn't the one handing out the Nancy Pelosi golf balls. Politico reported the story wrong; it was some other right wing idiot.

Job Creation-- Or Another Opportunity To Give Our Tax Dollars To Wall Street Fascists Again?

Yesterday Politico published a scorching OpEd by neo-liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs isn't a one-dimensional drooling right-wing ideologue and, although his overall theme is anti-Keynsian claptrap, there is plenty in what he says that can't be denied.

Almost the entire country seems to agree that the debt deal is miserable. Yet the shouting does little to clear up what is really wrong with the deal and with the U.S. economy. Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats. But both parties are partners in America’s decline.

We need a new direction in the country, and that requires taking on the powerful interests represented by both political parties.

President Barack Obama has failed to lead the country out of crisis. This is not just because of right-wing opposition, but also because Obama has promoted the wrong ideas. He came to office following the end of a Wall-Street-fueled consumption binge that had started during the Clinton administration and collapsed in 2008.

...Obama surrounded himself with the Wall Street types who had deregulated the financial sector and thereby created the bubble economy under President Bill Clinton – Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Gene Sperling and many others.

What kind of economic policy can one expect when nearly every senior administration official on the economic team is tied to Wall Street? The answer is predictable: One that is unfair, shortsighted and loaded with gimmicks. Yet in our exhausted, post-binge economy, the gimmicks don’t even create a blip in jobs and growth, much less a sustained recovery.

...The Republican opposition is, of course, far nastier and its economics are even worse. The GOP holds that there is one and only one answer to every problem: lower taxes on the rich.

In the Republican ideology, the super-rich are the job-creators and therefore deserve all the money we can shove their way, even as tens of millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet. There is also the idea that the poor are unworthy-- for example, an illegal minority migrant household.

The Republicans forever prey on a divide-and-conquer mentality, which is indeed leaving our country divided and conquered by hate and fear.

Sachs may be feted as a great thinker of the 21st Century but Matt Taibbi is a far keener analyst of real life politics and how it interacts with real life economics. There's probably a lot they agree on but Taibbi's work is more informative, more practical and better suited to a non-academic real world. His latest column in Rolling Stone takes on the dreaded corporate tax holiday concept still being pushed-- vigorously-- by neo-liberal freaks on Wall Street and K Street and in the offices of Republicans and Blue Dogs. In fact corporate whores Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT) are co-sponsoring a bill, the Freedom to Invest Act, which would “temporarily” lower the effective corporate tax rate to 5.25 percent for all profits being repatriated to America from overseas profits.

Essentially, this is a one-time tax holiday rewarding companies for systematically offshoring their profits since 2004-- the last time they did this “one-time” deal.

The Brady bill is still alive and in speaking to three different Hill staffers (on the House side) over the last few days, I’m hearing that it was “unaffected” by the debt deal and that it continues to gain momentum, thanks in large part to a lobbying effort that two different staffers described as intense and ongoing.

For people interested in this story, I definitely recommend reading this Bloomberg article focusing on Cisco, one of the biggest lobbyers in favor of the tax holiday. This is a company whose CEO, John Chambers, wrote an editorial last October in the Wall Street Journal predicting that the tax holiday would generate a trillion dollars in repatriated earnings, money that Chambers insisted would outdo even Barack Obama’s stimulus as a job-creation engine:

"The amount of corporate cash that would come flooding into the country could be larger than the entire federal stimulus package, and it could be used for creating jobs, investing in research, building plants, purchasing equipment, and other uses."

And yet: Chambers’s company, Cisco, would not commit to creating so much as a single job if the tax holiday is passed. As it is, the company has already committed to a wave of layoffs. When asked a question about Cisco's plans w/regard to a potential tax holiday, the company’s spokesman, John Earhardt, declined to answer. From the Bloomberg piece:

"It’s unclear whether any jobs would come from Cisco, which announced plans in May to shed an unspecified number of workers. Earnhardt, the spokesman, declined to comment on hiring plans for the company, whose customers include Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and AT&T Inc. (T)

Matt with Olbermann this week:

Tax Breaks For Treason-- Big Ones

Farish II wasn't shot for treason, nor was Prescott Bush... and the spawn of both have gone on, together, fighting for fascism

During World War II corporate America wasn't sure if it wanted to take sides. Most of the ruling families were fascists and had long backed Hitler and Mussolini. And they loathed Roosevelt and loathed democracy. Many of them-- let's take Big Oil-- continued selling oil to the Nazis after the U.S. entered the war. None of the big names in American industry-- Mellons, DuPonts, Rockefellers, Morgans, Bushs, et all-- were ever punished for aiding and abetting while American soldiers were dying on the battlefields.

Sunday Digby reminded us that the American ruling class-- and not just the Republicans-- are up to no good again.

Republicans are not only looking to cut the corporate tax rate, but they have been pushing to open a permanent tax loophole by switching to what’s known as a “territorial” corporate tax system, which would mean that corporations could permanently park money offshore and never pay taxes on it. The Republicans have also endorsed a misguided push to give corporations a tax windfall worth tens of billions of dollars through a tax repatriation holiday.

It reminded me that I buried an important bit of information in a long and convoluted post ostensibly about Ratko Mladic on Saturday. It wasn't really about Mdadic. And the quote, from Glen Yeadon's Nazi Hydra in America was set in the context of corporate collaboration with fascism and the Republican Party's flirtation with the Nazis. Remember, no one was punished. Here's the key quote you need to keep in mind while debate rages about how much more to give these corporations in tax loopholes and giveaways:

On March 26, 1942, Senator Truman accused Standard Oil of treason. Standard had delivered the new tetraethyl lead gas additive to both Germany and Japan. Standard was the major supplier of oil to both the Nazis and Japan. In his appearance before the Senate committee, [William Stamps] Farish II, the president of Standard, was asked if Standard had delivered the oil to Japan that made the attack on Pearl Harbor possible. He answered that Standard Oil was an international company.

His grandson and great-grandson, also heirs to the rabidly fascist DuPont dynasty, went on continue working with the rabidly fascist Bush family. William Stamps Farish III (pictured above) is widely considered the worst and least effective U.S. Ambassador to Britain in history. The family continues to finance the Republican Party and other extreme right-wing groups to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire!

If you've been following our posts riffing off Glen Yeadon's The Nazi Hydra in America, you may have gotten the idea that I think every millionaire in the country should have been lined up against a wall and shot. That would be the wrong idea. I certainly feel economic predators and corporate Nazi collaborators should have been brought to justice and I have been outspoken about far too many millionaires-- with their unique perspective and interests-- in Congress and the media. But there are plenty of worthy, patriotic millionaires... as evidenced in the short clip above, marking today's 10 anniversary of the Bush tax cuts.

Their message-- "rich people are not the cause of a robust economy; they're the result of a robust economy"-- was very different from Tim Pawlenty's ballyhooed big economic speech that came out at the same time. Pawlenty thinks his path to the Republican vice-presidential nomination is by calling for draconian changes if not an end to Social Security and Medicare. In short, Pawlenty, like all the Republicans, is demanding

• A massive new tax cut for the wealthy

• A massive tax cut (more than 50% reduction in the rate) for corporations-- including Big Oil (He's also called the idea of ending subsidies "ludicrous")

• The elimination of the estate tax and taxes on capital gains and dividend income

• A balanced budget amendment and spending cap at 18% of GDP-- translation: severe cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and everything else except the Military-Industrial Complex

In his not-ready for prime time speech, Pawlenty said "There are some obvious targets to cut. We can start by applying what I call 'the Google test.' If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn't need to offer the same good or service. Eddie Vale of Protect Your Care scratched his head in wonder.

I can Google ‘seniors’ and ‘health care’ does that mean Pawlenty would completely end Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security? I can Google ‘veterans’ and ‘hospital’ does that mean Pawlenty would dismantle the VA system? I can Google ‘pharmacy’ does that mean no senior citizen or child would ever get assistance with their medicines from Pawlenty? These may seem like idiotically stupid questions, but, are necessary since Pawlenty is going to give a speech to demonstrate his qualifications to be leader of the free world by basing his policy agenda off what he can find on the internet.

“It’s also pretty sad and pathetic how quickly the regular blue collar guy veneer has fallen off as he rushes to cry crocodile tears over class warfare while taking away health care from seniors and kids to pay for tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires and big oil.

Author and labor attorney Jonathan Tasini marked the anniversary of the Bush tax cuts for millionaires by asking what we've learned from their utter failure to create jobs or improve the economy. Not much.

We seem to learn very little. Or, perhaps, it's better to say that our elected representatives seem to learn very little-- partly, albeit, because of the corruption of the electoral process that seems to force even those who have half a brain to automatically spew out the words "tax cuts" along with "economic recovery," "government regulations" and "small business" as if there was even a connection between any of those phrases to building a health economy.

Example: in 2009, the president proposed, and the Congress passed, a stimulus bill that was supposed to drag the economy out of the crisis sparked by the financial crimes on Wall Street. The problem: the stimulus was too small-- $787 billion-- and a third of the bill was...tax cuts!!! The most inefficient way to create jobs. And, IMHO, it's the reasons the stimulus did not have the impact it could have had.

So, now, the president and Democrats are caught in a real pickle: they face a disastrous jobs picture but they seem reluctant to push for new government stimulus because they feel on the defensive defending the 2009 "failed" stimulus. Well, that's what you get for believing in tax cuts as some economic miracle-producer ("failed" is in quotes because actually if you ask governors and mayors about the stimulus you would find a lot of them grateful for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that were saved thanks to the stimulus).

And we don't learn.

People run around wanting to cut taxes for "small businesses" and eliminate the estate tax--even though this is just a cover that, "would allow the rich to continue to enjoy most of the tax cuts they received under President Bush while doing nothing to create or protect jobs."

The "compromise" tax deal in 2010 tilted to the wealthy.

Then, there is the truly dumb idea of giving corporations yet another tax break by letting them bring back profits stashed overseas virtually for free.

And wrapped around all this craziness is the entire phony debate about a debt and deficit "crisis"--phony because the only crisis that exists is the lack of jobs in the country, a crisis brought on by a massive robbery of our nation's wealth, in large part, due to the obsession over giving ever-larger tax cuts to people who do not deserve to get them (and a decision by many of those same people to pay themselves obscene CEO salaries).

It goes on and on and on. A robbery that has gone on for thirty years shows no sign of abating.

Thirty years? Why leave out the 1920s and '30s, the years the last 30 were based on? They were the Big Business heyday hacks like Pawlenty and Romney want to get us back to.