I love the social network debates. My favorite topic recently has been Big Business‘ attempt to take over our government in this years $4 billion election. As such, their favorite political party, the Republicans, have really ratcheted up the rhetoric. And Big Business has been sure to reward them.
Big Money in our elections is a bfd (Big Fucking Deal). To quote Citigroup, the only thing that stand in the way of a “new economic nobility” and a “plutocracy” is “one person, one vote.”
Besides sponsoring candidates and think tanks, besides giving money to violence-baiting sycophants, the most conservative billionaires (from around the world) also sponsor convenient misconceptions of history. Here’s a wonderful list, for example, from Perrspectives on 10 Republican lies about the Bush tax cuts.
It would be easy to point to the high unemployment rate and slowed GDP for elitist favoritism of the Republican and Right Wing political platforms. But that’s not it. In fact, quite a few assholes on Wall Street are very excited about the high unemployment rate as it allows them to cut employee wages. As for our GDP, we are a 70% consumer economy, with quite too much of the rest coming from the financial and real estate sector (both of which tanked late in the Bush Administration). When our credit and our shopping-addiction and our speculative markets dried up, so did the retarding, uneconomic economies. When you consider how little innovation and production is actually done in our country, you should actually be stunned that our GDP is growing at all.
- Lie #1: Democrats Plan Across the Board Tax Hikes on January 1st
- Lie #2: Democrats Want a $3.8 Trillion Tax Increase
- Lie #3: Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves
- Lie #4: The Bush Tax Cuts Didn’t Add to the Deficit
- Lie #5: Expiring High Income Tax Cuts Will Hurt Small Business
- Lie #6: The Estate Tax Devastates Small Businesses and Family Farms
- Lie #7: The Bush Tax Cuts Helped All Americans
- Lie #8. Extending Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy is the Best Way to Stimulate the Economy
- Lie #9. Bush Tax Cuts Produced 52 Straight Months of Job Growth
- Lie #10: The Rich Pay Too Much in Taxes Already
Big Business is doing VERY WELL right now. Don’t be fooled. JP Morgan for example, reported $4.4 billion third quarter profit. In fact, pay on wall street will be the highest ever FOR THE SECOND STRAIGHT YEAR AT $144 billion. Furthermore, this record growth even outpaces the finance sectors growth in revenue.
Big Business is spending billions of dollars on this election specifically because they are making so much money. They’ve managed to slow down the federal executive branch by having their Republican henchmen slow down both the legislative and approval process. But the line can’t hold forever. Sponsoring the Tea Party, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, the Chamber of Commerce, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the New York Post, the Washington Times, Fox News, Fox Business News, the Pittsburgh Tribune… these things cost money. And now they need the government to go back into the hands of the Republicans, who will allow them to withdraw their money from their investments free of any capital gains taxes.
Capital Gains Taxes are extremely important for a shared wealth pool (i.e. a tax system). Some rich people do little for their riches and simply collect the profits from previous investments. Since no portion of this is returned through payroll or income taxes, the Capital Gains Tax allows the government to tax a richer every time he/she cashes out of a major investment (thus giving the tax-payer some money back for his investment in the roads, the internet, the satelites, the law, the justice system, the plumbing, the subsidies, the education system and the security).
Rich useless folks, who basically just sit around a)collecting unearned money and b)figuring out how to collect more un-earned money, really loved it when the Neo-Conservatives slashed the Capital Gains Tax. They absolutely hated the fact that Obama re-introduced such taxes on our country’s wealthiest elite, despite the fact that the American Populace, as a whole, was paying it’s lowest tax rate since the 1950′s.
So the billionaires pay their Republican henchmen to make things up, like Obama will take your guns–which isn’t true. Heck they’ll even spend on the most corporatist Democrats out of desperate greed more than anything.
But there is only one true issue for these conservative elites–money. Power is a way to Money. Money is a way to Power. The Tao of Koch?
Fuck Feudalism,
–Reverend Manny (of the Human Village)
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