One of the reasons why Mitt Romney has always been the favorite to win the Republican nomination is because he is the oligarchy’s choice, with close ties to all the major banks. He has obtained [Read more…]
Joe Nocera, business correspondent for the New York Times, has been on a tear recently, blasting the National Collegiate Athletic Association for being petty and tyrannical in ways that harm individual students, even as major colleges have used sports and their athletes as money makers.
He says that the people who tend [Read more…]
A quite extraordinary thing has happened in American, and even world, politics. It used to be the case that great wealth and income inequality were topics that were not mentioned in mainstream discourse and to suggest that this was not healthy for a democracy was to be accused of being envious or creating class warfare or attacking capitalism itself.
But how things have changed. Now the vast disparity in income and wealth between the top 1% and the remaining 99% is front and center. The gulf between the former and the latter is a major topic of discussion in [Read more…]
The candidate for US Senate from Massachusetts seems to have passion and a willingness to take on the big financial interests that are working against the poor and the middle class. While the US Senate has become a largely ineffective body, she may still be able to use it as a platform to articulate a point of view that is currently with little voice in Congress.
Of course, I have been disillusioned before by many candidates who [Read more…]
Large gifts given to others are taxable. There are some loopholes. For example, a parent can give up to $10,000 per year to a child without incurring gift taxes. But if you have income that can be classified as ‘carried interest’, then you can give huge gifts to your children without incurring any tax whatsoever.
Romney’s tax returns reveal that he gave $100 million to his children using this loophole, that is available only to the wealthy whose income is from investments.
Thanks to reader Henry, I learned about this article by James Surowiecki in the New Yorker that explains how private equity firms like Bain Capital (where Romney made his fortune) make their money. It is not pretty.
Private equity firms use a small amount of their own money and [Read more…]
One reason that politicians and other officials can avoid addressing hard questions at press conferences is because each journalist is usually given the chance to ask just one question. The politician can answer evasively or dismissively and [Read more…]
Mitt Romney is not a good public speaker. I find it painful to listen to him. Even a short clip of his speeches reveals someone who seems uncomfortable in that role because he lacks the ability to make his points clearly. What has got him so far is money and preparation plus the backing of the party establishment, the media, and the oligarchy, coupled with his willingness to say anything to pander to his audience. This is what makes so puzzling his repeated stumbles on the question of his own taxes, a topic that he must surely have known was coming. His performance on this issue is weirdly awkward for someone who prides himself on his careful preparation.
There seems to be increasing intrusiveness in the political process resulting in the current expectation that candidates for major office [Read more…]
Tyler Durden has posted a quiz in which he lists the major contributors to the main contenders for the presidency in recent years and asks you to try and identify the candidate.
It is not easy, but the exercise reveals how the oligarchy covers its bets to make sure that whoever wins the presidency, that person is safely in their pockets.
Jon Stewart of The Daily Show looks at the working conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese mega-factory which manufactures so many of the electronic products that we use. The working conditions are so appalling that the company has to take suicide-prevention measures, all so that we can save about 25% on the prices of these gadgets.
There is no doubt that the US oligarchy would love to see American workers in the same situation, as can be seen by their union-busting efforts. Some of us may ridicule Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that we should replace each union janitorial job with 30 child laborers, but bear in mind that this is how the oligarchy thinks, that their goal is to maximize profits and their ideal of ‘efficiency’ is to drive wages down as low as they can go.