One guy headstomps her while another one holds her down. Wanna-be stormtroopers without the guts to take on someone who can fight back. Find out their names, and publish them, so that they can be held up as the gutless wonders they are.
Update: The curb stomping coward turns out to be Tim Profitt who appears to be Rand Paul’s Burbon Country coordinator. Charges have been laid, and an arrest warrant issued. The guy who held her down while she was head stomped appears to have been Mike Pezzano. As far as I am aware he has not been charged with battery yet.
Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold…
…The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.
The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!
You read that right. In the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. And even though their numbers shrank by 43 percent, this group’s total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, accounting for 0.6 percent of all pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.
They’re cashing out as fast as they can.
Go read the entire thing.
I like my commenters and readers. There’s virtually no one who comments here regularly I don’t think I’d like in person. I have continued blogging out of a sense of obligation to people who have read me for years. I would personally greatly appreciate it if folks would stop the personal attacks. If necessary I will start deleting comments or shutting down comment threads. But I really want to avoid the irritation, both to you and me, of either mandatory registration or author approval comments, or a combination of both.
And I don’t think there’s any commenter here who can’t look at what they write and know themselves if it’s a personal attack or trolling.
Not everyone here likes each other, not everyone here agrees with each other and that’s fine: we discuss important issues and people should be passionate. When that passion starts driving people away, when it starts turning personal amongst people who are basically on the same side, it becomes a problem. So, please, if you disagree with another commenter, by all means say so politely, but no more personal attacks. As for trolling, you know it when you see it, please refrain.
Oh, and if your comment doesn’t show up, it’s almost certainly due to the automatic spam filter, not due to anything manual. At this point I haven’t manually added anyone to the spam filter. I often am offline or don’t check the spam filter for some time, so don’t take it personally. You can contact me at admin-at-ianwelsh-dot-net if you think you’re caught in the spam filter. Again, I may not see your email for some time depending on what’s going on in my life, so if you don’t get an immediate reply, it’s almost certainly not that I’m deliberately ignoring you.
2010 – Republicans take control of the House. The Senate remains in Democratic hands, but the margin is reduced.
2011 – Bush’s tax cuts are extended. Social Security is slashed. This is done at Obama’s behest, so that Dems get blamed for it.
2012 – The Republicans take the Senate (this is virtually guaranteed, 2012’s geography is awful for Dems). They retain the House. They probably take the Presidency.
2013 – in charge of the judiciary, Congress and the Presidency, and with hard right crazies as a substantial caucus, the Republicans finally repeal the new deal. SS is turned into privatized accounts (older folks will keep most of what they have), Medicare is slashed going forward, regulatory agencies like the EPA are cut to the bone, education is turned over to the private sector as the Feds withdraw virtually all support for public schools and move to a voucher system. A new bubble (the last one) is inflated at all costs by Bernanke. Massive slashing of the federal civil service occurs, programs which are not slashed are transferred down to the States, where corruption is easier.
2014 – President Teabag starts a war somewhere to keep pump up the military Keynesianism. Said war is used as an excuse to even further curtail civil liberties.
If the Republicans don’t win the presidency in 2012, no big deal, they’ll still control Congress and the Supremes, and they’ll get him in in 2016. Obama will do much of what they want anyway, and get the blame.)
In news you may not have heard, the French have been protesting a bill to raise the retirement age in France from 60 to 62. And by protesting, I don’t mean just showing up for one day. Sarkozy has struck back:
Clashes have broken out outside a major oil refinery in France after riot police moved in to clear strikers who blockaded the terminal for 10 days.
Two people were hurt outside the Grandpuits refinery east of Paris, one of 12 facilities affected by strikes.
President Nicolas Sarkozy ordered the authorities to lift the blockade earlier this week after thousands of petrol stations across France ran dry.
The Senate will vote later on the pension reform that sparked the action.
Ministers said the bill would clear its last major hurdle in a matter of hours, after the Senate was asked to halt debate on hundreds of opposition amendments and hold a single vote on all of them.
Changes to the retirement and pension age could become law next week, once they pass the committee stage and a final vote is held in both houses of parliament.
Notice something here: the protesters are doing economically damaging things. They aren’t just showing up in the mall, waving some flags, making some speeches and wandering off.
Notice also, that Sarkozy is still going to pass his bill.
The key point will be whether the opposition keeps up the pressure. AFTER the bill passes, they must continue rolling strikes and occupations until the elite gives in.
RULE #1 Of Post-Modern Elite Thinking: Elites think in terms of costs. If the cost of something is less than the benefit of doing it, assuming the return is also high enough they will almost certainly do it.
The strikes and shutdowns are a COST. The benefit of raising the pension age is that it pays for bailouts, bonuses and high salaries for the elites (since it helps pay to continue the financial casino.) Unless the cost is clearly going to be higher than the gain, they will do it. The strikes and other actions must continue until the elites who run Sarkozy realize the cost is higher than the benefit to them. Or, of course, they can be made to fear something more existential. It may be time for a new French Republic, for example, which takes power out of their hands entirely and bankrupts them by forcing them to pay back all their ill-gotten gains.
At this point in time, France is the only nation in the first world where there is meaningful resistance to the rush of Austerity (aka. Hooverism) and the attempt by elites to permanently break the power and wealth of the middle and working class.
Pray for France. Because if they fall, no one is even trying, and if they fall the elites will know they can take anything away from any first world’s nation’s population.
It’s quite noticeable that the conservative rich massively outspend their more liberal brethren when it comes to influencing politics. I’ve seen estimates as high as a 9/1 difference in outside spending for Republicans vs. Democrats. Part of this is because Obama isn’t a liberal (and so, Soros, for example, is refusing to help this election) but this is an issue that transcends elections. Conservative rich like the Koch have spent billions building conservative institutions and message machinery (Fox, Heritage, talk radio, much much more).
The argument I have heard is that liberal rich should be concerned, because they may lose the rule of law. The rich use law much more than the poor or middle class, or even the upper class. They sue all the time, their corporations are creatures of law, and so on. so they should want to maintain the rule of law. What benefits everyone, benefits them too.
All true, except that they don’t think they’re losing the rule of law. They think that the law will protect their interests, and not those of others.
Since that is already mostly their experience (the law is a bludgeon for them rather than against them more often than not, in part because only they can really afford to use it to its full extent) they don’t see any reason why they can’t tilt the field even further.
In terms of equitable law (including legislation) benefiting everyone: yes and no. The era of lessened responsibility and of legislative and judicial capture has made them filthy rich. Arguably they would have been as rich or nearly as rich in a functioning society which produced more equitable incomes and better GDP growth because demand wouldn’t have been strangled (income for the rich rose just fine during the 45 to 75 period) BUT in relative terms they wouldn’t be as rich or powerful, because other people would be richer. Comparative power is what it’s about. If America becomes a third world country and the rich live in massive compounds, flying from one to the other (like they, er, do now) and the courts rule in their favor and the legislatures write bills for thm what is the negative? It’s only a real problem if they lose control, or the lower orders become uppity enough to go all Bastille day on them, which they don’t think Americans will do.
I’m not saying they’re necessarily right, but this is the way they think.
It is not clear to me that liberal rich see nearly as much benefit to them personally. They half buy the conservative argument, because that is their lived experience–they don’t have to deal with ordinary people, they don’t fly on the same planes, they don’t take the subway or buses or even ordinary taxis most of the time, they live in a bubble in which the problems of normal people effect them only remotely. They have hotels rooms or whole hotels which cost so much you and I will never enter them (we don’t even know their names, by and large) with private garages to private elevators to private lobbies to private rooms, from which they are conveyed in helicopters or limousines to private jets. They never see someone who isn’t part of their class or a servant or retainer. All this assuming they don’t have a private residence in every city they spend any significant amount of time in.
This is not an exaggeration. Most people have no idea how the rich really live.
They aren’t like us, there is a point where wealth becomes so huge that it lifts you out of ordinary existence and the global rich (including the American rich) are past that event horizon.
I notice that of the solutions suggested, raising taxes on the rich isn’t one of them. Truly, such a thing is unthinkable: far more unthinkable than poor people dying because they don’t have medication.
Interesting set of priorities.
I also strongly suspect that the savings will be less than the government thinks, since without medication many folks will wind up in the hospital.
Just sayin’.
Seriously, when the Administration says they oppose a countrywide freeze on foreclosures only weeks before the election, it’s hard to interpret their statements any other way.
I’m guessing the calculation is that Obama’s squeeze of entitlement spending for the middle class is more likely to pass if there are more Republicans in Congress. (ie. they are completely corrupt and utterly in the pocket of bankers who are giving more money to Republicans.)
Or they could be complete and utter morons with an out of control drug habit. I mean anyone who says, like Axelrod did, that ““I’m hoping that with more seats, Republicans will feel a greater sense of responsibility to work WITH us” is clearly not just in denial, he is as Peter Dauo said, hallucinating.
