04.14.14
Same as it ever was
From PaulKrugzilla, over the weekend:
“[The] concentration of wealth at the very top — the 0.1% — is fully back to Gilded Age levels … [and] a lot of wealth at the top is held in offshore tax havens …At the commanding heights of the US economy, hiding a lot of one’s wealth offshore is probably the norm, not the exception.”
Three years since the news of GE paying zero and the “Taxavoidination” jingle.
And what’s changed? Not a thing. That would be socialism!
Ha-ha-ha-ha! Offshore! No tax, to the max.
Ted Jr. said,
April 14, 2014 at 11:37 am
Yes, I think we’ve all been suckered by the capitalism rhetoric. It seems to be the most inefficient system ever to be used as a societal construct. The difference between modern capitalism and ancient Rome is that the Romans kept slaves and the capitalists pay slave wages.
Bread and circuses anyone? EBT cards and MSM anyone?
Plus ca change.
George Smith said,
April 18, 2014 at 11:59 am
Speaking of which I read this bit from PBS ‘Business’ section yesterday. Going in, understand the guy that calls the business ed shots here, Paul Solman, is someone whose belief system in the economy has been all blown to hell by the living proof that Keynsian thought and modeling on what he have now still works and had been perfectly descriptive of the economic crisis.
So, fundamentally, he’s an asshole American libertarian. And so PBS digs up David Graeber, an Occupy activist who has this to say:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/why-americas-favorite-anarchist-thinks-most-american-workers-are-slaves/
And it almost sounds reasonable for a moment. Only almost, though.
The first graph, an editor’s note, includes the name Charles Murray. Murray is a quack sociologist/writer very popular on the hard right because he’s written books about how not-white people don’t work hard enough and have inferior culture and family values and that this is the result of their poverty. Recently he came up with the idea of a universal credit, pinched from the Tories in the UK, so that the welfare bureaucracy could be dismantled. It was quickly adopted by our favorite, Paul Ryan, which I’ve spoken of earlier. And the reason they love it is because it puts all social welfare programs in one package, which can be slashed with one stroke.
The first graph also mentions a payment of $11,000 a year, completely laughable in many parts of America. Here in SoCal, that doesn’t even cover a year of rent, let alone food, clothing, electricity, water, gas and, optionally, a car, which is very hard but not impossible to get along without.
So in the very first paragraph, the PBS editor has injected a white supremacist (he has a file at the Southern Poverty Law Center) …
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/04/thanks-kochs-pbs-infested-white
and a base universal payment that doesn’t cover the cost of basic living in the country, just so everything else can be thrown out for a hard right every man for himself libertarian paradise.
Honestly, I have no idea why David Graeber, advertised as an Occupy activist, got twisted up in this since Occupy was one of the arch enemies of the tribe of hard right libertarian/GOP/Tea Party/Kochs.
But the conversation goes from bad to ludicrous, almost drug addled, by the end.
Hayek gets mentioned, another libertarian touchstone. Then there’s the idea thrown out that Brit music went to pot when the the art student dole was thrown out for workfare. The word “parasites” is referred to twice. There are always some people who will want to be parasites, we must always be informed.
“Parasites” needs a definition. Everyone who isn’t wealthy. Or everyone working a job that still needs social assistance to survive. Or everyone who get social assistance and still can’t survive. The dead have stopped being parasites.