The assault on democracy from the Koch's continues unabated ((Republican Nihilism)

In the spirit of Grover Norquist, or I should say in collusion with, Americans for [the Koch Brothers'] Prosperity are targeting the 40 or so GOP congressmen who are considering tax increases.

And there are Republican voters who think Republican congressmen will do the right thing

The conservative anti-tax group Americans for Prosperity is targeting 40 House Republicans who they believe could agree to a supercommittee deal that raises taxes. 

All 40 lawmakers have suggested a willingness to support tax hikes as part of a compromise by the supercommittee. The lawmakers include presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Pete King (R-N.Y.). 

Republican lawmakers on the supercommittee have put down a proposal that would raise at least $250 billion in new net tax revenues. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), supercommittee co-chairman, said Wednesday he could go further if Democrats offered more on entitlement spending cuts. 

Republicans appear divided on the issue of whether to include new tax revenues. If the supercommittee fails to get a deal, it would trigger cuts to national security spending that military leaders say would hit the Pentagon hard. 

Americans for Prosperity is encouraging voters in Florida and Virginia to voice their opposition to additional tax increases through telephone town-hall meetings on Wednesday. The group has also bought radio ads in a number of states targeting the legislators. 



 Link here, from The Hill

Verizon pays a negative income tax! Yay corporations! Starve the poor, feed the job creators!

Yet our right wing wishes to eliminate their tax. Heck, I'll settle for eliminating their subsidy

Verizon pays a negative federal income tax rate, then pursues more tax breaks

Citizens for Tax Justice has joined with Good Jobs First to follow up the recent report that found 30 Fortune 500 companies had paid a negative federal income tax rate over three years, looking at one of those companies in depth. From 2008 to 2010, Verizon paid an effective federal income tax rate of -2.9 percent; that meant that instead of the $11.4 billion the corporation would have paid at the statutory rate of 35 percent, "it got $951 million in rebates, putting its federal tax subsidies at $12.3 billion."

It wasn't just federal income taxes that Verizon dodged:

At the state level, Verizon should have paid about $2.3 billion in corporate income taxes during the period but it handed over only $866 million. Its aggregate state rate was only 2.6 percent, far below the weighted state average rate of 6.8 percent. This gave it state tax subsidies of about $1.4 billion.

But that's not all. Verizon has received at least $180.8 million in state and local subsidies in recent years, extracted in exchange for locating facilities and supposedly creating jobs—mostly low-wage ones—in the communities.

None of that, from the -2.9 percent federal income tax rate, the 2.6 percent state income tax rate, the $180.8 million in state and local subsidies, and several other large tax breaks Verizon has gotten, has been going reinvested in workers or the communities they live in:

Verizon has been eliminating jobs and investing less. During the past three years, the total number of employees at Verizon has fallen by more than 40,000 and the company’s capital expenditures have declined by $1 billion. Nor did these subsidies lead to higher compensation for Verizon’s employees—the company is demanding more than $1 billion in wage and benefit concessions from its 45,000 union-represented workers.

Original Page: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/sM1cziJi1UQ/-Verizon-pays-a-negative-federal-income-tax-rate,-then-pursues-more-tax-breaks

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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) graph tells us all we need to know about stimulus

This is from a report given to congress, linked here




It examines the stimulative effects of different proposals.  It's pretty easy to read, the longer the bar, the more dollars it brings to the economy, the shorter creates less stimulus.  


Note the two shortest bars, reducing taxes on business income and a tax holiday for foreign investment funds to come back home.  


The longest bars are policies that are proposed by the President.  The least effective are the ones proposed by the right wing. (You can add deregulating all safety and environmental regulations as their policy too, with little stimulative effect but HUGE costs)


Yet we have roughly half the country that believes what the Republicans tell us.  Why would anyone in the bottom 90% support the GOP?


Vote all Republicans out of office.  Removing the right is the only right thing to do.


Figure1_Blog-2.png

Two points should be noted from this video from a Romney event

First, the actions taken by his staff.  It is very subtle, but a young woman, a veteran, was silently standing there, but she wore an offensive tee shirt.  What did it say? "Vets against VA vouchers"

That's it.  She, as a veteran, exercised her right to expression by wearing a tee shirt that challenged Mitt's policy (a horrible privatization giveaway to corporations, as all the radical conservative ideas are) and she was removed.

The second issue to note is the actual comments by Romney during his speech.  Against unions collecting dues and using them politically.  They call it "Right To Work", but they don't say it is nothing but a union starvation program, pushed by corporations and the Republicans that serve them.

Big business has never been forced to destroy the environment, but they did every chance they got. No one forced them to have unsafe work conditions, but they did every chance they got, and they still do.  No one forces them to lower wages more and more, where the only jobs available are at the level of temp jobs or fast food...but they do.  And Republican policies are designed to foster that type of environment that allows them greater ease in doing this. Unions are just one speed bump against the unadulterated greed of corporations.  And Mitt spews his poison here, while his goons suppress speech, and very few of the people hurt by these policies catch this.  

The sad thing is, many of these people will vote for him.

Take back America from Ayn Rand.  Vote against every Republican on the ballot.

Looting Main Street |Matt Taibbi on the Jeff County AL bankruptcy

From last year, but spot on


.

Looting Main Street

How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

By Matt Taibbi
March 31, 2010 8:15 AM ET
--> Looting Main Street -->
Illustration by Victor Juhasz

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning," she says. "I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears."

This article appeared in the April 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. "Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years," she says.

Wall Street's Naked Swindle

The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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    Oh my, you mean regulations don't kill businesses?

    I would say that the lack of regulations kills workers and citizens.   

    Money quote:

    Data from the Bureau of Labor Statisticsshow that very few layoffs are caused principally by tougher rules.

    Whenever a firm lays off workers, the bureau asks executives the biggest reason for the job cuts.

    In 2010, 0.3 percent of the people who lost their jobs in layoffs were let go because of “government regulations/intervention.” By comparison, 25 percent were laid off because of a drop in business demand.




    http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/does-government-regulation-really-kill-jobs-economists-say-overall-effect-minimal/2011/10/19/gIQALRF5IN_story.html?wpisrc=nl_most

    This article is one of the dozens every day that proves the point of my book

    Help (not) Wanted: Immigration law worries farm owner

    Alabama pickle farmer Jerry Danford has about 50 immigrants working on his farm.  He fears Alabama’s new immigration law might force some of his workers to quit, leaving him without the help necessary to keep his business operating at full capacity.  Rock Center’s Kate Snow reports.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/45259935#45259935

    Quote:

    Danford is a lifelong Republican. He admits he did once vote for a Democrat for governor. But in every other race, at every level, he’s always been for the GOP. When I ask if he’s ever voted a Democrat into the White House he scoffs, making a face that says “you have to be kidding.”

    Republicans love Ayn Rand.  Ayn Rand hates America.  Therefore, simple math tells us that Republicans hate the real America.  I wish America would learn this.